Individualistic societies alienating child-parent relationships and reducing parents to sperm/egg/money donors are slowly starting to fall apart.
Do you know who's responsible to make sure children are safe online? Their parents. Not big tech, not the government, and not me by way of giving up my freedoms.
That’s funny, I wonder if they might remove it since it is a common way for people to circumvent the ID requirement laws for certain sites.
They probably should at least update it -- I don't think a government should recommend free VPN services. Too many of them are a form of botnet, malware, ddos, etc.
Main source of residential ip's you can "rent"?
The very same office of the eSafety commissioner that is enforcing age verification for social media.
Yes. Isn’t effective regulation of dangerous products wonderful.
That's why the government wants to get rid of them.
1984 was meant to be a warning, not the UK’s digital infrastructure roadmap
1984 is extremely naive.
It assumes that people will fight for their freedom and insane measures will be needed to keep them in check.
So foolishly optimistic… people can’t wait to give it away for less than a stable job. Maybe it was written in a different era. But I expect it was always economy that caused revolutions not ideologies.
Look at the images tab. This is so cliché there are hundreds of mugs and t-shirts with it!
Times would be tough if we could only express thoughts noone thought before.
> What an original thought.
Novel analysis here by IshKebab. :P
This take is doubleplus good
While their arguments are sound, Perhaps Mozilla should disclose in this document that they are also a VPN reseller.
I may be in the minority but I'm perfectly fine with Mozilla's approach here.
They link to the full document which lists their VPN subscriber count near the top of the about Mozilla section.
It would sound like an advertisement though, so in some way it’s better they don’t mention it
It’s better to hide conflicts of interest?
(Edit: I don’t disagree with Mozilla’s position, but failure to declare an obvious conflict of interest undermines their credibility.)
[deleted]
This is the Mozilla foundation, the VPN seller is Mozilla corporation.
The foundation does get some of its funding from the corporation, though.
[dead]
I have seen some of the inside of this and it's not quite as clear cut.
One side of this is driven by a bunch of not too reputable think tanks behind the scenes who persuaded a couple of fringe academics to agree with them and push for it via the civil service. The government is taking bad, paid for advice. I don't know what the agenda is there but there is one and I reckon it's commercial. Probably a consortium of businesses wanting to create a market they can get into.
However the security services do not agree with the government or the think tanks and actually promote advice contrary to the regulators. They will ultimately win.
Attacking the regulators and revealing who is behind all this is what we should be doing.
> They will ultimately win.
Sorry, who will win?
This comment is a little unclear.
However no matter what the government or security services want, they won't be able to stop people who want to use VPN or End to end encryption. Nothing would ever change in that regard.
The technology bit doesn't really matter though.
The real problem is that the legislation would bring the power to prosecute people who use them or use it against them.
The security services aren't having any of that shit because it puts their position at risk both from the front-facing side and recommendations and guidance issued and from their own operations.
Bullshit. GCHQ loves new ways to spy. Being able to harvest all traffic is their dream. I’m sure they already do harvest it all.
If they cared about privacy and security they wouldn’t be [redacted].
Their job is also to secure national infrastructure. Compromising that through policy would do more damage.
And also VPNs are tools to open doors in the minefield of legislations that they need to create to improve the incoming of some business, not of the people that voted for them.
Interesting that they mention the UK but forget that the EU also wants to protect the kids by banning VPNs
This blog post is highlighting their specific contribution to the UK government's open consultation[1], not a general call for sanity. There's a link to their open letter at the end of the piece. No doubt they will write other authorities when the need arises.
So your strategy when you are trying to change someones mind is to mention a lot of other people think like the mind you are trying to change?
Could you explain what is the theory behind that?
[dead]
Actually with data fusion VPN does not fix privacy. Ad networks does data fusion of Javascript browser finger print. So you are de cloaked any way on a VPN
most vpns block ads
not if the fingerprint code is coming from the first party server which is the case for most modern malware.
User to Mozilla: Cannot read your statement with a variant of your own browser because you have it "protected" by an internet gatekeeper.
> VPNs are essential privacy tools
Does Mozilla not understand that this is the exact reason why the UK wants to forbid them?
And that's also the reason why they introduced "age verification". It's not age verification, they couldn't care less about children.
Age verification is just mass surveillance under a fake name.
This assumes all parties involved already have a perfect understanding of the incentive structures at play.
