Written between 15th and 21th of June 2026 (introduction line written 8th of June)

A Free World

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As someone who grew up as a child of the first internet generation I’m finding it really disturbing how rapidly around 3 decades of unprecedented freedom are being erased with barely any serious debate.

In its early days growing out from a research experiment into a mass communication medium the internet avoided most censorship, first because it wasn’t taken seriously and then because it was seen as advantageous to treat it with a lighter hand to promote growth. 

Not everywhere of course, in countries like China with its “Great Firewall” mass regulation came in early, but in large parts of the world the internet became easily the greatest source of freedom ever known.

Ordinary people had the means to create websites and community platforms that expanded across borders, sharing ideas, but arguably far more importantly, files.

Especially as speeds got better, media could change hands rapidly, you didn’t have to order games, movies or books over the mail, in a store, or rely on in-person trade, you could do it all from your bedroom, and you could do it without ever putting your name or your face to it.

Near enough everywhere in the world that capability was a cause for concern for the world’s elites and certain corners of society for all sorts of reasons like copyright, illicit markets, decency or morality.

But in the corners of the globe where free expression was more of a virtue, the usual strategy for dealing with these things was to play a fairly weak game of whack-a-mole, battles in an unwinnable technological war so states could feel like they were “doing something” while not stepping on the toes of users too much.

Websites like The Pirate Bay would get blocked and shut down and usually for the big fish of this ocean they would pop right back up somewhere else, with a slightly different domain name hosted in another part of the world: Mirrors¹.

Add in the fact that even these kinds of measures were heavily scrutinised as attacks on freedom, that some countries like Russia were willing to turn a blind eye to these kinds of platforms being hosted on their turf, especially as their conflict with the West escalated, and that VPN technology² allowed users to basically opt out of whatever regulations their countries did have by masking their connection as coming from somewhere else, and the internet was able to easily beat the token efforts made to put it on a leash.

Papers, Please

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But nothing good lasts forever. As the Web 2.0 era entrenched itself in the 2010s we’ve seen mass consolidation in all of the core areas of digital life, communication is dominated by a select few platforms that host hundreds of millions or billions of users every day: Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Discord, the sprawling array of desktop operating systems has totally narrowed down to just the 2 big ones, Windows and MacOS, on mobile its iOS and Android, online video hosting has narrowed down to just one, YouTube.

There are alternatives, but these few monopolise people’s attention and use, because consolidation can be comforting. It’s nice being able to reach anyone you might want to chat with using only a few platforms rather than dozens of them, it’s easier to narrow things down to a basic choice of one or the other rather than have an endless amount of micromanaging to do, but the problem with consolidation is it makes things much easier to control.

Resistance from tech companies and civil rights arguments stalled it for long enough, but now here we are, digital freedoms are under attack from all angles.

There were some warning signs in the early 2020s when the UK and EU saw website blocks move from just copyright or indecency issues to mass politicised censorship as an increasingly longer list of media outlets were blocked due to the Ukraine War, alongside government attempts to insert themselves into social media moderation, but as we moved into the second half of this decade a much wider net was progressively cast, a fundamental reshaping of our relationship with the internet.

Age verification.

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First it was pornography, governments started with a big moral argument that was on the surface hard to push back against: Porn is easily accessible by kids and that needs to stop, they’re being exposed to sex too early and getting a warped idea of it, it’s inappropriate, it’s damaging, it’s poisoning their minds, and the hosts of porn sites are doing nothing about it, so regulators need to step in.

So the law would change, now hosts of this content couldn’t get away with a simple “are you 18?” yes or no checkbox, or a simple “give us your date of birth” page where whatever answer you gave would be taken at face value, the arse covering “age verification” strategy for most of the limited sections of the internet that bothered to do that.

Now it would be proper checks, give us your passport, give us your ID card, facial recognition, give us your bank card number, something to really prove you are the age you say you are, not just paying lip service to it.

But this was already the start of a slippery slope, since messaging platforms can involve sending any kinds of messages, explicit images, links to explicit pages, they can become involved in porn distribution, this suddenly turned into a much wider net of platforms being forced into age verification schemes, Discord and Bluesky forced people to use it to turn off content filters or access age restricted channels, Xbox restricted social features like voice chat to unverified users, the list got longer and longer and longer, slowly ushering an Internet of Checkpoints in an approach that spread across the Western world, and beyond.

Then in late 2025 Australia paved the way for something even bigger, not just restricted features for people who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, offer up their ID, but fully banning all under-16s from major social media platforms.

Presented as freeing Australia’s youth from the tight grip of exploitative algorithms and protecting them from being exposed to vile, abusive content, ID checks were rolled out across all of the major socials and people who couldn’t prove they were above age would have their profiles deleted, and this approach was rapidly seen as a role model, the EU started talking about it and the UK announced plans to make it law, it was a very fast slippery slope.

