respect to trans people both visible and invisible. your path is one of the hardest anyone travels, and you deserve all the support the rest of us can offer.
Remote
graydon
@graydon@types.pl
mastodon 4.8.0-alpha.2+glitchsemi-serious slightly-more-public / professional account, mostly computer stuff with a dash of leftist political advocacy.
dislike attention and deeply loathe getting into arguments with strangers on the internet, but am easily drawn into them regardless. therefore likely to block if debated. it's nothing personal, just my own self-preservation; there's no option to disable replies, and my next-best option is simply not to be here at all. sorry.
currently not accepting new non-personal-friend followers. get to know me somewhere else first.
272 Followers
313 Following
17 Posts
Joined November 19, 2022
mood:
grim
location:
pacific northwest
computers:
broken
Replying to
@cwebber@social.coop counterpoint: this is basically why I wound up starting rust. bitter about not writing ocaml at work.
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@mycorrhiza@post.lurk.org 10,000x YES the clock is the root of all evils in the modern age
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@secretasianman@types.pl there has to be a fast food crossover joke in here about the Bellmac 32.
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@mhoye (it's also not in any way about "your computer not working for you". the minor's computer works, they just send an extra bit to a website saying they're a minor. the website can ignore that! the only websites likely to care are those legally required to respond to that bit with a service denial. it's possible you're upset at the very idea of "websites have legal obligations" but then everyone who's arguing for "no age bit" usually says the way to solve this is for websites to instead be legally obliged to do _much more extensive_ content moderation, and have direct content liability and all sorts of stuff that would have vastly more chilling effects. so like I'm not even sure what the counter-proposal here is. should publishers or platforms have any responsibilities?)
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@mycorrhiza@post.lurk.org (I mean sure money obviously but money is time and anyways money is way older and it didn't used to be so bloody accurate)
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@serapath @mhoye it doesn't involve registering yourself with any authority. it's not performing surveillance. it's not going to change the life of a mature, consenting-adults population in any way. it's not treating adults as a toddler. it literally only works if you're giving a phone to a toddler (or someone young enough they don't own the phone).
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@serapath @mhoye What I'm talking about is what's actually being enacted in law -- the OS-level age check in California that is just a field the owner sets when setting up an account. What you're talking about is some imaginary dystopia nobody's actually enacting in law. That's the point I'm making.
Replying to
@serapath @mhoye "Something OS based is there whether you use it or not." Yes sure it yields a (as of the california law) 4-state variable bucketing you into sub-13, 13-16, 16-18, or 18+ that's of no consequence to anyone other than a parent _and can be set by the owner_.
It's not a question of "circumvention". It's a question of ownership. The device owner can set it. I you're 40 you can -- if you feel weird -- set your account to say you're 16 or 12 and wow cool you'll get denied pornography and social media. Every adult will just set it to 18+ because there's no advantage to setting it to the minor modes. Everyone who owns a device will set it to 18+.
But that's ok, it's not "circumventable" for kids, because _parents own their kids' devices_ and do device-setup for them. So it all works. There's no actual problem, just hyperbolic panic about "what if it were something different".
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@serapath @mhoye I don't see this as in any way related to "total surveillance". Anyone who wants to surveil you has far more tools at their disposal already. And the government has been literally ingesting and storing the entirety of the internet for decades; that's a vastly larger and almost completely orthogonal fight.
This is a fight over platforms showing kids stuff that makes them have serious mental problems, where parents have -- for better or worse -- the upper hand in legislation due to the enormous harms from modern algorithmic platforms, and I see roughly 3 possible outcomes:
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Section 230 gets rolled back and major platforms turn off user generated content altogether, all minor platforms get caught in the crossfire and have to shut down entirely, and the internet becomes an unrecognizable disney-scape.
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Some kind of age verification done by platforms themselves using deeply invasive and privacy-destroying things like scanning faces and uploading ID to 3rd parties. This is in Utah and Texas presently and is somewhat of a disaster.
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OS vendors embed a small, fairly benign, device-owner-controlled 1-or-2-bit signal of age-bucketing in a device attestation channel. Platforms respect it and inhibit various algorithmic functions / mask off a portion of user-generated content, the internet gets a bit less free-and-open, maybe smaller websites also do self-censorship based on the signal's presence (marking themselves 18+), but enough of the platforms' harms are mitigated that parents ease off the throttle.
None of these 3 futures is great for kids in abusive homes, or queer kids looking for community, or dozens of other cases I care deeply about.
But I also don't feel like I can really tell parents not to care about their kids getting eating disorders or becoming nazis or committing suicide or whatever. Even if I did make that argument, they outnumber and outmass me politically.
So that's the actual world I expect to occupy. And of those 3 futures, I think the 3rd is the overwhelmingly superior option.
Replying to
@serapath @mhoye well .. ok, in the hypothetical world someone passes that law and somehow makes it work at a global scale I might get a little more worked up over it .. except it's still only a 4-state age-bucket that is of no relevance to anyone over 18, and is far less of a burden than any of 100 other factors that allow or deny me access to a given website. like there are paywalls all over the internet. are you not equally upset about that? it seems not.
and in the meantime, I don't think the imaginary future you're projecting is all that likely to happen. you'd need enough 13-year-olds-who-bought-a-burner-phone-to-circumvent-their-parents-phone-ownership to get parents worked up over it, to the same extent they got worked up enough to pass the current law. I don't see that happening any time soon.
I think it's much _more_ likely that age verification gets so much misguided pushback from people like you that it fails, then the parents change tactic and get section 230 struck from the books, and all platforms self-censor everything and we wind up with disney-net full of 100% least-offensiveness stuff, for risk of liability.
but .. anyway I'm not trying to have the debate about "do parents have a right to control their kids", I think probably parents over-control kids but I'm not a parent so what do I know? my point is they have a set of concerns, they're enacting them in laws now, and the OS-level owner-sets-a-bit system is the _least bad_ way we know of addressing their concerns. and I expect it will mostly address their concerns. or at least enough to take the wind out of their sails politically.