As a journalist, I use a VPN as part of my job. It keeps me safe from legal and physical danger, keeping me anonymous when I'm out in the field, reporting on the stories that matter to you. Whilst working in America, I VPN back to the UK regularly, catching up on my favourite British TV shows like Red Dwarf, or ordering random tables a single fried egg on the Wetherspoons app. I also moderate a drug forum on reddit. Imagine how I felt when the forum I had called my internet vacation home chokeslammed me with an age verification process. It requested to scan my head to check I was old enough to go on the internet. With the youthful plastic surgery I had, it seemed impossible for me to prove I was old enough to look at pictures of plants and pills. Did the government expect people shouldn't know what drugs look like until they were old enough to take them? Had Keir Starmer decided on ethical smut to be distributed to teenage wankers or had he hoped they carve sexual forms out of potatoes like the good old days of the 17th century?
On the surface, this seemed like a nanny state kneejerk scolding that was prudish and utterly British, dreamt up by a man who would feel uncomfortable saying clitoris. Keir Starmer, the most hated man in Britain, a man who'd roll 2 d6 for a Charisma check and end up with 1, a person shaped piece of recycled paper, a man who goes to an Indian restaurant and asks for a Water curry and a slice of Warburtons toastie loaf, has ushered through another calamitous policy that makes people hate him more than they hate themselves. It is another nail in the coffin for the British public, but unfortunately the person in the coffin is still alive and can't escape because the prime minister keeps nailing the lid shut.
The easiest way to circumnavigate the flimsy pop up are obvious to any Internet user. You simply use a deepfake ai to take the feed from your camera, replace your face with Robert Downey Jr., then spoof the phone on a virtual machine sitting behind your OS, upload the data direct, serverside. You can overwrite the biometrics kept on your pass card with synthed DNA, use that as a kernel for a cryptowallet then set yourself up your own offshore limited company that operates as a multilevel marketing banking system, you start seeing shit at a whole other level.
But lets look at the pattern. In the past month India, France, England, Australia have all introduced strict online policing policies, with the USA bringing in their own censorship measures next month. So far so good. People comply, but if they don't they can just grab a VPN, no problemo. Here's the thing. VPNs are controlled by world governments as a way of monitoring people and collecting data to blackmail them later. At least half of the world’s politicians have had videos sent to them in compromising positions, with no demand for money, just the promise they will be in touch later. If they are too old to know what a VPN is, this happened a long time ago, but the rest are being ushered towards VPNs like pigs at an abattoir. The easily accessible solution to breaking the law turned out to be a latch around the neck, before someone standing overhead blots out the light and puts a boltgun to your forehead and you are still trying to make sense of what was happening then -
Total power over everything is what they desire. It is not a pursuit of money or status or security, at this point it is obvious that they have all these things. They have won, but thats not good enough. They want control. Not just power over a single person, but entire nations, the entire planet. It all starts here. With porn.
Who are ‘They’? It isn’t governments or billionaires or the CIA, it’s a handful of policy wonks and consultants that have gotten high smelling their own farts and playing 5D chess against themselves, building up a theoretical secret society that quickly slips out of their hands and spreads across civilisation like a computer plague. Hubris. Having a license to use the internet, digital passports, other shit that quantifies the individual to a string of data that can be absorbed and understood by Microsoft Co-Pilot looking at a Power BI dashboard. Entirely unnecessary, widely implemented, the enshittification of everything must continue at all costs.
Censorship at macro and micro levels. A generation that has taught itself to replace words with terms like unalive and grape, replacing vowels with asterisks, avoiding anything challenging because it makes them feel uncomfortable. People who feel weird touching parts of their own body. Autoinfantilisation to adhere to imaginary rules on social media platforms. We are all riding a rollercoaster that is going straight down to hell. The only seed of hope is that this has happened before, again and again through history. It gives rise to subcultures, the punks, the hippies, the buffoons, using what they have to hand to express themselves and to connect to others, to be human. Having a shit internet that barely works will give rise to a generation of computer hackers with silly haircuts and music they programmed with Python. Upload videos containing patterns of pixels that write code into the image file, creating backdoors for third party AI verification systems owned by Palantir and G4S. It is the dawn of the age of the cyberpunk.