Even under the uncharitable interpretation that 'the government' is against you, it assumes the state operates on Level 1 and can act on the raw premise that they don't care about privacy. While in reality, institutions have to manage optics and operate on Level 2 (as described in the SLtI framework: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qDmnyEMtJkE9Wrpau/simulacra-...). Because they have to maintain that Level 2 structural facade for long-term viability, they can be forced to concede key policy points anyway.
[flagged]
Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.
Your comment is psychotic too.
Yeah except that Ofcom(the UK communications regulator) already said that the main goal of the Online Safety Act isn't about protecting children, it's about "controlling online discourse". They dropped that pretense literally one day after the act got passed.
>>I am getting very intolerant of these conspiratorial comments
"officials explained that the regulation in question was 'not primarily aimed at ... the protection of children', but was about regulating 'services that have a significant influence over public discourse'".
Isn't this presentation disingenuous? The act is called the "Online safety act" and the quote isn't about the "regulation" in its entirety but about what constitutes a "Category 1" service. Described in an official explainer, meant for the public, as "Large user-to-user services" under the heading of "Adults will have more control over the content they see"[1].
It's not clear to me that this is some nefarious underhanded technique. The secretary of state asked why non-porn sites were included in Category 1, and was told that Category 1 wasn't intended to catch porn sites, but is intended to apply to "Large user-to-user services", in line with public communication from the government.
I don't think anybody is under any illusion that "Adults will have more control over the content they see" is intended to protect children.
This presentation seems entirely reasonable for the purposes of observing the stated goals, which differ from the purported goals. The act is being pitched as a means of "protecting children", which is also the mechanism making it harder for people to argue against it. It is entirely reasonable for people to observe that in practice the government is intending to use it to control online discourse.
The part of the act they are talking about seems to be concerned with content recommendation systems, not proof of age.
The original framing of the quote in that blue sky thread is highly misleading as a result.
Would you mind linking to where you got that "controlling online discourse" quote. I am not able to find anything like that.
However the context is highly misleading, as in the original context it appears to be in reference to parts of the act that deal with content recommendation, not parts that deal with age verification -
But as usual, that no longer matters in online discourse, it forms a soundbite that backs up the preconceptions of one side of an argument, that the whole exercise is nefarious, so it doesn’t matter if it’s actually true.
"privacy tools" doesn't sound strong enough. "tools to bypass censorship of the future fascist government" sound better, though longer
I always remember a video snippet of some meeting in US, some chinese looking woman says something like "Mao took our guns and killed us all, I'm never giving up my rifle". Some politician reminds her that they live in the democracy. She asks him something like "can you guarantee me that in 20 years it will still be a democracy", which he admits he can't
Didn't people make kinda that huge and broad movement too terminate PIPA and SOPA?
Could you, my wonderful Western friends, do that again?
I mean, all of it is even on video and largely on YouTube.
UK regulators are just hearing another excuse for a loicense.
The UK government does whatever Meta tells them to do.
We tax cigarettes because they’re bad for you. Let’s tax algorithmic news feeds.
And who tells Meta what to do?
The UK gov needs to sod off with all this 1984 BS
UK is not and has never been a free society, UK elites have an authoritarian streak.
Historically they were fairly smart at doing it subtly but the mask slipped during Covid and they never really put it back on.
Also - outside the HN bubble this stuff isn’t even unpopular. Normies supported covid lockdowns and they don’t want their kids watching porn either.
The people yearn to be ruled and nannied
I've heard people on HN make the argument that a blanket ban is better because their kids won't feel it's unfair that only their family implements strict internet blocks
[dead]
> Also - outside the HN bubble this stuff isn’t even unpopular.
This stuff wasn't unpopular on HN until it actually happened. Almost every submission on HN about social media had people calling for similar regulations or even outright bans. It was not until they actually started asking for IDs when HNers realized what they really wanted to achieve with these laws.
There is a huge difference between supporting the regulation of algorithmic feeds and other dark patterns and a direct attack on personal privacy.
>There is a huge difference between supporting the regulation of algorithmic feeds and other dark patterns and a direct attack on personal privacy.
Normies don't see the difference and politicians don't want there to be a difference. Normies want security and politicians will offer it wrapped in surveilance.
[flagged]
I hear the UK regulator did want to respond but Mozilla office doesn't have a fax machine. So the grandpas in charge of regulating modern tech just took a nap instead
[dead]
[dead]
This is a fairly difficult problem. I think the internet should be for adults only, like many other things. But we've fucked up by giving children internet access and it's going to be hard to undo it. I think rather than fighting these measures we need to work on alternatives because keeping children off the internet is a good idea, we just need to implement it in a good way.
