If bouncers copied my id, my home address and a bunch of private data every time I went to a bar I'd never go out.
This whole premise is absurd. There is tons of research and empirical and historical evidence that living in a surveillance state stifled free expression and thus narrows the richness of human creation and experimentation.
How old are you that you think constant surveillance is any kind of way to live? It's a thin gruel of a life.
This seems like such a lost cause to carry on about.
The fact that the post originates from a what appears to be an furry-aligned individual is probably not going to help get a majority of people to be sympathetic.
There appears to be no formidable organized resistance against the recent decades of surveillance boom.
With tech and many tech employees actively accelerating surveillance.
Horrible? yes. And extremely unlikely to be rolled back anytime soon.
(Disagree? I'd love to believe you are right!)
Lost causes are worth fighting for and keeping in the public eye, in the history of ideas being written off or challenges being considered impossible to overcome many end up swinging back hard the other way as long as they are ripe (the framework is preserved and still championed) and there is an inciting incident that swings public sentiment.
Defeatist attitudes and throwing in the towel almost never makes sense, engaging at a lower degree of time commitment is sensible for some, the meta commentary about it being hopeless is one of the worst types of self defeating comments a person can make, especially if they aren't in opposition, whose time are you trying to optimize with the comment? To what point and purpose are you saying this except to further deflate sails on an already still day?
The zeitgeist isn't purely rational or stable, change is often non linear, I've seen small subcultures with "impossible" headwinds completely own the space within my lifetime, we're just at the heel turn now and it's not universally popular, many people don't speak up because they are just getting vpns or moving to other forms of non-violent non-compliance.
I suspect a lot of doomposting online is someone writing down their negative self talk hoping some stranger will finally provide a convincing argument that they can use to fight their own feelings on the matter. It's like... involuntary group therapy?
You keep making this comparison, but it's not appropriate. The closest real-world analogy: in order to buy alcohol, you need to wear a tracking bracelet at all times, and be identified at every store you enter, even you you choose to purchase nothing. If our automated systems can't identify you with certainty, you'll be limited to only being able to do things a child could do.
And the real world has a huge gap between a child and an adult. If an 8-year old walked into Home Depot and bought a circular saw, there's no law against it, but the store might have questions. If a 14-year old did it, you might get a different result. At 17, they'd almost certainly let you.
The real world has people that are observing things and using judgement. Submitting to automated age checks online is not that.
It's appropriate (to me) as a limit society has decided it wants, and we should consider if there is a reason similar limits should, or should not, apply to the internet. The whole article we are discussing is how that could be implemented in a much more privacy-sade way.
But my point is that it won't be. The laws are getting passed, and there is no privacy preservation, there are no ZKPs, there's nothing except "submit your ID". You keep holding out for good faith, but the folks making the rules aren't acting in good faith. I very much appreciate the discussion here, but I think we're coming into the discussion with a different set of priors, so even if our values match, we might not agree.
Just to emphasize the point, the EU's age verification laws are actively preventing Android users from utilizing third party app stores because the implementation is tied to Google Play integrity services.
This whole premise is absurd. There is tons of research and empirical and historical evidence that living in a surveillance state stifled free expression and thus narrows the richness of human creation and experimentation.
How old are you that you think constant surveillance is any kind of way to live? It's a thin gruel of a life.