Quotulatiousness

June 20, 2026

Bill C-22 passes the Commons “as MPs raced for home for the summer”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Canadian Members of Parliament care more for their summer vacations than they do for the rights of Canadian citizens. While this isn’t really news, it’s just the latest proof that our elected representatives are … well, I was about to describe their moral failings in great detail, but that could get me arrested and jailed if-and-when the many authoritarian measures the Liberals want to enact become law. Instead, here’s Michael Geist‘s summary of the way Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Bill, got sent to the Senate on Thursday night:

Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, passed the House of Commons yesterday with the government invoking a single motion to approve several bills without further debate or individual votes as MPs raced for home for the summer. Bill C-22 will now head to the Senate, where it can expect a rougher ride when study begins in the fall. Rather than use the final days of the House session to answer the privacy, security, and oversight concerns raised by the Privacy Commissioner, academics, technology companies, and civil society groups, the government spent the time ensuring it would not have to, rushing the bill through committee, cutting off debate, and maligning critics with tactics that they once decried when in opposition.

The final days of Bill C-22 in the House marked a genuine abrogation of democratic norms. The government moved a motion to shut down the clause-by-clause study in the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, preventing the committee from adjourning until the bill had been pushed through. That led to a session that stretched past midnight, as MPs were barred from introducing new amendments and were left to vote on amendment after amendment without any discussion, debate, or even public disclosure of their contents. By the end of the committee session, no one could have known the contents of the bill that MPs had duly approved and sent back to the House for final approval. As noted, once back in the House, there was no further debate, discussion or even a vote. Just a motion that said the deal was done.

If the process was troubling, the rhetoric was embarrassing. I wrote earlier this week about Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree’s Vic Toews moment, as he said it was time for opposition parties to “choose” whether to stand with law enforcement and victims of crime (a refrain that sounded a lot like Toews’ 2012 comment to Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia, who is now the Speaker of the House, that he could “either stand with us or with the child pornographers”). Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon pushed that posture further on Thursday by dismissing the bill’s critics as wearing “tinfoil hats” engaged in “paranoia.” The charge fits a broader pattern in which this government treats independent privacy scrutiny as an obstacle rather than a safeguard, seen most clearly in the Bill C-36 approach to strip the Privacy Commissioner of authority over private-sector privacy law altogether.

The committee did approve some government amendments to the bill that improve aspects of the lawful access plan but they are still likely to leave companies, security experts, and privacy advocates concerned. For example, the maximum metadata retention period the government can impose drops from one year to six months, and a category of metadata can now be mandated only where the Minister is satisfied that the category and all of its elements are essential to investigations. That is better, but still not good enough as it is not tied to any actual evidence about why six months is needed and both the costs and risks associated with metadata retention, which is not a requirement in the U.S., are largely unchanged.

As The Reclamare explains, this bill is yet another likely irritant in US/Canadian affairs, as it will expose US citizens’ data to Canadian government oversight:

– A USA person creates/maintains a social media account — lets call it “XXX”

– Using its new C22 law, Canadian RCMP develops a “reasonable grounds to suspect” of “XXX” to a CDN investigation (a low investigative hunch standard under C-22).

– RCMP obtains a Canadian judicial authorization (an “Order”) and sends the Social Media company an International Production Request, which is not a USA warrant, not a §2703(d) order, and not routed through full MLAT (Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty) review.

– The social media company is bound by US law (SCA/ECPA), treats the request as a formal foreign inquiry.

– The social media company discloses limited metadata: summary of login IP ranges, account country setting, and other classification signals to prove USA origin

– This disclosure happens at Canada’s “reasonable suspicion” threshold, which is lower and less scrutinized than the US domestic requirement of “specific and articulable facts showing relevance and materiality” under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) for the exact same type of data.

– The USA user’s metadata, which would normally enjoy stronger 4th Amendment derived judicial protections, if sought directly by US authorities, is handed to a foreign government on weaker foreign grounds, without the same level of US court filtering or notice that a purely domestic US request would trigger.

– The 4th Amendment protection is effectively diluted because the platform’s good faith compliance with the foreign lower bar creates a new, easier pathway around domestic US constitutional safeguards for accounts that platforms classify as American

Canada’s Liberal government continues to chip away at our “Charter of Rights”, under the guise of “Protecting Citizens” and we are moving towards authoritarianism

While I loathe to create friction, I also hope your Rights can help slow Canada’s devolvement

It impacts you too

June 19, 2026

Nobody voted for this kind of dystopian nightmare, Mr. Carney!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Liberal Party, having engineered themselves a majority in the House of Commons, are on a speed-run to the kind of dystopian police state we used to read about in science fiction novels:

Millions of Canadians are beginning to see the similarities between communist regimes and the direction of current government policy.

The pattern is always the same.

It begins with noble promises: safety, equality, compassion, protection, the greater good.

It ends with censorship, coercion, surveillance, prisons, ruined lives, and a police state.

Always.

It comes wrapped in slogans, experts, committees, emergency powers, censorship, enemies of the people, and the belief that the state has the right to crush the individual for the greater good.

Consider…

C-2 – Strong Borders Act
C-22 – Lawful Access Act
C-34 – Safe Social Media Act
C-36 – Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act
C-9 – Combatting Hate Act
C-25 – Strong and Free Elections Act
S-209 – Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act

All seven are live in the 45th Parliament right now. None has received royal assent yet.

Consider that good, law-abiding Canadians are being gradually and systematically disarmed.

This is not a warning about some distant future.

In 2022 the federal government invoked emergency powers it did not have, froze the bank accounts of citizens over their political views, and banned Canadians from funding a protest. Two levels of court have since ruled it unconstitutional — a violation of the very Charter rights every one of these bills now circles.

That was the trial run. It needed an emergency as the excuse.

The seven bills above are the permanent version — the same reach, made routine — so that next time, no emergency need be declared at all.

A free country is not lost in a single day. It is legislated away in pieces, each one introduced with a reassuring name and defended as necessary, while good people keep assuring themselves it could never happen here.

It already did. The only question is whether enough Canadians notice before it becomes permanent.