What about just banning phones for children? Could we ever make that work? It would be like cigarette bans except we now have 5 year olds addicted to tobacco and addict parents who don't want to make them go cold turkey.
Public libraries and schools can be used for genuine research purposes, but not addictive shit. And implemented ad blockers at the network level.
I had internet since I was a kid. By attacking the internet you are attacking my homeland.
How old are you? I had the internet too but my homeland is already gone. Forums are empty, IRC channels quiet. It's just garbage run by adtech companies now.
Or we could realize that there are already 2 generations that grew while having access to the internet and turned out perfectly fine?
Who knows?
Sexualization of teens is a thing. I personally blame social media together with showbusiness. But kids had access to the internet at the same time.
And the internet was slightly different than it's now. It had much more sharp edges that we learned how to live with.
But it also was much less predatory. World's smartest psychologists and programmers didn't work 80 hour weeks for small fortunes to make it as much addictive as possible.. if it was only that. It's also as triggering and depressing as possible, because distressed and depressed people are engaging more and can't stop.
What I mean to say is that you can't really draw an equal sign between internet we grew up with and the one we give (or choose to limit) to our children.
I don't mean we should block them, just that it's not the same.
We are many things, but "fine" isn't one of them.
How much the problems today are due to, rather than coincidental with, the internet, is a much more difficult thing to discern.
We are fine. You're just falling for the "*this" generation is different" fallacy. Look up some history if you think previous generations had it all sorted until the nasty internet came along and corrupted us.
I'm not saying past generations were fine. Every generation having problems doesn't mean the most recent ones don't.
What makes problems into disasters is denying that there is a problem until it is too late.
Past generations mostly tried (with varying success) to fix the problems in their world. Sometimes the past generations' solutions are good, like much of the world mandating 40 hour work weeks and public pensions and workplace health and safety and so on; other times even when the problem is real, the solutions are worse, like the US experience with prohibition.
But when problems get ignored, you get stuff like leaded gasoline, cigarettes, and asbestos being everywhere, the Irish potato famine, the dissolution of the USSR, and the 2007 global financial crisis.
Even if AI doesn't do what it promises, the internet brings with it even more globalisation, cheap labour that undercuts any rich nation for jobs which can be done on a computer (which we've already seen examples of, not just with coding but also call centres). Even if Musk's promised about Optimus remain as unfulfilled as whichever version of full-self-driving just got made obsolete, a remote-controlled android does much the same for manual labour. And the internet does enable much weirder warfare: our governments can blame hacks on whoever they like, but there is often no dramatic photo of something burning as a result, just a diffuse degradation of economic performance from fully automated scams and blackmails.
And that's without any questions about demographic shift and who pays for the current generation's pensions when they retire, and if this has anything to do with free porn and the state of online dating apps. And without personalised propaganda. Without your home surveillance system (or robot vacuum cleaner) being turned against you by hacks only possible from cheap ubiquitous internet. Without any questions about if doomscrolling does or doesn't induce psychological problems, if sexual deepfakes are worse than schoolyard rumours, or if AI is sopping kids from learning as cheating is easier.
I would be one of those two generations. I dispute your point on two grounds: first, the internet today isn't what it was back then; secondly, I, and many of my peers, didn't turn out just fine.
Back then the internet was a wild west run by thousands of clever people. It was like living in a neighborhood full of people kind of like you. Nobody built it to be addictive or to cultivate attention. If you wanted something you searched for it. Nowadays everyone is on there and it's run by evil adtech companies. Kids these days are not having the experience we had back then.
It also didn't really do us much good. Already back then geeky types like me had somewhere to retreat to and we did. It took me years to learn real social skills and build a life off of the internet. When I see headlines like "Gen Z aren't having sex" I'm hardly surprised. They're not having sex because they're on the internet. What's more is nobody is learning to be an adult at all. People are in a adult bodies but still totally children at heart. They don't own anything, shun responsibility etc.
Individualistic societies alienating child-parent relationships and reducing parents to sperm/egg/money donors are slowly starting to fall apart.
Do you know who's responsible to make sure children are safe online? Their parents. Not big tech, not the government, and not me by way of giving up my freedoms.
Something I learned just recently—the Australian government (surprisingly!) actually recommends VPN usage, they even provide a bit of a guide and how to; https://beconnected.esafety.gov.au/topic-library/advanced-on...
