They key concept here is 'trickery', and how 'tricked' someone is on a spectrum. Society trusts our authorities to give their best efforts to keep our daily actions within the realm of 'the law'.

There is a spectrum of what one considers a 'joke'. If you tell an authority a dad joke, when they ask you a serious question, that is a fine place on the spectrum to joke with authorities. If you are giving them fake IDs to _trick_ them (and thus, trick society at large, who have delegated power to the authorities by vote etc...), that is not a good thing, to trick others you are living with, at the far end of the 'joke/trickery' spectrum.

Probably because the number of instances of people with real bombs has gone up. It’s not a joke any more because the real bomb isn’t the exception.

Can we stop being so obtuse and only look at the letter of the law and think about the actual practical real-life consequence as a measure of severity? This was a joke, and no harm was done.

Are you really advocating for a felony offence here?

This is the same line of thinking, just reversed, that people use to say "well it's not illegal" when someone does something super shitty that actually has awful consequences.

You can argue that 'well it was a joke!!' but if you were to joke around to your nearest FBI officer about how you have a bomb in your home and you're going to use it I imagine they wouldn't find it very funny.

Agreed! Joking about a bomb is a much more serious and very different situation than showing a joke ID (when you probably have your real ID in your pocket).

In your scenario, would you actually be ok or understanding if the "angry officer" made an example of you for this harmless joke? Or would you maybe protest that it was a bit disproportionate or unnecessary?

And finally, hearing people say "jokes are dangerous" in a serious manner makes me very sad for our society. The level of unconscious mass conformism seems to be growing fast, and historically that never leads to good outcomes.

Is there an ‘unless you’re Woz and it might be funny’ exception to that rule?

The fact is there is, and always has been, a ‘wealthy white guy’ exception to that rule and these kinds of shenanigans just draw attention to it.

A healthy society both has rule following and rule challenging. Sometimes there’s too much rule following, sometimes there’s too much chaos, and then things balance themselves out ideally.

If anyone says only one side is the right one, they are ideologically captured. It’s like saying only left or right is the right way to govern a country. It’s both and neither. We need this conflict within society to arrive at healthy decisions.

Get rid of one side at your peril.

Because police rely on technology committing a crime without your cellphone means you most likely will not get caught. We live in an age where wearing masks is acceptable. Where people let you steal from stores and where crime is ignored unless it's on twitter.

You can get away with so much more today.

Depends if you have something to lose. I suspect a lot of readers here are in the middle ground, where their net present value (including career/family/political/etc opportunities) is not high enough where they can afford to shield themselves without big sacrifices. But it is also not low enough to worth risking losing it all.

For example, they might be able to afford a house in a nice school district, daycare, saving for retirement, paying for healthcare, and taking care of elderly parents, but a job loss from one spouse could easily derail this train, and certainly legal expenses would.

This 'time machine' feature of ubiquitous surveillance is going to be a brave new world.

Well ngl, you sound like you could use less time on the internet yourself. This statement is just preposterous unless you spend hours of your life every day obsessing over twitter drama.