Read every bill. Watch every one of them. Because this is the stage where it can still be stopped … and perhaps our last chance.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is trying to get Canadians to pay attention to what just one of these bills will do:

Bill C-34 will affect every Canadian. Age verification. AI regulation. A new Digital Safety Commission. Most Canadians have never heard of it. Here’s what it will do.

Michael Geist posts a Substack Note about bill C-22:

Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, has been reported back from committee and is headed toward passage. There are some amendments, but many concerns remain. The updated bill with changes is at

parl.ca/Content/Bills/4…

There are two changes to metadata retention. First, the maximum retention period the government can impose drops from 1 year to 6 months. Second, it can now mandate a category of metadata only if satisfied the category and all its elements are essential to investigations.

The committee rewrote the definition of systemic vulnerability. A “substantial risk” becomes a “credible risk, based on recognized international technical standards”. But it also added a carve-out: a flaw exposing only a target’s data is not “systemic”.

Added a new section on decryption that says nothing in the Act can be read to compel a provider to decrypt user-encrypted data, unless the provider supplied the encryption and holds the key. Borrowed from US law, but doesn’t fit the same way.

Compliance with ministerial orders is now expressly subject to the systemic vulnerability exception. That addresses a contradiction in the original text, where the duty to comply appeared to be unconditional.

The original bill set no maximum duration on these ministerial orders. This now changes to a two-year cap without the open-ended review-and-extend mechanism.

The amendments will rightly leave many still concerned. Companies considering exiting Canada due to Bill C-22 are unlikely to conclude that it fully addresses their issues. Yet the government is likely to push it through the House today.

June 11, 2026

Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As promised/threatened, the Liberal government introduced a new bill to address ongoing concerns about “online harms”: Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act. The ever-informative Michael Geist provides an overview:

The government tabled Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, earlier today, marking its third attempt at online harms legislation after the failed 2021 consultation and Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act that died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election. As I wrote on the day Bill C-63 was introduced, that bill was effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of platform regulation provisions built around a duty to act responsibly and a clear list of identifiable harms, contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act reforms, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission with considerable regulatory discretion. My view at the time was that the contentious provisions should be removed and addressed separately, since they were certain to dominate the debate at the expense of what really mattered, namely the platform regulation piece. That is precisely how it played out as the speech provisions undermined the bill for months, and by the time the government conceded and agreed to split the bill, time ran out.

Bill C-34 suggests the government absorbed only part of the lesson. The Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions are gone, but in their place the government has thrown in everything else: the original Online Harms Act platform duties, an under-16 social media ban backed by mandated age verification, Bill S-209’s pornography age verification requirements, a new AI chatbot regulatory regime, and sweeping powers for a Digital Safety Commission that will write the rules, enforce them, and decide which platforms escape the ban restriction. It is an everything-all-at-once approach in which nearly every key component, including which services face the restriction, how age gets verified, which AI systems are covered, and what standards govern exemptions, is left to regulations that do not yet exist.

I’ve been working on this piece since before the bill was introduced with the expectation that many provisions from the prior proposal would resurface. This post is long, but seeks to provide a very initial review of key elements in the bill. For those looking for the key takeaways, there are five. First, the platform regulation elements with a duty to act responsibly once again offers a good starting point for working through regulation. Second, the inclusion of a social media ban for those under 16 is bad policy that will take considerable time to implement and raises serious privacy concerns that will affect tens of millions of Canadians. Third, the AI chatbot regulations are consistent with emerging standards, but the uncertainty of who it covers is not. Fourth, the government is creating a bureaucracy comparable to the CRTC in the Digital Safety Commission as it will wield serious power and be tasked with fleshing out much of the detail of how the law will work. Fifth, the uncertainty of this bill has the hallmarks of a government wanting to do something quickly, but the “trust us” approach likely means years of implementation work and potential court challenges.

The Foundation: A Duty to Act Responsibly

The aspect that attracted the broadest support in Bill C-63, namely the platform regulation rules, survived largely intact. The bill features the same seven categories of harmful content (intimate content communicated without consent, content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, content that induces a child to harm themselves, content used to bully a child, content that foments hatred, content that incites violence, and terrorism or violent extremism content) and revives the duty to act responsibly that requires platforms to assess and mitigate the risk of exposure to that content. There is also a duty to make certain categories of content inaccessible within 24 hours backed by a complaint path to the new Digital Safety Commission, and a duty to be transparent through public digital safety plans, record-keeping, and researcher access to data. These measures target how platforms actually operate and provide a credible starting point.

[…]

The Social Media Ban for Under 16’s

The headline measure, widely reported as a “temporary” ban on social media for those under 16, leaves many questions unanswered since the application of the ban, age verification methods, and exemption rules are all left to future regulation. The word “temporary” appears nowhere in the bill. […]

The AI Chatbot Regime: Mainstream Duties, Unbounded Definition

The government wisely took the duty path rather than the ban path on AI chatbots, an approach I argued last month would be even worse than the social media ban. There is no chatbot ban and no under-16 account restriction for chatbot services. Instead, the bill creates duties that track the emerging international mainstream found in California’s SB 243 and New York’s AI companion law. […]

The Commission: More Power, Fewer Limits, Smaller Penalties

The third concern is the one the government never resolved the first time. My day-one assessment of Bill C-63 flagged the Digital Safety Commission’s regulatory power as a serious concern. The answer two years later is an even more powerful Commission with more undefined limits. Bill C-63’s three-pronged approach of the Commission, a Digital Safety Office, and a Digital Safety Ombudsperson has been consolidated into a single Digital Safety Commission of Canada that develops the regulations and guidance, assesses compliance, manages complaints, conducts audits, issues compliance orders, levies administrative monetary penalties, and decides the exemption applications that determine which platforms escape the under-16 restriction. Once again, the amount of uncertainty is the real story since the design features at the heart of the duty to protect children are simply those “set out in the regulations”, and the user thresholds that determine which services are covered at all are to be determined.