That’s funny, I wonder if they might remove it since it is a common way for people to circumvent the ID requirement laws for certain sites.
They probably should at least update it -- I don't think a government should recommend free VPN services. Too many of them are a form of botnet, malware, ddos, etc.
Main source of residential ip's you can "rent"?
The very same office of the eSafety commissioner that is enforcing age verification for social media.
https://www.esafety.gov.au/newsroom/blogs/social-media-minim...
Yes. Isn’t effective regulation of dangerous products wonderful.
That's why the government wants to get rid of them.
1984 was meant to be a warning, not the UK’s digital infrastructure roadmap
1984 is extremely naive.
It assumes that people will fight for their freedom and insane measures will be needed to keep them in check.
So foolishly optimistic… people can’t wait to give it away for less than a stable job. Maybe it was written in a different era. But I expect it was always economy that caused revolutions not ideologies.
What an original thought.
https://www.google.com/search?q=1984+was+not+meant+to+be+an+...
Look at the images tab. This is so cliché there are hundreds of mugs and t-shirts with it!
Times would be tough if we could only express thoughts noone thought before.
> What an original thought.
Novel analysis here by IshKebab. :P
This take is doubleplus good
While their arguments are sound, Perhaps Mozilla should disclose in this document that they are also a VPN reseller.
I may be in the minority but I'm perfectly fine with Mozilla's approach here.
They link to the full document which lists their VPN subscriber count near the top of the about Mozilla section.
It would sound like an advertisement though, so in some way it’s better they don’t mention it
It’s better to hide conflicts of interest?
(Edit: I don’t disagree with Mozilla’s position, but failure to declare an obvious conflict of interest undermines their credibility.)
This is the Mozilla foundation, the VPN seller is Mozilla corporation.
The foundation does get some of its funding from the corporation, though.
[dead]
I have seen some of the inside of this and it's not quite as clear cut.
One side of this is driven by a bunch of not too reputable think tanks behind the scenes who persuaded a couple of fringe academics to agree with them and push for it via the civil service. The government is taking bad, paid for advice. I don't know what the agenda is there but there is one and I reckon it's commercial. Probably a consortium of businesses wanting to create a market they can get into.
However the security services do not agree with the government or the think tanks and actually promote advice contrary to the regulators. They will ultimately win.
Attacking the regulators and revealing who is behind all this is what we should be doing.
> They will ultimately win.
Sorry, who will win?
This comment is a little unclear.
However no matter what the government or security services want, they won't be able to stop people who want to use VPN or End to end encryption. Nothing would ever change in that regard.
The technology bit doesn't really matter though.
The real problem is that the legislation would bring the power to prosecute people who use them or use it against them.
The security services aren't having any of that shit because it puts their position at risk both from the front-facing side and recommendations and guidance issued and from their own operations.
Bullshit. GCHQ loves new ways to spy. Being able to harvest all traffic is their dream. I’m sure they already do harvest it all.
If they cared about privacy and security they wouldn’t be [redacted].
Their job is also to secure national infrastructure. Compromising that through policy would do more damage.
There has always been tension in this area. A prime example is Dual_EC_DRBG https://harvardnsj.org/2022/06/07/dueling-over-dual_ec_drgb-...
And also VPNs are tools to open doors in the minefield of legislations that they need to create to improve the incoming of some business, not of the people that voted for them.
Interesting that they mention the UK but forget that the EU also wants to protect the kids by banning VPNs
This blog post is highlighting their specific contribution to the UK government's open consultation[1], not a general call for sanity. There's a link to their open letter at the end of the piece. No doubt they will write other authorities when the need arises.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-th...
So your strategy when you are trying to change someones mind is to mention a lot of other people think like the mind you are trying to change?
Could you explain what is the theory behind that?
[dead]
Actually with data fusion VPN does not fix privacy. Ad networks does data fusion of Javascript browser finger print. So you are de cloaked any way on a VPN
most vpns block ads
not if the fingerprint code is coming from the first party server which is the case for most modern malware.
User to Mozilla: Cannot read your statement with a variant of your own browser because you have it "protected" by an internet gatekeeper.
> VPNs are essential privacy tools
Does Mozilla not understand that this is the exact reason why the UK wants to forbid them?
And that's also the reason why they introduced "age verification". It's not age verification, they couldn't care less about children.
Age verification is just mass surveillance under a fake name.
This assumes all parties involved already have a perfect understanding of the incentive structures at play.
