I can understand why governments would push for something like this after 9/11, though it of course goes without saying that this is a totally unacceptable violation of someone’s basic rights. It also goes without saying that governments always want more control over their citizens, but what exactly are they so worried might happen, right now, in 2025 or the near future?
Another factor is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Late capitalism has to keep finding more and more shameless ways to squeeze regular people as the easy money recedes. Lobbyists are pushing harder to lock people into a few big services and subscriptions so they are forced to yield more personal data and spending money.
I just kind of assumed that 🇪🇺 had a little more sense than that. Oh well. 🙁
They only seem different because they were allowed a little democratic socialism, as a treat (until the USSR fell)
If you look at the sitting governments in the EU most aren’t progressive or sth. Most are conservative leaning and are very willing to sacrifice most freedom for some artificial gain
A lot of good points here, but I’d also like to bring forward another hypothesis which partially explain the incredible speed at which this is moving forward in the last few months (even though things have been brewing back and forth for years, decades).
The US has become a hostile state. For Five Eyes, Six Eyed, Nine Eyes, and Forty Yes that means much less domestic intel since all the Eyes were sharing domestic intelligence to circumvent stronger protections on their own citizens. Canada would spy for the US and the UK, and vice versa, which was a neat way of getting rid of pesky rights afforded to citizens.
Hmm, that actually sounds pretty plausible. I think it’s also being propped up and bought (read: corruption) by Thiel’s fascist company.
Totally, Thiel, and the GAFAM are foaming at the mouth.total identity makes lusers far more valuable to them.
Google wants to be the go to for age verification so they can sell it to other websites. They’ll also coincidentally control a lot of information on every user. They are fighting for these age verification laws.
EU is fasttracking the Fourth Reich. Can’t have totaliarism without complete communication control.
It’s nothing new, They try to pull some bullshit at least once every decade. In the USA it was the Clipper Chip in the 90s where they said “trust the government with a backdoor” and then it got cracked and they tried very hard to prosecute one of the inventors of PGP… in the 2010s it was SOPA and other bills they tried to pass.
Authoritarianism, and Russia wanting more blackmail material.
As a European, it’s been a long time coming. I would say tide turned in favour of it and both Ukraine and Israel-Gaza have been important factors - Most countries suddenly decided they didn’t have enough sway over public support for Western imperialism. And the big part of that has been the internet.
yeah they still have the airwaves on lock
I feel it’s the same vibe with return to office policy in Canada.
These things seem like they come from absolutely no where with no legitimate reason and then all of these executives are on board making it happen.
Like what the fuck is going on
If you’re talking about Toronto and Ottawa, as far as I heard, a huge part of the reason is Downtown businesses are struggling now that way fewer people are commuting Downtown.
But the solution to this is not RTO. If your DOWNTOWN of all places isn’t self sufficient I don’t know what to tell you other than your municipal policies are failing. Just let people live in the office buildings. “Oh they’re too wide and you’ll have to make the units narrow strips that only have a tiny sliver of window on one side” Do that then. Tons of people would still live in those because Downtown should be the most desirable place to live.
“Oh they’re too wide and you’ll have to make the units narrow strips that only have a tiny sliver of window on one side” Do that then.
Some people would be willing to live like that. But the rents per ft^2 or m^2 would be abysmally low. And renovating the buildings would still be very expensive. It may be physically possible to turn those deep floor plate cube farm skyscrapers into housing, but it isn’t financially possible. The money would be better spent tearing the buildings down entirely and just building entirely new residential buildings from scratch.
Ok so how exactly have all these companies all agreed to do this at the same time. That’s not strange to you?
In the worlds of the immortal George Carlin: it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.
I don’t want to just dismiss this as “business as usual.” What stands out to me is how coordinated the return-to-work push was. Sure, we know there’s a “big club” of elites who share similar goals. But sharing goals isn’t the same as acting in lockstep.
Think about it: I can join a fitness club, but that doesn’t mean all of us show up on Wednesday wearing the same outfit. There’s a difference between belonging to a group and receiving instructions that lead everyone to move together.
That’s why I think this deserves more attention. The inference here isn’t just that the wealthy share values or face the same incentives it’s that they communicate and coordinate globally in ways that go far beyond coincidence. And that, to me, is a much bigger story than just “rich people doing rich people stuff.”
Do you think the ultra wealthy don’t associate and communicate with each other? Why wouldn’t there be private Signal chats composed only of billionaires? It’s not about shared incentives. The “club” part is very literal.
Just let people live in the office buildings
Yes 👍
It’s all rigged, we are cattle
We always use to like say it but holy fuck it seems like a whole new thing. The way these things spread it is freaky.
Because people aren’t supportive enough of Ukraine and
, and they blame the phonesThe NWO people in each nation have their own special part to play until we get to one unified world government.
Right but where are the “fuck the NWO” people
Look around at your friends and family. It should be them on the fuck NWO side… If it’s not them then blame them OR understand their naivety. …or worse realize their evil.
