So, it seems like today is the day that the UK's "Online Safety Act" rolls out, which means all manner of sites and services, from Bluesky to PornHub via Discord, have started demanding that you "verify" your age, either by gurning into your device's camera (or, indeed, providing a photo of Norman Reedus from Death Stranding 2) or by — fuck this all the way to hell and back — sending over a photo of your ID, or registering your payment card details.
The reason for this is ostensibly to "protect children" from all the nasty, terrible awful things on the Internet, but as we've seen it can be circumvented by a few nerds on X, The Everything App or enlisting the services of a VPN — exactly the sort of thing these services are for — then it all seems a bit pointless really. Plus then you have to consider what might be the real reason this is all happening. It may sound a bit tinfoil hatty, but most people aren't entirely comfortable associating a photograph of themselves, their ID or their payment information with, among other things, something they fancy cracking one off to.
The ID verification services, of course, assure us that your photographs and data are deleted immediately after you've been verified, but we have no real way of knowing if that is actually the case, or if the deletion process simply copies them to a server somewhere offshore that isn't subject to GDPR. And if the latter is true, given that the services associate your ID information with your email address in most cases, it's probably straightforward enough to tie any sort of "unsavoury" (regardless of legality) activity back to an individual — be it hammering one out to stepsisters stuck in washing machines, looking up instructions on how to make a bomb or attempting to organise political protests.
Over the course of the last few years, with the rise of AI and all manner of other tech enshittification, I can't help but feel — and I'm not alone in this — that we're getting all the downsides of a cyberpunk future that authors warned about, and none of the upsides. Our city centres are not the sprawling, darkly beautiful neon landscapes they're supposed to be — though you might have a backlit, animated ad for Persil on your local bus stop — and no-one is going through life kitting themselves out with cybernetics to do interesting, unusual, creative, daring and illegal things.
Worse, and this is probably the biggest kicker, is that all the "villains" of the piece are so very boring. Cyberpunk villains are vibrant, exciting, dramatic — but not in reality. We have Trump, whose name literally means "guff", and Elon Musk, who is just a fucking idiot, and Sam Altman, who is a delusional cunt. None of them have the charisma to make them worth hating; they're just… there, making the world worse, bit by bit, one little nibble at a time. The world is suffering death by a thousand cuts, and it feels like there's not much we can do about it other than to subscribe to NordVPN (and feel weird about it after all the jokes about YouTubers shilling it) and just try to muddle on the best we can.
Perhaps this will mark a grand return to finding discarded porn mags in bushes. That'll be a blast from the past, won't it? Though hopefully not a blast you come into direct contact with.
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