this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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In my youth I was taught that democracy meant that the government served the people.
What do any of these laws have to do with serving the people? Do they have anything to do with the will of the people?
The government serves the class that controls production and right now that class is really really concerned about what everyone does when they aren't slaving away for them.
Billionaires are people.
They have the will to fuck everything that moves.
Billionaires certainly are people, but these laws don't even serve billionaires in any meaningful sense, so that's hardly an explanation without more elaboration.
Well, the billionaires that own age verification and surveillance services have gone from trying their best to stalk to world through tracking and analytics, despite pesky privacy laws, to forcing giants swaths of populations to hand over data by compulsion.
Yeah, they're making a mint off us.
OK, that's about the elaboration I was looking for...
Somehow I don't think this is the central reason. I think governments are perfectly capable of doing bad things completely without billionaires having an interest in it. It especially doesn't explain things like the California law that will regulate how we can or cannot program operating systems (hint: software code is a form of speech, meaning that this ought to be struck down as a violation of free speech), because no age verification services are involved in that.
I am Californian and that one snuck past me. I really didn't hear anything about it until recently and I'm pretty pissed.
You can't put the genie back into the lamp on biometrics. We needed real control over outlr digital data and biometrics before this became law. I hope it is repealed somehow, but the elite class don't give a fuck.
As for business vs government, government is scrutinized closer but businesses get away with much more. It's easier to get around red tape to outsource work to businesses than build government infrastructure to do things themselves.
Yes, I expressed the same sentiment here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/55959326/24302621
Is our entire information "ecosystem" so broken that we only pay attention to bad things after they've already happened, not before when there is still a chance to stop them?!
The non-stop flood of bad things happening makes it very difficult to keep up with anything, even the topics that are most important to us. Which makes it all the easier for new local laws that strip away our rights to be slipped past the citizens who care enough to stop them.
The information overload is the system working as intended for those who seek to exploit us.
In your youth, your teachers lied to you.
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It's serving the will of prudes, religious fruitcakes, inattentive parents, the technologically illiterate, and anyone dumb enough to be taken in by the "think of the children!" Rhetoric of the control-freaks.
Unfortunately this is a rather large constituency.
I would find it very sad if they were a majority, anywhere. :(
The problem is the silent majority.
And what counts as silent.
Because if you haven't actually demonstrated, talked to, or written (with a letter) to a politician, you're effectively silent.
Talking about it with friends and family and on the internet is tantamount to silence when it comes to influencing politics.
The other side, the raving lunatics who want total surveillance... they are loud as hell.
More like a vocal minority, I'd guess. Its upto the majority to also be vocal.
I'm assuming you're in the USA. If this a correct assumption, then you're not in a democracy, strictly speaking; but a republic.
I am not. I am from a country whose constitution starts with the statement that it is a democratic republic.