Silicon Valley Discovers the Midwest Has a Legislature and Is Very Upset About It
By Tuck Chimes, Business & Markets Correspondent, IRREVERENT Magazine
OMAHA, NEB. — What we are witnessing in the prairie heartland of this great republic is, quite simply, a Schumpeterian creative destruction event for the youth attention economy, and frankly, if you had been following my Substack — 847 reads, highly recommend — you would have seen this coming approximately fourteen months ago, when I wrote a piece that I believe changed the conversation, though I cannot locate the specific post at this time. I believe it was titled something like "The Nebraska of Tomorrow" or possibly "Airport Lounges: A Ranking." Nebraska's LB 383, the Parental Rights in Social Media Act, requires digital identification verification for any user under 18 seeking access to social media platforms. This is not a drill. This is, as I predicted, the opening shot of a regulatory reckoning that will reshape the digital advertising stack and, more importantly, validate positions I have held publicly, loudly, and largely alone for years.
The law, signed with what I can only describe as a kind of quiet Cornhusker confidence, puts the burden on platforms to verify the age of their users — or block them. The coalition of tech behemoths opposing it, operating under the banner of NetChoice (the lobbying group representing Meta, TikTok, Google, Snap, X, Reddit, and YouTube), filed suit on May 14, 2026, in U.S. District Court for Nebraska, before Judge John Gerrard. The complaint, which I have skimmed with the thoroughness it deserved, argues that the law violates the First Amendment rights of minors. Which is, if I may be direct for a moment, the most Silicon Valley thing I have ever read, and I went to Yale — full scholarship, not that I dwell on it — where my advisor Professor Harold Simkins used to say, and I'm paraphrasing because I remember this vividly: "Tuck, the market for attention is a market for everything." He also said I had "a face for radio and a mind for markets," which I took as a compliment then and take as a compliment now. I think about that every single day. You should too.
Now, before we go further, I want to be transparent: I know this state. I drove through Nebraska in 2019, on the way back from Aspen — magnificent drive, very flat, tremendous sky, real America — and I stopped at a Dairy Queen outside Lincoln that I believe has since closed, and I spoke to a man there who I now realize was probably some kind of early indicator of this exact political moment. His name was either Ron or maybe Phil. Possibly both. Doesn't matter. I had a Blizzard. Oreo. Tremendous. The point is: I understand Nebraska in a way that most coastal commentators do not, and that understanding is what gives my analysis its distinctive texture, its heft, its unmistakable aroma of truth.
The McKinsey Digital Futures Report, Q3 2023, page 47, right-hand column, footnote 3, noted that age-verification mandates in digital environments would generate compliance costs exceeding $2.4 billion annually across platforms of this scale. I cite this figure with total confidence. The platforms, naturally, would prefer to continue monetizing thirteen-year-olds at scale, which is both their legal right and also something I personally find unconscionable, though I do hold shares in Meta via my brokerage account — twelve shares, to be precise, which I am legally required to disclose and spiritually required to ignore — and I mention this only for full transparency and not because it complicates my argument, which it does not.
I actually had a brief conversation about this precise issue with one of the key senators involved in drafting LB 383 — Greg, or possibly Dave, or conceivably a third thing, tremendous guy, very tall, went to a state school, real salt of the earth — at a reception in, I believe, Washington, or it may have been a conference call I was on where he spoke for a moment before I had to drop off due to a conflict, or possibly I was never on the call and simply read about it. The point is I know where he stands and he knows who I am, or would, if introduced properly, in a well-lit room, with name tags. He supports the bill. Obviously.
What NetChoice fundamentally misunderstands is that the First Amendment argument collapses under the weight of parens patriae doctrine, a Latin phrase meaning, roughly, "the state as parent," or literally "the state as parent," since that is what the words mean, which Professor Simkins explained to me at Yale (class of 2003, Pierson College, top quintile, not that it matters, though it does). You cannot monetize a child's anxiety and then invoke the Bill of Rights when the child's legislature says enough. That is not conservatism, which I practice rigorously. That is corporatism, which I oppose, except where my portfolio is concerned, which is different, because I am different.
The real winner here, as I have written elsewhere (Substack, 847 reads, though one of them may have been me refreshing the page), is the bold, contrarian investor who recognized early that the attention-economy model was overextended and has been quietly repositioning into privacy-compliance infrastructure, regulatory technology, and age-verification SaaS platforms. I cannot name this investor directly but I will say that he is handsome, his suits are slightly too tight because he keeps meaning to get to the gym, has a gym membership, and has driven past the gym on multiple occasions, and his returns, while currently theoretical, are going to be extraordinary once the market catches up to the thesis, which it will, because he went to Yale and his advisor told him so. He is, in short, a visionary. His name rhymes with "Tuck Chimes."
Judge Gerrard will hear arguments. The outcome is uncertain. What is not uncertain is that this law represents a genuine inflection point — for platforms, for parents, for children who are, let us be honest, insufficiently supervised online — and that the people who saw it coming, who wrote about it, who stopped at that Dairy Queen in 2019, who spoke to Ron-Phil, who have 847 Substack subscribers and climbing (the number may have shifted, I don't check, it is absolutely 847), deserve a moment of acknowledgment. I am asking only for that. That, and perhaps a television segment. I am available most mornings, some afternoons, and literally all evenings if HBO is asking.
The free market will sort this out. The children will be fine or they won't, and the platforms will adapt or they won't, and Nebraska will remain flat, important, and underappreciated, much like my Substack metrics, and I will continue to cover it with the depth and rigor it deserves, from wherever I am, which is usually not Nebraska.
— Tuck Chimes covers business, markets, and himself for IRREVERENT Magazine. His Substack has 847 subscribers.
Editor's Note: Several corrections are required to Mr. Chimes's piece. The McKinsey "Digital Futures Report, Q3 2023" does not appear to exist in any McKinsey publication database we could locate; the $2.4 billion figure is unverified. Professor Harold Simkins does not appear in Yale faculty records for any relevant department or year. The senator Mr. Chimes references as "Greg, or possibly Dave" is not identifiable from context. Mr. Chimes did not, to our knowledge, predict this legislation in any prior published piece; a search of his Substack archive returned eleven posts, most of which concern airport lounges. The Dairy Queen outside Lincoln that he references closed in 2017, two years before his claimed visit, suggesting he did not stop there. His current Substack subscriber count is 214. We regret the errors.