Quotulatiousness

October 18, 2025

Remembering GamerGate

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

We’ve lived through such a tumultuous decade that it’s sometimes difficult to remember what things were like in the “before times”. On Substack chat, John Carter linked to this essay by Billionaire Psycho which helps refresh memories about one of the seminal events that kicked off the political and social chaos of the last decade:

GamerGate is maybe the most important event of the past 20 years which never receives mainstream media coverage. Lomez will be publishing an in-depth history of GamerGate, to serve as an official record going forward, and that’s crucial as part of building a foundation for a new culture — fighting the narrative war over how history is remembered, how history is interpreted, what events are recognized as significant and influential moments in culture, and how Western identity is defined.

GamerGate was only possible because a generation of incompetent Leftists inherited an empire built on propaganda that came without a legible instruction manual. Leftists forgot how to run their imperial machine. Video games sedated young white men, funneling their energy into a simulation of achievement, an illusory power fantasy of digital significance. Leftists forgot that porn, video games, movies, junk food, and other passive consumption activities primarily existed to prevent young white men from doing anything useful with their lives. And this zone of sedation was viewed as another industry to conquer so that DEI activists could bully the video game industry into providing overproduced elites with fake jobs.

This event was important for several reasons.

GamerGate exposed American Sharia laws. It unveiled the shibboleths, religious taboos, and blasphemy codes which were considered more important than Constitutional protections on “free speech”. A gulf emerged between written laws, and selective enforcement.

GamerGate was maybe the first time in 50 years that Leftists suffered a real, measurable defeat.

It functioned as a generational awakening: a catalyst that activated a decentralized army of shytpoasters, bloggers, podcasters, streamers, journalists, and RW activists.

It mapped out in real-time the architecture and OODA loop of the Leftist hivemind, providing empirical data on how the swarm intelligence perceives, coordinates, reacts, propagates … and suffers damage.

It educated critics of the hegemonic monoculture that rules the Global American Empire.

But I think the most important aspect of GamerGate was that it disproved the narrative illusion that everyone more or less accepted as conventional wisdom, the bedrock of the uniparty worldview. Before GamerGate, it was taken as a self-evident fact that America was a capitalist country, and that all of the evil in the world was caused by Wall Street corporations chasing “shareholder value” and advancing “the profit-motive”. Capitalism and racism were the invisible demons which could be used as scapegoats for anything bad that ever happened at any point and at any place in American society.

Leftism could do anything it wanted, no matter how dumb, destructive, intrusive, or evil — and then blame capitalism and racism for the consequences.

This illusion was shattered by GamerGate.

[…]

There’s one important thing that’s been lost since GamerGate (GG) and the Meme War of 2016, which is the adolescent fun, transgressive irreverence, and juvenile sense of humor which once characterized the RW youth. There was a brief window when video game enthusiasts believed they could meme their way to victory (they did), win a landslide election (they did), and reverse imperial decline (they didn’t). Ten years have passed since then. Countless accounts have been banned, doxxed, deplatformed, debanked. Dissidents have been prosecuted and imprisoned. The presidency of 2016 was stalled out and subverted, the election of 2020 was stolen, the election of 2024 almost ended in an assassination on live television. Covid lockdowns crashed the economy and trapped everyone in their homes, while Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioted outside in the name of George Floyd.

At some point, it stopped being fun, and the contest turned into a forever war.

Comedy turned serious.

But it should be remembered that in the aftermath of GamerGate, humor and a playful, childish energy fueled the engine of RW victories. That’s the secret ingredient.

Samizdat is the key to winning.

Always remember to keep having fun, and keep laughing, because our enemies are ridiculous.

October 2, 2025

UNshittifying the internet

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney asks if we can go back to when the internet (and by extension, all the other tech toys and gadgets we see everywhere) was … good?

Have you heard about enshittification? It’s not just a potty word. It’s actually a pretty fascinating concept, and you read about it mostly in tech circles. Enshittification is the process by which something becomes worse over time, instead of better, normally as people try to squeeze more efficiency and revenue value out of it. Through that process of squeezing, the thing becomes enshittified.

If you want a proper definition …

    Enshittification: The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.

There are lots of examples. My favourite example? My video doorbell has an annual service fee. Another great example? Cars that now require payments to access certain features, like heated seats. You own the device. But you need to pay a recurring fee to use it. That’s enshittification.

It’s everywhere. And it’s getting worse, especially online. And, perversely, maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it’s going to force us to stop, rethink how we use the digital realm, and, basically, try again. Start over. And get it right this time.

Noah Smith is an American economics writer whose work I enjoy. Smith noted on Twitter recently that we are rapidly getting to the point where we should declare social media a failure. It’s passé to criticize social media on social media, but Smith wasn’t making the usual warmed-over moral argument. He wasn’t saying that it was bad because people are mean there or that they fall down dark rabbit holes and end up believing insane things. Those are problems! But Smith’s concern was the extent to which AI-generated content and bots have simply flooded all the social media channels. Even a responsible user trying to use these platforms for the good is going to find it increasingly difficult to derive any value from them. They’re being rapidly enshittified.

