Teachable Moment: All is fair in love and war
A gender war flashpoint highlights the concrete privacy concerns of age verification
The narrow window of time where the public could make use of the web to hold power accountable is coming to a close. The corporate consolidation over the digital town square has already relegated the free exchange of ideas to the moderately technically savvy user. When it comes to challenging totalitarianism, this is a catastrophic loss. Far from being humanity’s “information super-highway”, much of cyberspace has been transformed into broadcast television with likes.
Governments have caught up to the digital tools of our time. While “team freedom” becomes more apathetic and nihilistic about technology, a well-funded and connected league of bureaucrats are working to ensure that the people can never again use these tools to threaten their power. During the Covid years, it was invaluable for people of the world to share notes on what their governments were doing to them. It is clear that such an opportunity will be throttled away in the future.
Last week, the world was given a major demonstration of how bifurcated the web of tomorrow is. The vast majority of people are going to concede to verification schemes to access web content, and a small minority will be gated from major online services. This separation is but a first step into a vastly more gated and controlled web, that will make digital dissent a fading memory. For now the focus is on the United Kingdom, but there have been many similar proposals in Canada, Australia, as well as Europe. It is fortunate that while this is being put into place, there was a high-profile example of the concrete dangers of our current path. It just so happens that a dating gossip app had a devastating data breach, weaponizing the private and personal information of those who were required to hand it over to participate.
The tea spills
It is easy to be hard on the young. Our social and technological environment has been changing so rapidly it’s genuinely hard to understand the challenges people face. Young boys and girls are creatures of an environment many hardly understand, much less work to improve. To make matters worse, not all interventions work out for the better. An app was made with the stated goal of allowing women to share notes and red flags about men in their lives. As it grew in popularity, eventually somebody noticed that the uploaded photo ID documents (to prove the users were women) were publicly accessible.
This breach is perfect culture war fodder, and has received a great deal of mainstream coverage. This alone raises the stakes of the breach. Assurances of safety and security mean nothing in circumstances where there is sufficient motivation to leverage the data. S2 Underground makes a point to highlight the national security implications of this breach. Many people verified themselves with their workplace ID, or had their selfies linked to their actual location. The problems don’t end there. Scammers will routinely make use of breached information to find prey, and this kind of information can be expected to be leveraged for harassment campaigns.
This strikes at the root justification for ID verification online: the idea that it makes anyone at all safer. The tight intermingling of our real-world identities with the digital world has been a disaster for privacy and safety as a whole. The apathetic refrain “[they] can get everything anyways” says a lot more when “they” isn’t just intelligence agencies, but scammers and vindictive people online. While governments and corporations will promise you that they will take every precaution to protect your information, take no comfort from it. Breaches are a fight against entropy and almost assured on a long enough time line. Personal information has been leaked from small start-ups to the biggest tech giants of them all. If what we’re actually after is safety, it’s high time to consider what that truly means in a digital context.
The safety promised by these systems is merely the transfer of risk from the giant institutions onto the people. The dangers only escalate as these systems consolidate control and power while failing to truly address the problems of our time. The false dichotomy between safety and freedom online is a very convenient way to avoid having to answer for the power they possess in control of these systems. It can’t be ignored that while these measures are put in place to ‘protect us’ governments are also introducing ‘back-door’ legislation to be able to spy on all that transpires on these platforms. The sum effect of these regulations is that there will be fewer independent digital platforms, and so much more speech control online. Nothing new, but an escalation of existing trends. Do you feel safer already?
The digital dark age begins
Despite age verification being imposed for your safety, scope creep is inevitable. It did not take long at all for the this law to ensure that X was suppressing footage of protests. Ultimately, none of this is new. Governments across the world are leveraging the corporate consolidation of the web to completely eliminate dissent. One has to ask: what do these governments intend to do once they have seized total dominance over the public discussion? It is important to consider what this global coordinated gating of information is actually aimed at solving.
Age verification often fails to accomplish its stated goals. Already we have seen that video game screenshots are sufficient to fool some of these systems. Correcting for mistakes by making validation more invasive simply increases the risk to participants. As simple methods continue to fail, we can expect the intrusions to move from platforms to your own devices. Client-side scanning and other mechanisms can be adopted to ensure safety at the expense of a state veto over political dissent. The paper-thin pretexts of policing hate and disinformation collapse entirely when one observes how these policies are actually applied in practice: the letter of every regulation applied to silence inconvenient voices, while selected speakers are given preferential treatment. The new dark age doesn’t look dark at all, but instead brightly illuminated like a casino. A wide assortment of attention-grabbing colors arranged to hide rot we’re not supposed to notice. Any attempt to communicate to the public requires you to play by the house’s rules.
