There’s a discriminatory aspect to this that isn’t being addressed, specifically that our God given right to sexuality applies to some people, but to others it does not. It sounds kind of bad to put it like that with respect to minors, but how many people can legitimately defend government intervention when it comes to ANYTHING on the internet? We did just fine for the entire existance of the internet. It used to be just plain common sense not to use our real names on websites, it was very natural in the days prior to our awarness of surveillance for people to only use their real name in email, because you were contacting people you knew, and outside of that, EVERYONE used a pseudonym on message forums, prior to the rise of social media, where again it was more advantageous for people to know who you were. We didn’t know that information was being tied back to the email we verified with, we didn’t know that everything we put out there was indexed and analyzed.
In addition to that, porn has ALWAYS, ALWAYS, been around. In the 1980s I knew where I could buy porn and I did. My friends knew where they could buy porn and the one’s who didn’t would know the moment that they found out that the guy sitting next to you, who hated you, knew were to buy it. This was all magazines. With the internet, on dial up, there was no video so it was really common for people to look through porn sites that hosted JPG images that took 30 seconds to load and right click and save what they liked. Along came Facebook and we got comfortable putting our real name on a site that used us for “annonymous adverstising” and it seemed fine, some people were trying to ring alarm bells but no one listened because the idea that this sort of thing would be used maliciously was absurd. It was absolutely absurd to make that assumption. Slowly more and more people were concerned and when Edward Snowden came along and blew the top off of how bad it is, people felt guilty, ashamed because the resistance and information of what we did know had already grown, but it was paranoid fixation to have been part of that attempt to educate people about the potential for abuse. The idea of “I have nothing to hide, so I don’t care” had already taken hold deep within us when Snowden revealed the obviously illegal practices that were going on, which violated what every free society has known, and in many places is built into the law and the culture. These revelations didn’t reveal just illegal activity, but the fact that they were, and are, human rights abuses, were obvious but most of us didn’t care I suppose out of denial that they were part of the reason it had become okay in the first place, that they had already never listened to the nutjobs who were saying there was too much room for abuse, that there was too much sensitive information being given to a single company. In all honesty, if people had known just 15 years ago what the internet would be today with respect to a complete lack of privacy, everyone would have completely ditched their social media accounts and our culture would be VERY critical of what is considered normal today.
Even today, after having deleted my Facebook account 8 years ago, I’m certain that in their own private thoughts, a lot of people I know still think I’m a bit neurotic when it was only every realistic, and although I deleted it because for mental health reasons, I had long expressed that I wasn’t comfortable with some shadow threat that I couldn’t really define when it came to privacy. Both reasons for separating myself from social media were very realistic and we’ve all watched other people become fixated and obsessed with their social media at one time or another and what is “normal” is more or less just a matter of how much abuse a person is willing to put themselves through while saying “I like doing it” and having their justification for that. For some of us the level of tolerance is lower, for some it is higher.
Nothing has changed, it is the same cultural pathology that started a long time ago and if we really spend time on it we can probably find the same thing over and over that predates the internet, but after living in various countries for extended periods I look at things and ask myself “Where was social media most heavily embraced?” and the answer is in the United States. You ask again, “Where is the craziest place in the world to try to make sense of not just the current culture, but how that culture has changed?” and the answer is The United States. You ask “Where, that I have experienced, are the most mundane and idiotic arguments prevalent in such a way that threatens the security of people living there?” and the answer is The United States. “Where are people living better than the vast majority of the world yet are unhappy about things that don’t even effect them to the point of horrible personal frustration?” The United States. “Where is racial, sexual, political, and generalized idiotic, separation threatening to bring down the people, the government, society, and it has nothing to do with the ability to eat, sleep relatively safely, and live a life that, worldwide, most people would find general gratitude for the basic needs that life provides them?”
Well i guess you can now point to some other countries as well, but where did all this toxic attitude start? In the United States. I’ve watched other countries go down the same path, and it isn’t as intense, but where did it start? Which country did those people look up to the most? Where did the means for all the suspicion and hatred to be spread come from; where was in born?
I will say that as a person who hasn’t lived in the United States for over 2 decades, that it has become a foreign country at this point and it is sad to watch other places follow.
The toxicity though… it’s really clear to me that the point was missed entirely and that this discussion was never intended to be a general discussion about online privacy. We more or less ALL agree that surveillance is a bad thing. If we don’t, why are we even here? We more or less all agree that data breaches WILL happen, that governments WILL abuse us, that companies WILL abuse us. We watch things happen such as Mark Zuckerberg launch man in the middle attacks on our phones and get barely slapped on the wrist and the law ignores the fact that it wasn’t done just to other corporations but that it was an attack on EVERY user and that many, many, many millions of people were hacked, and that none of them were compensated, and that Zuckerberg is above the law with respect to how any of us would be handled if we accomplished the same thing on a tiny scale. Maybe most of us don’t agree with that last assesment, but its difficult to say that it isn’t a valid way for a person to look at it…
…yet when its a discussion, here, that was presented from the perspective of rights being infringed upon members of the LGBT community, or people who enjoy the sexuality of the LGBT community, all of a sudden its met with responses that suggest that we should now accept government control in our lives, and not to mention that we should do it “for the kids”.
I have kids. I don’t invade their privacy. It is not comfortable to be saying things like “Porn sites are not realistic depictions of what someone should expect from sex. Very few people like anal sex or want to be licking someone’s butthole, It is not by any means supposed to be educational and a lot of what is there is a health hazard. It is there for entertainment and not a depiction of what a realistic relationship looks like.” But saying that is a lot more realistic than the idea that I can put an effective block into place that “the person sitting next to them in school” (as it was for me with magazines), who doesn’t even like them, won’t tell them how to circumvent whatever is put up that attempts to stop them and this includes legislation. Ask yourself if you wanted to watch porn, and it was outlawed entirely in your jurisdiction, if that was going to stop you? No, it would not. It’s difficult to disagree with this and its difficult to agree that any government can be trusted when it comes to stepping in on any online issue with the exception of consumer protection, scams, hackers, etc.
The idea that government can help is ridiculous. The idea that data breaches are a threat is part of the reason that most of us found this site AT ALL, Yet as soon as we hear “LGBT” we immediately draw on the part of us that has been poisoned with toxicity driven by others along with what for many of us is also compounded by a bit of confusion because for most of us it is different than our experience in life. It is not important to understand others intimatly to look at the facts and say “There is potential for harm here” and its the same f-ing harm that all of us are seeking to mitigate.
EDIT: As a side note, when I select “Fastest Server” on the VPN and it comes out of Texas every single time, now, there is a reasonable assumption to made that Texas servers were freed up because everyone there is avoiding their fastest server, which was their local server.