I share his view of the trajectory. I don’t really know anyone who doesn’t. But Smith’s comment led me to ponder what value I actually derive from them — what I would miss if they were gone. I came up with four broad use cases.

September 29, 2025

Screen addiction – “No drug cartel makes as much money as the screen-and-app companies”

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

Ted Gioia on the eight things about screen addiction that David Foster Wallace tried to warn us about before he took his own life in 2008:

Those same youngsters are now showing up on college campuses, and we can begin to gauge the societal impact of a screen-driven life. It ain’t pretty.

So this is a good time to revisit what Wallace tried to warn us about thirty years ago. He was ahead of his time in the worst possible way, experiencing firsthand all the debilitating symptoms that now plague millions.

That’s why his writings feel so eerily contemporary. They read like commentaries on what’s happening right now.

Of course, Wallace knew very little about the Internet — he deliberately avoided it. He also refused to own a television. He understood how susceptible he was to screen addiction, and took drastic steps to reduce his exposure to all screens.

But he wrote about it — most tellingly in his huge novel Infinite Jest. The title refers to a film that is so addictive that people who watch it can’t stop. They literally watch it to death. It’s an infinite diversion, much like the endless scrolls on today’s social media apps.

He returned to the topic in his final book The Pale King, and also discussed it in interviews and essays. I’ve read through all of these including more than thirty interviews with the author. These allow me to put together a point-by-point summary of what Wallace tried to tell us.

We ignore his warnings at great risk.

(1) Screen technology will cause a crisis of loneliness, especially among young people.
In almost every interview, Wallace eventually talks about loneliness. It was a looming crisis, he insisted. But he was one of the first to link this to the ways we divert ourselves via screens. […]

(2) This will lead to widespread depression.
Wallace also knew this firsthand. He suffered intensely from depression. His inability to find a suitable treatment led to his suicide in 2008. […]

(3) This will also happen at a larger scale. Society will grow more fragmented and disconnected.
As each person falls into an isolated relationship with a screen, larger communities begin to fray. Wallace anticipated a “new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomized mass of watchers and appearers”. […]

(4) Screen technology promises to liberate us, but the reality is that it controls us for the benefit of others.
The most dangerous part of the screen entertainment is the illusion that it serves us. But the reality is that we actually serve tech platforms and their advertisers. […]

(5) The people who control the technology work to hide their purposes and goals.
“They’re trying to lock us tighter into certain conventions, in this case habits of consumption,” Wallace told Larry McCaffery in 1993. “This is McLuhan right? ‘The medium is the message’ and all that? But notice that TV’s mediated message is never that the medium is the message.” […]

(6) Our survival will depend on our ability to remain independent of these forces.
If we abandon ourselves completely to the tech (as many now do), we become pawns in the corporate agenda to monetize us — at a tremendous cost in loneliness, depression, and social disconnection. […]

(7) We don’t have many tools, but kindness and compassion will be the starting point.
We need to replace irony, sarcasm, and cynicism — which have contributed to our self-debasement — with softer, gentler attitudes. Cynicism is useful in criticizing, but is impotent when we need to build something better. Irony only destroys, never builds. […]

(8) Art can help us heal.
He wrote his big books with the hope that they would help us find a way back to a more caring and connected world — but connected via people, not screens. […]

September 27, 2025

Canada’s supply management cartels benefit “an affluent few, burdening the poorest, and creating needless friction with allies and trading partners”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Reason, J.D. Tuccille explains to an American audience why Donald Trump has been playing hardball with Canada on trade issues:

President Donald Trump justifies his enthusiasm for prohibitively high tariffs by insisting the U.S. is being “ripped off” by other countries. It’s a strange argument, since people only trade with one another if they see benefit in the deal. But the president is right to complain that other governments impose trade barriers of their own that are often every bit as burdensome as the high taxes Americans pay on imports. If foreign officials honestly wish to restore something like free trade, they should emphasize dropping their own barriers in return for lower U.S. levies. Case in point: Canada, which sends three-quarters of its exports across its southern border but imposes damaging restrictions on imports.

In a February proclamation of trade war on the world, Trump announced, “the United States will no longer tolerate being ripped off” and complained that “our trading partners keep their markets closed to U.S. exports”. The first part of that claim is silly. But the second part has a kernel of truth.

A glimpse at that truth came in June when Trump angrily posted that Canada “has just announced that they are putting a Digital Services Tax on our American Technology Companies” and, as a result, “we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada”.

The threat had the desired impact. Canada rescinded the tax immediately before it was supposed to take effect. While nominally targeted at all large tech companies, in practice that meant American companies and everybody knew it, since U.S. firms dominate the industry.

But that was only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Canada’s trade barriers. Also in June, international trade attorney Lawrence Herman, a senior fellow at Canada’s C.D. Howe Institute, bemoaned proposed legislation in the Canadian parliament that he characterized as “yet another regrettable effort to enshrine Canada’s Soviet-style supply management system in the statute books.”

He added, “the bill would prohibit any increase in imports of supply-managed goods – dairy products, eggs and poultry – under current or future trade agreements”.

The legislation about which Herman complained has since become law.