June 10, 2026

To protect under-16s from harmful content, everyone will now need to show their ID online

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Australia’s attempt to ban under-16s from accessing social media and other online sites blew up rather quickly. Britain and Canada, seeing what happened down under, chorused “Hold our beers!“:

“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The government is expected to table the Digital Safety Act on Wednesday with reports that it will include a ban on social media for those under 16, framed as a “temporary” measure that platforms can exit once a new digital regulator certifies their safety standards. I have been writing about these issues, from the original Online Harms Act to mandated age verification and website blocking and now the kids’ ban, for several years. This FAQ gathers the analysis in one place, with links throughout to the longer pieces for anyone who wants to go deeper. The key takeaway is that a kids’ social media ban is an ineffective and harmful policy that raises privacy concerns for tens of millions of Canadians through mandated age verification requirements. The policy fails to address the underlying concerns with social media and the prospect of a “temporary” ban makes little sense since the requirement might be reversible, but the data collection and regulatory infrastructure are permanent.

What is the government reportedly about to introduce?

According to the Globe and Mail, the forthcoming bill would bar anyone under 16 from social media. The government will indicate that this is a temporary safeguard with an opt-back-in once a regulator certifies safety standards. The government will frame this as “temporary” measure, but I argue that once established, there is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube given that the policy will require a regulator and proof of age from everyone.

Didn’t this start with Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act? What happened to it?

Bill C-63 was the government’s 2024 online harms bill, and from my first-day take I described it as effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of provisions focused on platforms that featured a duty to act responsibly, more contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act provisions, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission modelled on the CRTC to be funded by the tech companies. My view was that the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions should have been dropped or incorporated into a separate piece of legislation. Bill C-63 itself died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election, but the duty-to-act-responsibly model is likely to survive as part of the forthcoming bill.

Why is a kids’ social media ban bad policy?

I set out at least six reasons in this post on the issue. The most important is the first: the harms people associate with social media, such as algorithmic manipulation, addictive engagement design, weak content moderation, inconsistent enforcement, inadequate transparency, and privacy risks, affect users of every age. Treating them as a children’s problem misidentifies both the source of the harm and the right target of regulation. By focusing legislative attention on who is permitted to use social media rather than on how the platforms operate, an age-based ban lets legislators and the companies off the hook from more effective broad-based regulation. The other reasons identified in the post include the absence of evidence that bans work, the privacy harms they create, and the constitutional rights of the children they claim to protect.

Does the ban actually work?

The evidence to date says no. Australia’s under-16 ban took effect in December 2025, and the eSafety Commissioner’s first compliance report found that roughly 70 per cent of children who had accounts before the ban retained access to at least one platform three months later, with no discernible reduction in cyberbullying or image-based abuse complaints from under-16 users. Children route around age gates through VPNs, borrowed accounts, and false birthdates, and the most at-risk users are the most likely to circumvent them. Professor Lisa Given laid out much of this on a Law Bytes episode before most of the data was even in. Canadian politicians now citing the Australian approach with approval are pointing to a model whose own regulator’s data suggests has thus far proven ineffective. At a recent Canada 2020 event in Ottawa, Australian professor Amanda Third confirmed that kids are actively circumventing the ban and indicated that parents are concerned that their children are now less safe.

Doesn’t polling show overwhelming public support for a ban?

The headline number is real but misleading. The March 2026 Angus Reid Institute survey found that three-quarters of respondents support a full ban on social media for those under 16, and politicians have cited it repeatedly. But as McGill’s Sara Grimes documented on this Law Bytes podcast episode, the less-quoted numbers in the same survey complicate the picture: 72 per cent said parents, not governments, should be primarily responsible for regulating teens’ social media use, only 32 per cent picked 16 as the right threshold, and the survey did not ask respondents anything about the mechanism any ban would actually require. Simply put, public support for “protect kids from harm” is not the same as public support for “every Canadian must submit ID to a third-party provider in order to use the internet”.

Hasn’t social media been proven harmful to kids?

The data on social media harms to kids is far more mixed than is often portrayed in the media and in Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation book that has fuelled much of the legislative panic. Grimes has produced a very accessible explainer on the issue that walks through the science. As she notes in Panic First, Evidence Later, “there is a serious problem. Researchers who have spent their entire careers studying adolescent mental health, children’s digital media, developmental science, and media psychology – the people who actually built the evidence base Haidt draws on – have raised sustained, substantive objections to his core claims.”

Read all of Michael Geist’s FAQ here.

June 6, 2026

Brave browser users and X’s latest algorithm changes

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

While I use the Brave web browser, I don’t access the social media site formerly known as Twitter with it, so I haven’t seen the described behaviour, thank goodness:

Recent algorithm changes on X may be unfairly hammering Brave users. And there’s a larger issue here about bad interactions between robots and privacy measures.

@nikitabier
@brave

My friend Jay Maynard, who some of you may know as Tron Guy, just got permabanned off X for “inauthentic behavior”. His appeal was swiftly denied.

Jay is not a spammer, scammer or engagement farmer; he is, in fact, exactly the kind of good citizen X says it wants. Jay asked Gemini for analysis, and now thinks he knows what happened.

Brave, as a privacy measure, randomly changes the identity presented to sites in order to avoid tracking by the ad vampires. Gemini suggested that some code at X interpreted this as spammy behavior using multiple browsers. If so – and this does seem plausible – everybody trying to protect their privacy with Brave is at risk.

This is a general problem, not just an X glitch or a Brave issue. Social media sites are increasingly relying for security on forms of heuristic AI that are prone to unacceptably high false-positive rates.

More specifically, platforms are increasingly treating a user’s refusal to be tracked, fingerprinted, and categorized as a hostile act. When a site makes it impossible to connect via a privacy-focused user agent without getting flagged as a malicious bot, it stops being “security” and effectively becomes a retaliatory lockout for protecting oneself.

Worse yet, such system architecture provides no circuit breaker – humans are only rarely and exceptionally asked review for errors. Jay’s appeal denial came back so fast that it was obvious no meat-brain ever saw it. He has filed complaints within the Minnesota Attorney General and the Better Business Bureau, because what else can he do? The robots have locked him out.

