Will, the father of a 6-year-old daughter, says to me that ‘the ship has sailed’. Lisbeth, mother of two secondary school aged children says: ‘whether you like it, whether you don’t, it's gonna continue’. Clarissa, whose son is at the cusp of adulthood, reminds me, ‘every time you step outside your front door … you are captured more than you might think’. Felix, father of 11- and 9-year-old children imagines: ‘this is a fantasy because I don't think it could really happen, but if it was up to me, I would absolutely move into a community which was completely offline’. Delyse, mother of twin daughters, is fearful, throughout our conversation with an almost fatalistic sense of the future that lies ahead for her children, as she says ‘my theory is that any mistake my children make now or in the next 5 years, that it will be stored somewhere on someone's phone or in someone's camera or something. And it will just ultimately destroy them’. Rijula, a mother of colour, with concerns about the impacts of datafication for children of colour, wishes to settle for less: ‘even if there's not consultation’, even if outcomes ‘can't be changed’, as she says: ‘even if there's not consultation, just information, just engagement that we are doing this even if we can't change the outcome knowing that this is happening and being aware of it is I think … important’.

These discourses of inevitability (Markham, 2021), cynicism, technological determinism in future talk (Leonardi, 2008), resignation (Duffy and Meisner, 2023; Draper and Turow, 2019) and disconnection (Kaun, 2021) that intertwined through my conversations with parents, will not surprise those who pay attention to people's imaginations of technological futures. Markham positions, for instance, the role of inevitability in people's imaginations and talk, as discursive closure – where, in naturalising and neutralising technology, imaginations of alternatives and counters remain closed (2021). Here, some parents, like Felix – position disconnection as an impossible-yet-possible strategy when thinking about algorithmic futures. Kaun's theorisation of disconnection draws to our attention that the disconnection that Felix imagines is not solely a ‘coping strategy but also … a civic virtue … merely based on individual responsibility that rarely fosters collective, community-based values’ (2021, p 1580).