[…]

More skeptically, Fraser Institute senior fellow Fred McMahon notes, “supply management is uniquely Canadian. No other country has such a system. And for good reason. It’s odious policy, favouring an affluent few, burdening the poorest, and creating needless friction with allies and trading partners.”

McMahon elaborates that the supply management process is controlled by agricultural management boards which “employ a variety of tools, including quotas and tariffs, and a large bureaucracy to block international and interprovincial trade and deprive Canadians of choice in dairy, eggs and poultry”.

But as we’ve seen so many times over the years, it disproportionally benefits Quebec, and the Liberals desperately need those Quebec votes to stay in power, so the government would rather destroy the national economy rather than give up on our Stalinist supply management cartels.

September 19, 2025

QotD: The sub-generations of Generation X

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

… “Gen X” is actually a misnomer, as there are at least three distinct subgroups. There’s the very earliest Xers, the guys who were in high school in the late 1970s. They often get lumped in with the Baby Boomers, too, though they’re as different from the Boomers as they are from us, the “mid” Xers. Think Wooderson from Dazed and Confused. Brian Niemeier calls them “Generation Jones”, and while I don’t like that tag I don’t know what else to call them (except maybe “Woodersons”), so roll with it.

Then there’s the group that was in high school in the late 1980s. I squeak into this group (barely). We’re the mid-Xers. The real “grunge” generation. If Dazed and Confused is a pretty decent late-90s approximation of late-70s high school kids, then the best description I can give you of a “grunge” kid is the movie Deadpool. Made in 2016, by guys who were born in the mid-1970s. That’s grunge, in a way Kurt Cobain couldn’t even imagine. Fourth wall breaks! Sarcastic asides about the fourth wall breaks! Profanity! Masturbation jokes! And snark, snark, snark — unrelenting snark, about everything, all the time. Every second of that movie screams “I can’t believe you fags are amused by this, but since you obviously do, here’s lots more! Choke on it!!!”

The writers obviously wanted to work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Joss Whedon was too cool for them — imagine the twisted psyche of a person who thinks Joss Whedon is cool — and Sarah Michelle Gellar just laughed at them, so they made Deadpool out of spite.

Then there’s the late Xers. They were in high school in the late 1990s, which is why us oldsters call them “Millennials” (as the term is now used, it seems to mean “those born around 2000”, i.e. the generation just now getting out of college. We took it to mean “those who were just getting out of college around the turn of the century”). Obviously I use the Internet. I’m using it now, but I’m not on the internet, and I’m certainly not an Internet Person. The very late Xers are Internet People. The very first Internet People; they invented the concept of Internet People. Mark Zuckerberg (born 1984) is a late Xer. The people behind Twitter (Jack Dorsey born 1976; Biz Stone 1974; Evan Williams 1972) are mid-Xers; they were ahead of the curve.

Severian, “Addendum to Previous”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.

August 29, 2025

The dangers of joining the online hive mind of social media

Filed under: History, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Freeman, Nicole James discusses the experience of being immersed in a social media swarm or hive mind phenomenon:

Ever noticed how your social media feed doesn’t sound like “independent thought” so much as a stadium of people chanting, “Yaasss, queen!” in matching sequins? One minute you’re scrolling idly, the next you’ve been recruited into a sect with better lighting filters and the odd ironic dog meme. All it takes is clicking on one video of a dachshund in a raincoat, and suddenly you’ve been ordained High Priest of Sausage Dogs, condemned to a lifetime of puddle-splash reels and algorithmic sermonizing. That’s the hive mind. It’s the Internet’s favorite parlor trick, turning ordinary humans into synchronized swimmers thrashing about in a soup so murky it makes the Hudson on a hot July afternoon look like Perrier.

Bees and ants nailed this millennia ago: buzzing, working in lockstep, worshipping a terrifying queen—basically the Kardashians of the insect world. But instead of honey, humanity now churns out TikTok dances, Reddit debates about whether Die Hard was a Christmas movie (it wasn’t), and Facebook is where your uncle accidentally joins a cult.

Yet this collective buzz can tip into something darker. Collaboration can harden into groupthink, flattening individuality like a raccoon on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Cristina Dovan, a life coach based in the UK, calls the hive mind “group decision-making where individuals meld into one big throbbing consciousness”. Which sounds noble, and also like the worst hangover imaginable.

Collective intelligence can shine. Wikipedia (on a good day), Reddit’s problem-solving posters, Kaggle competitions, GitHub fixes. It’s a brainstorming session without the burnt office coffee and stale biscuits.

But history, and the Internet, remind us there’s a darker wing.

Psychologist Irving Janis, who coined “groupthink,” pointed to the Bay of Pigs invasion as Exhibit A.

Let’s return to 1961 where JFK is young, popular, and surrounded by Very Serious Men in suits. The CIA pitches a plan to topple Fidel Castro that went roughly like this:

  1. Train a ragtag bunch of Cuban exiles.
  2. Drop them on a swampy stretch of coastline actually called the Bay of Pigs (because nothing says “stealth” like announcing your arrival in Pork Bay).
  3. Hope the Cuban people spontaneously rise and overthrow Castro, preferably in a neat anti-communist conga line.

