It has been a day since the Online Safety Act came into affect in the UK to “protect the children”, and political posts are being removed from social media left, right, and centre.
I've immediately not been able to enter a mental health discussion without allowing my webcam to take a photo of my face (which I'm not super comfortable doing considering I was discussing how I recently found my best friend dead).
If I'm honest, I do think modern pornography seems like a hotbed of coercion, degredation, abuse and rape, with the likes of PornHub hosting a lost of (imho rightly) illegal imagery. As a teacher, I have found it disturbing to have 11/12-year-olds talking about obscene sexual acts and stuff they've seen online, while being simultaneously squeamish about displays of actual affection and intimacy in books - freaking out about hand holding while merrily joking about fetish porn, for instance. I do find it pretty dystopian.
But, as you make clear, this is far from good-faith legislature.
So what do we call it? Digital Fascism! In another age it was actual jackboots but now there is no longer the need to knock on your door, the state censors your brain directly! George Orwell, eat your heart out, amateur!
Successive governments have had 30 years to make pornography inaccessible for children, they have never even tried. Now fuhrer Starmer pretends that he cares. It seems more like fascism than child protection, but that's the modern Labour/Conservative/Reform Party - I can't tell thr difference anymore.
On FKA (X) last night I saw one (female Labour) MP claiming that it would stop children 'stumbling on' hateful/dangerous content (incl. porno). They don't have much opinion of children's abilities do they?
As a teacher, I definitely think a lot of adults are clueless about how clued up a lot of kids are when it comes to using VPNs and much more in order to get around blocks.
If it was for our kids', or our, safety it would not be a one-way, planetary, digital panopticon, we would be able to see "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes".
We don't get to see who Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg are consorting with behind our screens.
We need to democratise the megalomanic $i££y con€-h€ad o£igarch$$.
Your piece comes at an appropriate moment. Just yesterday I was cogitating on Tim Berners-Lee and how he views the monster that his Frankenstein has become.
It used to be stacked on the top shelf of the newsagent's, sometimes even prohibitorily wrapped in cellophane. That was how hard it used to be to get hold of porn. Now, it's boring. If it were boring, that is. But I'd have no more submitted my credentials to buy a glossy magazine than I will on the Net. And that is interesting because of two things:
(i) porn is the principal product exchanged on the Internet, and, we are told, without it the Internet would simply not exist. Upwards of 2/3 of traffic on the Internet is pornography;
(ii) most porn on the Internet costs nothing. It is the fact that it is free to access by saying "I'm an adult" that makes you wonder how it comes that the Internet depends on it for its livelihood. Well, there are lots of things on the WWW that cost nothing but make pots of money for someone. And, clearly, porn is one of them.
I have a favourite conspiracy theory about Internet porn: you don't need to reconcile points (i) and (ii), above, because they are a red herring. The money that porn makes in bucketloads is not made on the Internet. It's just made to look that way, using the somewhat irreconcilable method alluded to. Ergo Internet porn is a decoy, and what a decoy! Billions of MB of stuff. Well, if it's not all there, where else would it be?
You used to be able to simply pick up a stone and lob it through a plate glass window, just like that. Oh, the halcyon days. How I remember them! So easy was it in the low-tech past. But requiring all persons to register for the occasional picking-up of a stone for an occasional lobbing-thereof through a window will be bound to reduce the instances when they just get picked up and thrown. Let him who is without sin chuck the first one, because we will know his name. That is what your law does. It reduces the number of stones thrown by people at plate-glass windows, in comparative terms of course.
Porn will continue to be consumed in mind-boggling quantities on the Internet and if you ever see some with an actor who looks vaguely like me, I deny it completely. But the legislator has magnificently solved a problem, one that none but the most obtuse can fail to recognise as a problem, and has sent it into the corner of the room with a coned hat upon its head. But the legislator has seemingly failed to consider what must surely, for all but the dunceheaded here, be the most apropros question, and I know that your readers are all as sharp as ... F sharp, so that is: why is porn free on the Internet? (Obvious answers will be given a rude buzzing noise such as is featured on QI.)
