The Machine That Processes Children: A Guest Post by Robert Brockway

An imaginary friend comes to life in this chilling and hilarious tale about what happens when our childhood companions never leave. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Robert Brockway on writing I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200.

When I got the news that my grandfather died, we were three weeks into the COVID lockdown and I’d just been laid off from my job of thirteen years. I was starting to suspect the world was ending – if not the whole thing, then at least mine. I’d spent the first half of that day researching a comedy article about a children’s YouTube channel called Troom Troom. That’s what I was doing. I was watching a Ukrainian slop video teaching children to sneak sausage into school in lipstick cases when I got the call he was gone.

Tragedy, panic, absurdity. That’s life.

That must be why Troom Troom imprinted on me. It’s a comically insane channel, full of bright colors and obnoxious voices spinning out endless tutorials based on misunderstood search terms from bored children. It’s manic, unpoliced, unfocused. It exists only to farm views at any cost. It actually inspired part of my goofy new horror novel, I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200. I used Troom Troom videos to inform the strange world the main character is pulled into, when her imaginary friend starts hurting her for reasons she cannot understand. The metaphor came easy.

Troom Troom isn’t an outlier, it’s not alone in the world of exploitative children’s slop. And most of its videos have millions of views. Think of the most beloved story from your childhood. Got it? Troom Troom has a hundred times the impact of that, every single day. I don’t know what this is doing to children’s brains. I can’t imagine it’ll get better now that the robots are spinning content at an exponential rate. You know what? Maybe this is all just an old man repeating a familiar refrain: Rock ‘n roll turns you deviant, TV rots your brain, video games make you violent.

But hey, try something for me. Open a new tab, pull up YouTube, and go search “Fat K-Pop Demon Hunters.” Enjoy your firehose of bizarre, unrestrained AI slop aimed at kids looking for more of their favorite movie. I picked that search term at random, you can do it for almost anything. The job of a parent is to help their kid contextualize stories in the real world. How do you do that when the media landscape is both infinite and ephemeral? Devoid of meaning or even humanity? When its author is a vast self-cannibalizing machine built to foster engagement for the sake of engagement?

Oh, this is the part where you expect an answer.

I’m sorry if I misled you. I have no idea what the solution is. We might not need one. The kids could deal with all this fine, and I’m just an old man panicking because of the layered trauma that fell on me the day I found a children’s Youtube channel teaching children fun and bewildering ways to escape street kidnappings. That’s a real video on Troom Troom, by the way. 1.6 million views. Every tip would get a child killed.

Maybe we do need a solution. I know it’s not control, that just fosters rebellion. It’s probably something boring like early education with a focus on media literacy. I hope a team of brilliant psychiatrists are working on that. Because that is not my job. It’s my job to spot when cultural shifts provide fertile ground for goofy horror novels. And I’m pretty sure I found it in the slop machine that processes children, because the future it promises is both deeply unserious and completely terrifying.