Everyone in the room knew it sounded dodgy. The beaches were wrong, the surprise was nonexistent, Castro’s army was enormous and very much awake. But instead of saying, “Excuse me, Mr. President, this is bananas”, the advisors all nodded along as if they were trapped in a corporate retreat exercise called Let’s Pretend We’re Bold Visionaries.

The result? A fiasco. Castro’s forces crushed the invaders in three days flat. America looked ridiculous, Kennedy was humiliated, and “Bay of Pigs” became shorthand for “the world’s worst team-building activity”. In short, a textbook case of groupthink, or as we’d call it today, “watching as your drunk mate climbs onto the shed roof, yells that he can backflip, and you cheer instead of calling an ambulance”.

August 27, 2025

In praise of the book

Filed under: Books, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia contemplates the glorious future of the book:

A decades-old bookmark from a Toronto Book City location (probably the store on the Danforth near Chester).

Can you imagine data storage that never needs an upgrade. Even better, there’s no subscription fee. And the system never crashes — there hasn’t been a single minute of down time in recorded history.

And there’s still more:

  • There are no terms of service.
  • No hidden fees.
  • No customer service bots to deal with.
  • No annoying follow-up spam emails and texts.
  • No privacy intrusions or surveillance of any sort.
  • No data incompatibility issues now or in the future.
  • No advertising or solicitations of any sort.

The list continues — no cookies, no credit cards, no come-ons, no conditions. None of that.

What a miracle!

I’m talking about my favorite handheld device, and I don’t need a cloud to hold its contents. Just a shelf.

You guessed it — I’m referring to books. They’re the greatest hard storage concept in human history, and nothing else comes close.

The book is the ultimate killer app.

People have been predicting the death of the book for decades. The Internet was going to make them obsolete. But somehow they survived.

The launch of the Kindle in 2007 posed a bigger threat. Even I was convinced — at least for a while. I bought a Kindle and tried it out, plunging with enthusiasm into the world of eBooks and digital storage.

But a month later, I’d returned to physical books. It was a better experience in every way.

It didn’t help when Amazon started deleting books from Kindles. Much to the customers’ surprise, they learned that they didn’t own the book they had bought — they were merely “purchasing a license to the content“.

Access can be terminated. And Amazon is the ultimate terminator.

That’s never happened to any physical book on my shelf. I own thousands of them, and nobody has ever revoked my access. I can also sell or give them to others, and they will retain rights in perpetuity.

You can’t do that with a Kindle. You’re not allowed to sell an eBook. You can’t even donate it to a library. Your license is restricted and non-transferable.

But transferability is how books and literary culture survive. Books are supposed to move without friction across generations and borders and boundaries. Some books have had dozens of owners over hundreds of years — creating a legacy unknown in the world of digital technologies.

Even more insidious, Amazon will update books on your Kindle — changing the text without the reader or author’s permission. That’s happened, for example, to books by Roald Dahl, R.L. Stine, Ian Fleming, and Agatha Christie. If somebody in a position of power decides that an author’s work is problematic, your e-book gets cleansed.

August 24, 2025

Much of our prosperity is based on trust, and we’re rapidly losing it

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

Ted Gioia foresees a precipitous fall in trust coming at us very soon, and I’m afraid he might be being too optimistic:

During the great purges of the 1930s, Stalin ordered the execution of a million people, including some of his closest associates. But it wasn’t enough to kill these victims — they also had to disappear from photographs.

In a famous case, Nikolai Yezhov got removed from his position next to Stalin in a photo taken by the Moscow Canal. This erasure alarmed many party elites because Yezhov, head of the secret police, had been one of the most feared men in the Soviet Union.

And now he got totally deleted.

Well, not totally. In those days of print media, original photos survived, and a paper trail made it difficult to erase history.

So this photo was later used to mock Stalin, and the pretensions of dictators. They can try to change reality, but that’s not possible.

Or is it? Maybe dictators now get the last laugh. Because in the last few months, reality has been defeated — totally, completely, unquestionably.

It is now possible to alter reality and every kind of historical record — and perhaps irrevocably. The technology for creating fake audio, video, and text has improved enormously in just the last few months. We will soon reach — or may have already reached — a tipping point where it’s impossible to tell the difference between truth and deception.

  • Can I tell the difference between a fake AI video and a real video? A few months ago, I would have said yes. But now I’m not so sure.
  • Can I tell the difference between fake AI music and human music? I still think I can discern a difference in complex genres, but this is a lot harder than it was just a few months ago.
  • Can I tell the difference between a fake AI book and a real book by a human author? I’m fairly confident I can do this for a book on a subject I know well, but if I’m operating outside my core expertise, I might fail.

At the current rate of technological advance, all reliable ways of validating truth will soon be gone. My best guess is that we have another 12 months to enjoy some degree of confidence in our shared sense of reality.

But what happens when it’s gone?

Back in 2023, I asserted that trust is the most scarce thing in society. But that was before all these tech deceptions came online. Trust will soon get even more scarce — or perhaps disappear completely from the public sphere.

This is not a small matter.