Badly designed robots and zeal to squeeze human oversight out of the system forces regular citizens to rely on state law enforcement or consumer protection bureaus.

Allow me to gently suggest to the people running X that unless you want politicians poking their noses into your business and imposing constraints on you that you are not going to like, you need to fix your security and appeal processes so running to the law isn’t necessary.

May 29, 2026

Debunking the “it’s just phone book information” claim for Bill C-22

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Michael Geist explains why the “it’s just phone book information” hand-waving by politicians and government officials is worse than misleading: it’s deliberate mendacity.

en telefonbog (a Danish telephone directory)
Photo by Tomasz Sienicki via Wikimedia Commons

If this sounds familiar, it is because the same tired claims have been used for years. In September 2011, then-Public Safety Minister Vic Toews defended the Harper government’s lawful access proposals by claiming “linking an internet address to subscriber information is on par with the phone book linking phone numbers to an address”. Christopher Parsons, then a researcher at the Citizen Lab, responded with a detailed anatomy of what a lawful access “phone record” actually contained, showing that the three-field directory entry the government was invoking was being used to describe an eleven-field record including IP addresses, IMEI and IMSI numbers, SIM serials, device identifiers, and account information from multiple providers, any one of which could be cross-referenced to build a comprehensive profile of a person’s online life.

The Supreme Court of Canada put the issue to rest in the Spencer decision, holding unanimously in 2014 that there is a reasonable expectation of privacy in subscriber information precisely because the disclosure of such information “will often amount to the identification of a user with intimate or sensitive activities being carried out online, usually on the understanding that these activities would be anonymous”. It returned to the same terrain in Bykovets in 2024, extending Charter protection to IP addresses on the reasoning that an IP address is the “first digital breadcrumb that can lead the state on the trail of an individual’s Internet activity”.

Bill C-22’s new subscriber information production order applies a low evidentiary standard but covers name, pseudonym, address, telephone number, email address, account identifiers, types of services provided to the subscriber, the period during which they were provided, and information that identifies the devices, equipment, or things used by the subscriber in relation to those services. In short, a modern subscriber record is not a phone book entry but rather an index of a person’s digital life and the government is proposing to reduce the standard needed to gain access to that information.

Moreover, the same phony framing is now being stretched beyond subscriber data to mandatory metadata retention. As Conservative MP Andrew Lawton noted to Fraser at committee, the government and its officials have been telling Canadians that requiring electronic service providers to retain metadata for up to a year is “no different than just having a copy of the phone book that someone could leaf through”. That is a laughable comparison, given that metadata includes the date, time, duration, and type of a communication, the identifiers of the devices involved, and information identifying the location of the device. It is as if the phone book would include the details of every call made including location, call recipient, and device. And given retention for up to a year, the plan poses a disproportionate privacy risk that is likely to be struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, should it survive in its current form.

And in a follow-up post, he writes:

On encryption, Anandasangaree said the bill “was never meant to breach encryption” and promised to “clarify it in the Bill”. Language clarification is welcome but structural problems remain. The safeguards in Bill C-22 at ss. 5(5) and 7(5), which state that a provider is not required to comply if compliance would create a systemic vulnerability, are incompatible with s. 12, which unconditionally requires compliance with orders, and with s. 13, which specifies that orders prevail over regulations when inconsistencies arise. The term “systemic vulnerability” is not defined in the statute, and the Governor in Council has the power to make regulations “respecting the meaning of any term or expression for the purposes of this Act”. None of this is fixed by promising clearer language. It is fixed by the kind of amendment the Privacy Commissioner proposed this week, namely adopting Australia’s definition, which expressly covers actions that render encryption less effective, together with an explicit prohibition on regulations or orders that require the introduction of, or prevent the rectification of, a systemic vulnerability.

Moreover, Anandasangaree’s defence of the bill’s privacy implications was a deflection rather than an answer, as he tried to turn the attention to the privacy practices in the private sector, stating, “I drive a vehicle where every single point that I drive to is tracked. And that data is not with me.” Commercial data practices are indeed a real concern and Canada needs stronger laws to address them. However, the bill’s surveillance map of every Canadian is not justified by pointing to the absence of meaningful constraints on data collection and to the failure of his own government to address long-overdue private-sector privacy reform.

That brings the press conference back to the Privacy Commissioner. Asked directly whether he would accept Commissioner Philippe Dufresne’s amendments, the Minister said he would “be looking at” them and “looking to see what he has to offer”. Dufresne tabled eight concrete amendments at committee on Tuesday: narrowing subscriber information to a closed list (name, address, telephone number, IP address), restricting who can be compelled to telecommunications service providers, defining “publicly available information” to exclude information in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, an overarching requirement that SAAIA obligations be necessary and proportionate, an Australian-style amendment to “systemic vulnerability”, an explicit prohibition on orders requiring vulnerability introduction or preventing rectification, an exemption to the SAAIA’s confidentiality rules to allow disclosure to regulatory bodies such as the OPC, and allowing his office to investigate if data breaches result from application of the new powers. Anandasangaree’s comments, coming a day after the Dufresne’s committee appearance, noted that “we have until like five o’clock today” for amendments. That window does not leave room to seriously consider the Commissioner’s recommendations. The “I will be looking at” claim, delivered hours before the deadline, amounted to a rejection of the recommendations.

April 18, 2026

Australia’s age verification scheme – a great success!

Filed under: Australia, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Every time a politician gets up on hind legs to propose yet another brilliant scheme to ensure little Jaden and little Daenerys don’t access adult content on the internet, I remind myself that it’s going to be pitting the tech know-how of people who need help opening child-proof caps against the youngsters they get to open the child-proof caps for them. In other words, it’s not going to work out quite how the politicians expect:

“Kid-notebook-computer-learns-159533” by LuidmilaKot is marked with CC0 1.0 .

