Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

The early Internet users weren't people who subscribed to AOL to look at porn in the 90's. They were the people who were granted access to the ARPANET to work in the 80's. The Internet was an exclusive community back then. You had government employees, knowledge workers, and elite university students who had all passed institutional screening processes. You were only allowed to use the ARPANET if you were using it to do something useful and aligned. Therefore you could feel reasonably assured that anyone you talked to online was going to be better than the average person you'd find going outside and walking down the street. If you wanted to know who they were, you could just finger their username. If you wanted to know who owned a domain, you could whois it, get their name and then even write them mail or call them.

People have wanted that old Internet back for a long time. i.e. the one that existed before Eternal September. Those are the people who run your tech companies. The ones who remember what it was like. These people understand what people actually want isn't always the same thing as what they say they want. They understand why the only truly successful Internet spaces on the modern Internet are the ones like Facebook that got people to be non-anonymous. Another example is the best places to work that folks desperately want to get into are the companies like Google whose intranets are much more like the old Internet. These are really the only Internet spaces that normal people want to use. Because people want to interact with other people who are similar to them. Because people want to know who other people are. Otherwise we can't operate as the social creatures that evolution designed us to be. I don't think any civilization in history has operated its public square as a gigantic red light district where everyone is required to wear a mask. So why should we?

Overcoming the anonymous religion problem that somehow glommed onto the hacker and cyberpunk movements is more important and urgent now than it's ever been, because the Internet has been filling up with billions of AI agents. It's gonna be Eternal September in overdrive. Humanity is really facing a tradeoff where you'll have to have gatekeeping again and won't be allowed to conceal who you are, or you can be gaslit by machines forever in your own robot fantasy.

Nope. That is a storage locker. A bank uses the money it holds for other purposes such as loans or its own investments, possibly returning interest to the depositor. But, most importantly, a bank disperses money. it therefore needs to know who deposits what so that it doesn't eventually release funds to the wrong person. And then there are the lengthy procedures for handing out money without customer permission. People die. Governments garnish wages. Courts order payments to for child support. If you hold money you have to be prepared for this stuff. So you need to be absolutely confident in the identity of everyone you deal with.

Want a simple bank? A bank that doesn't ask for ID? Keep your cash under your mattress. Or put it all in a crypto wallet.

Or perhaps our current Home Sec in 2014 declaring "Rioters face years in prison as Home Secretary Yvette Cooper promises ‘swift justice’" [1]

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8695988/London...

[1] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/riots-prison-justice-l...

It's all part of making effective protesting illegal. You can justify each little step as you clutch your pearls (even me, to an extent if I don't think of the bigger picture), but then when you realise that the sum of all that is permitted is standing alone creating no disturbance for anyone, effecting no change, and you realise effective protesting is banned.

The same could be said about enterprise, investment, war, etc.

It's the people who won't take risks that schemers try to exclude.

This is the real reason why no one will ever remember your name kid.