Even under the uncharitable interpretation that 'the government' is against you, it assumes the state operates on Level 1 and can act on the raw premise that they don't care about privacy. While in reality, institutions have to manage optics and operate on Level 2 (as described in the SLtI framework: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qDmnyEMtJkE9Wrpau/simulacra-...). Because they have to maintain that Level 2 structural facade for long-term viability, they can be forced to concede key policy points anyway.
[flagged]
Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.
Your comment is psychotic too.
Yeah except that Ofcom(the UK communications regulator) already said that the main goal of the Online Safety Act isn't about protecting children, it's about "controlling online discourse". They dropped that pretense literally one day after the act got passed.
>>I am getting very intolerant of these conspiratorial comments
Weird thing to brag about, but sure.
Source, please?
https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...
"officials explained that the regulation in question was 'not primarily aimed at ... the protection of children', but was about regulating 'services that have a significant influence over public discourse'".
Isn't this presentation disingenuous? The act is called the "Online safety act" and the quote isn't about the "regulation" in its entirety but about what constitutes a "Category 1" service. Described in an official explainer, meant for the public, as "Large user-to-user services" under the heading of "Adults will have more control over the content they see"[1].
It's not clear to me that this is some nefarious underhanded technique. The secretary of state asked why non-porn sites were included in Category 1, and was told that Category 1 wasn't intended to catch porn sites, but is intended to apply to "Large user-to-user services", in line with public communication from the government.
I don't think anybody is under any illusion that "Adults will have more control over the content they see" is intended to protect children.
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act...
This presentation seems entirely reasonable for the purposes of observing the stated goals, which differ from the purported goals. The act is being pitched as a means of "protecting children", which is also the mechanism making it harder for people to argue against it. It is entirely reasonable for people to observe that in practice the government is intending to use it to control online discourse.
The part of the act they are talking about seems to be concerned with content recommendation systems, not proof of age.
The original framing of the quote in that blue sky thread is highly misleading as a result.
Would you mind linking to where you got that "controlling online discourse" quote. I am not able to find anything like that.
It comes from an article in the times - https://archive.ph/2025.08.13-190800/https://www.thetimes.co...
However the context is highly misleading, as in the original context it appears to be in reference to parts of the act that deal with content recommendation, not parts that deal with age verification -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910161
But as usual, that no longer matters in online discourse, it forms a soundbite that backs up the preconceptions of one side of an argument, that the whole exercise is nefarious, so it doesn’t matter if it’s actually true.
"privacy tools" doesn't sound strong enough. "tools to bypass censorship of the future fascist government" sound better, though longer
I always remember a video snippet of some meeting in US, some chinese looking woman says something like "Mao took our guns and killed us all, I'm never giving up my rifle". Some politician reminds her that they live in the democracy. She asks him something like "can you guarantee me that in 20 years it will still be a democracy", which he admits he can't
found the video https://www.reddit.com/r/GunMemes/comments/1c13kkz/survivor_...
Didn't people make kinda that huge and broad movement too terminate PIPA and SOPA?
Could you, my wonderful Western friends, do that again?
I mean, all of it is even on video and largely on YouTube.
UK regulators are just hearing another excuse for a loicense.
The UK government does whatever Meta tells them to do. We tax cigarettes because they’re bad for you. Let’s tax algorithmic news feeds.
And who tells Meta what to do?
The UK gov needs to sod off with all this 1984 BS
UK is not and has never been a free society, UK elites have an authoritarian streak.
Historically they were fairly smart at doing it subtly but the mask slipped during Covid and they never really put it back on.
Also - outside the HN bubble this stuff isn’t even unpopular. Normies supported covid lockdowns and they don’t want their kids watching porn either.
The people yearn to be ruled and nannied
I've heard people on HN make the argument that a blanket ban is better because their kids won't feel it's unfair that only their family implements strict internet blocks
[dead]
> Also - outside the HN bubble this stuff isn’t even unpopular.
This stuff wasn't unpopular on HN until it actually happened. Almost every submission on HN about social media had people calling for similar regulations or even outright bans. It was not until they actually started asking for IDs when HNers realized what they really wanted to achieve with these laws.
There is a huge difference between supporting the regulation of algorithmic feeds and other dark patterns and a direct attack on personal privacy.
>There is a huge difference between supporting the regulation of algorithmic feeds and other dark patterns and a direct attack on personal privacy.