Assuming the legislator isn't as stupid as B flat, they can hardly expect a tidal wave of statutory enforcement to magically solve whatever problems are deemed to arise from under-18s watching titillating movies. But their legislation does avoid them needing to address the question publicly, and gives them a panacea for when, not if, it fails to right the wrongs of society.
With what we now know about the probity and trustworthiness of the insurance and banking sectors, the distinction of trust that used to set them apart from the pornography publishing business is less defined. Do we trust porn companies like we trust our local savings bank? Or do we regard savings banks with the same askance regard as porn companies? A vous le choix.
When I think back to that frisson of excitement that would course through my veins as, 30 years ago, I engaged in a daring and audacious act that many now copy but only I knew as a first step into a world of wonder. Ah, memories! The act was of course "Sending an e-mail." We corresponded in those days with people all around the world. Not many, not chatting or instant messaging, but electronic mail, and it didn't need a stamp. We pre-arranged when we would send them, to recreate the sense of a conversation. It blew our minds, and we said goodbye to Royal Mail. But if the Internet is now like the M6 at Birmingham, then we will one day end up dealing with the ennuis of travel around the virtual globe the same way as we deal with that motorway: the wealthy choose a toll route, and those with a bit more time at their disposal will take the tourist route, and discover quaint old pubs again.
Very eloquent and very interesting. I've also been wondering recently what Tim Berners Lee might be thinking.
Of course (back to porn) there wasn't just the mild top shelf stuff - there were the dirty bookshops in Soho & elsewhere - strange shops in almost every town with blanked out windows & solid doors. Only for the cognoscenti of course - & for anyone wanting to be amyl.
I think it would be great fun if a klaxon went off any time anyone (irrespective of age) looks at porn on the internet - *especially* if they're in a public place. Not for any specific purpose - just for fun.
Like the little bell you hear every time an angel gets their wings. On a visit to the Pearly Gates - his first and last - a chap notices clocks apparently turning on the wall - millions of them. When he enquires, St Peter advises they are counters. They click one minute forward every time the owner tells a lie. He points to one which never moved its all its owner's lifetime: Saint Teresa of Calcutta. Others tick on at a rate of ... well, God knows what. Finally, he was asked where Donald Trump's counter is. St Peter points upward. "There's a heaven in heaven?" the chap asked. "No," came the reply. "We use it as a ceiling fan."
Exactly. Some years ago I had a phone call via Facebook with a friend who was living in Shanghai. Partway through the call I said Hey, I thought Facebook was banned in China, how are we having this call? He said Oh, everyone here is on Facebook if they want to be, we all use VPNs all the time. Looks like UK citizens are now in a similar boat as Chinese ones when it comes to having access to the internet. But thankfully there are easy solutions.
How much more censorship do we tolerate before rising up. One thing is crystal clear: those that censor are NEVER the good guys. I am a free speech absolutist who puts faith in a free market of ideas. And last I checked us "conspiracy theororists" have been correct at least 30 to Zero.
=====
Please share as FB has drastically limited my ability to distribute my writings. Thanks. This is the most comprehensive essay on the dangers of Trump's Genius Act that will lead to a digital ID, a cashless society, digital surveilance and a social credit score for every American. Welcome to the new age of global slavery. In the next few years they will eliminate cash and replace it with a digital wallet that the government can suspend if you don't comply with their demands. Don't want the next mRNA "gene editing" jab? Then we cut you off from you digital wallet. In the coming years you will be nothing more than a slave on a Global Plantation. Thanks Trump.
Trump's Genius Act moves us toward a Dystopian Chinese Credit and Control System
The Stablecoin Digital Currency will bring about the Globalist Great Reset
A poorly chosen VPN (look into the prevalence of Israeli ownership of VPNs) has your location and device data plus details of all of the data that you choose to carefully route through them.