Then there’s…

The War on Encryption

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After major platforms rolled out End-to-End encryption for messaging services in the early 2020s, many governments went into a major panic, E2EE technology makes it so that only the sender and receiver of a message can read it, because it’s encrypted in transit, meaning that even the messaging service you send it on can’t read it.

This was a major threat to them not only because it makes it much harder to spy on people, but also because it blocked the ability of governments to use tech consolidation to their advantage. 

When everything is in a select few places, all you need to do is strong arm that small number of big tech companies holding the data into giving you what you want, with a silver tongue or a more forceful legal threat. With End to End encryption stopping even the platforms themselves from knowing what’s being said, that doesn’t work, you can’t pressure someone to give you data that they don’t have.

Of course the argument about this is that unbreakable privacy creates a safe haven for all that criminality, and all sorts of things can be hidden under that cover. When police broke the encryption on underworld platform EncroChat in 2020, for a brief window of a few months they were able to gather mountains of evidence on gang activity, and we’re not just talking petty shit like drug smuggling, we’re talking about murder plots, the smuggling of automatic rifles, submachine guns and hand grenades, there was even a torture chamber. Once the game was up and EncroChat realised they’d been breached forces from the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, France, Italy and other countries sprung their trap and launched mass arrests, smashing dozens of violent networks and exposing their conspiracies.

Now imagine if we had the power to do that with every platform, to always be watching, how many lives could we save? How many are we letting go by not using that power?

Unease over encryption and calls to poke holes in it are nothing new, but like with age verification schemes, now these threats aren’t just empty words and half hearted efforts. In the same law that introduced mass age verification in the UK, the Online Safety Act, the British parliament gave media regulator OFCOM the power to force platforms to use so-called “accredited technologies” to find and remove material related to “terrorism” and child sexual abuse material, or CSAM.

What these “accredited technologies” actually are wasn’t specified, but it obviously involves removing or putting a backdoor in encryption, because again, you can’t force someone to find content, or remove it, if they can’t see it in the first place.

They haven’t actually used these powers yet because especially privacy focused platforms like Signal (and to a lesser extent WhatsApp) specifically market themselves on the strength of their encryption and would still rather pull out of a market than cooperate with demands for a backdoor, because once you place one in your system it’s there for everyone, and the credibility of your platform to having a gold standard in privacy is gone.

And that’s the obvious problem, criminals only fell for the Encro scheme because for months they believed they were using a platform that wouldn’t rat them out, when it becomes public knowledge that every platform has turned into a listening device, they’ll seek out new ones that don’t care about what the law has to say or use new methods entirely. Encryption erasure asks platforms to destroy privacy for all of their customers, the vast majority of them being ordinary people, to stop criminal networks that can just migrate elsewhere.

Similar anxieties over how much people were being asked to give up recently caused an EU initiative called “Chat Control” to collapse. Chat Control was an attempt to enforce mass scanning technology, and although the majority of the EU Parliament supported the initiative, opposition from key European countries like Germany blocked the plan from becoming law despite repeated attempts to hammer it through.

The Potholes

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Even if we put the ethics totally aside, just on a practical level, this will never be fully workable, and even making it partially workable would require tightening the legal grip much further, until everyone really starts to choke.

In the months after Australia’s social media ban, the country’s own E-Safety Commission admitted that according to their surveys, around 70% of under 16s had managed to avoid the restrictions, keeping their accounts after the ban came into force³, which isn’t a surprise when, according to polling, the overwhelming majority of Aussie teens think it’s a shit idea, don’t believe it will work and want to avoid it.

Age verification can be tricked: You can use other people’s bank details and ID cards, you can use other people’s faces for facial recognition, or even fake ones entirely, and facial recognition can also just guess wrong when trying to figure out age, some people look older than they really are after all.

Then there’s the VPN problem, the opt out from the law, the ability to migrate to somewhere else’s, they’re easy to get hold of and can make hundreds of pages of regulations, millions of pounds worth of enforcement worthless in seconds, in my browser, Vivaldi, they added Proton VPN as a built-in feature last year, all it takes for me to access it is 2 clicks, one to open the extension and one to press the connect button.

Except for a select few platforms I’m really attached to, have accounts with and don’t want to be restricted on, I have literally no incentive to cooperate with age verification at all.

Do I want to faff about spending 5 or 10 minutes doing a bank card check, facial recognition or an ID scan, getting uncomfortable about sharing very personal aspects of my data with platforms that have no real reason to hold it? Or press 2 buttons in 5 seconds and get rid of the whole problem? It’s not a difficult question to answer.

And then there’s the fact that platforms based outside countries with these laws can just ignore them, when OFCOM tried to fine online forum 4Chan huge sums of money for refusing to do age checks and carry out other measures as part of the Online Safety Act, 4Chan just said no.

