There was a remarkable video going around the Scottish socials yesterday which led to quite a bit of media coverage. It’s a four-minute long video showing some furious Scotrail passengers confronting a drunk middle-aged pervert who is quietly filming a group of quiet, sober 16- and 17-year old girls heading home from a night out.
It really is worth a watch, because it’s a four-minute long documentary masterclass in bystander action, documenting offenses, holding perpetrators to account, centering the victims, and somehow staying calm and focused even when you want to batter the fuck out of someone who has it coming.
(Disclaimer: the spoken dialogue in the video is not in the King’s English, it’s in our local Glaswegian dialect, which…some of you seem to struggle with. As you’re also aware by now, in our dialect, we use obscenities like other people use punctuation. Just so you know.)
Of course the pervert turns out to be a senior legal officer at Edinburgh City Council. Of course he was. Hold on to that thought, it matters.
Right then Heather, what on earth does a video of an alkie on a train have to do with tech policy?
A lot, as it turns out.
The first point is that the passengers instinctively confront and document the person inflicting the harm. At no time do they castigate the teenage girls being filmed without their knowledge or consent – young women who are absolutely entitled to any night out they please – or imply that it’s the girls’ conduct at fault. The whole train has the girls’ backs.
This runs against the grain of 2026 tech policy, which decrees that it’s young people who need their behavior censored and constrained, in ways that punish them for the actions of the perpetrator.
The second point is that as far as policymakers are concerned, it’s the senior legal officer with the phone who is rightfully entitled to have the phone and use it any way he pleases. If the girls on a night out are allowed to have a phone at all – and there are areas of British society which do not believe they should – then their usage of them must be strictly controlled, censored, and curtailed, allegedly for their own protection.
Those policy arguments are shielded in the need to take back control from Big Tech. But what happened on that train, as you saw, had nothing to do with Big Tech, aside from the video of the incident being shared there. That incident was about the dynamics of power, privilege, and dominance, as they play out every day in the real world.
And it’s about time we talked about that.
I have written before about how the raft of legislation aiming to control what young adults can do with their phones, essentially punishing them for the sins of Big Tech, can put their immediate personal safety at risk from dangers far more violent than algorithms.
Many other people, observing our current policy context, have also called out how smartphone and social media bans for young adults (and we are talking about that particular group here, not toddlers and primary schoolers) risk swaddling them in cotton wool and then releasing them into the world, without critical adulting skills, on the day they hit a magic birthday. Those girls on the train clearly have been allowed to develop some excellent adulting and resilience skills.
Not all young people are that lucky, by design and – as things currently stand – by policy aspiration.
We don’t talk enough about how the impetus for the most authoritarian internet regulation in the UK, including the <16s ban, has come from the affluent/wealthy/1% elite on the political right wing, or as I’ve called them elsewhere in this blog, the Tatler/Telegraph/Times set. It’s easy to understand why: the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions. These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults. They never have. And they never did themselves, which is why the notion of blanket bans come so easily to them. That is also why the notion of living one’s life with total personal agency, grounded in confident resilience, without the continuous daily intervention of third party intermediaries (mummy and daddy for life, age verification services, content screening services, safety tech, employees, staff, nannies, au pairs) is, to those people, completely and utterly incomprehensible.
In other words, the cultural values that a detached elite wish to impose on their offspring for life have been transposed into law, policy, and regulation, and from there, into the personal lives of young people who are living in very different cultural circumstances, in very different places, with very different mental maps of how their lives are going to play out.
We are allowing cosseted snobs for whom “if you called your dad, he could stop it all” is the only truth they have ever known in their lives, and ever will, decree how some teenagers on a train hundreds of miles away should be able to react when they are being targeted by a predator in a small, confined space.
That’s why this video matters.
What you are seeing in this video is an inflection point. It’s watching policy arguments crumble on their first contact with the real world. It’s watching how power works on paper, vs how power works in the real world, and how that balance can invert itself in a second. It’s watching lines of carefully constructed public relations dogma being thrown on their heads. It’s watching working-class teenagers who have far better heads on their shoulders than the elite pervert filming them in public. It’s watching how personal security plays out for women, in real time, in the real world.
It’s watching precisely why young adults need phones, the agency to use them, and the life skills to make their ways in the world with their phones in their pockets.
And as always, it’s watching a smug perpetrator scamper away, safe in the confidence that his privilege will protect him from the consequences of his actions, knowing he can look forward to many years of insisting, to anyone who will still give him the time of day, that he and only he is the real victim here.
Hey girls, this weekend: go out exactly as you were. Go do exactly what you did last weekend. Go have fun. Keep your phones on you, keep your wits about you, and you’ll be fine. You’re going to have an amazing life.
Enjoy it.
On a personal note, I am amazed that the video did not cause me to have nightmares last night, because that guy – the pervert perpetrator – is a carbon copy of my alcoholic ex-husband. Not the filming the girls part, the smarmy alkie part. He looks nothing like my ex-husband, but watching that video was like being back in front of him again. That smug, in-your face grin even as he’s been caught out, the arrogance of someone who’d never been told “no” in his life by anyone except me, the haughty confidence of someone who knows his Scottish white male privilege will slap him on the back and protect him from any consequences, on top of the paralytic drunkenness replete with a liquid mess down his shirt (and undoubtedly a solid mess in his boxers too, which was always my job to clean up) – that’s what I lived with every day of my life in my own home for years.
You wonder why I was always tired and fragile and escaping to conferences. You wonder it’s why I can spot an alkie (not a problem drinker, an alkie) from a mile away.
Cos I gotta tell you, you learn as much about the dynamics of power, dominance, and control living with one of these people as you do in the corridors of Whitehall. You learn how to spot those dynamics, buried deep in code of practice footnotes and sub-paragraphs of draft regulations, as easily as you know how to spot the glazed eyes and the smug grin.
Written and posted from a much better and more beautiful place, in every sense.
