Comment by prohobo
9 days ago
I'm completely baffled why anyone still engages with the "official" framing around this. Obviously, it's not for protecting children. Obviously, it's a technocratic trojan horse for increasing surveillance capabilities on digital systems. This is so cynically anti-democratic that they obfuscate the real purpose, don't even bother to make it plausible, and everyone is left talking about how "awful it is" that it's already legislated.
I swear to God, if someone replies to this talking about how we need to protect the children I'm going to start requiring "age verification" from commenters, and I'll do a little background check to find out w̵h̵e̵r̵e̵ ̵t̵h̵e̵y̵ ̵l̵i̵v̵e̵ if they're over 18.
It's because none of the stuff you say is obvious is actually obvious. You might be totally right about all of it (my own view is that regardless of what the intention is, this stuff will inevitably be misused), but it needs to be demonstrated that you are. The word obvious has a different meaning.
This is a pretty common phenomenon in politics, where people have a political view that is obvious to them, but other people actually disagree with that view. This is one way that political discussions go off the rails, because if you think your own views are obvious, you quickly start thinking that people have some ulterior motive for debating that "obvious" view. But the reality is often just that they just have a genuine difference of perspective, that the thing that is obvious to you is just not obvious to them.
This is a great point. I highly recommend "Liminal Thinking", which explains how what he calls "Battles for the Obvious" like this get started.
If this goes through, I wouldn't be surprised if facial recognition ends up being the "solution" to the problems this creates.
I walked to get a sandwich today and I counted no less than ten cameras along the way.
On an unrelated note, I'm thinking of taking up a laser hobby.
High power lasers reflect in unpredictable ways thereby endangering everyone around you. There are other options that don't risk bodily harm.
What are the options?
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> If this goes through, I wouldn't be surprised if facial recognition ends up being the "solution" to the problems this creates.
The end goal is for every IP address to be associated with a physical person and an ID card number. Which is where we'll end up after they'll unsuccessfully try to ban VPNs that are used to bypass age-verification checks.
Because it's not at all obvious. The vast majority of people posting on Hacker News in 2026 probably had extreme exposure to the internet early in life and turned out alright. So they're probably not as concerned about children being exposed to adult content.
But clearly people in other cultures have a huge problem with it. Don't fall victim to survivorship bias + echo chamber.
There's not another obvious solution to the problem, it's debated in every thread. (no laptop + homeschool is not a real option for 99% of people)
> There's not another obvious solution to the problem
The problem with this solution is it's far too overly broad while also not working well. It leaves out the most important parts from the legislation while specifying universal compliance.
What the law should have been is "Operating systems intended to be used by minors should have this age verification specification implemented" with a nice documentation of that specification and how it should work. As written, you'll basically end up with the potential that every single OS ends up with it's own age verification system, which defeats the entire point of these laws in the first place.
Saying "all operating systems" puts us in this complicated and dumb position where now an embedded OS needs to worry about age verification of it's user.
hear hear... just recently in a similar discussion someone on here wrote:
"Write me a sonnet on how proliferating child pornography is really free speech."
which kind of sums it up nicely unfortunately.
There you go:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47385001
That doesn't really with with the voting. AB 1043 passed 58-0 in the Cali state assembly which is mostly normal democrats. Those people aren't thinking ha ha ha our evil plans are working. They are thinking let protect kids. I'm skeptical of your obviouslys.
Communists were also not thinking "hahaha how evil we are, let's do GULAGs!" they wanted happiness for everyone, but look where it went. The thing is - it always goes there.
> Obviously, it's not for protecting children
Frankly, this is false. There's a lot of well intentioned people writing these laws and pushing for them.
> Obviously, it's a technocratic trojan horse for increasing surveillance capabilities on digital systems.
However, it is also this.
And that's not a tradeoff I think we should make as a society.
Well said. Yeah. Well intentioned things can still result in bad outcomes.
"well intentioned people"
I believe the standard nomenclature is "useful idiots".