4Chan is hosted in the USA and owned by a Japanese guy, and since the US doesn’t have a law like the OSA they’re not going to help the Brits enforce it on their citizens, so British law is basically irrelevant to them. OFCOM have claimed that platforms anywhere in the world have a duty to comply with the OSA because their services are being accessed by British users, but that’s just not the way the world works, if I don’t live in your country and I don’t have any business there, I don’t have to follow your laws.

So all OFCOM has left when their threats are basically irrelevant is just demanding that websites get blocked by Internet Service Providers.

How do you stop these gaping loopholes? Well, you get much more intrusive.

These regulations sit in an awkward middle ground, they’re a disturbing increase in government power, but they don’t produce results. If you want that to change, you have to make the odds much more uneven, you need things to lean towards more power.

What would that look like? Well, let me paint a picture.

Right now most age verification platforms pledge that right after you verify, whatever you gave them to do that will be deleted, but that makes it incredibly easy to get away with cheating.

Let’s say you’re 14, you manage to convince an adult friend or family member to do the scan for you, the platform can’t later check to see if that face actually matches with yours, all they know is you passed the test.

It’s the same problem with IDs and even bank info. If you give a card number to verify, how can the platform later check that it was actually your bank card? Not just your mum’s card you stole out of her wallet? They can’t, because as soon as that test is complete, any info on how it was passed goes in the bin.

So, keep the data, indefinitely. Do random checks, if what someone provided to verify doesn’t match with how they present themselves on their profile, make them do the test again and see what they come up with, or just ban them, don’t give them a second chance. Of course, this would mean the near total end of anonymity on the internet.

Then, as some have already called for, age gate the VPNs as well, or again, just ban them, and of course, anyone who doesn’t comply that you can’t reach has to be blocked, rapidly, any links, any mirrors, make these international platforms totally out of reach for your population.

And what about search engines? Image searches can directly show you images from a website without you having to actually visit it or deal with its restrictions, so for example if you look for sexualised search terms in your search engine, you’ll find pictures from porn sites on full display, no questions asked, even if the website they’re actually from would force you to verify before you view them if you directly visited it.

The major search engines already have “safe search” options that can filter these things out, but right now a user can turn them on or off at their leisure. So I guess we have to gate that behind verification as well and ban access to any search engine that doesn’t have these filters or doesn’t want to gatekeep them.

Basically, you start to build a walled garden, a nationalised, tightly controlled experiment, just like China’s Great Firewall, or as Russia brands it, the “sovereign internet”. You have to sacrifice a lot of freedom before you even come close to really achieving this dream of “safety”.

See how much more work you have to put in than it initially sounds? Because if loopholes exist, people will make the most of them. Close as many of them as possible.

And after all that, you still won’t really manage it. Although it’s a small amount of their overall population China, which has been working far harder at all this for far longer than the Western world with an incredibly sophisticated system, probably the most extensive in the world besides North Korea’s “intranet”, still has millions of people breaching past the Firewall, you can still find Chinese people on Twitter.

And that’s with that big if, if we avoid talking about the ethics and just very generously assume that this is the right solution, so let’s stop doing that.

The Ethics

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Taking Responsibility

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Here’s the thing, it actually is totally possible to strike that balance between privacy and sheltering kids. I’m not trying to argue that kids being impacted by the digital world isn’t a serious problem, it is. When you’re young, you’re dumb, you’re impressionable, and having the keys to the whole wide world, including its darker sides, at that point in life, can be very damaging, we shouldn’t ignore that, and for too long, we more or less have.

But the good thing about kids is they don’t have a lot of the rights that the rest of us do, because we don’t trust them yet they don’t have bank cards, they can’t get jobs, the financial means to independence aren’t there. That means parents, or caregivers, have a lot of power to control what they see and what they get, the reason we have this problem we’re in now is because a lot of those parents haven’t been using that power wisely.

It’s an uncomfortable message to tell parents, it’s not a popular political narrative to basically tell lots of your voters, it’s your problem and you need to take responsibility, rather than a brave narrative of “standing up to big tech”, but this is where we are.

Lots of parents are worried about what their kids are finding online, but they also aren’t doing enough about it. Parental controls are not a new invention, the tools have existed to filter out large chunks of the web, feed info on kids app use and search history to parents and manage access to them, they’re not foolproof, but since the caregivers have direct access to their kids they can impose whatever measures they feel are needed, including just taking the devices away. And of course, they are the ones in control of when their kids even get their hands on devices for the first time.

Caregivers have more options because when they’re setting restrictions on devices, they know they’re dealing with a kid, it’s not the government or a tech company on their behalf using restrictions in case you’re a kid, which can only ever go so far.

You’re not going to have outcomes like feeding your app use and your search history direct to some government minder so they can keep things age appropriate, because that’s never going to be socially acceptable, the Prime Minister isn’t my dad. But with a caregiver to a kid, that’s a pretty normal and acceptable thing to expect as they grow up, so there are more tools you can put in the toolbox without it seeming like things are becoming, legally or socially, intensely intrusive and infantilising to the public.

