This has been brewing in my mind for the past week and I really need to write about it.
In the course of staying afloat on all of the insane new digital id laws happening across the world and the United States, I have found very little in-depth analysis. One thing particularly lacking has been a solid legal context for understanding how likely or unlikely these laws are to either be passed or to survive scrutiny, and that legal context ultimately decides the future and how effective people can be at fighting back.
The general “news” pattern is pure rot, in my opinion. I’ve seen numerous video clips of dozens of news stations saying the exact same thing, and this makes sense because these are syndicated and often run by the same people at the very top. But then you also get a ton of low-effort YouTube channels that survive off of repeating current events. If you want to dig into a particular event, there will often be a one-week period during which everybody is talking about it, followed by complete radio silence afterward, often with no updates ever provided.
Only twice in my life have political/news-type subjects caused me actual mental distress, but in the midst of trying to establish the facts without overwhelming myself, I’ve realized that it simply doesn’t pay to watch people repeat the same thing over and over again. One article will say, “This new law is bad! You should be worried!” and then the next will say, “Why X law is worse than you thought!” and they aren’t necessarily wrong, there’s just very little that I personally can do about it, and constantly exposing myself to the shock value doesn’t help anything. Especially since – once again – critical legal context has been left out of the discussion.
One of the most depressing websites in the world is the Privacy subreddit, which I try to visit sparingly. The cards are largely stacked against us when it comes to privacy, and too many people get rich off of big tech’s violations for anything to really swing in our favor. But we are also up against Surveillance Capitalism, a paradigm completely new to this world, which had never existed until the turn of the 21st century. We are not “ahistorical”, we are living through history, and someday the woes of our generation will score a few paragraphs in the history books. Unfortunately, these years won’t pass by without putting up a fight, and we have to find a way forward.
For all of the interwebz’s benefits, the thinking expressed on it tends to be shallow. I deeply miss when some of my friends would share actually meaningful reflections on things.
As for the origins of these insane id and age verification laws, most people are content to make huge claims: “They want to control us!” “It’s all about censorship!” “Palantir wants our data!” …and these might be entirely correct. But…when I first learned about Operation Paperclip, I had to ask myself, “What does it mean that after WW2, the US government hired a ton of Nazis?” So I read a book on the subject, and it turns out it’s complicated. It started off with people wanting to execute those men outright, but as suspicion of the Soviet Union grew, some people in the military realized that US rocket technology was about 20 years behind the Germans’. If they let a few experts escape the noose and paid them for information…maybe they could bridge that gap? Many were outright opposed to this and did everything in their power to stop it, but others were more cunning and decided that it was an unfortunate bargain that needed to be made if the US was to survive Soviet aggression. Saying “the government” hired Nazis is technically correct, but “the government” is composed of hundreds of thousands of people, all with varying levels of influence, persuasion, conviction, and capability.
So…when it comes to these laws? I don’t know, man. Clearly people who operate age verification services stand to profit handsomely, and that’s where I would look if I were looking for corruption. But also, political parties have their factions, and some tycoons try to play both sides. Webs of influence are really what we need to be looking at, not necessarily low-level state representatives who are happy to play the party line in exchange for campaign finance. It’s also telling to me that almost immediately after the OS age verification laws in California and Colorado hit the news cycle, Brazil basically pledged to enforce their own version of this law in a two-week time frame (good luck with that, Brazil!). What’s suspicious about this is that South American leaders have a history of being overthrown if they don’t play ball with the CIA, and nothing would potential indicate playing ball harder than reading the US room – so to speak – and committing oneself to it with gusto. That’s speculation on my part, of course, but with something like this, I would rather get at specifics than just making broad and unproven claims and sitting around and being pensive (even thought I’m good at the latter). (my general opinion is that the CIA are the overseas goons working for the executive branch or some variation of it, but I have a lot to learn about this stuff)
I do think there is a strategy at play to overwhelm people. There has been no serious public debate before the passing of these laws, most of which are horrendously stupid from a technical perspective, but they have been popping up everywhere, and they do seem aimed at getting people to verify their id for every website visited. This is fitting with the “total information awareness” our intelligence agencies were chomping at the bit for in the early 2000s, but the infrastructure finally exists to make it happen, if only the laws can be crammed through fast enough. It’s also consistent with the ideology of some major tycoons with massive influence in Europe, as well as the UN’s Agenda 2030, which is pretty scary stuff, if not a little too prone to conspiracies. Unfortunately, I’m not an expert or even really a novice at researching this stuff to get at a more nuanced understanding.
First steps are probably to learn more about the Constitution. How have I known so little about it all these years?