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.
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.