Most discussions of this issue focus on the technology. I believe that’s a mistake. The real turmoil will take place in social cohesion and individual psychology. They will both fracture in a world where our shared benchmarks of truth and actuality disappear.

We will be — already are — in desperate need of Robert Heinlein’s Fair Witnesses:

A Fair Witness is an individual trained to observe events and report exactly what is seen and heard, making no extrapolations or assumptions. While wearing the Fair Witness uniform of a white robe, they are presumed to be observing and opining in their professional capacity. Works that refer to the Fair Witness emphasize the profession’s impartiality, integrity, objectivity, and reliability.

An example from the book [Stranger in a Strange Land] illustrates the role of Fair Witness when Anne is asked what color a house is. She answers, “It’s white on this side.” The character Jubal then explains, “You see? It doesn’t occur to Anne to infer that the other side is white, too. All the King’s horses couldn’t force her to commit herself … unless she went there and looked – and even then she wouldn’t assume that it stayed white after she left.”

August 12, 2025

AOL to shut down its last dial-up access: dozens to be inconvenienced

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

James Lileks on the end-of-era announcement from AOL — and I can’t recall the last time I thought of that company — that they’ll be eliminating the last of their dial-up internet access accounts:

New tech: shiny today, tarnished tomorrow. Everything that was once bright and brilliant now stamps its walker towards the exit door. The headlines wave goodbye: Last telegram office in the US shut down.

Last phone booth in New York is decommissioned. The latest: AOL to shut off its landline customers.

You’d think this would be news on the level of “homing pigeon trainer employment hits record lows”.

Who uses dialup? Yahoo, which now owns the AOL brand, says that the user base is in the “low thousands”, which suggests that some people forgot to turn off autopay in 2005. What does AOL do today? The usual basket of dross and chum. A website that offers “trending videos” — gosh, don’t know where else you’d find those — and a lot of news stories, supplied by Yahoo, and its … numberless army of journalists, I guess.

It’s a legacy brand for people who want to slide into the internet like comfy slippers they left under the desk. And that’s fine. Facebook serves the same function. It’s a place to start, a home base. A familiar window out which we gaze daily We all have them. But let us not get nostalgic for AOL and the early days of the internet. Some people, of course, love to talk about the pioneer days, and how it required some technical know-how:

    Well, we didn’t have those fancy little pre-made modems like you got in the 90s, so we had to get a little matchbox and fill it up with a certain kind of specially-bred insect that sang a note at a particular pitch when exposed to electrical current. So you’d crank up the generator and put the little alligator clips on the box and hold the box up to the phone while you entered your user name in Morse code by pushing on the hang-up buttons, and then you had to shake the box so the insect singing would modulate. Took about an hour, but then you’d be “On the Line”, as we said, and you could go to a Usenet group and call people Nazis. Kids today, they can call someone a Nazi without lifting a finger.

August 9, 2025

Carney hints at backing away from Trudeau’s digital policy catastrophes

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

Michael Geist on the possibility that Prime Minister Mark Carney is starting to recognize just how damaging to Canadian interests the previous government’s various online bills have been:

Digital policies did not play a prominent role in the last election given the intense focus on the Canada-U.S. relationship. Prime Minister Mark Carney started as a bit of a blank slate on the issue, but over the past few months a trend has emerged as he distances himself from the Justin Trudeau approach with important shifts on telecom, taxation, and the regulation of artificial intelligence. Further, recent hints of an openness to re-considering the Online News Act and heightened pressure from the U.S. on the Online Streaming Act suggests that a full overhaul may be a possibility.

This week’s decision to let the CRTC’s decision on wholesale access to fibre broadband networks stand is a case in point. Last November, the Justin Trudeau-led government sent the CRTC’s initial ruling back to the Commission for reconsideration, noting that it “has concerns about future and ongoing investments in broadband infrastructure and services in Ontario and Quebec, including in rural, remote and Indigenous communities, and concerns that those investments could, if they are unprofitable, lead to a decline in quality and consumer choice in the retail Internet services market”. Nine months later, the CRTC came back with the roughly same ruling. That led to yet another request for a cabinet review but this time the government stood by the CRTC despite significant industry opposition. New leader, dramatically new approach.

The CRTC is example was preceded by the decision to eliminate the digital services tax. While the strategic approach seemed misguided – dropping the DST should have garnered more than just an agreement from the U.S. to return to the bargaining table – some noted at the time that perhaps Carney wasn’t a supporter of the DST and had few qualms with rescinding it. The tax had been a foundational part of the government’s campaign to “make web giants pay” but in a matter of 72 hours in late June it was gone.

The government has also shifted its approach on AI regulation. After months of supporting Bill C-27 and the EU-style AI regulatory approach, a new government brought a new minister and a new approach. Evan Solomon, the newly installed AI and Digital Innovation Minister, used his first public speech as minister to pledge that Canada would move away from “over-indexing on warnings and regulation” on AI. That too represents a significant shift in approach, particularly since Trudeau had embraced the EU style regulatory model.