Among the great many bogeymen of the current moment is social media, which stands accused of making young people anxious and unhappy. Whatever the merits of those charges — and they’re debatable — politicians have predictably tried to address concerns by applying the blunt instrument of coercive law to kids’ online activities rather than simply let parents help their children make better choices. The experience in Australia now shows the subjects of the law have, once again, proven cleverer than law enforcers.

[…]

“There are significant questions about the effectiveness of Australia’s social media ban”, reports the U.K.’s Molly Rose Foundation, which supports internet restrictions, of the results of a poll of Australian young people. “Three fifths (61%) of 12–15 year-olds who previously held accounts on restricted platforms continue to have access to one or more active accounts.”

The group adds that “70% of children still using restricted sites say that it was ‘easy’ to circumvent the ban. In most cases, social media platforms have failed to detect or seek to remove under 16s accounts.”

Importantly, officials agree that young people subject to the law are actively evading its impact. In a compliance update published last month, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, which enforces the ban, conceded that “a substantial proportion of Australian children under the age of 16 continue to retain accounts, create new accounts, or pass platforms’ age assurance systems”.

Like the Molly Rose Foundation, Australian regulators note that noncompliance is not just a concern for the small platforms with limited exposure in Australia which were expected to become refuges for Australian teens seeking online connections. They also point to large, established companies including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.

In the majority of cases, according to both reports, young people ignoring the law have not yet been asked to verify their age. But, according to the Molly Rose Foundation, “around a quarter of children still using each restricted platform had been successfully able to get around an age check on a pre-existing account”. Some changed their claimed age, others had older friends and relatives set up accounts for them, and still others gamed technology intended to estimate their age by their appearance.

March 26, 2026

Canada’s “national broadcaster” has become an expensive irrelevance

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was set up to provide Canadians across the vast heartland of the country with quality news and entertainment options. Some would say it was able to achieve those goals well enough for decades, but with the rise of the internet, fewer and fewer people are watching, listening to, or reading CBC content. In some major cities, the CBC’s share of attention is a rounding error, despite the federal government subsidizing their effort on top of the annual budget they already receive from the taxpayers.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison makes the case for letting the CBC shut down:

CBC Isn’t Being Attacked. It’s Being Ignored. And That’s Worse.

There’s an old business rule most people learn the hard way: if your customers quietly leave, you’re already finished. No protest. No boycott. Just silence.

That’s where the CBC is right now.

You can spin it. You can defend it. You can fund it.
But you can’t fake attention.

We’re looking at a public broadcaster that calls itself the “voice of Canada” while pulling audiences so small they’d embarrass a local radio host. In some cases, tens of thousands of viewers in major cities. That’s not a dip. That’s a collapse.

And here’s the uncomfortable part:

Canadians didn’t lose interest in news. They lost interest in that version of news.

Because when reporting turns into messaging, people notice. When coverage feels selective, people adjust. When tone replaces trust, people leave.

Quietly.

Now layer in Mark Carney.

Carney’s entire pitch rests on a simple belief: that complex societies should be guided by centralized expertise. Managed from the top. Coordinated. Directed. Calibrated.

Sounds efficient. Sounds smart. Sounds like it belongs in a white paper.

But we already have a working example of that model in action.
It’s called CBC.

Centralized control

Institutional messaging

Weak accountability to audience demand

Heavy public funding

And the result?

A broadcaster Canadians are walking away from in real time.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s a signal.

Here’s the reframe nobody wants to touch:

CBC isn’t failing because it lacks resources.
It’s failing because it lost the discipline of needing to be chosen.

When your funding doesn’t depend on your audience, your audience eventually stops depending on you.

That’s not ideological. That’s behavioural economics.

Carney’s model doubles down on that exact structure. More planning. More coordination. More reliance on expert systems that assume compliance instead of earning trust.

But trust doesn’t scale through authority.
It scales through responsiveness.

And that’s the part that’s missing.

This is where the conversation usually derails into tribal nonsense. “Defund”. “Protect”. “Save public media”.

Misses the point.

The real question is simpler and harsher:

What happens when institutions stop adapting because they don’t have to?

You don’t get stability.
You get drift.

You don’t get unity.
You get quiet disengagement.

And you don’t get better outcomes by expanding that model across the country.

You get more of the same, just bigger.

I’ve run businesses. You learn this fast or you go broke:

If people stop showing up, it’s not because they suddenly became irrational. It’s because you stopped giving them a reason.

CBC stopped giving people a reason.
Carney’s approach assumes the reason doesn’t matter.

That’s the disconnect.

Hard line:
If an institution can’t earn attention, it shouldn’t demand trust.

March 23, 2026

Mapping the “Manosphere”

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo says — and a lot will agree with here — that we can’t hate gender studies enough:

As Leo Kearse posted on Substack Notes – “When’s Louis Theroux doing a documentary on THIS manosphere? When’s he going to expose the idiocy of its leading proponents, such as Stella Creasy and Hannah Spencer?”

Nothing beats a threat narrative for a gender studies academic in search of relevance, and what more urgent than the dark corners of the internet where men (and the women who love them) allegedly spread misogyny and male supremacism.

Many academics now claim expertise in this area of gender studies, probing the volatile fragility and violent anxieties of manosphere men, and calling to repentance all who resist the feminist future. Many of these academics are women, making a sweet living warning about male “hate”, but there are plenty of male feminists as well, crusaders against others’ toxicity.

In “Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s): New Directions for Research“, four scholars of masculinity survey the latest research on digital media and violent extremism. Vivian Gerrand, Debbie Ging, Joshua Roose, and Michael Flood claim to have read hundreds of studies of the manosphere, which they call an “online ecosystem of anti-women actors”.

According to them, the manosphere is brimming over with grievance-mongering, grift, and gynocidal fantasy. Nothing in it is good or sincere or well-intentioned. Various sub-genres of online content, including fitness advice, stoicism, and the tradwife lifestyle, are presented as outgrowths of misogynistic extremism from which millions of men and boys require rescue, by force if necessary.

A Roll Call of Buzzwords

The researchers make no distinction between manosphere content generally and what they call male supremacy — or, indeed, between those terms and a host of others, all pejorative. Their introductory paragraph alone provides a roll call of buzzwords that link any dissent from Marxist-feminist orthodoxy to misogynistic violence.

