Unending Digital Childhood: Structural Parallels between Parental Gatekeeping and Big Tech–State Collaborative Information Control

This study examines how digital gatekeeping is rhetorically constructed and politically justified through a researcher-generated polemical artifact, Unending Digital Childhood: Structural Parallels Between Parental Gatekeeping and Big Tech–State Collaborative Information Control. Drawing on family systems research on parental gatekeeping, the study treats the polemic as a purpose-built rhetorical object whose nine footnotes operationalize in situ nine critical frameworks: Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucaultian power/knowledge, Marxist political economy, biopolitics, radical feminism, epistemic injustice, necropolitics, postcolonial theory, and critical pedagogy. Using rhetorical-theoretical criticism informed by Foss’s framework, the study analyzes how the artifact dramatizes Big Tech–state information control as a paternalistic structure that shapes consent, autonomy, and access to knowledge. The analysis demonstrates that digital gatekeeping functions not merely as moderation or governance, but as a relational form of epistemic domination that infantilizes users and normalizes dependency. By combining rhetorical criticism with interdisciplinary theory, the study offers a systematic account of how polemical form can be used to expose the cultural logic of platform power. The study contributes to scholarship on digital media, platform governance, and rhetorical criticism by showing how contemporary information systems are legitimated through narratives of safety, expertise, and protection.