Every New Technology Gets Accused of Ruining Children
In the 1880s it was bicycle face, in the 1990s it was the web browser, and the warning is always the same.
David Senra · Marc Andreessen, co-founder of a16z & NetscapeIn the 1880s, American newspapers warned young women not to ride the bicycle. If they pedaled hard, the papers said, exertion would freeze into a permanent grimace called bicycle face, and they would never find a husband.
That warning is the classic example of a recurring moral panic over new tools, in the account of Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, the company behind one of the first widely used web browsers. A new technology arrives, and critics warn that it will ruin morality, ruin women, and especially ruin children.
In his account, the bicycle was disruptive because towns sat five, 10, or 15 miles apart, too far to walk easily. The bicycle let a young person ride to the next town for the first time and meet young people she did not grow up with, and for young women especially, that mobility worried local men.
The same sequence greeted the browser in 1994. When Netscape started, at most two million people were online over slow dial-up modems. Home computers did not come with the connection software installed, so buyers had to buy and install a separate package to get online. Newspapers said no one would ever type a credit card number or a real name online, warned the web would endanger children and require censorship, and claimed the tiny user counts were inflated and fraudulent.
The list runs much older. Plato and Socrates held that written language was a mistake because knowledge should be spoken. The telling even imagines the first person to carry fire down the mountain being attacked for endangering the village. Since then the alarms have included paperback novels, playing cards, jazz, rock and roll, comic books, calculators, portable cassette players, heavy metal, and fantasy games.
Early coverage said Netscape would never make money because everybody knew the internet was free. Critics also said putting a credit card number or a real name online would invite hackers and ruin your life. Netscape went on to build one of the first systems for selling things online and one of the original internet advertising businesses, and its software helped bring The Wall Street Journal to the web.
That history is now cataloged by the Pessimist Archive, a collection of contemporaneous panic headlines. In Andreessen's reading, those episodes reveal less about the tools than about anxiety when people gain a new freedom.
Questions people ask
Was there any medical evidence for bicycle face?
The source does not cite any medical study or doctor behind the claim. It appears only as press advice to young women, warning that exertion would freeze the face and prevent marriage. In Andreessen's telling, it is a moral lecture about mobility, not a reported medical finding.
What exactly were people afraid the early web would do to kids?
Contemporary critics said the web would destroy children and posed a huge risk to them, leading to early calls for censorship and for taking material down. Andreessen places that alarm alongside earlier panics over comic books, rock and roll, and heavy metal.
What is the Pessimist Archive?
It is a website that collects contemporaneous newspaper articles and other writings that warned new technologies would cause harm. In Andreessen's telling, reading them together shows how similar the panic sounds each time a new tool appears.