This is an area where I can genuinely say I think my parents, my dad specifically, did a good job, he grew up in the early days of computer tech and became highly knowledgeable on them, he built PCs, including, eventually, my own and used lots of software, does he know much of anything about social media? No, he hates the idea of it and wouldn’t touch it with a 10ft barge pole, but he generally knows his stuff when it comes to hardware and software so he had a decent idea of how to regulate them as a parent.

When I was growing up and got my first computer when I was little it was a laptop that sat in our living room, and I didn’t have headphones, so whatever I was looking at, they were keeping an eye, watching films and TV was for the big screen and surround sound, out loud, usually a family thing.

I got a personal phone in my first year of high school, but it was a flip phone, long after those things had become out of date, it had texting, calling, and Snake, that was pretty much it.

I found these choices uncomfortable at the time, I didn’t like blasting the YouTube videos I wanted to watch through my laptop’s crummy speakers at full volume, it was awkward and it made me cringe, I absolutely hated being saddled with a last-gen handset, having to text by pressing repeatedly on the same number keys to get different letters, but here I am many years later, and I get what he was trying to do, he was keeping me away from a mass medium I wasn’t ready for, looking back, I appreciate it.

As I got older I was given the headphones, the PC in my own room, the smartphone, the tools of the modern world’s trade, and by that point he did struggle to keep up.

There was no widespread filter, he didn’t monitor my search history, none of that, so I ended up coming across the right wing pipeline with my friends, falling down a 2 year rabbithole of dodgy politics that took a while to climb out of, I kept them to myself and the communities I was in, so he didn’t know, and with the few restrictions he did still impose, I began to get around them.

He tried to regulate what games I could play, I wasn’t supposed to be playing GTA, all he knew was that it was the spawn of Satan, that series, but he didn’t know about POSTAL 2, where you can knock someone’s head off with a shovel and kick it around for sport, run around with your flyers undone pissing on people to your heart’s content, and drop Napalm on people harder than the US Air Force on a Vietnamese treeline. He didn’t know about Dishonored where I could summon hordes of rats to eat people alive, or chop heads in frozen time.

He didn’t know about Saints Row 2, or Duke Nukem 3D, or all sorts of other adult oriented games, he only saw brief glimpses of them and when I promised it wasn’t GTA, that was the end of the conversation, and ironically when I bought the GTA games themselves, he had no idea and couldn’t recognise them, he’d heard about them, but didn’t actually know them. 

I got away with buying these games that I’d never be sold over the counter at the time, without asking him and giving him the chance to judge if their content was acceptable, by just buying Steam wallet cards with my pocket money and spending them in the online store.

His last real attempt at controlling my digital use was putting a curfew on my internet access, shutting it off in the late hours to try and push me to go to bed, but then I worked out I could just go in my settings, make myself undiscoverable on the network, and that was it, his last real grip on power left and he didn’t try to get it back.

So near the end, maybe he was too lax at times, maybe not, I don’t really know if trying to keep the training wheels on for longer would’ve been helpful influence or would’ve just made me more rebellious and resentful, but the point is he acted as a gatekeeper, and knew that as I was getting older he needed to start taking off the restraints. Was it perfect? Sure it wasn’t, but he put the work in, that’s the most you can ask for.

A lot of parents just don’t do that, either they don’t know how the tools work or they don’t want to pay attention to what their kids are seeing online, they want the phone, the tablet, the laptop, to be a digital opiate, their kid’s off switch.

It’s easy for me to judge that when I’m not a parent and I’m a long way away from even considering being one, I can’t really appreciate the exhaustion, frustration and anxiety that comes with all that responsibility, and I get that wanting a break from it all is very natural, but this is an area where being lax has serious consequences.

Caregivers need to keep an eye on what their kids are encountering on the internet, they need to be thinking very carefully about when the right time is to introduce them to those tools, and when to bring the guardrails down step by step. There’s no one answer for what that even looks like, because kids grow up differently, they reach levels of mental maturity at different stages, but the point is, their guardians need to start putting the work in.

There’s definitely a place for governments to give advice to them in doing that, but outsourcing the problem from caregivers to politicians and laws isn’t the answer. There’s no universal standard for when people are ready for certain types of media as they grow up and even if there was, political leaders who grew up a generation or 2 before the internet existed and don’t understand it won’t be the ones to find it.

You’re Right to Be Worried

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I get that there are serious concerns around social media, I know the dangers from experience.

I’m wary of how algorithms can act like a drug, easily digestible endless short form content. I spent years using Snapchat as just a glorified texting platform but when I scrolled a few screens to the right one day and found Spotlight I became worryingly glued, now it’s Instagram reels, I won’t say that all of the content I found there was bad or toxic, actually I found lots of posts that were insightful and interesting, stuff like history, news or reflections on mental health, but there’s also crap like the ragebait and the AI slop, and the format itself is just concerning, infinite scrolling short clips can be genuinely addictive.

