Welcome to Interland: The Borderless Country Mining Your Kid’s Data While Teaching Them Not to Share

Somewhere between the cloud and the couch, humanity has quietly annexed a new country the size of Rhode Island and twice as cynical. It issues no passports, levies no taxes, and still manages to feel overcrowded. Cartographers call it a “digital collaboration platform”; everyone else calls it Interland.

Born inside a Google sub-committee that was allegedly tasked with teaching children not to hand their data to strangers, Interland has grown into a bilingual Esperanto of safe-space gamification and late-capitalist guilt. Picture Club Penguin with a privacy policy, or the United Nations if it were run by animators on their third espresso. In four candy-colored kingdoms—Reality River, Tower of Treasure, Mindful Mountain, and Kind Kingdom—you defeat phishing trolls and oversharing goblins while a disembodied narrator coos, “Great job, cyber-citizen!” It’s all very wholesome until you realize the game’s moral authority is funded by the same conglomerate that knows you searched “how to fake your own death” at 2:14 a.m.

The global uptake has been predictably uneven. Scandinavian school boards have adopted Interland as compulsory coursework, because nothing says Nordic utopia like outsourcing civic virtue to a for-profit American firm. Meanwhile, French teachers stage one-day strikes, arguing that Gallic children should learn discretion the old-fashioned way—by reading their parents’ intercepted love letters. In India, government ministers tout Interland as a cure for WhatsApp lynch mobs, conveniently sidestepping the fact that the platform itself runs on WhatsApp’s parent. And across the Belt and Road, Chinese classrooms run a pirated version renamed “SafeNet Hero,” where the final boss is a foreign journalist holding a microphone.

The real prize, however, isn’t children’s attention spans—it’s the behavioral metadata harvested while they click “Report” on cartoon hackers. Every time a ten-year-old flags a pop-up for knockoff Ray-Bans, a server farm in Council Bluffs learns which demographics are most likely to confuse phishing with fashion. That data is then repackaged into “insights dashboards” sold to advertisers who, irony of ironies, use it to craft the very scams the game warns against. It’s the ouroboros of late-stage data capitalism: the snake eats its own tail, pauses to monetize the footage, and thanks you for your participation.

Diplomatically, Interland has become the soft-power equivalent of a participation trophy. The State Department ships Chromebooks pre-loaded with the game to developing nations, because nothing builds lasting alliances like cartoon firewalls. Estonia—already the world’s most enthusiastic e-residency pusher—has proposed an “Interland Schengen Zone,” where avatars can cross virtual borders without a VPN, provided they surrender biometric selfies. Critics note the scheme bears an uncanny resemblance to a loyalty program for human souls, but the Wi-Fi is excellent.

Even cyber-criminals have opinions. The Lazarus Group reportedly ran a phishing campaign disguised as an Interland update, gifting North Korean teenagers malware that mines Monero during math class. Their slogan—“Play Kind Kingdom, fund ballistic missile program”—is either the most honest ad copy of the decade or proof that irony has achieved full nuclear capability.

Which brings us to the existential punchline: Interland’s final lesson is that there is no “inter” anymore—only land. Every click, swipe, and polite refusal to accept cookies redraws borders on a map we can’t see. The game teaches children to guard their passwords while training them to surrender everything else. By the time they’re old enough to vote, the concept of privacy will feel as quaint as a rotary phone or a politician’s apology.

So here’s to Interland, the world’s newest superpower: flagless, taxless, and effortlessly colonizing the eight-second attention span. Long may it reign—until the server bill comes due, and we discover the rent is payable only in the currency we were told to protect. Until then, enjoy your stay. The Wi-Fi is free, but the exit fee is everything else you’ve got.