> I was a kid with unrestricted, unsupervised internet access, and it definitely affected many things in my life. If I happen to have a child in the future, they won't go through that.
I've heard this a few times, but what was so bad? And, sorry to break it you, reality has some bad bits to it - do you think being ignorant of these is useful, or that it just sets you up for a bigger fall?
Why do you think removing independence (nannying) from another human being is the answer? Would you want to be nannied for ever, by corporations and governments?
To me the question is more who is going to nanny me, and ideally its myself (the mature option), but in my experience starting as a child and going into adulthood, mental health can break this down to where people can't nanny/take care of themselves. In that case, the question at hand is: who is going to protect you from yourself? The state? Your family? Your friends?
Oftentimes the answer is "nobody". There's just nobody you can rely on to get the level of care you require. There are lots of arguments like Bowling Alone for how the breakdown of community has contributed to this separate issue.
In my view, by constructing and supporting legislation like this, people are implicitly admitting that parents, teachers, schools, communities, and all the rest are failing at their job of keeping moderation local and raising the next generation.
But the thing is, unfortunately this is a true statement in too many cases, including mine. My parents failed to parent me well enough, and my counselors were either instrumental in my own trauma or failed to address my issues soon enough, and as such I developed a sex addiction in adolescence fueled by persistent ongoing stress from my upbringing that I continue to seek treatment for to this day. Could content moderation laws have cured my parents' narcissism? Nope. Could they have prevented me from needing to act out to relieve the stress of my early relational trauma? Nope. Could they have helped match me with more competent therapists? Nope.
Could they have caused me to go to rehab for alcohol abuse instead of porn? Maybe.
For all his statements I disagree with, I subscribe to Gabor Mate's view that traumatized individuals are compelled to be addicted to something. At that point, there are a lot of things to become addicted to other than the ones you can content moderate, given the (false) assumption that it's possible moderate enough of it.
Pornography was necessary but not sufficient for me to have it that bad coming out of childhood. Early exposure to it was only incidental. My upbringing was far more significant a cause in this. But unlike which websites I was allowed to visit as a child, a 100% chance of having emotionally involved parents isn't something you can legislate into existence.
What I feel isn't being talked about enough in this discussion is that this implicit realization that the world just sucks sometimes leads to justification that someone else needs to step in to protect children's fragile minds if the formerly trusted institutions aren't. The big option left is the platforms and systems hosting the tech themselves so they're targeted instead.
My opinion? If your parents aren't able to raise you to be free of significant trauma spawning "hungry ghosts" that you will need to turn to your unfettered internet access to feed, whether TikTok or LiveLeak or elsewhere, lest you are bombarded by stress every waking moment... then the situation was hopeless to begin with. You can't fix that problem with laws. You should have just had better parents, as awful as that sounds. And because of nothing more than bad luck, you're just going to have to unpack that problem with the healthcare system for years/decades, because there's not much else we know of that can meaningfully address childhood trauma that severe.
However, I don't think the medical establishment will necessarily help. Or looking outside generally - this will probably only compound or defer the problem. You will have to deal with it yourself in the end. I believe everyone already has all they need in themselves to do this.
It's almost as if there is a global plan to deanonymise everyone online, and for governments and corporations to have total awareness and control of everyone's actions.
This has been going on in full force since the GWB admin in response and using the excuse of the terroristic attacks.
They called it total information awareness. They pretended to bury it. All they did was hide their intentions from the public. They even spied on Congress and they spied on presidential candidates. If they had no decorum for those folks imagine what they are willing to do to collect information on the public.
this should realy be one of those accross the aisles things. Well it kinda is, across both sides of the political spectrum there is for some fucking reason a huge support for this. I am so pissed.
Not 81,000 as it says in the title. I know I'm being nitpicky, but I wouldn't round up to 81k. Surely the 'important number' in this case is 80, so you would round down to that. Then let the reader pleasantly discover you had interviewed ~500 more than you stated.
It's funny to me when someone does this sort of minor hyperbole that's verging on lying - you have to wonder what is going on.
80,000, 81,000, 80,500, and 80,510 are all valid ways to round 80,508 depending on the number of significant digits you want to preserve. For a number in the tens of thousands, it's natural to round to the nearest thousand which is appropriately 81k.
I get it, I know how rounding works. I mean, its basically 100k - why not just say that? That would be justifiable too, right?
What would you have done, in those circumstances though? Would you 'round up', overstating your case, like Anthropic did? Or would you ensure that you avoid the suggestion that you were misrepresenting the numbers?
I'd round it to 81k whether the number is good or bad. It's less than a 1% difference. What I wouldn't do is round it to 100k because that's a 24% increase, unless the number was really inconsequential. Say you have a website with 10m requests over a month, 9.9m were successful, and "100k" were failed requests for nonsense pages.
They'll find whatever they need to find (or not find) just as we do. Its simply an impossible exercise to go back in time, carrying all of our assumptions about modern life and what we have been taught about the 'Ancient world'.
I think warrantless access, deanonymising the internet, etc, are things that go together. If you want auto-governance (technocracy), to micro-manage every citizen, these are the foundations you need. As it is already determined that this is what will be happening, no amount of discussion will make a material change - the legislation is going in whether people want it or not. The individual justifications for each legal step in the construction are either going to be done with low visibility, or a trope like ('for the children/terrorists') will be wheeled out. Works every time, so why change?
There is no warrantless access to data here though. None. It's merely showing the warrant to the person being 'searched'. As mentioned elsewhere, the same has been true for decades with someone's phone being tapped.
The ISP can see the warrant. The judge creates a warrant. The court sees the warrant.
The nice thing about not being in jail is that you have the freedom to choose where and how you live. Feel free to move into a shack in the middle of the woods away from everyone. Plenty of people make the choice to live as hermits or shutins because they don't want to deal with other people or the demands being a part of a community places on them.
Well, it’s more that there will be a specific society that you’ll be forced to be a part of. You can try to keep to yourself but you’ll still be living, eating, showering, and so on in rather cramped conditions with many others.
> Avoiding every corporation that does stuff you disagree with just isn't feasible.
That would be all of them. They are all dirty.
The idea of 'voting with your dollar' is ridiculous - they are all terrible, so there's nothing to vote for. But yes, modern life requires that we engage with their nonsense, no need to think of the interaction as anything more that begrudging extraction.
Do you think any corporate isn't extracting data from you? Put techno companies to one side (as if not all companies are not actually tech nowadays) - what about pharmaceuticals, cars? All extractive as well as selling a product. Supermarkets? Financial companies? If you think there are companies not observing the data as well as selling the product, I don't think you're paying attention.
>Do you think any corporate isn't extracting data from you?
I think they are extracting and sharing data to varying degrees and that some have a business model which pushes them to one end of the spectrum.
If you take the example of supermarkets you used nearly all of them push loyalty cards which they use as a mechanism to manipulate your purchasing decisions but the one I frequent doesn't (Aldi UK).
Even in the example you use of a friendlier corporate, you have no idea what is being monitored. You only know there are no loyalty cards. You don't know if they are tracking consumers through the shop, over visits, etc. They do do that. They're not making a profit to do right by everyone.
At least all publicly traded companies are 100% completely psychopathic. It's just what they are. Their objective to create shareholder value just trumps everything else.
With private companies you have whatever morals the owners have. It's a very mixed bag.
I've heard this a few times, but what was so bad? And, sorry to break it you, reality has some bad bits to it - do you think being ignorant of these is useful, or that it just sets you up for a bigger fall?
Why do you think removing independence (nannying) from another human being is the answer? Would you want to be nannied for ever, by corporations and governments?
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