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The gradual death of the open internet and ideological capture and where this all leads
One interesting thing you get to do when you get older is to take stock of your predictions, observe trends over a longer timespan and see if your mental models were actually worth their salt.
When I was growing up, I was at the very tail end of the people who still grew up with what I'd like to call a relatively "open" internet. Open in the sense that there was no Reddit, no walled gardens, the iPhone was young, Facebook was beginning to be a thing when I was in school.
Internet norms were very libertarian in most "serious" places, much more male, much more autistic. People thought that we'd have this open space forever where there are no central authoritarian rulers, censorship was mocked as technically impossible even with the Great Chinese Firewall having been a thing, the Arab spring was heralded as a prototype of internet-enabled uprising against authoritarian rulers, the whole thing was very much end-of-history-like. Things like the EFF and Richard Stallmann were relevant, nerds cared about open source, etc.
Then it all came crashing down. People began to concentrate on social media, on sites like Reddit. Network effects did their thing and centralised power and moderation. Eternal September became truly eternal. The word "echo chamber" became a thing. Smartphones meant tech literacy was no longer a prerequisite. The whole thing became politicised, with Trump, Cambridge Analytica, etc. Now everyone is a Russian, Chinese, Israeli shill. Nobody ultimately cares about privacy, censorship, speech norms, etc. that much. Stallmann got cancelled, I think the EFF and the various open source orgs are now all either into AI grifting or grievance stuff. It's gone or going away. I won't look at wrongthink when I have secure-boot enabled TPM-secured age verification built into my OS and sending all my wrongthink to the government.
It was fun while it was closed up. I am sure none of this is novel.
But the interesting thing is the further direction of travel.
Australia and Britain now have age-verification laws which require everyone to submit ID. I think some more authoritarian Asian countries (like South Korea) already have this for things like video games. It is also talked about to make things like VPNs illegal or harder to access in the UK (with the usual suspects pointing out that this puts the UK in company with countries like Russia and NK), the other non-US Anglosphere countries usually follow (seriously Australia/UK/Canada/NZ have a weird thing for paternalism). The sad thing is that this is bipartisan and nobody really opposes this. The evidence base for social media bans is actually quite thin so this will probably not even make the kids not miserable while entrenching ideological control
You can picture children being fed state-backed news from a young age now too, which I guess is Lindy in a way. Will probably entrench and accelerate existing biases and trends even further though. I don't expect "peak woke" to have been passed.
The big boogy-men of the Internet are incels, right wingers and Andrew Tate. Incel discourse is a personal bugbear of mine because it is completely detached from reality in the sense that even though even right-wingers come up with plenty of theories about supposed resentful incel violence, the people most likely to rape and murder women are actually the sex havers. But I digress.
So the governments come up with weird dystopian schemes of censoring and tracking this stuff while other kinds of probably actually harmful stuff (neurotic and mentally ill women amplifying their neuroses about men and society, viz. the "Angry Young Woman", race-grievance amplification, various untrue "tax the rich stuff" verging into blood libel and calls for assassinations) is left untouched, amplified or even supported. Moral panics are nothing new I suppose.
I am a very heavy user of LLMs. I talk to them basically all day at work at this point. Not everyone does, there are still plenty of people who don't use LLMs but younger people use them more than others. I imagine usership heavily skews intellectually as well, as a lot of the general population hates interacting with textual media. I imagine that in the coming years the censors and nudgers will also try to get a front-row seat to this as well, so when you ask for certain things you not only get a Reddit Markov Chain but one where all the "wrong" opinions have been RLFH'd out.
In the future when everyone outsources their thought processes to LLMs that presents a level of ideological centralisation Stalin could have only dreamt of. Should Amanda Askell et al. get to decide how everyone thinks? Maybe not in my opinion, but who knows what'll this stuff do to the kids.
This stuff is particularly pernicious in the non-US anglosphere. I think the EU is also thinking about OS/device-level censorship but in Germany a court struck down the social media ban idea for kids for now (with the argument being something like "kids are people", which is very Kantian and German-idealist in a way). I think California or something tried to force the Linux kernel to put this stuff in and right-wingers will jump on this just as left-wingers would, with different bugbears (porn for right-wingers, wrongthink for left-wingers). Not sure if the US will be a holdout or not. At least speech norms are a thing.
As someone who skews Libertarian, this is all a great disappointment, especially because I like being able to argue with smart people, even if they have viewpoints many consider despicable. I personally mostly just want to be left alone and not have goons sent to people's houses because of wrongthink. Do they still make the kids read Orwell? But I guess not only has the experiment of giving everyone a seat at the table to talk to each other failed spectacularly, it has also manifested a vector of ideological state control hitherto unparalleled that governments are now starting to seriously use. Who knows, maybe complaining about having to pay 50+% of my paycheck to Boomer UBI will be criminalised in 20 years. At least the Chinese are honest about this stuff and don't pretend to be into free speech.
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.
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.
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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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