The French school protests are being read as a Gen Z uprising or an election sideshow. Underneath both is a quieter, more interesting fight: what a country owes its children when there are fewer of them.

In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at M.I.T., built a program called ELIZA. There was nothing behind it but a few hundred lines of pattern-matching, and Weizenbaum knew it was a trick. What unsettled him was how well the trick worked. His own secretary, who had watched him write the program and understood exactly what it was, sat down with it one day and, after a few exchanges, asked him to leave the room.

It is 12:47 a.m. You told yourself you would put the phone down an hour ago. Nobody is stopping you. There is no guard at the door, no rule, no penalty. That is exactly why you can't. The feed in your hand doesn't care what you want to want. It knows what you lingered on, what you watched twice, what you tapped when you assumed nobody was counting.