> I believe the standard nomenclature is "useful idiots".
I don't. This snark really lets you downplay them and willingly ignore people who are concerned about a real problem. And then you'll act surprised when they get traction and you've been laughing the whole time.
I think there is a solution, and it's to prevent companies from offering social features to children. Full stop. No age verification, just make it a "ban on sight" thing.
> There's a lot of well intentioned people writing these laws and pushing for them.
No, there absolutely are not. There are Meta et al and their international lobbyists, pushing copy-paste bills. Anyone pearl clutching for the kids is an idiot, or is paid off.
If it makes you feel better to turn people who disagree with you into cartoon villains, then more power to you. But you'll lose the debate because you will only engage in strawman arguments. There are real arguments in favor of this that should not be dismissed, but should be embraced and we should explain why those arguments are weaker than ours.
I feel extremely strongly that this is a Trojan horse that will expand surveillance and control by governments and giant corporations, and ultimately be used to lock us out of our own devices. I think many people supporting this are well-meaning but extremely naive. Meta is not naive of course, they expect to come out on the top of this as a giant corporation. But there are millions upon millions of people who do support this that are not going to come out on top. Those are also the people we need to convince. We're not going to change meta's mind, but we might be able to change others minds.
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It’s blatant staging for the global rollout of the beast system.
https://share.google/aimode/69eYN9B5dzogRBCc6
>I'm completely baffled why anyone still engages with the "official" framing around this.
We all know how these laws are not meant to protect children.
Then we decry the hypocrisy of it.
And then we stop at that.
So nobody is saying what needs to be said.
These laws are explicitly designed to hurt children.
These laws have nothing to do with children. Neither protection nor malice.
It's mass surveillance. Let's not get distracted.
What is the point of the mass surveillance in the first place? Control. Over what? Over human futures. Who will be hit worst by the mass surveillance regime? Those growing up under it.
For starters, an independent self-education will become impossible. Millions more young people would be forced to choose between becoming fluent in whatever maddening proprietary nonsenses their schools are paid to teach them - or ostracism and starvation. They would never know the validity that disintermediated computation lends to one's interior thought process. Many more people would grow into the world of ubiquitous multilevel gaslighting instead of the world of free thought. And that would be those children's life now.
Here's a bit of a doomsday scenario, you can pepper with it your dialogues with people thinking of the children too hard, and you may find their reactions enlightening.
As enmeshed as personal computing and mass media already are with personal life, it can take an organized e***s-minded outfit scant generations to literally devolve your children into a servile underclass. Simply by making access to computation a tightly controlled privilege, and using that to amplify social inequality. (While their own kids get to play out the fantasies dreamt up for them by the colonial laureates of yore, i.e. be immortal trillionaire wizard aristocrats who can work "magic" because they get to learn actual sciences and not just some ever-changing APIs to them. Which would probably fall apart in a few generations making a huge mess of things, potentially permanently bringing down the global supply chain by mass incompetence - but how could they care?)
This is a global legislative assault against the greatest novel liberty humanity has gained from technology for generations: the Internet is literally a means for anyone to project their disembodied thoughts at a distance! Whatever force is even capable of attacking that, it would not be playing for chump change. Nor is it likely to be the unimaginative sort of entity (unless, perhaps, these laws are part of an AGI bootstrapping itself throughout society?) which is why I'm being only slightly anxious about spitballing concrete patterns of defeat in view of it.
And even if we do not end up on the branch of reality where social inequality gets written into the genome and the bloody e***ists win - forcing minors to identify themselves online is sure to facilitate the global cultural conveyor belt that winds through Willy Wonka's Consent Factory Island and beyond.
Plenty of "think of the children" arguments either way if that's how they're playing it. It's a reflexive, non-rational argument, from the same firmware update as "your mom is sacred" (i.e. good luck being child or partner of abuser who had kids to become untouchable). So yeah, do think of the children. Think of their futures. You cowards.
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