We might be doing Big Brother's work for him by paying him to channel our secrets under his nose.
VPNs. There are open-source VPNs, but the configuration can need to be based on a paying service. VPNs are an Internet service, however. And, to contract it, you will need to submit certain personal and payment information. And the information you give to your VPN provider can be hacked or subpoenaed by the authorities. The VPN gets you into the website, but that's hardly James Bond stuff: it's free and - excuse the allusion - a four-year-old boy could do it. But keeping your data secret whilst doing it, there even your four-year-old would have to think hard.
Unbelievable! Until now, I didn't realize how far the UK would go to protect its weird idea of what civilization is. It seems the genocide in Gaza has shown us, and how similar other western nations are that way. Thanks for posting, Ricky.
This has been the "Holy Grail" for tyrannical regimes since the internet became the primary news source, bypassing the traditional media. They MUST find a way to censor the internet even more than they already have. "Protecting the Children" and "Online Safety " is that way. Like the "Patriot Act" in the USA, this is another piece of the dictatorial bureaucracies' puzzle; another tool in the toolbox. They strive to muzzle everyone by striking fear into their daily lives. Every Tyrant does it, whether it is a dictator like Hitler, Stalin or Mao. Or a tyranny by bureaucracy, as in many so called "democracies", like the USA and EU.
I've immediately not been able to enter a mental health discussion without allowing my webcam to take a photo of my face (which I'm not super comfortable doing considering I was discussing how I recently found my best friend dead).
If I'm honest, I do think modern pornography seems like a hotbed of coercion, degredation, abuse and rape, with the likes of PornHub hosting a lost of (imho rightly) illegal imagery. As a teacher, I have found it disturbing to have 11/12-year-olds talking about obscene sexual acts and stuff they've seen online, while being simultaneously squeamish about displays of actual affection and intimacy in books - freaking out about hand holding while merrily joking about fetish porn, for instance. I do find it pretty dystopian.
But, as you make clear, this is far from good-faith legislature.
exactly, there are alternative measures that could have protected kids far more effectively
So what do we call it? Digital Fascism! In another age it was actual jackboots but now there is no longer the need to knock on your door, the state censors your brain directly! George Orwell, eat your heart out, amateur!
AI decides what we can and can't say. AI owned and controlled by the 1%. Facisim online. Democracy has been bought and imprisoned
Successive governments have had 30 years to make pornography inaccessible for children, they have never even tried. Now fuhrer Starmer pretends that he cares. It seems more like fascism than child protection, but that's the modern Labour/Conservative/Reform Party - I can't tell thr difference anymore.
Pre-Online 'Safety', one might refer to this as a legislative clusterf*ck.
POST-Online 'Safety', that might be interpreted as pornography...
On FKA (X) last night I saw one (female Labour) MP claiming that it would stop children 'stumbling on' hateful/dangerous content (incl. porno). They don't have much opinion of children's abilities do they?
As a teacher, I definitely think a lot of adults are clueless about how clued up a lot of kids are when it comes to using VPNs and much more in order to get around blocks.
As a friend of a teacher whose daughter showed her how to get around the school firewall (all the students knew obvs) I think you're spot on!
yes big brother is watching you....it always has been. Get woke or bend the knee.
If it was for our kids', or our, safety it would not be a one-way, planetary, digital panopticon, we would be able to see "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes".
We don't get to see who Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg are consorting with behind our screens.
We need to democratise the megalomanic $i££y con€-h€ad o£igarch$$.
Your piece comes at an appropriate moment. Just yesterday I was cogitating on Tim Berners-Lee and how he views the monster that his Frankenstein has become.