The manosphere, we’re told, is “bound by the belief that mainstream society is a misandrist conspiracy that disadvantages men”. Manosphere groups “frame contemporary gender politics as a ‘war against men'”. These groups also “frequently engage in misogynistic abuse as well as inciting violence against women”, thus creating an “online environment of accelerating harms”.

None of these statements is ever supported with evidence, but it is likely too much to expect evidence: the direct equation between male-positive advocacy and murderous misogyny is no longer a subject of academic debate, if it ever was. It is an axiom.

In one short paragraph, then, we move from non-feminist perspectives to “misandrist conspiracies”, and from belief in a “war against men” to “inciting violence” and “accelerating harms”. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with anti-feminist content will recognize the definitional sleights of hand. Are any of these academics genuinely familiar with the subject they are writing about? It seems more likely that they have taken a shortcut to a politically-approved position.

What about the mass of anti-feminist and male-positive content creators — Rick Bradford at The Illustrated Empathy Gap, Tom Golden at Men Are Good, Alison Tieman and company at Honey Badger Radio, Bettina Arndt at Bettina Arndt, Hannah Spier at Psychobabble, just to name a few — who come nowhere near “inciting violence against women”? On the contrary, they pursue a vision of mutual cooperation and accountability between the sexes by rejecting female privilege and paranoia. Is this manosphere content, or not?

Many men’s rights advocates — researchers like Stephen Baskerville, Paul Nathanson, James Nuzzo, David Shackleton, Gerard Casey, Helen Smith, and Grant Brown, just to name those I’ve been consulting most recently — simply document male disadvantage with evidence. They do not assert conspiracies or stoke grievance.

As for the “war against men”, have our researchers read any of the voluminous feminist writings that celebrate male death and openly advocate a world without them? When feminist leaders — many of them university professors — are not only allowed but actually celebrated for declaring their anti-male hatred and calling for a “decontamination of the earth“, what are sensible people to conclude about anti-male animus?

March 2, 2026

A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator

Filed under: Business, Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Forbrukerrådet – Norwegian Consumer Council
Published 27 Feb 2026

Digital products and services keep getting worse. In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved into enshittification and how to resist it. The report shows how this phenomenon affects both consumers and society at large, but that it is possible to turn the tide.

Read more on: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/breakin…
(more…)

January 24, 2026

Britain’s Amelia phenomenon

Filed under: Britain, Gaming, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On his Substack, Fergus Mason talks about the new Queen of English Resistance, Amelia:

Amelia, the new queen of the British right.

Independent journalism is a pretty grim business right now. Writing about the state of our poor broken country can be soul-destroying. Good news is thin on the ground; new calamities seem to arrive daily, either a fresh atrocity committed by an illegal immigrant or some new Labour assault on our freedom. So it’s nice when something a little more light-hearted comes along — even if it does make some serious points, too.

A couple of weeks ago the media started reporting a new online game funded by Prevent, the government’s (completely dysfunctional) department for diverting people away from extremism. Commissioned by Hull City Council and produced by “creative social enterprise” Shout Out UK, the game — called Pathways — is intended to “Encourage learning about the concept of extremism and radicalisation through the process of choice and safe exploration”.

As games go, this is a spectacularly dull one. Players choose a character, from a very limited selection — there are two, one male and one female, but they’re both called Charlie and use they/them pronouns. They then have to navigate their character through a series of scenarios, answering multiple-choice questions. The idea is that if you give the “wrong” answers you’ll get referred to Prevent, but it soon becomes obvious that almost any answers will get you referred to Prevent. The constant theme is that there are approved views and ways of acting — which don’t, for example, include doing research to find out if something you saw on the internet is true or not — and that, if you deviate from this, the state will step in to “support” you. A lot of this support looks suspiciously like re-education:

[…]

Of course, if you know much about the online right, you’ll probably see the problem already. As one stunned Reddit user commented, “Wait, are you telling me they made the cute goth e-girl the ‘racist’? Do they understand how the internet works?”

Well, they certainly do now.

The Daily Telegraph published an article about Pathways on 9 January, bringing the game to public notice. That same day, X user Bovril-Gesellschaft posted “I think I’m in love with Amelia”. It seemed many other right-wingers were too, because within hours Amelia memes were appearing in large numbers. Mostly produced with AI, these depicted Amelia in a wide range of styles (probably reflecting their creators’ personal tastes), but all featured her purple hair and most stuck with the outfit of a pink dress and purple hoodie or cardigan the game depicted her in. Images ranged from cartoons in the style of the original game to photorealism. […]

There’s a lot to laugh about in this. For example, brightly coloured “danger hair” has generally been the hallmark of women on the far left. Amelia subverts this by giving our new heroine her distinctive purple bob. Will we see the pro-Hamas nuts and trans cultists abruptly return to natural hair colours to dissociate themselves from Amelia? That would be funny.

January 17, 2026

Shout Out UK – “… embracing right-wing extremism will give you a shot at getting a manic pixie dream girl gf”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter looks at the most amazing political own-goal I’ve encountered in a long, long time:

Somewhere in the suffocating fog of the unhappy and restless Yookay, a minor functionary of the government’s behavioural shaping bureaucracy is staring at her computer screen in appalled alarm at the horror she’s accidentally helped to summon from the churning depths of the Immaterium.

Shout Out UK, which describes its mission as “countering disinformation through political and media literacy”, released a “visual novel” called Pathways, subtitled “navigating the Internet, gaming, and extremism”. The game itself is of course terrible, a ham-fisted “teaching aid” intended to remind British teenagers that even innocuous and entirely peaceful activities – downloading memes, speaking your mind, watching videos, researching things for yourself, attending rallies – will complicate their lives if they draw the concerned and empathetic eye of the managerial state, which after all just wants what’s best for them.

