It's an international coordinated effort to undermine every single citizen's privacy, an agenda being pushed for years, again and again in every country and state, by a coalition including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc., corporations that profit greatly from mandatory identity verification online. It's only a matter of time until they buy out enough politicians to push it through and force future generations to live under their panopticon. Same with digitization of money.
They likely don't even really care about the panopticon - they see a way to build a moat that even billion-dollar startups won't be able to easily cross.<p>Regulatory capture is real.
> a coalition including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc., corporations that profit greatly from mandatory identity verification online.<p>This is not being pushed by private companies. There is no money in it. It is being pushed by governments, and those governments use those private companies as (willing) vehicles to do things that it is illegal for them to do directly. And it is not being pushed by the <i>democratic</i> portions of governments, which have been minimized and weakened to the point of invisibility. None of this makes it to the ballot, "both" sides support it.<p>Since the turn of the millennium, all powers have been pushed to the Executive, in every Western country. And the Executive wouldn't be the Executive if he/she weren't completely compromised. Governing with 20% of the support of the public is the <i>norm</i> now in Western governments and institutions. If more than 20% of people support you, you're a "populist dictator."
That coordinated effort also includes the buying up of US media sources by billionaires and gigacorps to control the content of not just news sources and social forums, but every electronic window we have onto the world.<p>Remember, the panopticon observed people who were in a prison.
I hate privacy, even down to the idea itself. I will buy out politicians, and push relentlessly until every trace of privacy is eliminated from the world. I love being watched. The idea of a panopticon makes me feel amazing and I want to force it on everyone until the end of time.
I'm reading your comment as sarcasm, but I do have a non-sarcastic hot take on it.<p>If we have to live in a panopticon I think access to the data should be available to everyone. That eliminates the power imbalance and/or makes the idea of the thing distasteful to powerful people who might actually try to restore privacy and eliminate the panopticon.
If those wish to preserve privacy want to be effective, there needs to be a pragmatism in understanding differing opinions. Reducing opponents to caricatures and fighting those is a losers strategy. It will guarantee defeat.<p>Being able to accurately articulate a position one doesn't possess themselves is necessary to effectively countering it.
Power is then moved to whomever owns the most computer power and perhaps education
> If we have to live in a panopticon...<p>So that's where we are now? "If we have to live in the torture nexus, let's at least make it equitable"
I can see why people fall into the trap of calling for an equitable torment nexus: it is both cynical (it supposes everyone in power is corrupt and everyone at the top would oppose an equitable torment nexus) and also naive/optimistic (it supposes that we have any hope to actually impose an equitable torment nexus).<p>But I think the latter factor wins out, so we should just oppose obviously bad things in a non-clever fashion.
I don't see it as cynical. I'm just accepting the obvious reality.<p>I have no power to stop what's happening. I might as well make the best of it for myself and my family, and hope it becomes so bad that people who actually do have the power to stop it do something about it. Maybe it'll rise to the level that enough individual citizens will call out for change, but I continue to be amazed at what people will put up with in the name of convenience, continuation of their lifestyle, and, as it relates specifically to surveillance capitalism, shiny digital doodads and baubles that bring them temporary joy.<p>Capital being speech in the US, since I'm not a billionaire I have very little influence.<p>I have optimism and hope for people doing good things locally, but absolutely no hope large-scale problems will ever be fixed. I feel like the US political system experienced some phase change in the last 50 years, has "solidified", and is now completely unable to do anything meaningful at scale. The New Deal couldn't happen today. The interstate highway system couldn't happen today. The Affordable Care Act started off as a watered-down, weakened version of what it could have been (because anything more radical would never have passed), and the private interests have had 20 years to chip away at it, sculpting it into a driver of revenue. Heck, we can't even build mass public transit at the level of cities.<p>Private capital, meanwhile, soldiers on accomplishing its goals in spite of (or because of) our political gridlock.<p>I'd love to feel differently.
The fact that you couldn't identify it as sarcasm/satire is indictive of not having an accurate understanding of your opponents position. If you want to defeat your opponents, understand their calculus.
It has reached the level of moral panic, so it’s the current topic everywhere.<p>Even on Hacker News, threads about children and social media or short form video will draw a lot of comments supporting harsh age restrictions, including an alarming number of extremist comments in favor banning under-18s from using the internet or phones.<p>It’s not until the discussion turns to implantation details that the sentiment swings firm negative. The average comment in favor of age restrictions hasn’t thought through what it would mean, they only assume that some mechanism will exist that only impacts children and/or sites they don’t care about.<p>As soon as the implantation details come out and everyone realizes that you can’t restrict children without first verifying everyone’s age or that “social media” includes Discord and other services they use, the outrage starts.<p>We’re now entering the phases where everyone realizes that these calls to action have consequences for everyone because there is no easy solution that automatically only impacts children.
Thank you for saying this. I've been similarly baffled.<p>The call to ban children from social media seemed like it was coming loudest from tech people - like HN users.<p>How did they think this was going to work?
> the discussion turns to implantation details<p>Do not try and derail this thread with facts about vaccines!
People connect to the internet and do bad things (or have bad things happen to them)<p>They need to pay a service provider to have the capability to do bad things (or be exposed to bad things)<p>Why can't we just ask/compel the service provider to identify these people (or block the bad things).<p>For any politician the line of thinking will be something like that. It comes off as incredibly long hanging fruit that would have broad positive impact for the whole of society. Like the apple in the garden of eden, just walk over, take a bite, and you'll be a political hero without having to do much work at all.
> Why can't we just ask/compel the service provider to identify these people (or block the bad things).<p>Isn't that basically what's happening? Service providers, such as Discord recently for example, are asking for identification to prove users are of a certain age. If you punish service providers for providing services to minors then they will need to do age verification.
It's Meta: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_billion_in_nonprofit_grants_and_45/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...</a>
Facebook is theorized to be paying an advocacy group to launch these, so that they can externalize the legal problems of social networking onto age verification and piecemeal state laws; simultaneously lowering their damages costs in future lawsuits and also raising the drawbridge over the newly-difficult compliance moat against future competitors.
Well hackernews wont like this but the answer is because it's enforcing the status quo. Verifying age for age-related materials and services. Some internet related services had a defacto exemption from following the laws because the enforcement logistics just werent there. A physical store that sells porn has to ID whereas online you dont, for example.<p>In addition there are more services, such as social media, becoming age-gated.<p>The enforcement hurts the sensibilities of people like us on hackernews but it's common sense to a lot of people. We live in very polarizing times, but as you've noted, it has bipartisan support. The easiest explanation is the hackernews-friendly take of lack of enforcement mechanisms is the more radical one.<p>Personally I think it's a bit sad but inevitable. The laws are just catching up. And there will absolutely be some good coming from it, such as holding companies liable for breaking the law.
It's not called a uniparty for nothing. Vote red, vote blue, we're all gonna end up in the same place eventually, the only difference is the timeline (pretty interesting that the first states pushing this stuff are California, Colorado, Illinois, etc. -- not exactly who you imagine being concerned with "think of the children", is it?). All the bickering between the two parties is pro wrestling kayfabe at the end of the day.