The problem with the internet is the mixing of different contexts. You can have cute cats, disney fandom, hobbies, politics, porn, extremism all on the same platform. In the real world you don't have strip clubs at disney world or children wandering about in a bar.
In my state children can wander in a bar. They can even sit at the stool in front the bar counter. It's considered better to allow it than have children neglected at home without supervision.
The kind of hierarchies we deem necessary are certainly different.
In most of Europe (spoiler: overgeneralization incoming) nobody would have an issue with a child walking alone through a city, going into a bar and ordering a coke. Nobody is going to stop them from taking public transit to a book store, and nothing is legally or physically preventing them from looking at a couple pages in the latest playboy issue in the magazine rack. Though the clerk might interfere out of his own judgement, and depending on the country they might check your age before selling it. You will however be asked for ID before being allowed in a strip club, brothel or casino, or before being sold a DVD of some action movie.
> You will however be asked for ID before being allowed in a strip club, brothel or casino, or before being sold a DVD of some action movie.
The action movie too? I’ve never seen that happen, and I’m certain I rented a whole bunch of age inappropriate DVD’s (or was it VCR’s?) back in the day. Maybe we were required to be ID’ed and the teenager behind the counter just gave zero fucks?
Again, depends on the country and time I suppose but "Video stores" back in the day used to be completely off limits to kids where I was. Just couldn't get in until 18. I never understood why as a kid.
One time my parents got me in. They had made a deal with the owner that I'd be shielded by a parent from seeing anything in the store on my way to the small corner of "age appropriate" VHSs, so that I could pick out what I wanted and then I'd have to leave the store while my parents went to rent it, coz from the cashier's counter I'd see too much.
Of course today I understand but back then I was just like "WTF!, why not!?"
Funny to think about now. It was a tiny corner I could see and a huuuuuge store I wasn't allowed in.
This sounds like the one I went to as a kid except the kid friendly stuff was up front. Beyond that was a huge room full of porn tapes, that iirc was locked so age filtering happened at the second door instead.
I've been ID'ed as a teenager when I was trying to buy Skyrim, which at the time was rated for audiences older than me. Gamestop and electronic retailers also generally didn't have teenage employees.
I know movie theaters are different from video rental stores - but I once got carded on a date at age 16, to see the movie Johnny Pneumonic. It was rated R. Still had one more year to go. It was rather embarrassing.
> You will however be asked for ID before being allowed in a strip club, brothel or casino, or before being sold a DVD of some action movie.
Yeah, but the bar bouncer doesn't keep a registry of a million different customers and profit from selling my info.
I wonder if there could be some sort of NFC/USB Yubikey thingy that resides in your government-issued ID that responds with TRUE if the person is considered an adult. Ideally, it would just leak your nationality (the "is_adult=true" response would be digitally signed by your government at ID-issuing time).
Exactly. Î really don’t understand that some take issue of verifying ages. IRL, you can be asked your ID to buy porn magazines, drink alcohol… Why would it be a nuisance to verify the same things online? Is it because you would be asked every time as your data wouldnt be stored for privacy issues? So, people are realizing that automating everything has drawbacks and that interacting with real humans directly has also advantages? Societies have evolved over hundreds of years and that has resulted in sets of rules to organize them. Would you really prefer the real life to have the rules of the internet replace what we have IRL?
When I'm carded in RL, it is atypical for my ID to be stored, and I must be informed of the fact. A clerk examines the birthday line, and that is that. There is no record. The purchase is de facto anonymous; if I pay in cash, there is no record correlating me with the transaction.
As a gay man, I am profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of one or more private companies having a durable record of the content I look at, for what I would hope are obvious historical reasons. Additionally, age-gate laws will inevitably be used for oppressive purposes - remember, a substantial number of conservatives view ANY mention of the mere existence of LGBT people or families as inherently pornographic, sexual, or obscene, and those people would absolutely seek to have all LGBT content age-gated. Hell, even without such laws we see this in libraries and schools. The harm that would be averted from age verification online is not proportional to the evils it would give rise to, plain and simple.
The only form of age verification I would ever be OK with would be on the same basis as being carded in RL - something like, at a corner store I could buy a tag with an ID number on it that would count as proof of age for as long as I had it, for online purposes. The clerk would verify my age and then give me a tag in a sealed box with a random number, thus preserving my anonymity from both angles: the clerk would not know what number he sold me, and the state would not know who bought the number, only that the retailer averred that I had had my age verified.
The US hard-separates children and adults more than other countries.
In Europe, my ex and our two teen daughters could go out in the late evening and feel comfortable socializing in places that would be unthinkable in the US.
In general, US culture seems to stratify people by ages in all sorts of ways, official and just cultural. It doesn't feel as socially healthy to me. We are all better for having a wide variety of friends and family around us.
You used to walk into a newsagent and see the regular papers and magazines, and then the rack of playboy and porn just sitting off to the side, often not that far from the kids magazines and comics.
Japanese convenience stores still work this way. I’m still a bit bemused every time I see scantily clad ladies right next to the shounen manga, but maybe it shouldn’t xD
Dunno if this has changed, but it used to be this way in the US at basically any gas station in a ruralish area by a highway (in other words - stops with truckers), and you'd just have row after row of porn mags. The only 'censorship' is that they tended to be in racks that covered up about 3/5th of their height, so you could see the title and a bit more, but generally anything explicit would be in the lower 3/5th that you could only see if you picked it up.
This sounds to me like an argument against platform centralization, as the internet itself isn't a platform, but a protocol. So this is a problem of platforms, and their improper design. Not a problem of the internet itself.
The problem with the internet is that it is flat. Society has hierarchies, has always had hierarchies, and the architecture (in the broadest sense) of "RL" societies reflected that.
Internet came out of military and academia and had a flat namespace. No consideraton whatsoever was given to the idea of a 'social model' for it. This was discussed way back in late '90s in a yahoo group that has since disappeared: social models for communication networks.
