Kirman does not treat the feature as empty. For a teenager without a tutor, or without a teacher who has time for her questions, a Socratic companion can offer a real democratization of intellectually rigorous support, she writes — one that surpasses, in scope of knowledge and availability, what any human source could provide.
At the surface, Teen Mode seeks to prevent some of the more obvious harms. Kirman describes guardrails against destructive content, parent notifications when self-harm is a concern, and a ban on the system presenting itself as a friend, claiming personal feelings, or suggesting it is anything other than a tool.
She draws on a psychoanalytic account of adolescence. What makes the period generative, she argues, is not that teenagers get it right. It is that they think they are right — and that conviction gives them the nerve to find out what they actually believe.
For years, she notes, technology companies have contested any causal link between their products and the harms named in a wave of similar lawsuits. Those cases allege that the companies did not merely fail to protect children but deliberately designed products to exploit them.
The deeper problem, she argues, is what the industry and the designers of Teen Mode have not addressed. The system may ask a teenager to think, but it is still holding her hand, still guiding, and still keeping the dependency going.
Where tutors eventually go home, and parents get frustrated or simply have other things to do, Teen Mode is a tireless interlocutor. She calls it, arguably, the only invention in human history capable of sustaining infinite patience with a teenager.
Teen Mode, she writes, offers something genuinely new. Accessible to any student with a phone, it gently pushes back on easy answers and creates, rather than forecloses, the discomfort of not-yet-knowing.
Study Mode, in her account, is meant to yield gains that will hold. Teen Mode may also address some of the harms already done to teenagers.
In doing so, Kirman writes, it exacerbates the developmental harm at the root of the crisis.