I sometimes feel worried or embarrassed at how I’m wasting my time doing it, struggling to switch off, and instinctively reaching to scroll for no real reason, to the point that I tried removing Instagram from my main home screen to add more steps to access it, hoping the extra time I would have to spend going to access it would make me stop, think, and do something else, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but now I often turn my phone off entirely when I need to be productive to add even more (and longer) steps, that usually works.

I don’t usually have an addictive personality, I’ve been a smoker, a drinker and all that and I’ve been able to easily go without, if I have cravings I can just ignore them without that much impact, but this, somehow it does get me.

As a kid I actually deleted most of my social media profiles over the years, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, because I either got bored of posting, found communities lacking and got tired of arguing with opinionated randoms, faced bullying, or got anxious about corporate surveillance, which until this recent push was a far more serious concern than the government. A mass of companies desperate for every bit of data they could get their hands on, the intricate details of your interests to personalise their ads as much as possible and shovel them down your throat, much more aggressively than network TV.

I’m concerned about moderation, the select few companies managing these platforms can have an intense amount of influence over public conversation across the world by deciding what content is allowed, what gets banned and what gets suppressed, through tactics like shadow banning⁴ or algorithmic downgrading.

They’ve also been at times incredibly unreliable with the moderation process, you can be banned with little or no reason provided for where or how you broke the rules, just given a vague “don’t break the rules” and a link to a long list of guidelines. How can you appeal a decision if you don’t even know what you were accused of doing? Even if you manage to get to that stage you can find yourself dealing with some useless automated system or an overworked employee who probably has to see hundreds or thousands of reports a day, you might as well be talking to a brick wall.

I’m creeped out by the toxic elements of algorithms, where they care more about what gets your attention than what you actually like. I get ads I hate but paused on, to either go through the menus and hit “not recommend” or block the account, and because I stopped I end up in a negative feedback loop where I’d constantly get hammered by the same content, it only stops, eventually, after I learn to not react and quickly scroll away, that’s malicious design.

I had to deal with the uncomfortable knowledge that I was growing up writing a massive record of myself scattered across different communities and direct chats, sometimes that can be good, useful even, you can fact check your memories what you were going through in the past through message histories and recover things that might have slipped you by over the years, you can reminisce about the fun times you had, the connections you made, but it’s also something that can be used for the worse. In the past people could grow up, be ignorant, say stupid things and for the most part just leave them in the past and be known for the person they are now, but things have changed. We live in a world where cringy or shameful things you said can potentially be dug up years later.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we should always give someone a pass because their bad behaviour was a long time ago, we especially shouldn’t if they haven’t actually changed, but I’ve found it worrying to see people getting dragged for things they said 10 years ago, that awkward disconnect where they’ve already learned to do better but have to deal with the outrage of people seeing their old ignorant or harsh comments for the first time, treating it as if it was just said in front of them in that moment. It hasn’t happened to me personally, but I think it’s a problem that will only grow as my generation gets older and becomes more scrutinised.

Everyone makes mistakes, says things they didn’t mean to say or at least express their thoughts too crudely sometimes, some more than others, but everyone does it, now instead of a comment that hangs in the air awkwardly for a few seconds it can potentially be used to shame you in front of millions of people.

I’ve thought about how once politicians reach prominence journalists will dig into every inch of their history trying to find dirt they can spread⁵, either because they want to humiliate someone they don’t like or because it’s just good for the clickbait drama, and how much of a mess that will be when people my age reach their 40s or their 60s, the average time you’re reaching high office in the UK, will we be seeing sprawls of dug up Discord message logs and Tweets embarrassing the Prime Minister of the 2040s?

There are problems around group culture. When in-group messages with very different standards on acceptable expression reach out-groups it can get very messy. Since communities are self selecting and self regulating you can find wildly different social standards compared to the outside world, you can end up inside a wildly different Overton Window⁶ to normal life. 

It can leave you normalising ideas or behaviours that would be social suicide in the real world, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, a queer person can find community being open about their identity when their country or their family would reject them, torment them or aggressively try to re-educate them, but by the same token a racist or a Neo Nazi can find an echo chamber where their attitudes aren’t called out, depriving them of a reality check.

Beyond hypotheticals, I saw plenty more dangerous and uncomfortable outcomes online.

I was unnerved when people in my year group in school had their nudes leaked and ended up getting made fun of with nicknames based on them. I put up with harassment from people eager to know me that I just wasn’t interested in, I had to deal with attacks on servers by spambots mass posting gore, I saw entire communities having a malicious picture of me based on lies, prejudice against me because I’d been working with a trans artist, pushed back against people bullying her and deleted posts making fun of trans suicide.

One time I even nuked an entire server I used to own, it was a kind of political discussion server I’d inherited from another guy that had people across the world in it with literally all sorts of views, people who were progressive vs people who were highly reactionary.

