I think the reason is because he was trying illustrate that you can say an awful lot (in analogical language) about things that are not empirically observable.
The problem is a framed as a question of protection (who doesn't want to be protected?) with the intended effect of over-reach (spying).
The coordinated track that governments around the world are on (sponsored by corporations), is that governments and corps will be able to monitor and track individuals online - people will be deanonymised (via OS logins, no side loading, 'protect the children'). The ostensibly kind desires are just sugar.
Even if you accept that fact that people are online too much (by choice), teens are drinking/smoking less. When you push one thing another pops out. Forcing 'good' conformity on others, is actually psychological meddling. In my view meddling with another's desires (even if it's for their own good, in your opinion) is a form of psychological abuse. Inner re-engineering of others should not be normalised or accepted because it is done by government.
Are the social media companies not meddling with our desires through all the psychological tricks they use? I think their overreach should be feared as much as, if not more than, state overreach.
Having corporations in the role of 'bad cop', allows the illusion that the government is 'good cop', and that they can manage reality for the greater good.
However, the only entity that can manage reality, is the individual for themselves. Working with a constrained subset of reality, means you do not actually have the full picture.
Perversely, not having the full picture, means that people pretend that someone else has got this for us (government). Seeking an external authority, rather than working through reality personally, prevents the individual from building up the correct understanding: only you can manage yourself correctly. Having information hidden from you supports the idea that individuals are not capable of managing themselves, and encourages 'looking outside for help' aka nannying to manage one's difficulties. It puts people into a state of neoteny - prolonged adolescence - which benefits those who use psychopathic/narcissistic tricks. It's a choreographed, incremental ballet, that is intended to get 'the people' to a destination (technocratic governance) that no one would choose.
Corporations are not in the role of bad cop, they exist to exploit us for profit and have many nasty tactics they can use to do that. To put the blame at the feet of individuals for that exploitation underestimated how much power they have.
The state can, at least in theory, be structured to serve rather than exploit us.
On top of that, the idea that individuals have the time, energy, or inclination to completely manage their own "reality" rather than relying on external authorities is daft imo. At some point we need to trust and rely on eachother and there are various entities beyond nation states that are set up specifically for that too.
> Corporations are not in the role of bad cop, they exist to exploit us for profit and have many nasty tactics they can use to do that.
.. and governments are the same.
I believe we already live in a form of fascism where business and governments are aspects of the same entity.
> The state can, at least in theory, be structured to serve rather than exploit us.
I disagree. It can soak up believers energy though, forcing people against others who they have no personal issues with.
> On top of that, the idea that individuals have the time, energy, or inclination to completely manage their own "reality" rather than relying on external authorities is daft imo.
It might be daft in your opinion, but assuming the answers you want will be provided externally could be a working definition of insanity, imo.
No, not the WHO, pharmaceutical companies or Bill Gates. These folk only have humanity's interests at heart, nothing to do with money and power. At all. You should absolutely trust your children to these folks.
> I was a kid with unrestricted, unsupervised internet access, and it definitely affected many things in my life. If I happen to have a child in the future, they won't go through that.
I've heard this a few times, but what was so bad? And, sorry to break it you, reality has some bad bits to it - do you think being ignorant of these is useful, or that it just sets you up for a bigger fall?
Why do you think removing independence (nannying) from another human being is the answer? Would you want to be nannied for ever, by corporations and governments?
To me the question is more who is going to nanny me, and ideally its myself (the mature option), but in my experience starting as a child and going into adulthood, mental health can break this down to where people can't nanny/take care of themselves. In that case, the question at hand is: who is going to protect you from yourself? The state? Your family? Your friends?
Oftentimes the answer is "nobody". There's just nobody you can rely on to get the level of care you require. There are lots of arguments like Bowling Alone for how the breakdown of community has contributed to this separate issue.
In my view, by constructing and supporting legislation like this, people are implicitly admitting that parents, teachers, schools, communities, and all the rest are failing at their job of keeping moderation local and raising the next generation.
But the thing is, unfortunately this is a true statement in too many cases, including mine. My parents failed to parent me well enough, and my counselors were either instrumental in my own trauma or failed to address my issues soon enough, and as such I developed a sex addiction in adolescence fueled by persistent ongoing stress from my upbringing that I continue to seek treatment for to this day. Could content moderation laws have cured my parents' narcissism? Nope. Could they have prevented me from needing to act out to relieve the stress of my early relational trauma? Nope. Could they have helped match me with more competent therapists? Nope.
Could they have caused me to go to rehab for alcohol abuse instead of porn? Maybe.
For all his statements I disagree with, I subscribe to Gabor Mate's view that traumatized individuals are compelled to be addicted to something. At that point, there are a lot of things to become addicted to other than the ones you can content moderate, given the (false) assumption that it's possible moderate enough of it.
Pornography was necessary but not sufficient for me to have it that bad coming out of childhood. Early exposure to it was only incidental. My upbringing was far more significant a cause in this. But unlike which websites I was allowed to visit as a child, a 100% chance of having emotionally involved parents isn't something you can legislate into existence.
What I feel isn't being talked about enough in this discussion is that this implicit realization that the world just sucks sometimes leads to justification that someone else needs to step in to protect children's fragile minds if the formerly trusted institutions aren't. The big option left is the platforms and systems hosting the tech themselves so they're targeted instead.
My opinion? If your parents aren't able to raise you to be free of significant trauma spawning "hungry ghosts" that you will need to turn to your unfettered internet access to feed, whether TikTok or LiveLeak or elsewhere, lest you are bombarded by stress every waking moment... then the situation was hopeless to begin with. You can't fix that problem with laws. You should have just had better parents, as awful as that sounds. And because of nothing more than bad luck, you're just going to have to unpack that problem with the healthcare system for years/decades, because there's not much else we know of that can meaningfully address childhood trauma that severe.
However, I don't think the medical establishment will necessarily help. Or looking outside generally - this will probably only compound or defer the problem. You will have to deal with it yourself in the end. I believe everyone already has all they need in themselves to do this.
It's almost as if there is a global plan to deanonymise everyone online, and for governments and corporations to have total awareness and control of everyone's actions.
This has been going on in full force since the GWB admin in response and using the excuse of the terroristic attacks.
They called it total information awareness. They pretended to bury it. All they did was hide their intentions from the public. They even spied on Congress and they spied on presidential candidates. If they had no decorum for those folks imagine what they are willing to do to collect information on the public.
this should realy be one of those accross the aisles things. Well it kinda is, across both sides of the political spectrum there is for some fucking reason a huge support for this. I am so pissed.
you know what I am slowly starting to feel the conspiracy theorists, just its not wack child eating lizardman but Super Rich people wanting back a Feudalist Society.
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