@taylorlorenz I will put this here since it seems relevant to the topic.

Many years ago, I had a friend on Tumblr. We met through a cartoon about singing rocks. Expanded our relationships to Discord.

She was in Venezuela.

I last heard from her in 2017.

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Several years ago I was playing a game where you become light collecting, candle forging children. One of my friends was in Texas. His best friend was someone from Hong Kong. Then China took over.

I stopped playing not long after...

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I will not pretend these were pleasant. They weren't. But they were Important, and only possible because of the relative openness and the pseudonominimity of the web.

I needed to be in a mixed-age environment. I needed to be someone with no identity. Because it gave me neighbors across the globe. When China claimed HongKong, there was a loud part of me that did not fucking care whether China technically owned Hong Kong or not. China was taking away a neighbor, and ripping away someone's best friend.

Honestly, that was the part of me that was right.

A little while later, I saw people talking about how you no longer hear about the protests in Hong Kong.

I am not gonna pretend that felt as close. But I thought of that candle forging kid as I read about how the Apple Daily was closed.

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Why say this? All of this?

Honestly, because I think killing those moments is a large part of the point. Those I knew from these communal spaces online helped to move people from all over the world from "conceptually people" to "People". Which helps to shift where my mindset is politically. Shifts what I can justify. Where my lines are. How I react to things.

These bans are not about protecting children. They're about preventing the ones most ready to connect with people from reaching those they most need to connect with, and discussing issues they have not yet been coerced into accepting.

@taylorlorenz

This isn't about "protecting children".

It's about promoting global fascism.

@taylorlorenz

Yeah, ensuring your *convenience* (changing colours in Minecraft? really?) doesn't justify exposing entire generations of children to an unfettered internet—1/4th of which is porn.

This article is filled w/ misinformation. Algorithmic social media promoting poor mental health is no longer the slightest bit controversial (w/ any researchers not funded by Big Tech). Big Tech is the Big Tobacco of the 21st century. Congrats on being a part of the problem.

@taylorlorenz I would also add to this the California law that will mandate operative systems to have a personal account synced.
So, not only to be online but they even want to control and record who uses which computer.

That's the most outrageous thing I've ever seen.

@taylorlorenz Note that a "fully surveilled panopticon" internet will lose a LOT of users, and still more will use it only for banking and shopping.

Some folks will stop renewing phone and internet service entirely. Others will abandon the web and communicate only over noncomplying peer to peer encrypted networks with those they know. Still others will use Tor or whatever else it takes to connect to sites in nonparticipating countries.

A lot of smaller sites not hosted in problem jurisdictions will just block those jurisdictions like Pornhub does, and again like Pornhub make no effort to block Tor and VPN traffic.

Such sites may have to offer .onion access to bypass Tor exit nodes, which can only handle very limited bandwidth.

The Internet will be a lot smaller and it will be split into complying and noncomplying sides, just as the porn industry is right now.

Think of Pornhub as doing the job of a soldier out on point with an AK-47, eyes and ears alert as they lead the rest of the unit into dangerous territory. Put your feet where they do and you won't step on any mines that they don't trigger first.

@taylorlorenz Who is paying for the lobbyists for this seemingly worldwide campaign for the legislation to install identity surveillance everywhere "for the children"?

And why, even in blue states, are the politicians always so eager to enable tools so easily abused by authoritarian, fascist governments