The destruction of the web as a place for independent exchange of ideas has absolutely dire consequences for the future of humanity. Conceding cyberspace to tyrants after they made it inescapable is the final defeat before endless torment. Abandoning the free and open web only gives your local propagandists an unparalleled advantage over you. Setting proper digital boundaries is possible, but the opportunity to do so is fading.
Curating coherence
People do not appreciate the vital importance of a free cyberspace enough. It is clear that we can expect the vast majority of the public to not only accept the death of digital dissent, but to lecture us about how important it is. At this stage, the best one can hope for is to merely preserve what is important as the darkness creeps in. With enough care and persistence, we can work to reverse the trend, but it is going to take much more than what has currently arisen.
Recognize and resist hostile cyberspace
The ultimate contradiction of trying to make the Internet safe is that the corporate web exists to farm value from people. There can be no safety on platforms that exist to sell every moment of attention at the expense of your mental health. Another unpopular distinction is that merely using a VPN to evade the current iteration of ID verification is not a way to resist these measures. At worst it is signaling to the corporation that their users can be expected to absorb the impact of future violations.
Understand that there is more to the world wide web than a few corporate controlled platforms. There are new decentralized protocols, and ways to build up independent cyberspace. These giant tech monopolies will be the enforcers of state politics and morality for as long as people tolerate it. We are already beginning to see the intrusions leap from mere mental health concerns to health trackers observing minute biological details.
Under the guise of making cyberspace ‘safe’ for all, we are seeing a parallel escalation in the ways in which our digital landscape can control, manipulate, and abuse people. These trends are hardly coincidental. It is high time to directly face the fact that these systems are hostile to the people they manage. You are not even a ‘user’ of these systems, you are a resource to be exploited, if not a liability to be managed. Do not give these platforms the benefit of the doubt, much less your sensitive personal information.
Develop and build independent technical capacity
The existing set of cyber-rebels are largely a loose set of individuals who chose to break free of hostile cyberspace early, for a variety of reasons. As a community, we have hardly begun to tread water. We are not even close to building rafts for others in any large way. Organized independent technical skills and resources are needed to truly chart a better direction. This requires freedom fighters from all walks of life to recognize the centrality of digital freedom in their real-life endeavors.
Digital freedom is not the most important fight, but it is becoming a very critical front that is a prerequisite to holding governments and institutions accountable. If we wish to truly break new ground, rather than optimize within the boundaries assigned to us, victories in cyberspace are needed. This is no simple task. I can admit it is not easy to find technical people who recognize the stakes, responsibility, and opportunity in forging a radically new direction.
Breaking free from hostile cyberspace requires finding or producing independent alternatives. It is utterly pointless to finger-wag at those trapped in virtual prisons if we are not well-equipped to offer an alternative. For far more people than you think, this is all that they have known. As the years crawl by, it becomes increasingly dire for increasing numbers of people.
Curate Independent cyberspace and ‘IRL’ space
If you want people to connect offline, you need to ensure there actually are rich social environments for people to thrive in. This may come as a shock, but authentic person-to-person interaction takes time. To make matters worse, our modern environment undermines a significant amount of trust which makes this even harder. Bringing people together is not just work, but a phenomenally valuable skill. It is important to be patient with the process, remind yourself what this is really all about.
At the same time, it really is not ideal to write-off the digital entirely. Fundamentally the goal should be for discovering, building, and maintaining a better digital experience that doesn’t intrude on our actual lives. The ability for people across the world to share information and connect has never truly been the problem. The problem has always been how social interactions have been gated and mediated by corporations and governments with malicious intent.
A better digital landscape is possible, it should compliment our lives rather than intrude on them. This simple distinction is what separates a free cyberspace from the controlled dystopia the powers of the world wish to force on us.
What can we do to protect this boundary?
The really worrying thing is that we saw it coming a long while ago (with articles like this beautiful one), but it seems to be impossible to counter it, despite all the movements denouncing them (I bet we'll find a solution though, let's be optimistic). I stopped logging into anything asking me to prove my ID with fingerprints or eye scan once I woke up, which my corporate ex-employer's bullying helped me to achieve... And somehow, I am grateful to them because now I know, and I can still read and write to Substack, and I love you all for what you do. Thanks a million Gabriel!
Another great article Gabe, thank you. Despite my personal efforts to break the digital shock collars in my life, I am already one of the people you mentioned who are on the fringes. It is not an easy life.
I think it will get really difficult in Australia when they tie biometrics and digital ID to the tax and health departments. For many of the noisy keyboard warriors with luxury beliefs, they will find themselves in checkmate.