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Strictly theoretically, yes. Practically, if your bank requires using an app to access the account online, and that app refuses to work on non-"secured" system, you're out of luck. If your government has "digital ID" system, which only works on "secured" platforms, and you have to use it for any interaction with anything government-related, which is everything in a modern welfare state - you're out of luck. Yes, you can choose not using any of it, leave the modern society and live in a hut on an isolated island and survive on moss and mushrooms. Nobody really is going to choose that, so that's not a real choice.
Of course, there will always be the black market. USSR had the black market (a huge one), North Korea has the black market (that's how they haven't starved yet). The Powers That Be are mostly fine with it, as long as it remains black and thus hard to access for somebody who is not already "outside" the system - criminals, spies, etc. I mean, they would fight them case by case, but they are not an existential threat. Controlling the wide population is existential, controlling 0.1% of freaks is merely police routine. And the governments are increasingly moving towards legitimizing and enabling population-level controls. We will soon see delegitimization of non-controllable software and hardware - first as "insecure" and "dangerous", then as a tool of criminals - i.e. finding an unlocked phone on somebody would be universally treated as a sign that person is a criminal. Then it will be officially banned.
I don't think you'd be surprised to hear me call this a slippery slope argument. There's a lot of implied necessary changes and conditionalities baked into your scenario.
This stretches credulity. And how does "phone" and "unlocked" get defined in a legal sense. If I assemble an old hobby kit radio, do I possess an unlocked phone in principle?
I think the more likely answer is that a lot of legislation is going to fall apart because of a technical illiteracy. Look at New York State's RAISE act (Recently passed):
How can model weights "escape"? How is that different than inadvertent release and/or unauthorized access.
The entire "demonstrable evidence of an increased risk" is ambiguity on ambiguity. And this is being linked to model weights; giant matrices of very long numbers. How in the world can you create a direct causal line here?
There's nothing wrong with the slippery slope argument, if there's an actual slope, and it is very slippery.
No it does not. It already exists: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/india-orders-mobile-phones-preloaded-with-government-app-ensure-cyber-safety-2025-12-01/ https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/china-implements-mandatory-face-scans-for-mobile-phone-users-report-says/ https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/354
Let that not bother you, the government has enough money to hire a thousand of lawyers and let them outplay you in any rule-lawyering contest - given that they will actually be judging who won anyway. Mandating every phone having locked boot sequence that is signed by approved government key is enough to build it. And easy to check.
We have already played this out with guns and drugs. If you assemble some weird shit that the government struggles to classify, you are a dangerous person who is presumed to do something evil, and now you have to spend enormous resources to prove otherwise and stay out of jail. And, since nobody but you does this weird shit, you have no allies and stand on your own against the government machine, and nobody even cares if you win or lose but a couple of principle freaks with Mastodon accounts. And if by some weird luck somebody cares and you manage to win in one case, and become popular, the government just puts the law in the next 2000-page mega-bill that bans specifically what you are doing. Because it's dangerous to children or something.
That's a big failure mode that geeks still persist on holding onto. We are so smarter with the technology that we will out-technology the government. It works on the small scale. On the large scale the government will just lock up the whole environment - and if there is a couple of rats and cockroaches under the floorboards, it's not a big threat. Yes, you can run around as an individual rat and collects some scraps and crumbles that fall off the table. But you will never get a seat at the table itself while being a rat. And that's the goal.
It does not matter that specific legislators get specific details wrong. It does matter that they have the power to control these details. And once it is established that they do, they will eventually lock down all the specific details in a way they want to. If they want 99.99% of people using government-controlled identity-linked devices to access the internet - that's what will happen, and the fact that you can solder together an unauthorized device and use it in your basement (until your ISP blocks you and notifies the police) is not a big win on your side.
Links to Chinese and Indian government crackdowns? Ok. I mean, there's a reason I don't live there and call both of those regimes authoritarian.
So the system is already irrevocably rigged against me. But ...
I should want to have a seat at the corruption table?
Why would "they" (I think you mean legislators) want this? If you're going to answer with "because they want total control!" Then you're just feeding into a straw man archetype.
I'm interested in preventing a censored future. And I also think there is a very real chance it could happen - look at England arresting people for tweets. But what you're presenting is an "you're already fucked!" blackpill doomer scenario that relies on a lot of circular argumentation and conspiracy thinking. There's a lot of logical leaps - they're gonna find a way to fuck you, bud! - without a lot of well thought out causal chains for how it would all actually happen. I find so little value in this.
If you think it can only happen in China and can not happen in any other country, you are very dangerously naive. Europe (and Britain, which exited EU but somehow kept the worse parts) is well on the way to implement widespread internet controls, surveillance, universal digital ID and mandatory device lock-ups. See for example: https://reclaimthenet.org/uk-lawmakers-propose-mandatory-on-device-surveillance-and-vpn-age-verification - for the children, of course! Yes, China and India and other countries that never had traditions of freedom are further on the way but nobody really values freedom in "the liberal West" anymore, so it's only question of time.
You should want to have a seat at the table where the policies and the future of the society is decided. Or maybe not, they'd decide it anyway, whether you want the seat or not. You may not be interested in politics, but the politics is always interested in you.
For the same reason they always want it - control. More controllable population is easier to govern. If you control the information, if you control the narrative, it's easier to govern than if you do not. You can implement policies without some pesky irritating dissidents asking stupid questions. You can just order people do things, and they'd do them without you worrying about their "rights" or "freedoms". It's much easier to rule as a king than as a temporary mayor who is constantly questioned and could be deposed anytime. You are a good person who has some excellent ideas about how to govern things - imagine how much good you could do for the society if you don't have to waste your time on anything else but implementing your excellent ideas!
Saying "straw man" does not automatically refute any argument. These are real men, who pass real laws, which you can witness being passed right now. You can ignore this is happening, but it won't ignore you.
But you think that the best way to do it is to deny it's possible, in the face of all the facts, until the very last moment where it comes to your home and drags you to the lockup? I don't think it's as effective a strategy as you think it is.
No, I am not saying you are already fucked. I am saying you will be fucked, if you do not start fighting it right now. I am saying Europe is probably already fucked, because there's nobody left to fight anything there, but in the US there are still some people that care. The institutions that used to care - ACLU, EFF, free software, etc. - are falling one by one, but they are not yet all dead, and it's not too late. But it will be, pretty soon.
No, it's "they already found a way to fuck you, and here's examples where they are fucking other people the same way they're going to fuck you - you still have some, very small, timeframe where you could prevent them from fucking you in the same way they are already fucking other people". Of course, this requires, as the first step, recognizing this is actually happening, and it's a serious problem. And it's not going to be solved by "oh we'll just commit a small patch to fix it".
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