I’m imagining a dystopian future where to KYC gets way out of control and you are required to undergo a credit, background, and reference check to make an account on a major platform. My guess is that as more of the internet turns to shit that feeds an AI machine that consumes this shit only to regurgitate it later, there will be a need to find out who is really human anymore.

> My guess is that as more of the internet turns to shit that feeds an AI machine that consumes this shit only to regurgitate it later, there will be a need to find out who is really human anymore.

Big tech is already setting up to take advantage of the situation and the “AI influx” is the narrative they’ll use to sell it to the average person. We’re going to end up with a verified ID system and Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook will be the gatekeepers.

IMO it’ll happen via Passwordless (auth) and I think the recent push for verification systems on porn sites is just a dry run for what they’ve got planned for the mainstream.

Well, there are often scare-articles running about the "social credit system" in China, and I think that many corporate leaders are watching China very closely in order to establish the same systems in the West. I think that likewise, consumers should pay attention to how this takes shape in China, because we'll be next on the list for implementation and deployment.

> I think that likewise, consumers should pay attention to how this takes shape in China, because we'll be next on the list for implementation and deployment.

What information source(s) do you recommend for having a pulse on this?

I loosely follow laowhy86, he is interesting and follows what is going on there very closely: https://twitter.com/laowhy86

We already have something far more insidious in the United States - Credit Ratings. Not only are the tendrils woven so thoroughly into nearly every aspect of modern life, they are run by for profit corporations with zero transparency and accountability. Getting access to credit/loans/housing/jobs/insurance and likely a whole lot more depends on your credit rating. Mess up your credit (often by no real fault of your own) and watch whatever tenuous grip of financial normalcy you have disappear - everything will now be much more difficult and much more expensive as you try to reconstruct your life over the next decade or two. Good luck.

China would love to have our credit ratings system - but I suspect that they don't fully have the financial transaction transparency and society-wide buy-in just yet to be able to really make it work. I'm sure they'll get there eventually, but for now, they still have a large enough 'alternative' economy/non-regulated transactions and exchange that would both allow people to escape the scrutiny of a more official credit ratings system and these unregulated economic channels would likely grow larger due to people's displeasure and avoidance of the ever increasing authoritarian reach. Social credit introduces this concept using data and tools they have available, and eases this into daily life with less existentially disrupting capability - at least for now.

....With rich people getting around it by hiring proxies, who are required by contract to lead bland lives for the duration not to get their accounts blocked.

Feels more and more like we live in a cyberpunk dystopia, just without all the cool gadgets.

Cybercuck dystopia, where instead of cool gadgets we are slaves to the machine - willingly

Tfw I willingly gave up all my freedom to corporations but instead of a cute robotic waifu all I got was a talking doorbell

Also the doorbell hates you and will sometimes report you to the police for innocuous things.

Your chirrupy breakfast companion.

Nobody "got cancelled". Accounts are cancelled, not people.

With more and more stuff requiring online enrollment and access, getting a decades-old email account with everything in your life attached to, the surface area for potential life disruption is going to be similar to being canceled. We discovered during the pandemic how reliant we actually are on uncaring platforms that will issue a permaban on an account with sometimes no stated cause. This problem, IMHO, is the one big tech regulation that literally every government has been sleeping on. Instead they are focusing on dumb-shit, asinine issues like cookie warnings that (surprise) seem to do very little to actually protect people because nobody has the will, knowledge, or stones to make a regulatory change that actively targets behavior they wish to see eliminated (nonconsensual internet tracking) and would rather focus on a proxy for it (cookies), ultimately causing collateral damage by making a monster out of a core HTTP concept and contributing to banner fatigue through a hellish design-by-government-committee swill of utterly useless regulations. But I digress.

The USPS does not stop delivering mail nor does it revoke your home address if you send or are sent content they deem unfit for delivery (as is the case for many postal services around the world). A meaningful consumer protection would include an expansion into the concept of a “common carrier” to legally mandate a certain classes of online communications providers to not remove access to one’s account (barring an order coming directly from the courts) or they must provide a clear flow to migrate your data to a new email account and forward all messages there for the next N days. In return, they are given expanded safe harbor and indemnification from what the user does on their account.

What I found particularly troubling about twitter banning Trump was that this move of deplatforming was more impactful that literally anything other taken towards him. Where one stands on the former president is largely irrelevant as this should be concerning because it exposes the elephant-sized lynchpin we have in modern communications: power to silence is heavily consolidated among a small number of players who do not answer and are indifferent to the needs of the general public. To be fair, they are not required to be, and with normal market forces, users are usually empowered to choose where to spend their time, but unfortunately the network effect is more powerful than market forces here resulting in a winner-take-all situation for each major platform subtype.

I got cancelled by PayPal for arbitrary "we can't tell you" reasons. I'm already a pariah. I can't send money to my friends (especially internationally), can't commission artwork (because people use PayPal), can't buy stuff with protection online...