Dinkaltranen

This is a somewhat old draft I found while tidying up. Enjoy.

The Australian Government is introducing a series of laws that basically require every citizen to have their identity verified to use the internet, including camera access for identification and tracking when using navigation services, youtube, or social media in general.

The purpose of a system is what is does, not what it says it does, and I don't think this will protect children even if that's what they want to front it as. I think if you look at the UK for the disastrous results of a similar online verification system. The government should facilitate and empower its citizens to make decisions about the care of their children, not make that choice from them. Especially with all that is coming with this, which is a giant fucking asterisk.

Are the kids fucked? Yes.

Is it the government's job to stop it? Maybe, again, empowering its citizens to protect their children is the key here.

Will it actually do what it at least says on paper it intends to do, which is to protect kids from dangerous online content? No, definitely not.

Is it the massive government overreach masquerading as something good? Yes, I think it is nearly as bad as the Patriot Act.

The only reason I can think of for them not pretending this isn't a massive authoritarian act using benevolence as a front is that they already have this data which, yes, they probably do, they probably already can track you just as well now as they will before, but now it is effectively putting the camera on the shelf, unironically Big Brother style. “We're always watching! Now we're just letting you know explicitly”. The subtext of this action is clear: The government does not trust you, and the only way they can control you is by waving over your head that any transgression will be noted. It is an attempt of the government to embody Old Testament God.

Say what I will about my parents, they realised that if I got access to the internet from a young age (or a phone that could use it) I would fucking fry my brain. Now it seems completely accepted to give phones to infants. This is not a legal issue, it's a behavioural one. By trying to make it one, we are displacing all the consequences of the behaviour, i.e "I let my child use the internet for 5 hours a day unsupervised from the age of 3 and now they don't know how to pass 9th grade" and saying "Well the Government should have never allowed me to do that to my child!" It is the job of the parent to teach their child how to live, not the government. Neglect is already illegal.

This is the same line of thinking of people who would cut someone else with a sharp knife and then would try to sue the manufacturer for not putting labels on it that warn you could hurt someone with it.

Yes, raising your child in this era with the attitude my parents did will probably leave your child isolated from the social culture of their peers. Yes, placating a young child is a lot of work, funnily enough that has always been the case, and most parents did that hard work. We didn’t replace hitting our kids to make them behave with throwing a phone at them to make them behave, as again, historically, most (good) parents chose not to do these things. But I digress, I thought we agreed that this internet culture, and the things they are being exposed to are bad, and we should protect them from it.

Would you rather your child competent and out of touch with social media, or out of touch with reality and incapable. If you think the second is acceptable, maybe it should be okay that the next authoritarian law we implace should be one that prevents people from having kids if they won’t care for them or raise them properly. Oh, but that law seems draconian and impossible to enforce? Strange that. If you can’t be trusted with how you raise your children, you can’t be trusted with your fecundity. Sorry, you made the rules. Follow that line of thinking to its intellectual end, if you dare.

“The kids are in trouble.” Yes, but why are they in trouble? “Because of the internet.” But who let them on the internet? Who literally gave it to them? Did that person teach them how to use it responsibly at an age where they had that capacity?

Even if it was the government, which, come on now, it isn’t, would you really trust them to make the right decision about everything? Would you not check that, hey, my child has a cursory understanding of mathematics, and language, and that they haven’t been taught that the way babies are made is when a man pees on a woman. Because that’ll make for some very awkward conversations down the line.

This whole thing reeks of child negligence, of complete and utter lacking parental responsibility. Parents go. “Oh my god, it wasn’t me, it was the internet! Please government save me from myself and also my children from me!”

And grandparents don’t know anything about the internet, so they go: “well my child says that the internet is very bad and that it messed up my grandchild, and I can see they are very messed up, so this must be the case.”

And the kids and young people in between go “Well being on the internet really fucked me up and I am yet to solve the problems it has caused me, so when I have kids I don’t want to have to deal with them having this problem.” Even though the problem wasn’t the internet, it was the way they engaged with it.

Everyone who has supported this law between these demographics has engaged in wilful, society level denial and ignorance. It is displacement on levels that shouldn’t be fucking possible. But this is the demographic who makes, legislates, and enforces these laws.

The internet and its consequences were incredibly impactful on society in ways that nobody could ever predict. We will still probably not recognise all of the effects of the fallout for 50 years. It was, and is, a worldwide cultural and societal revolution. It has not been handled with the care and respect it deserves. And now the consequences of that have become part of the culture.

The problem with the internet is not that it is innately bad. The problem with the internet is that it is effectively infinite. You can never ‘run out’ of use for it. It is information and entertainment and shopping and everything else you can think of. It is a real-life cornucopia.

We are not designed for this. Because humans are not designed for infinite anything. The environment we evolved in were limited and full of consequences. Forgive me for using an evolutionary argument. But it seems absurd to me that we consider infinite anything good. It is blatantly obvious that drinking yourself to death, or masturbating chronically, or anything that makes us satiated in excess is very bad for us.

So why the fuck would a tool that allows the user to constantly gratify themselves through first, second, or third party means, be given to a child, who cannot look after themselves or be responsible for anything important?

The only reason I can ever imagine you giving your child something like this without protection or warning them of its dangers, is that you either do not care about your child, or more disturbingly, that you actually want to destroy your child.

“Wow the incredible infinite gratification rectangle actually is cursed and corrupts the weak and those who use it in excess.”

Yeah man, who’d have thought. It’s not like we have an entire history of mythological legends which emphasise the significance of not using the infinitely powerful probably cursed magical artifact.