I was replying to this:

> I've always taught my children never to use their real names online. Precisely to avoid creeps. Mandatory age verification means mandatory identification.

“Adults shouldn’t have to reveal their identities” is a totally legitimate concern. It’s also very different from the child scenario in this case because the entire point of revealing the identity is to gain access to features a child should not have access to.

Being an adult is the ability to be responsible for your actions. Arguing for the ability to disclaim any responsibility or risk of responsibility, at the expense of children's safety, is peak child behavior.

This view also makes a mockery of free speech, which was originally intended to allow mature adults to take responsibility and ownership of their actions and beliefs, not run away from them. The idea of running away from your actions and beliefs, in the name of freedom, inverts the entire philosophical foundation.

I have no problem with personal responsibility, I do have a problem with mass government surveillance. (Or depending on implementation, merely government control of private communications. Either way it's not a good thing.)

"You must give the government more control of your life or you hate children." is a bad argument.

You're conflating identification with surveillance; which are completely separate issues. Every bar that cards you isn't surveilling you. Every bank that KYCs you isn't obligated to track every purchase; if they do, the reaction is not to ban KYC, but ban the surveillance. Every library card you use to check out, is not obligated to sell your data; if they do, the reaction is to ban data sales, not library cards.

The cypherpunk ideology has convinced you that any form of identity verification equals totalitarian control, which is precisely the absolutist thinking that prevents reasonable child safety measures, and got us here. There's a massive middle ground between 'anonymous free-for-all' and 'government surveillance state' that you're pretending doesn't exist.

You might say that's a slippery slope. However, government at all is a slippery slope, a senator can literally propose anything at any time, and a Supreme Court ruling can practically do whatever it wants. And yet, every attempt at living without a government, has always been worse. The internet right now is like living in an anarchic society with moderators and tech companies as warlords. The warlords don't see a problem with this, but the majority of people underneath know full well there's a government already.

The cypherpunk ideology doesn't keep government out of tech. It just creates worse governments with less accountability and more power.

All this word salad and smooth talk about the "middle ground" just worries me even more. We have been living in such an unusual period of peace, prosperity and freedom that the pampered, wealthy segment of the Western people is considering children seeing porn as a some sort of catastrophe, warranting extreme countermeasures. However, meanwhile in the actual reality, people are still being killed on the basis of sexual orientation.

I would support reasonable measures to block children from accessing pornographic content, but making people upload government IDs or biometric data does not belong to the realm of what is reasonable.

Ah yes, the noble calling of protecting the children by ensuring they grow up in an Orwellian dystopia they aren't allowed to even criticize.