Prevent, if you haven’t heard of them, are a group of government-funded busybodies whose remit is to prevent extremism via early intervention, catching impressionable youth before they can be radicalized. The organization was nominally started to deal with Islamic terrorists, but in recent years it has focused on the “right-wing extremism” of the native British to the exclusion of all else. The Southport butcher Axel Rudakubana, for instance, was referred to Prevent multiple times for his open glorification of white genocide, which Prevent ignored completely.

The player can choose either a male or female character, both of whom are amusingly and awkwardly referred to with they/them pronouns, with grammatical abominations such as “Charlie decided to look for themselves” sprinkled throughout. The character is then placed in a series of scenarios and made to choose between good and bad options: downloading extremist content or telling an adult; agreeing with a classmate that ethnic minorities are being shown favouritism at the expense of native youth vs clapping back at her unconscionable bigotry; watching a video and reading more about the subject or ignoring it; accepting or refusing an invitation to join a secret group chat; attending an anti-immigration rally or staying home. If you make the bad choice, a little “extremism meter” goes into the red.

[…]

If you want to play the game for yourself, your best bet is probably to download the archived version of the Government Approved Goth Girl Dating Simulator. I was able to play it a week ago, but since then it gets stuck on the loading screen, which at first I thought was because they’d taken it offline, but is probably just because Shout Out UK has gotten DDOSed by an entirely unexpected surge of interest in their execrable product (or maybe it’s just that the Shout Out UK website has a dead link on its page, as after poking around a bit on their website I was able to find one that works). Alternatively, you can find most of the screenshots archived here.

Had it not been for one unfortunate creative choice made by the development team, no one would have taken any notice of Pathways. It would have been one of countless cringe-inducing training aids churned out by regime-adjacent quangos cashing in on the flood of taxpayer lucre sluicing through the DEI-and-disinformation industry. But for some reason, which can be explained only by a calamitous failure on the part of Shout Out UK to develop an accurate theory of mind for their target audience, the creators of Pathways decided that it would be a great idea to cast the awful bigot leading the protagonist step by step to his ideological doom in the form of a cute alt girl, thereby sending the message that embracing right-wing extremism will give you a shot at getting a manic pixie dream girl gf.

Update, 18 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

November 10, 2025

Enshittification, the book

Filed under: Books, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Cory Doctorow originally coined the all-too-useful name for the steady deterioration of pretty much everything in the online world and now it’s the title of his latest book:

Author and activist Cory Doctorow wants you to understand why online digital platforms are failing users, and he’s fighting for a better internet. “Enshittification” — a word he coined to describe the degradation of online platforms and services — is the slightly profane albeit funny title of his latest book.

[…]

First question from me: “What does enshittification look like in Canada?” (Try saying that word without chuckling). The country had several opportunities to lead as a global digital force to be reckoned with, Cory agrees, and in his view, “we dropped the ball on market concentration”.

“The Competition Bureau has, through almost all of its history, until last year when we got a new bill out of Parliament, been, I think, the weakest competition bureau in the world,” Cory declares, emphatically. It’s hard to refute his assessment: The merger of Shaw and Rogers, two very large telecoms in Canada, was made official in 2023, the year before Canada’s competition law was modernized.

“Wouldn’t you think, at the very least, Canada would have a robust domestic network platform available by now?” I ask. Gander Social, a made-in-Canada social media platform, designed as an alternative to large U.S.-based companies, is only now being beta tested.

“There are any number of people who would like very, very much to host a few thousand of their friends on a little Mastodon or Blue Sky server that can talk to all the other ones, and everyone can be in a conversation,” Cory counters.

“We don’t all have to be on the same server,” Cory continues. “If there’s one thing we learned from the Amazon outage, it’s that putting everyone on the same server is an incredibly bad idea, right? So we can all be on different servers in the same way we’re all on different email servers, drive on different roads. We have to live in different cities; we don’t all have to be in the same place to all talk to each other and be part of a single digital network. That’s what networks are, right?

“You know, what we don’t have, the lacuna in this plan, the thing that we need public investment in, is not the bicycles on the road, it’s the bike lanes, it’s the infrastructure, and it’s the kind of thing the private sector can’t do well,” he asserts. The pain points for small businesses, communities, large businesses, cooperatives or any entity wanting to host a social media platform, Cory suggests, include things like security audits and content moderation tools.

He also recommends “some mechanism to ease people’s passage off (existing) social media and onto a new platform”. Right now, Cory explains, “you have people building these new platforms and wondering how the people on the old platforms are going to get there. This is like West Germans building housing for East Germans in West Germany, without thinking about how they’re going to get over the wall. Except that, we built the wall. We are the ones maintaining the wall. The wall is made entirely of law. The wall could be torn down with an act of Parliament at the stroke of a pen.”

And on the related topic of artificial intelligence being crowbarred into everything we use online:

Cory’s also saying very provocative things about AI. His most-memorable quip: “AI is the asbestos we are shovelling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations”. While he sees the merits of AI to support the work of radiologists or lawyers or software engineers — or nearly anyone — he doesn’t believe AI can do the job. “But,” he warns, “an AI salesman can 100 per cent convince your boss to fire you and replace you with AI”.

October 31, 2025

“NFL media is dominated by the nerds” and their “never-ending performance of Well, Actually football contrarianism”

Filed under: Football, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Freddie deBoer discusses the way NFL media coverage has changed from the retired jocks of old to today’s emphasis on data nerd analysis and clickbait contrarianism:

Being a sports media professional means forcing yourself to have this kind of a reaction every time you’re on camera.
Screencap from Freddie deBoer

Consider how smart football journalism was supposed to be by now. Long the domain of ex-jocks ladling out evidence-free bromides about how you have to pound the ball and causation-flipping claims that time of possession is the ultimate metric, today NFL media is dominated by the nerds, analysts who proudly announce that they’ve never played the game and let their teenage resentments power their never-ending performance of Well, Actually football contrarianism. Experience is out! Numbers are in! Empiricism reigns! The bible was right: someday, the meek will inherit the earth, and it’s happening every Sunday on NFL Twitter, where it’s always time to re-prosecute high school.