It used to be stacked on the top shelf of the newsagent's, sometimes even prohibitorily wrapped in cellophane. That was how hard it used to be to get hold of porn. Now, it's boring. If it were boring, that is. But I'd have no more submitted my credentials to buy a glossy magazine than I will on the Net. And that is interesting because of two things:
(i) porn is the principal product exchanged on the Internet, and, we are told, without it the Internet would simply not exist. Upwards of 2/3 of traffic on the Internet is pornography;
(ii) most porn on the Internet costs nothing. It is the fact that it is free to access by saying "I'm an adult" that makes you wonder how it comes that the Internet depends on it for its livelihood. Well, there are lots of things on the WWW that cost nothing but make pots of money for someone. And, clearly, porn is one of them.
I have a favourite conspiracy theory about Internet porn: you don't need to reconcile points (i) and (ii), above, because they are a red herring. The money that porn makes in bucketloads is not made on the Internet. It's just made to look that way, using the somewhat irreconcilable method alluded to. Ergo Internet porn is a decoy, and what a decoy! Billions of MB of stuff. Well, if it's not all there, where else would it be?
You used to be able to simply pick up a stone and lob it through a plate glass window, just like that. Oh, the halcyon days. How I remember them! So easy was it in the low-tech past. But requiring all persons to register for the occasional picking-up of a stone for an occasional lobbing-thereof through a window will be bound to reduce the instances when they just get picked up and thrown. Let him who is without sin chuck the first one, because we will know his name. That is what your law does. It reduces the number of stones thrown by people at plate-glass windows, in comparative terms of course.
Porn will continue to be consumed in mind-boggling quantities on the Internet and if you ever see some with an actor who looks vaguely like me, I deny it completely. But the legislator has magnificently solved a problem, one that none but the most obtuse can fail to recognise as a problem, and has sent it into the corner of the room with a coned hat upon its head. But the legislator has seemingly failed to consider what must surely, for all but the dunceheaded here, be the most apropros question, and I know that your readers are all as sharp as ... F sharp, so that is: why is porn free on the Internet? (Obvious answers will be given a rude buzzing noise such as is featured on QI.)
Assuming the legislator isn't as stupid as B flat, they can hardly expect a tidal wave of statutory enforcement to magically solve whatever problems are deemed to arise from under-18s watching titillating movies. But their legislation does avoid them needing to address the question publicly, and gives them a panacea for when, not if, it fails to right the wrongs of society.
With what we now know about the probity and trustworthiness of the insurance and banking sectors, the distinction of trust that used to set them apart from the pornography publishing business is less defined. Do we trust porn companies like we trust our local savings bank? Or do we regard savings banks with the same askance regard as porn companies? A vous le choix.
When I think back to that frisson of excitement that would course through my veins as, 30 years ago, I engaged in a daring and audacious act that many now copy but only I knew as a first step into a world of wonder. Ah, memories! The act was of course "Sending an e-mail." We corresponded in those days with people all around the world. Not many, not chatting or instant messaging, but electronic mail, and it didn't need a stamp. We pre-arranged when we would send them, to recreate the sense of a conversation. It blew our minds, and we said goodbye to Royal Mail. But if the Internet is now like the M6 at Birmingham, then we will one day end up dealing with the ennuis of travel around the virtual globe the same way as we deal with that motorway: the wealthy choose a toll route, and those with a bit more time at their disposal will take the tourist route, and discover quaint old pubs again.
Very eloquent and very interesting. I've also been wondering recently what Tim Berners Lee might be thinking.
Of course (back to porn) there wasn't just the mild top shelf stuff - there were the dirty bookshops in Soho & elsewhere - strange shops in almost every town with blanked out windows & solid doors. Only for the cognoscenti of course - & for anyone wanting to be amyl.
I think it would be great fun if a klaxon went off any time anyone (irrespective of age) looks at porn on the internet - *especially* if they're in a public place. Not for any specific purpose - just for fun.