I had friends I solidly got on with there, there were educational conversations and lots of laughs at memes or people dropping the most low IQ takes imaginable, I learned a bunch while I was there and had lots of entertainment, but I ended up having to reckon with the fact that many people there had gone far beyond edgy jokes and were into full on normalised hate, just coating it in edgy humour to make it seem less harmful, I got sick of so many people in the community being proudly racist, so I ended up deleting the whole thing and walking away.

A Different Narrative

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But that is one side of a very long complex story of my digital life.

Social media is also where I found a whole other social network that was much more enduring and genuine than the friendships I had growing up in school, people that were abroad in Czechia, Poland, Germany, but we shared jokes, deep chats and gaming sessions that gave me something to look forward to when I was struggling with social isolation, anxiety and frustration with classes I couldn’t stand, these are people I still know today and make up some core friendships of mine.

There was my long distance girlfriend I met over Discord, who from an ocean away gave me love, commitment, care and motivation to live when I hit rock bottom, at a point where I didn’t feel I had it anywhere else. In many ways it was exactly because she was long distance that I felt I could really trust her with my frustrations and reach out to her in my darkest moments. There was no way anything I said would end up being leaked out as gossip to people I didn’t want to hear it, so she could give me private encouragement that set me on a path to becoming mentally stable again. I have family members that didn’t take our relationship seriously at the time then ended up asking after her long after we broke up, one pretty much credited her with my survival and I’d agree.

They used to always tell me that a voice chat or text on a screen can never compare to real life, and to a decent extent that’s true, but there’s a big asterisk to that. A lengthy voice chat or paragraphs of back and forth texting with someone you have a substantial relationship with will give you far more than a hangout with someone where you don’t have a good dynamic.

And building ties online is often way easier than in the real world, because you have an endless array of communities ranging from hundreds to thousands of people in reach and you can easily start chatting. When I’m texting in a server I don’t have all the anxieties that can come with reaching out in person.

Oh I don’t want to feel like I’m invading their personal space, I don’t wanna deal with awkward silences and struggling to balance turn taking, I don’t want to linger and outstay my welcome… Bro, you’re on Discord, you probably can’t even see their face, if they aren’t in the mood to chat in the moment they can just come back to your messages later when they are, timing isn’t key, you can let things hang in the air, so it’s a lot easier to start the ball rolling, have a bunch of back and forths and eventually end up with some friends.

Social media is also where, in a sizable part, I educated myself about things going on in the world, starting me on the road to becoming a journalist, a writer and a researcher. I watched loads of documentaries on YouTube especially from VICE, their dispatches from Ukraine in the invasion of Crimea and the Donbas War, their documentaries on North Korea, their projects on the War on Terror where I watched the Syrian Civil War and the rise and fall of ISIS in real time. It was the era of the citizen journalist, the rise of independent media, which can often do a better job than the mainstream and especially do it faster. I’ve watched news stories unfold in real time sometimes hours before mainstream channels report them, in detail or even just at all. 

Some might say that as a young teen I was watching these things too early, I’d say I’m glad I did. It was the start of an education that gave me a broad knowledge about the world I can call on in my personal works and the research skills I now use in my actual job as a freelance writer, a line of work that I can easily say is far better than anything else I’d likely find on the job market as things stand.

It’s knowledge that stuck with me far more than anything I learnt in actual school because I didn’t find a highly linear, structured system dedicated to memorisation and passing arbitrary tests, based on a curriculum we were constantly told we’d need for the real world and obviously never did, motivational at all, doing things on my own terms made learning genuinely engaging.

People who don’t know better treat the online world as something doomed to be anti-social, unproductive and damaging, “oh you’re just scrolling on that phone all day”, but in reality it can be pro social and genuinely insightful, it’s where I’m finding my tribe and learning in my own way.

Is it a replacement for going outside? No, I still think it’s important to go and touch grass and get the benefits of fresh air, there’s only so much you can see and learn through a screen, this is kind of why I love being in the music scene so much. When I work from home and my friends are all long distance to some degree (whether it’s being in different cities or different countries) I love having a good excuse to get fresh air, visit new places and socialise in person.

But my online life and my in person life compliment each other, how did I get into the music scene as a young adult? Social media, when I came back to Instagram to keep up with artists and made lots of ties through my picture diary profile.

These things were a core of my experience growing up, and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. I can’t tell you what my life would’ve been like had I grown up under this Draconian social experiment where opening a fucking Twitter account has the same level of security as travelling through an international airport, but I can imagine it would’ve been a lot worse. I would be a completely different person to who I am today, through lost opportunity.

So when I heard the government say they wanted to “give children their childhood back” through a digital surveillance state locking public spaces away, I wasn’t impressed.

An Unfair Burden

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And even though so much of this is in the name of protecting children, banning children from certain spaces, and so on, it’s not just children that these new authoritarian approaches will impact, it’s everyone.