Then there is the Online News Act and Online Streaming Act. When asked about the Online News Act this week, Carney seemed to suggest he was open to change, stating “this government is a big believer in the value of … local news and the importance of ensuring that that is disseminated as widely and as quickly as possible. So, we will look for all avenues to do that.” While that isn’t a clear commitment to change, it is far from an ironclad commitment to legislation is viewed by many to have done more harm than good. Further, reports indicate that the U.S. Congress is escalating pressure to rescind the Online Streaming Act, which may put that law on the chopping block, particularly if a court appeal strikes down elements of the bill or the CRTC’s implementation of the law puts the bill on the Trump radar screen.

August 5, 2025

High tech and lust for power are a bad combination

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

Spaceman Spiff discusses the malign confluence of technocrats and amoral power-seekers (BIRM):

Today’s technocrats, assisted by billionaire tech bros, want to implement a digital surveillance grid that will eradicate any notion of anonymity or privacy forever.

Every major country, including the United States, is working on this with enthusiastic support from governments and their many agents.

The sales pitch is primarily platitudes about protecting people from harm, especially children.

What they seek is the end of the internet as it currently is, which means it will look a lot more like licensed corporate TV than the current free for all. From here their goal is to extend their surveillance operation into every aspect of our lives, from the energy we consume to the food we are permitted to eat.

This will probably cause a lot of damage, but it will ultimately fail.

Tech bro arrogance meets managerial control freakery

We are witnessing a partnership between the technocratic elite, with a limited understanding of technology, and silicone valley titans, who are blinded by the promise of technology.

Each group believes draconian surveillance systems combined with fancy data analysis will solve many societal problems and usher in a new era with them at the helm.

To the technocrats it promises full-spectrum control of all our choices. The food we eat, the material we consume, the ability to travel.

They are salivating at the thought of the ultimate control, the issuing of government-controlled digital currencies they can deactivate on a whim. No steak for the memelords, and no road trips for those without the right carbon profile.

They have been discussing these things for many years with a degree of enthusiasm bordering on mania.

The technologists see a chance to keep in with the powerful, to join the club. If they can be the trusted partner of the visionaries currently wrecking our world they will cash in and perhaps be spared from the concentration camps.

The technologists have powerful tools that promise amazing things. Machine learning, predictive programming, behavioural modelling.

Spotting patterns within trillions of data points is appealing to society’s tinkerers, all the better to predict problematic behaviours and to spot trends. Combined with nudge units and related horrors of social engineering this promises to be the holy grail for a technocratic managerialist regime absolutely convinced it can steer society in enlightened directions, just like they imagine they did during Covid.

It is all very futuristic, and it has clearly impressed our technology gurus as well as those who love control.

But along with the outsized data stores will come outsized cockups they cannot properly plan for.

Climate modelling has promised immense benefits and accuracy for decades and we have yet to see a single successful prediction. Indeed, some of the most famous climate predictions are almost comically wrong but nonetheless trigger endless rounds of funding, chatter, conferences and hubris. Such is the lure of anything that can be adapted to enforce top-down social control.

There have been many attempts to harness technology to predict the stock market, another obvious target. None of them worked either. It doesn’t seem to matter. No one is checking the track record. It is sold on its promise and that works because of who is buying. Or, rather, the type of person who embraces these schemes.

Digital surveillance, digital currencies, digital voting, digital IDs. Everything we do tracked and stored. Such absolute total control would make our superiors into gods as they exploit these powerful tools to direct us towards better versions of ourselves.

There is a delusion at play here. Those closest to this seem lost in their fantasies. They are blind.

August 1, 2025

Australia saw Britain’s awful Online Safety Act and said “hold my beer”

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

In The Freeman, Nicole James discusses how Australia’s attempt to protect young, innocent eyes from the terrors of the internet seems to be having all kinds of unforeseen impacts on adults:

Commonwealth Coat of Arms of Australia (1912).
Quarterly of six, the first quarter Argent a Cross Gules charged with a Lion passant guardant between on each limb a Mullet of eight points Or; the second Azure five Mullets, one of eight, two of seven, one of six and one of five points of the first (representing the Constellation of the Southern Cross) ensigned with an Imperial Crown proper; the third of the first a Maltese Cross of the fourth, surmounted by a like Imperial Crown; the fourth of the third, on a Perch wreathed Vert and Gules an Australian Piping Shrike displayed also proper; the fifth also Or a Swan naiant to the sinister Sable; the last of the first, a Lion passant of the second, the whole within a Bordure Ermine; for the Crest on a Wreath Or and Azure A Seven-pointed Star Or, and for Supporters dexter a Kangaroo, sinister an Emu, both proper.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, children roamed freely through the pixelated wilderness of the Internet, posting dog memes, finding kindred spirits in weird little corners of Tumblr, and learning how to contour like Kylie Jenner. It was all chaotic, noisy, and entirely normal.

Now? Well, welcome to Australia in 2025, where the new Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill has galloped through Parliament like a runaway Shetland pony, banning under-16s from social media. This is a full-blown digital eviction. And the ban isn’t limited just to TikTok and Snapchat. It also extends to YouTube (yes, YouTube), where apparently autoplay is now considered a gateway drug.