Like the little bell you hear every time an angel gets their wings. On a visit to the Pearly Gates - his first and last - a chap notices clocks apparently turning on the wall - millions of them. When he enquires, St Peter advises they are counters. They click one minute forward every time the owner tells a lie. He points to one which never moved its all its owner's lifetime: Saint Teresa of Calcutta. Others tick on at a rate of ... well, God knows what. Finally, he was asked where Donald Trump's counter is. St Peter points upward. "There's a heaven in heaven?" the chap asked. "No," came the reply. "We use it as a ceiling fan."
🤣
Fucking ironic when the danger posed to the well-being of society is instigated by those who tell us their job is to keep us safe.
Use a vpn service to look like your in America 🤷♂️
Exactly. Some years ago I had a phone call via Facebook with a friend who was living in Shanghai. Partway through the call I said Hey, I thought Facebook was banned in China, how are we having this call? He said Oh, everyone here is on Facebook if they want to be, we all use VPNs all the time. Looks like UK citizens are now in a similar boat as Chinese ones when it comes to having access to the internet. But thankfully there are easy solutions.
How much more censorship do we tolerate before rising up. One thing is crystal clear: those that censor are NEVER the good guys. I am a free speech absolutist who puts faith in a free market of ideas. And last I checked us "conspiracy theororists" have been correct at least 30 to Zero.
=====
Please share as FB has drastically limited my ability to distribute my writings. Thanks. This is the most comprehensive essay on the dangers of Trump's Genius Act that will lead to a digital ID, a cashless society, digital surveilance and a social credit score for every American. Welcome to the new age of global slavery. In the next few years they will eliminate cash and replace it with a digital wallet that the government can suspend if you don't comply with their demands. Don't want the next mRNA "gene editing" jab? Then we cut you off from you digital wallet. In the coming years you will be nothing more than a slave on a Global Plantation. Thanks Trump.
Trump's Genius Act moves us toward a Dystopian Chinese Credit and Control System
The Stablecoin Digital Currency will bring about the Globalist Great Reset
https://brucecain.substack.com/p/trumps-genius-act-moves-us-toward
I suggest everyone install a free or paid VPN app, this way we can counter these restrictions.
Some browsers have built in VPNs, so you can access twitter, fb and ig through your browser.
DON’T let the fuckers win and give them your personal information.
A poorly chosen VPN (look into the prevalence of Israeli ownership of VPNs) has your location and device data plus details of all of the data that you choose to carefully route through them.
We might be doing Big Brother's work for him by paying him to channel our secrets under his nose.
What companies utilise Israeli owned VPN?
I sometimes use the built in one on the opera browser-
I’m thinking of getting Nord Vpn.
I just saw a video today on the same subject.
Scary!
VPNs. There are open-source VPNs, but the configuration can need to be based on a paying service. VPNs are an Internet service, however. And, to contract it, you will need to submit certain personal and payment information. And the information you give to your VPN provider can be hacked or subpoenaed by the authorities. The VPN gets you into the website, but that's hardly James Bond stuff: it's free and - excuse the allusion - a four-year-old boy could do it. But keeping your data secret whilst doing it, there even your four-year-old would have to think hard.
True, I was only suggesting a simple way to not being made to submit ID for verification.
Unbelievable! Until now, I didn't realize how far the UK would go to protect its weird idea of what civilization is. It seems the genocide in Gaza has shown us, and how similar other western nations are that way. Thanks for posting, Ricky.
This has been the "Holy Grail" for tyrannical regimes since the internet became the primary news source, bypassing the traditional media. They MUST find a way to censor the internet even more than they already have. "Protecting the Children" and "Online Safety " is that way. Like the "Patriot Act" in the USA, this is another piece of the dictatorial bureaucracies' puzzle; another tool in the toolbox. They strive to muzzle everyone by striking fear into their daily lives. Every Tyrant does it, whether it is a dictator like Hitler, Stalin or Mao. Or a tyranny by bureaucracy, as in many so called "democracies", like the USA and EU.
Truth…