Because you can’t verify that someone’s at a viewing age unless you check them, the Internet of Checkpoints puts the burden on adults to repeatedly prove, sharing highly personal data, that they’re not a child, scanning schemes demand that adults repeatedly prove they’re not sharing child abuse material by scanning every single thing you send, and that is not a reasonable standard AT ALL.

The government’s non-existent “right” to treat you as guilty until proven innocent of being a child pornographer, or to force you to prove that you’re not a 5 year old in need of being sheltered from the terrors of the world, is not more important than your right to privacy.

These measures would also make us incredibly vulnerable to extortion and identity theft from data leaks as documents are collected in their masses (this has already happened before) and scams by dodgy site owners who can imitate a verification process to trick people into handing over their information. It won’t instantly set off alarm bells as asking people for their card details, selfies or sensitive identity documents for no reason other than a barrier for entry becomes highly normalised.

All that risk, inconvenience, intrusion, and cost compared to parents maybe, just maybe, keeping a bit of a closer eye and a tighter hand.

One of the biggest scams politicians are trying to peddle is the idea that all this spying and checking is actually bringing the digital world into line with normality, with the physical one, my beard does most of the work selling that I’m an adult these days, but if it didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to just go down the pub and order a beer, go gambling in a betting shop, go to a nightclub (or a strip club), without showing ID, so why should anyone be able to roam around the internet without any questions?

Setting aside the fact that you can’t neatly compare the two, the idea that, for example, we can’t have encryption because there shouldn’t be any place the government can’t listen in isn’t a standard we would ever accept in the physical world. 

If we accepted all of our streets, our homes, being bugged with microphones, so that even our most personal spaces were being monitored, you’d catch a whole lot more crime, but there’s no way in hell we’d ever consider that worth it, so why should we normalise the idea that everything needs to be scanned in the digital space?

If a cop came to your door and out of nowhere insisted that they needed to check your house for child abuse material, and they had no warrant or actual reason to believe you had anything because like the overwhelming majority of the population you’re not a predator sex offender, would you open up and let them go through your room, all your belongings, everything you have, just to reassure them anyway? No, you probably wouldn’t, because it’s not your job to spend your every waking moment proving to the government that you’re not an abuser.

We don’t live in a system of guilty until proven innocent, or at least, we shouldn’t. Because even if you have nothing to hide, that doesn’t mean you want to share everything in your life with people when you don’t need to, especially if you don’t know them. That’s how privacy works.

After all, there are plenty of valid reasons to not want to be recorded, to want to be anonymous, journalists discussing with sensitive sources, whistleblowers who could lose their jobs, liberty or lives for speaking out without approval, or at all, people discussing opinions the government might throw them in jail for, and let’s not think for a second that if this becomes the standard, more repressive countries won’t take the inspiration to, say, send queer people caught talking about their orientation to conversion therapy or the chopping block.

And while a lot of countries have ID cards you have to own the UK isn’t one of them, even in most countries that do have ID cards, you aren’t constantly stopped and demanded to show them to exist in ordinary spaces unless you live in a police state.

I don’t have to carry any ID to go out on the streets or go round someone’s house, neither does a 12 year old, a 14 year old or a 17 year old, even though, God forbid, they might see some things out there that aren’t child friendly, suggestive ads, music with explicit lyrics, violent video games, people swearing casually or in an argument, or that often violent, depressing, shock content filled TV show called “the news”.

I remember coming into school one morning when I was 14 years old and watching Grenfell Tower burn down live on my form teacher’s laptop, around that same period we were constantly seeing broadcasts about terror attacks, bombings, stabbings, sometimes shootings, we’ve heard about murders, sex abuses, devastating accidents, the War on Terror, the Ukraine War, the Iran War, that very brief Venezuela War, that very dragged out war-that-we-only-occasionally-talk-about-but-it’s-still-going-on-every-day, the Myanmar War! There really is plenty to go around.

In between celebrating the footy wins we see the rubble from Israeli mass bombing campaigns, parents crying over their dead kids, settlers sneering as they cut schools off from their pupils with barbed wire. You can’t swear before 9pm on the telly but you can broadcast the worst atrocities and oppressions known to man on repeat.

See, that’s the problem with moral policing, unless you infantilise society to the point that living in it would be pure insanity, you’ll always have inconsistencies with it, you’ll always be some flavour of hypocrite.

14 year old Alice can watch war crimes at home or on the TV in the school cafeteria, but the idea that she would come across misogyny on TikTok is so intolerable that we need a worldwide lockdown.

And you know what? I don’t even think it’s a bad thing that these horrible things get on the every day all ages news. Morning, noon and night, would I like it if we balanced it out by spotlighting uplifting things at times? Sure, but the point is we can’t hide the reality of what’s going on in the world just because it’s hurtful to see, and might be even more so for younger people, and we don’t, that’s what the real world is like.

