I’m blaming Santa. As 2025 reaches its inevitable endgame, I can’t help thinking we have all become gullible children enthralled by the promise of tech cornucopia, refusing to see the folds in our logic because deep down we don’t want to break the magic.

While the federal government prepares to take the toys off the children with its world-first social media ban, it is hanging out the stockings for the self-same tech overlords to fill with new goodies via its light-touch National AI Plan.

These inherently contradictory policies punctuate a year where, for all the focus on the one-sided domestic contest, the main political challenges have moved into a virtual arena built and controlled by the most powerful corporations the world has ever seen.

While the Albanese government has emerged triumphant on the home front, its stewardship of the national interest in the helter-skelter advance of technology has been less than glorious.

As our final Guardian Essential report of the year reinforces, the under-16s social media ban that comes into force on Wednesday is an effective piece of retail politics that purports to wind back the clock to a simpler time where teen angst was not a commodity for commercial exploitation.

To what extent to do you support or oppose the current ban on social media for children under 16 years old?

While the policy has been criticised by experts and activists as being more performative than substantive, it speaks to the justified anxiety many parents feel about the impact of the surveillance and attention economy on young minds.

My beef with the ban is not its breadth but its shallowness; it concedes the model of extraction, outrage and exploitation for everyone over the age of 16 by giving the algorithms a new status as a point of aspiration for those reaching maturity.

Of greater concern is that while the government is recognising our desire to keep social media away from our children, it is hanging out the mistletoe for more powerful and untested AI products: deepfake apps, intimate companions, industrial-scale fraudsters, oceans of slop and the banal cruelty that robs young people of the magic of the blank page.

The so-called National AI Plan released last week could have been a moment to learn from the failed social media experiment and harness this wild stallion but, sadly, the government has squibbed it to join the global race to tap some still-to-be-defined “opportunity”.

The decision to dispense with legislated mandatory AI guardrails and defer responsibility to (another) well-intentioned but ill-defined and under-funded regulator is a triumph for these tech behemoths whose local vassals have captured government with their fairytales of abundance.

Listening to this government talk about AI is a bit like using it: on the one hand there are risks, but on the other hand it will be awesome. Prompt further and it’s difficult to get clarity on the upsides, just the parroting of self-serving, industry-funded modelling that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

But what if this isn’t a case of triangulation? What if, as we have ascertained for children and social media, this is simply not a desirable technology? What if, like nuclear energy, the risk of misuse and damage is so great it should be tightly controlled for specific uses and not a general-purpose tool?

Many on the AI train truly believe this will improve our world and can rattle off aspirational benefits – curing cancer, solving climate change, equalising education – but they are caught in the rip and ignoring the rocks because deep down they all believe in magic.

Blind faith allows them to ignore the evidence that the AI models are built on stolen labour, intensive use seems to be making people dumber and even the positive cases come at the expense of future employment opportunities for young people.

Albo won big by convincing us we could avoid the madness of Donald Trump’s new world order but his AI plan embeds Australia deeply in its orbit. The decision to get into bed with OpenAI, a company that has been accused by a former senior employee of putting “shiny products” over******safety and is now building wank-bots to prop up its share price, is a particular act of acquiescence to a sordid and reckless Silicon Valley.

The truth is the entire AI bandwagon is an energy sink; not just the copious amounts of power and water its datacentres demand but the human labour it sucks up to automate work and destroy culture for the promise of a few productivity points.

A second question shows the public seems more concerned than the government about these risks.

How concerned are you about each of the following potential impacts of AI?

Those of us pushing back may have the public on side but we are losing the bigger battle – not just because big tech has the money and the resources but because they have a narrative anchored in the magic of progress.

The lack of critical thinking about such consequential change has been the baseline of 2025; good people turn dewy-eyed when they talk AI, entering a fugue state where it feels like they are tapping into the wisdom of the universe when all they are doing is feeding off some predictive text with a tendency to hallucinate.

And maybe I’m the crazy one, the Luddite, who just can’t understand progress and get with the program, but I read my history and I don’t see how the future plays out the way these boosters wish it would.

Which brings me back to Santa. There is a well-worn Marxist analysis of Christmas which holds the whole ritual is a way of conditioning young minds for a lifetime of consumption by equating compliance with acquisition.

More insidious to me is that the Christmas ritual conditions us from an early age to embrace the conceit that good things just appear, that desire is fulfilled by magic rather than the real alchemy of a connection earned with empathy and honesty.

A final and highly indulgent question shows Santa’s brand has its own issues: his deceits, gluttony and godlessness may finally be catching up with the old boy.

How concerned are you about each of the following potential impacts of the Santa tradition on children?

But I maintain this magic myth empowers the gormless shamans of our future dystopia, inducing us to covet the baubles because that’s what we’ve been taught gives us joy, willing the fantasy to be true in the face of all evidence.

But we aren’t the kids; we are the adults who deck the halls and do everything in our power to convince our children that the world is a good place. Hard truth: life is messy and contradictory, and no one comes down the chimney.

As for me, my Christmas wish is that the AI bubble bursts sooner rather than later so we can go back to thinking these things through soberly.

Peter Lewis is the executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company that undertook research for Labor in the last election and conducts qualitative research for Guardian Australia. He is the host of Per Capita’s Burning Platforms podcast