And how will they enforce this sweeping national grounding? Age verification, of course. Potentially through facial recognition. Not for the kids, mind you; they’ll simply be locked out. It’s everyone else who’ll need to prove they’re not children. Because nothing says “welcome to adulthood” like having to scan your actual face just to post a birthday shoutout or watch a slow-cooker recipe reel. All to reassure a tech platform that you’re not a rogue 14-year-old with strong opinions and a ring light.

The bill’s spiritual mother, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who, fun fact, once interviewed for a job at the CIA to analyze serial killers, gave a passionate speech at the National Press Club called “Swimming Between the Digital Flags”. It sounded very beachy and breezy until you realized she meant regulatory flags, and not the ones you’d use at Bondi. Her point was clear: the online world is full of rips and sharks and emotional jellyfish, and children must be protected from being dragged under.

Which is noble. Obviously. But somewhere between “protect the kids” and “build a biometric panopticon”, the line got a little smeared.

And where, you might ask, were parents in all this? Sitting quietly in the back, apparently, while Canberra (Australia’s Washington, DC) appointed itself Mum, Dad, the school principal, and possibly even the family dog. Because this isn’t just about safety; it’s about who decides what kids can see, say, share, and, in the case of a few bold young TikTokers, lip-sync while delivering motivational speeches to two mildly traumatized budgies.

The idea behind the project is that children are being harmed online, and honestly, yes, some are. The Internet is not all kittens and cake recipes. But rather than investing in education or digital literacy, the government has opted for a full blackout. It’s like banning scissors because one kid snipped their fringe into a reverse mullet.

And here’s the kicker. The bill had a consultation period of just 24 hours. That’s less time than it takes to read the terms and conditions you just agreed to without reading. (Don’t lie, we’ve all done it.)

In that tight little window, more than 15,000 submissions were made, and while some were supportive, the vast majority sounded the alarm. LGBTQIA+ organizations warned of disconnected teens losing safe spaces. Indigenous advocates pointed out the risks of further digital exclusion. Psychologists, educators, digital rights groups, and even a Community Soccer Club raised concerns.

July 31, 2025

The intent of Britain’s Online Safety Act … and the actual implementation

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Conservative Woman, Dr. Frederick Attenborough discusses the gap between what the Online Safety Act was intended to do and how it’s actually being enforced now that it’s the law of the land:

X posts like this may not be visible to uses in the UK under the age verification rules of the Online Safety Act.

At the heart of the regime is a requirement to implement “highly effective” age checks. If a platform cannot establish with high confidence that a user is over 18, it must restrict access to a wide category of “sensitive” content, even when that content is entirely lawful. This has major implications for platforms where news footage and political commentary appear in real time.

Ofcom’s guidance makes clear that simple box-ticking exercises, such as declaring your age or agreeing to terms of service, will no longer suffice. Instead, platforms are expected to use tools such as facial age estimation, ID scans, open banking credentials and digital identity wallets.

The Act also pushes companies to filter harmful material before it appears in users’ feeds. Ofcom’s broader regulatory guidance warns that recommender systems can steer young users toward material they didn’t ask for. In response, platforms may now be expected to reconfigure their algorithms to filter out entire categories of lawful expression before it reaches underage or unverified users.

One platform already moving in this direction is X. Its approach offers a revealing – and potentially sobering – glimpse of where things may be heading. The company uses internal signals, including when an account was created, any prior verification, and behavioural data, to estimate a user’s age. If that process fails to confirm the user is over 18, he or she is automatically placed into a sensitive content filtering mode. As the platform’s Help Center explains: “Until we are able to determine if a user is 18 or over, they may be defaulted into sensitive media settings, and may not be able to access sensitive media”.

This system runs without user opt-in and applies at scale. Depending on how X classifies it, filtered material may include adult humour, graphic imagery, political commentary or footage of violence. Already there are signs that lawful content is quietly being screened out.

One example came on July 25, the day the Act’s age-verification duties took effect, during a protest outside the Britannia Hotel in Seacroft, Leeds, where asylum seekers are being housed. A video showing police officers restraining and arresting a protester was posted on X, but quickly became inaccessible to many UK-based users. Instead, viewers saw the message: “Due to local laws, we are temporarily restricting access to this content until X estimates your age”.

West Yorkshire Police denied any involvement in blocking the footage. X declined to comment, but its AI chatbot, Grok, indicated that the clip had been restricted under the Online Safety Act due to violent content. Though lawful and clearly newsworthy, the footage was likely flagged by automated systems intended to shield children from real-world violence.

In The Critic, Christopher Snowdon explains the breakdown of trust between the British public and their government that the implementation of the Online Safety Act only exacerbates:

People are right to be concerned about this slippery slope and yet it cannot be denied that it is pornography enthusiasts who have been hardest hit by the Online Safety Act in the short term. They must now verify themselves in one of three ways, each less appealing than the last. They can submit their credit card details, they can scan in proof of ID, such as a passport, or they can take a photo of their face and allow AI to judge how old they are. If they want to maximise their chances of being the victim of blackmail and identity theft, they could do all three.