So no, the Internet of Checkpoints isn’t taking things back to normality.

Sadly fairly early on we have to cope with the fact that the world isn’t perfect, it isn’t all sunshine and roses. It has lots of kind, wonderful, good people, and it also has really terrible, cruel and ignorant ones too, and sadly a lot of them have power they abuse, that’s not a fact we can hide for very long.

The world isn’t built for children and how we run it doesn’t revolve around them, and it can’t. They’re a permanent minority, the most permanent one there is, because soon enough they’ll grow up and join the majority, adults. Of course we can try to shelter them to some degree, especially in their earlier years, but that can only go so far.

The Big Listening Device

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But of course, governments don’t like taking no for an answer, so now the debate is shifting to something even more sinister, device level scanning.

Rather than having the Internet of Checkpoints be dotted throughout a huge array of apps and platforms, some governments have shifted their thinking to making one big, harder to avoid checkpoint, your device itself.

Your phone, your computer, its operating system will be the one to force age verification, and carry out mass censorship if you don’t cooperate. Apple already fired the starting gun on this, bizarrely claiming they were forced to by the Online Safety Act even though that just wasn’t true. As of March this year iOS users are now subject to content filtering and universal scanning by default, every image they send, receive or share will be screened, and they can’t turn it off unless they verify, a few months later the UK government announced that they wanted to make that a universal requirement for phones and tablets, and go even further.

Arguing that the overwhelming majority of child sexual abuse material is self taken by children with their own devices, they planned to have constant scanning, either while the camera is open or as a picture is taken, to block these kinds of photos being taken. Device level implementation is also how they’ve considered implementing the social media ban.

In the US, California has passed a law demanding device level verification on all systems, currently it relies on self reporting your age, not more sophisticated ID checks, but when it becomes obvious that self reporting is a paper thin system on its own, this could spiral into something much more sinister.

It’s a lot more powerful for sure, you can’t just bypass it with a VPN because the scanner isn’t on the internet, it’s on the device itself and you can’t get around web censorship by directly sharing files because the system is looking through all of them.

But again if we just look at the practical side of things, billions of phones and tablets have already been sold, their users can turn off automatic updates and most devices only receive a few years of support at most before the manufacturer stops issuing new versions, with desktops it’s even easier to refuse updates and on both mobiles and PCs its possible to root the device and replace it with a new operating system entirely.

Even though community oriented operating systems like many Linux distributions make up a small minority of the market, they are very prominent, and since they’re not run by big corporations you can threaten or fine into compliance they can easily resist demands for this sort of thing, since the code is open source anyone can just make their own version and change it as they wish. Even if a distro implemented age verification, someone else could just fork⁷ it and then strip it out again, making the whole thing irrelevant.

Custom systems are much less common on phones than PCs, but they do exist. So while there are far less loopholes to this kind of scheme than the Internet of Checkpoints, it’s very far from foolproof.

Device level verification might block some workarounds, it doesn’t stop all of them. 

The big one of people being able to just trick the verification systems in the first place is still there, and if you find a website or image searcher that doesn’t follow the rules and hasn’t been hit by the whack-a-mole ban game yet, as long as you don’t download the content and just view it online, you can still get round this great big Checkpoint.

The only way you could really make it near enough foolproof would be scanning everything on the screen, at all times: Your OS is constantly watching what you’re browsing, blurring out anything “inappropriate”, it wouldn’t stop anyone who hasn’t got the update, but anyone who has, you’ve pretty much got them, but is that something you would be willing to accept? 24/7 monitoring?

To build a walled garden you need a big wall, you need to keep making it taller over and over again to keep pace with people trying to escape, they’ll hop over it, go round it, dig holes and crawl under it, they’ll jump, climb, get ladders, so you build more, you put on barbed wire, you put up watchtowers, and then when people realise they’re surrounded they’ll wonder if it was all worth it.

How far do you want to go to try and solve a problem that families can, when given the right support and encouragement, already solve themselves?

Conclusion

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We really need to ask ourselves, are we okay with suddenly tossing away decades of convention around privacy and civil liberties in the name of schemes that have no track record of actually working, that always need to go further and further to avoid being a paper tiger, cooked up by people who have very little idea about the world they’re trying to “protect” people from?

I’m not above the idea that sometimes you need to give away a little power for a safer world, I’m not an anarchist, but I do think that before you accept someone else’s idea of the “new normal” you think about if it’s as necessary as they want you to believe, and you expect the people pushing it to earn your trust first.

To put it mildly, there’s not much of that going around.

But the real problem here isn’t anything short term, it’s the fact that the Overton Window has shifted, these kinds of ideas used to be too controversial to seriously go far, now they’ve become widespread and mainstream, normalised.

We need a conversation that changes that so we don’t sleepwalk into the biggest extension of mass surveillance we’ve ever seen, or, if we can’t stop it, well, plan accordingly.

Footnotes

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