And yet … The analytics revolution promised to graft rationality and context onto our game-day commentary, but when it comes to the most common and pernicious trend in NFL analysis — overreacting to small samples and short runs of good or bad performance — nothing has really changed. That’s because NFL new media conditions dictate that even the most temperamentally sober and judicious talking heads operate as 24/7 hype machines. This is not, to put it mildly, a new problem. In 2007, ESPN’s Kevin Jackson wrote that NFL media was “Overreaction Nation – a land where no sample size is too small for drawing conclusions, where the most common movement is the knee-jerk”. That description still fits the NFL media perfectly. Week after week, cable TV and podcasters spin wild narratives, proclaiming teams hopeless or superhuman after one game, seemingly embracing the idea that “no sample size is too small”. That this all comes from people who will tell you that they’re the keepers of the flame of Rational Football Analysis only makes it all more annoying.

Modern front offices have jumped on modern statistical analysis, with every team employing analytics departments and with more and more coaches regularly expressing disdain for yesterday’s conventional wisdom. This isn’t a secret; the Ringer, which has always employed its fair share of football nerds who heap contempt on the old ways, proclaimed back in 2018 that “football’s analytics moment has arrived”, pointing out the rise of modern tracking data and explaining how it gives teams an edge. But if we’re honest, even the Ringer was clear that football will never be baseball in statistical clarity: “Football will likely never be baseball, where statistics can basically explain anything,” Kevin Clark (now of ESPN) wrote – “there are too few games and too many variables”. In other words, the sport I love the most is inherently a beast of variance, full of noise. You’d think that message would temper the beat writers.

Instead, it seems the analytics evangelists and talking heads don’t trust their own analytic philosophy. They invoke “small sample size” as a scolding cliché if you dare overreact, but shamelessly turn right around and do it themselves. With every Monday morning comes a fresh rush of oversimplified hot takes. And time has proven that the ostensibly-objective analytics peddlers are no better when it comes to hype than their old school former player competition.

The Minnesota Vikings drafted J.J. McCarthy last year as their “quarterback of the future” only to lose him for his rookie season with a knee injury in the preseason. He started two games so far this season and got injured in his first loss and will only return to play this coming weekend. Bust? A lot of online fans certainly seem to think so, on the basis of a two-game sample, one of which included one quarter of amazing work earning him NFC Offensive Player of the Week. Fans are fickle at the best of times, but the NFL media hype juices that into a kind of sports schizophrenia.

Could Drake Maye be the next big thing? Sure. He certainly has the physical ability. Or he could be Daunte Culpepper. Could CJ Stroud and Jayden Daniels justify all of the hype from their rookie years? Of course! The point is that I don’t know, you don’t know, and neither do the NFL pundits. Neither does Ben Solak. And what bothers me in particular about this species of condescending NFL pundit is that they will endorse concepts like “small sample size theater” when it conforms to their narratives and then gleefully discard those concepts when they don’t. It’s quite frustrating.

Here are tropes to watch out for when it comes to the NFL hype train:

  • One Game = Season’s Fate A single loss becomes proof a coach’s job is on the line, a single win means the team is a contender.
  • Player of the Year (or Bust) in 48 Hours A QB throws two picks and the media declares him washed up; the next week he goes 25-of-30 and he’s an MVP candidate. NFL pundits alternate between funeral dirges and coronation ceremonies every Monday.
  • Outsized Weighting of One Stat Analysts cherry-pick a percentage or grade and assign it cosmic meaning, AKA “going the full PFF.” (This is, not coincidentally, a big part of why so many ex-players despise PFF.)
  • Vox Populi Misguided NFL analysis has a habit of looking an awful lot like chatter on Reddit; go look for a team’s subreddit and note the way that supposedly adult-in-the-room analysts ape the exact same hype and intensity of the Reddit squad. A lot of new media-style entities even straight-up quote random tweets as if they’re serious analysis. When you’re looking to backstop deeply irresponsible predictions, any evidence will do.

QotD: The Zoomers as human Giant Pandas

Filed under: China, Humour, Media, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When was the moment you first realized you’re a cold-hearted sumbitch? For me, it was sometime in my late childhood — early high school, thereabouts — when for whatever reason I became aware of the Giant Panda. I forget the occasion — I think one of the few captive pairs was going to have cubs — but we were treated to a massive media blitz about these gentle giants. And look: they’re cute and all, but the upshot of so many of those stories was that these things are critically endangered, not least because it takes tremendous effort to get them to breed.

Not just “breed in captivity”, mind you. Breed in general. Apparently panda lovin’ is like nerds on date night — the conditions must be perfect, it’s incredibly awkward, it takes massive effort, and even the tiniest misstep can throw the whole thing off forever. Your average MGTOW gets more poony than your average panda … all of which prompted in me the very uncharitable thought: Are you sure God doesn’t want it to be dead?

Which — black pill incoming — is pretty much what I feel about the human race right now.

Take a gander at this. The “aki no kure” guy has a lot of issues, no doubt, but when he’s on he’s a very useful read. If for no other reason than that he keeps up with the Kids These Days, and I just can’t, y’all, I just can’t. And here’s why:

    Well, if Zoomers never leave the home (something they all make self-deprecating jokes about), then you *are* watching their daily lives as they sit in a chair in front of a computer set-up. Their whole lives are online and virtual, not IRL. Their daily activities are not going to the store and running into neighbors who they share funny stories with, it’s scrolling their timeline and engaging with its content. So you are watching them go through all sorts of daily activities — checking their subreddit, uploading pictures to Instagram, clapping back to haters on Twitter, reacting to other streamers’ video clips, sending text messages, and so on and so forth. And the other characters in their online lives are also entirely online — other accounts who they interact with, although every once in awhile they make an IRL guest appearance.

That right there is my definition of hell. Seriously, if that’s “life” in the Worker’s Paradise, I’m punching out. But: That’s what so many people, not just “Zoomers”, seem to want. See “Every single thing about the Holocough, 2020-present”. If that’s what Western Civ has come to, then let me complete my transformation into the goofiest hippie on campus circa 1992: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.”

Severian, “Giant Pandas”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-28.

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