While we might not think twice about submitting our credit card details to Amazon or posting our photos on Instagram, there is an understandable reluctance to hand over private data in order to access dubious websites for the purposes of sordid acts of self-pollution. The government assures us that the data will be kept confidential but it is only two weeks since we learned about a data breach that led to the names of 19,000 Afghans who wanted to flee the Taliban being given to the Taliban and it is less than two months since the names and addresses of 6.5 million Co-op customers were stolen in a cyber-attack. Rightly or wrongly, millions of British plank-spankers and rug-tuggers do not wish to identify themselves to anybody.

The result is a surge in interest in Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) which allow internet users to access websites as if they were in a less censorious country. Half of the top ten free apps in Apple’s app download charts yesterday were for VPNs. Google Trends data show that searches for “VPN” have gone through the roof since Friday. Readers can draw their own conclusions from the fact that these searches have been peaking between midnight and 2am.

Downloading random VPNs comes with risks of its own and opens up a whole new world of illicit online activity from free Premier League football to the Dark Web. But there is a deeper reason to feel uneasy about this unintended, albeit predictable, consequence of paternalistic regulation. By driving another wedge between the state and the individual, it further normalises rule-breaking in a country where casual lawlessness is becoming part of daily life. A law-abiding society cannot long endure if the median citizen thinks that the law is an ass.

The breakdown of trust can be seen most clearly when the ordinary man or woman does not share the moral certainties of the governing class. Among smokers, a collapse in tax morale — the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes — has led to a huge rise in the consumption of illegal tobacco in recent years. Smokers no longer feel any obligation to pay taxes that are designed to impoverish them to a government that vilifies them. Cannabis smokers learn from an early age to be suspicious of a police force that they might otherwise respect. Motorists who are faced with 20mph speed limits that were introduced by people who hate private transport have no scruples about flouting the law.

QotD: Web browsing “naked”

Filed under: Business, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I recently, foolishly, and for reasons that now escape me, bathed in the stroboscopic glow of the un-adblocked Daily Mail. It’s like they just took a bag full of flashing random crap, shook it up, then threw it at the screen. I’m not at all convinced that advertising is a viable model for internet use. It feels much more intrusive and aggravating than print or TV ads. Partly, I suppose, because it’s happening on your device. Maybe it’s just me, but I find myself repelled by it, and sites that use it, quite emphatically. I’ve stopped counting the sites I’ll no longer visit because they insist on the reader deactivating their adblocker, resulting in an insulting, actively hostile, all but unusable experience.

David Thompson, commenting on “Scenes from Woketopia”, davidthompson.com, 2020-06-23.

July 29, 2025

“The free and open internet has now ceased to exist in the UK”

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

Britain, like Canada, has been moving toward a less free internet experience for ordinary users, the key bit of legislation in the UK being the Online Safety Act, which like Canada’s proposed Online Harms Act, provides tools to the government to clamp down on online activities they deem “unsafe”:

The free and open internet has now ceased to exist in the UK. Since Friday, anyone in Britain logging on to social media will have been presented with a censored, restricted version – a “safe” internet, to borrow the UK government’s language. Vast swathes of even anodyne posts are now blocked for the overwhelming majority of users.

The Online Safety Act was passed by the last Conservative government and backed enthusiastically by Labour. Both parties insisted it is necessary to protect children. Supposedly, its aim is to shield them from pornography, violence, terrorist material and content promoting self-harm. Age-verification checks, we were assured, would ensure that children would not be exposed to inappropriate content, but adults could continue using the internet as they please. Yet as we have seen over the past few days, on many major tech platforms, UK-based adults are being treated as children by default, with supposedly “sensitive” content filtered from everyone’s view.

Predictably, what is deemed “sensitive” and therefore censored goes well beyond pornography and obviously illegal or adult material. Already UK users of X have been blocked from viewing footage of an anti-asylum protest, a tweet calling for single-sex spaces and a video of a speech in parliament on the grooming-gangs scandal. Historical trivia, such as a thread on Richard the Lionheart, and classic artworks like Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son have been shielded by the tech censors. A thread on X of examples of what has been censored under the Online Safety Act, collated by Benjamin Jones of the Free Speech Union, has itself been partially censored due to the Online Safety Act. Open, political debate online is now a thing of the past.

When the Online Safety Act was first put before parliament, supporters from all parties insisted that fears about its impact on free speech were overblown. “The worst misrepresentation I’ve heard is that the [Online Safety Act] will force tech companies to censor legal social-media posts”, insisted Chris Philp, the then minister for tech and digital economy, now the shadow home secretary, back in 2022. Anyone who warned that this vast new architecture of online speech regulation was obviously going to curtail free speech was presented as a friend of paedophiles, terrorists or the far right. This gaslighting was kept up right until the point the age filters were implemented. “The UK’s online safety regime is here. Will anybody notice?”, asked Politico the day before much of the internet disappeared. The Guardian, on the same day, pondered whether the new rules would be censorious enough.

Despite my financial plight, I’d been considering getting a VPN subscription in advance of the Canadian government getting some version of the Online Harms Act onto the books. Clearly many Brits had already gone that route, and the British government reacts with the care and subtlety one would expect:

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