Normies don't see the difference and politicians don't want there to be a difference. Normies want security and politicians will offer it wrapped in surveilance.
[flagged]
I hear the UK regulator did want to respond but Mozilla office doesn't have a fax machine. So the grandpas in charge of regulating modern tech just took a nap instead
[dead]
[dead]
This is a fairly difficult problem. I think the internet should be for adults only, like many other things. But we've fucked up by giving children internet access and it's going to be hard to undo it. I think rather than fighting these measures we need to work on alternatives because keeping children off the internet is a good idea, we just need to implement it in a good way.
What about just banning phones for children? Could we ever make that work? It would be like cigarette bans except we now have 5 year olds addicted to tobacco and addict parents who don't want to make them go cold turkey.
Public libraries and schools can be used for genuine research purposes, but not addictive shit. And implemented ad blockers at the network level.
I had internet since I was a kid. By attacking the internet you are attacking my homeland.
How old are you? I had the internet too but my homeland is already gone. Forums are empty, IRC channels quiet. It's just garbage run by adtech companies now.
Or we could realize that there are already 2 generations that grew while having access to the internet and turned out perfectly fine?
Who knows?
Sexualization of teens is a thing. I personally blame social media together with showbusiness. But kids had access to the internet at the same time.
And the internet was slightly different than it's now. It had much more sharp edges that we learned how to live with.
But it also was much less predatory. World's smartest psychologists and programmers didn't work 80 hour weeks for small fortunes to make it as much addictive as possible.. if it was only that. It's also as triggering and depressing as possible, because distressed and depressed people are engaging more and can't stop.
What I mean to say is that you can't really draw an equal sign between internet we grew up with and the one we give (or choose to limit) to our children.
I don't mean we should block them, just that it's not the same.
We are many things, but "fine" isn't one of them.
How much the problems today are due to, rather than coincidental with, the internet, is a much more difficult thing to discern.
We are fine. You're just falling for the "*this" generation is different" fallacy. Look up some history if you think previous generations had it all sorted until the nasty internet came along and corrupted us.
I'm not saying past generations were fine. Every generation having problems doesn't mean the most recent ones don't.
What makes problems into disasters is denying that there is a problem until it is too late.
Past generations mostly tried (with varying success) to fix the problems in their world. Sometimes the past generations' solutions are good, like much of the world mandating 40 hour work weeks and public pensions and workplace health and safety and so on; other times even when the problem is real, the solutions are worse, like the US experience with prohibition.
But when problems get ignored, you get stuff like leaded gasoline, cigarettes, and asbestos being everywhere, the Irish potato famine, the dissolution of the USSR, and the 2007 global financial crisis.
Even if AI doesn't do what it promises, the internet brings with it even more globalisation, cheap labour that undercuts any rich nation for jobs which can be done on a computer (which we've already seen examples of, not just with coding but also call centres). Even if Musk's promised about Optimus remain as unfulfilled as whichever version of full-self-driving just got made obsolete, a remote-controlled android does much the same for manual labour. And the internet does enable much weirder warfare: our governments can blame hacks on whoever they like, but there is often no dramatic photo of something burning as a result, just a diffuse degradation of economic performance from fully automated scams and blackmails.
And that's without any questions about demographic shift and who pays for the current generation's pensions when they retire, and if this has anything to do with free porn and the state of online dating apps. And without personalised propaganda. Without your home surveillance system (or robot vacuum cleaner) being turned against you by hacks only possible from cheap ubiquitous internet. Without any questions about if doomscrolling does or doesn't induce psychological problems, if sexual deepfakes are worse than schoolyard rumours, or if AI is sopping kids from learning as cheating is easier.
I would be one of those two generations. I dispute your point on two grounds: first, the internet today isn't what it was back then; secondly, I, and many of my peers, didn't turn out just fine.
Back then the internet was a wild west run by thousands of clever people. It was like living in a neighborhood full of people kind of like you. Nobody built it to be addictive or to cultivate attention. If you wanted something you searched for it. Nowadays everyone is on there and it's run by evil adtech companies. Kids these days are not having the experience we had back then.
It also didn't really do us much good. Already back then geeky types like me had somewhere to retreat to and we did. It took me years to learn real social skills and build a life off of the internet. When I see headlines like "Gen Z aren't having sex" I'm hardly surprised. They're not having sex because they're on the internet. What's more is nobody is learning to be an adult at all. People are in a adult bodies but still totally children at heart. They don't own anything, shun responsibility etc.
[dead]