As age-verification bullshit becomes more common, I am determined to simply not participate in any service or video game that requires it. The day I see the prompt, is the day I leave.

Maybe the government’s hope is that I stop participating in society, but I assure you that I will not. I’ll find or build alternatives, and refuse to comply with bad law.

I hope you will, too.

And as a silver lining, maybe the weird internet we end up creating as a result will suck less than the current one.

It may be inadvisable to put this in writing, but I’m serious about this: if I am ever required to put up an age-gate, I intend to defy that law.

You’re going to have to break into my house and physically remove the server, when it comes down to it.

And it’s not that I doubt they can. I don’t have the same kind of resources that the state does. It’s more that I intend to make them do so publicly, in the sunlight.

I solemnly swear to be the biggest pain in the ass for fascists possible.

At this point, I believe there’s more value in being loud and public about resistance.

The legal system already does not function, specifically for me. I have no reason to believe that the Constitution will protect me, or that plausible deniability will keep me out of jail. At this point, if the fash wants to put me there, they will reverse engineer a reason to do so, or even do so illegally.

But if others see me making noise, they might decide to push back, too. Corporations certainly aren’t!

All I know is that the internet is absolutely the most important thing humanity has ever created, and is maybe the only tool that we have today which is capable of equalizing the insane wealth, information, and power inequalities in my country.

Our ability to communicate freely, to exchange ideas, and to organize terrifies all of the right people. Good. It should.

I will not participate in destroying my own home— and yes, I do consider the Internet my home. I’m corny like that.

I understand that my own corner of the internet is not particularly important, but I only have to be one brick in the wall.

And I can even become a *couple* of bricks by extending those principles to the other sites and tools that I use, and refusing to participate in ones that cave to pressure to erode our civil rights.

No one will notice that I’m not using Floop or Glorm or whatever. It’s true that I won’t cause the owners to change their behavior. But neither will I help them build power.

@Haste When you do build alternatives, please name them Floop and Glorm. I'll sign up immediately.
@mpark I feel like Floop would be a website where you share pictures of fruit with faces drawn on them.
@Haste When what it actually is is an ai-free site for peer reviewing research.
@mpark oh wow, there really IS a site called Floop 🤣 I genuinely thought it was too absurd a sound to have been used
@Haste That is hilarious. And Glorm is apparently a character in a children's book.