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IMO I feel like age verification is a motte. I 100% support young people having limited internet. Especially now that access is in your pocket and isn’t the family computer with lack of privacy.
The issue with age-verification is the linkage to adults real identities and societies broader desire for political control through thought control. You can’t do the good thing (8 year olds not able to watch bukkake) without also making it very easy for society to do the bad thing (universal thought police).
This seems to be a universal issue with modern technology. Nuclear energy having bombs or Self-Driving enabling government to control your cars.
Sure, I think young people should not have open access to the internet, but I'm also not willing to do what it takes to accomplish that.
It's the realm of progressives to ignore these kinds of trade-offs, and to focus obstinately on the thing they want while ignoring what it takes to get there.
Children's internet access can be mitigated without really invading privacy.
Better parental controls, phone bans in schools, and propaganda "the free internet is bad for children". I think those would get the most young people off the free internet for most of their youth, which is enough for significant improvement to society, even with a few (with negligent parents and/or ambition) still online.
Maybe it can be mitigated without invading privacy, but that's not the world we live in, and that's not what people are proposing, is it? What we're getting is full online ID for everyone.
Yes, the proposals are bad.
But I think it's easier to persuade with "age verification is fine, but this proposal is bad because it unnecessarily hurts privacy (and won't even work), here's a better one" than "age verification is bad".
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Freedom over safety 100%. Don't 8 year olds have parents? How about their parents just not buy them a smart phone? Easy. Age verification is a complete abomination, it's not even a trojan horse, it's a trojan warship. It looks bad on the outside and everyone can tell what's inside.
Peer pressure is a thing, as is "other kids may not have parents as wary, or they may have older siblings able to circumvent restrictions for them". There was a piece in the advice column a while back, in a national newspaper, about "my pre-teen son watched porn at a friend's house, what the heck do I do? how do I talk to him about this?"
It's a thorny problem. There is so much out there now that wasn't there when we were starting to use the Internet, and pretending (if we all weren't already 18 or older) that yep indeedy I am of legal age in my country to read this, now give me the Legomance, or trying to work out what this story ranked as on the citrus scale.
I care about strange children about as much as they and their parents care about my freedom, which is apparently 0.
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Unlimited freedom is a hellish dystopian society. You could say it’s freedom for alcohol companies to target customers by identifying alcoholics by having mobile alcohol trucks setting up outside someone’s house offering the first drink for free at 9 am and ratcheting up temptation. Mobile phones can be like that.
Young children often don’t have great temptation control. I don’t think having shitty parents means that children should be offered vices at 8 year olds. There is always a temptation between freedom and security.
Unlimited freedom is a frontier society, which certainly isn't always safe, but I wouldn't describe it as hellish and dystopian.
It's dystopian to have the police knock on your door for complaining about being stabbed by a foreigner. It's just a violent death to be scalped by an Indian, and it's just normal exposure to die of hunger or cold.
Frontier societies are functional because there isn't enough concentrated wealth to attract predators. Unlimited freedom in an affluent society where the administrative cost of running a complex scam is Nigerian minimum wage plus a smartphone is more like a frontier society subject to constant Indian raids.
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Okay. Alcoholism is a genetic disease. I would rather they filter themselves out than make fit people live under tyranny. Although I would support keyhole solutions out of charity, I can't stand the parasitism of ruining everything for most people so that a sickly minority gets catered to.
Same logic here. Kids with bad parents have parents with bad genes. But they get their genes from their parents. No more taking from beautiful ones to provide protection from selection for the hässlich. I would support keyhole solutions out of noblesse oblige, but everyone showing their identity card to every website so neglectful people don't see a nude body when they are young is not that.
To be clear you support like genociding 99% of Americans? Everyone genes have something like alcoholism in them. And with modern technology targeting human fault points becomes increasingly easy. Gambling on your phone. 2-clicks drone delivered alcohol and drugs.
And a lot of things people do that are bad also have socially desirable attributes. With alcohol it’s only a slight difference between being life of the party socially talented guy and a life ruined by alcoholism. Some could even say that’s just the difference between Joe and Hunter Biden. Gambling is also very similar. Degenerate gambler and hedge fund manager is a fairly similar personality trait.
There is no way freedom would genocide anywhere near 99% of Americans. Given it's supposed to be the land of the free, that would be quite ironic, anyway.
IMO founding fathers didn’t deal with the modern advertising and marketing state or dopamine drips from phones. And in this thread we are specific talking about smartphones and children. Maybe 99% is too high but the ability to get addicted is much higher now. A few years ago lifetimes risks of dying from a fentanyl OD was running 2-3%.
And 2-3% is acceptable. That's close to the bottom 2-3%, and they do it to themselves. It's terrible dysgenics to save them from themselves.
The 2-3% run rate was just 80 (human lifespan)(US drug OD/year)/US population. This is only fentanyl. Addiction rates would need to include the alcoholics (slow deaths), weed, gamblers. And a true libertarian society like the internet would mean much younger age of exposure.
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At the end of the day, there are only two positions -- "You can just do things" and "We live in a society". Each person has one or the other orientation (with most being the latter), and this determines their position on almost any regulation that doesn't go directly to their self-interest. It does not matter where on the freedom-to-tyranny scale society is at the moment.
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