The genocide in Gaza and the massive response against it made them realize that they no longer had the ability to control the narrative despite their best efforts to spread Zionist propaganda. The so called “free world” has always relied on being able to sway public opinion and manufacture consent through media when necessary. Now that it’s stopped working because of people’s access to media on the internet that counters their efforts, they decided it’s time to push a more restrictive regime in order to deal with the issue.
Most of this was happening or initially attempted long before the current Gaza situation, so it’s not that.
How can we decapitate this system before it strangles us back into the silence of the pre-internet ?
We probably can’t because the political formations that need to be organized take years to develop and grow. Namely, socialist organizations. And the ruling class and its political class lackeys already go after those as well, so it will be full of struggle. But it is the only real path forward for any kind of actually democratic system and is worth pursuing ASAP.
The countries under discussion are democratic republics, aren’t they? If so, then age verification is what the people voted for, not an insidious plot by “they”.
the people get a choice between a few candidates, all of whom are preapproved in the major parties by the donors, who aren’t really of “the people” in any meaningful sense of the word
There’s no conspiracy of collusion between parties. Any party is free to put forward candidates who favor popular policies. And if that candidates wins, but doesn’t fulfill their promises, then the voters will remember that.
and yet they all have the same donors and the same lobbyists
I think if you asked the people whattl they voted for none of them would say it was this. And yet it is still set to roll out.
Makes you wonder what liberal democracy really means doesn’t it?
Sometimes policy issues arise after an election cycle, in which case the voters didn’t have an opportunity to vote for or against the candidates based on their position on the policy issue. Was that the case with age verification in the UK?
In a healthy democracy, future elections decide the fate of these policies, which can be reverted. Even the USA’s complete prohibition on recreational alcohol, which was popular with voters at the time, and codified into the constitution itself, later became unpopular with voters, and was repealed. So as long as the democracy remains healthy, there is always an opportunity for bad policies to be repealed.
You should read the rest of the thread to get an understanding of why surveillance and deanonymization is being pushed. It is not to solve some real issue to the benefit of the public, it is a response to the failure of the media systems of control to control narratives.
Your claims about a “healthy democracy” are fairy tales. That’s propaganda about how it works, not how it works in practice. The UK has its current Prime Minister due to a series of coordinated media campaigns against the previous leader of Labour, for examlle, with an internal purge using bad faith claims following his removal. No element of that was democratic and none of the UK governments have been popular for ages.
Question why so-called democracies only produce unpopular governments. Why don’t the parties align with popular interests in reality? Whose interests do they align with?
Now I’m even more confused lol. What’s the motive for media companies to promote candidates who pass laws that require age verification on websites such as porn sites? Are porn websites causing media companies to lose revenue or something?
Media companies oppose left candidates. Left candidates threaten the material interests of the owners of these companies, the ad buyers, the people who fund think tanks and establish or otherwise embed in academic programs like journalism schools.
The remainder is non-left candidates. These are people who work in those interests and therefore receive media support. For example, Reform UK gets inordinate neuteal or positive media coverage as well as volume compared to even the greens who are not much of a threat to capital.
These mass surveillance laws are a reaction to an failure in this overall apparatus to control thought and speech re: Gaza. They want to track and suppress and oppress information and speech that runs contrary to ruling class interests. The ruling class is heavily invested in the genocidal settler colonial project of “Israel” both literally with piles of cash and politically-strategically as a means by which to control and profit from political destabilization in parts of the Middle East.
Their explicit statements about why they want to do this are just a lie, a pretext. They are not personally or politically invested in protecting kids, lol. These are the people that protected Jimmy Saville and impoverished and made food insecure huge percentages of UK children.
Democratic? That is exactly what the US is and you see how that worked out.
The USA is not a healthy democracy.
People don’t vote for policies in a western democratic republic, they vote for candidates that are pre-approved by parties and donors.
It is in the best interests of the parties to put forward candidates and policies who will have voter appeal, in order to prevail over competing parties.
The media is also controlled by those same donors. The people believe what they’re told to believe, and then given candidates that only align with what they’re told to believe. Anyone outside of the norm for the parties and donor’s ideology is systematically portrayed as unserious and delusional. It is not in the interest of a party to win with a candidate that disagrees with their core beliefs. Which is why establishment democrats prefer to lose when the party is forced to run a leftist. You can see exactly this phenomenon in the NYC mayoral race.
The Australian labor government didn’t have age verification as one of their core policies. Also the specifics in Australia is being done by the esafety commission rather than through parliament. This whole age verification stuff is very undemocratic in nature
are you antisemitism concern trolling or new?
Even if our elections were “democratic” (they aren’t), there is absolutely no chance of voting this shit away before it is foisted onto the population.
It’s due to Palantir and co, lobbying various European governments in recent years. Look at which EU governments are Palantir’s clients.
It’s sadly led to the EU has actually announced a copy of the UK Online Safety Act for 2026, as far as I can tell: https://leminal.space/post/25089051/17854998 It’s received less press coverage than the whole Chat Control thing.
Peter Theil is the #1 most dangerous man in the world right now. Need Luigi #2.
This has been ongoing for decades now, nothing new. They try every other year or so and they only need a single win
Fascism or at least the police state politicians are getting a lot of funding because information is profitable.
