In a purported effort to ‘protect the children,’ Discord has announced that all accounts will be given the safety settings assigned for teenagers unless the user can prove they are an adult. This proving-you’re-an-adult will be done with an ‘age inference model’ that guesses if you’ve an adult based on your activity on the platform. But what if this algorithm doesn’t infer that you’re an adult (perhaps you don’t swear enough, perhaps you swear too much)? How then do you prove that you are, in fact, a grown-ass adult who wants to use this messaging platform that harkens back to the forums of your youth or serves as a means to voice chat with your brother while you play video games online? There’s an easy solution for that: upload a video of yourself or a government issue ID.
Let’s put aside that the age verification vendor has some pretty deep ties to Peter Thiel, a man who’s doing his absolute damndest to misinterpret Tolkien by naming his surveillance platform Palantir (and his venture capital funds Mithril and Valar)1 as he cozies up to wannabe dictators and compiles databases of Americans’ private information. Alright, that is actually a lot to put aside, but if we start talking about the fascist tendencies of the ‘tech elite’ we’ll be here all day2. Simply put, I don’t want to give Discord any more information about myself than it’s already been able to glean. Part of it is a security issue — Discord got hacked a few months back and, amongst files taken were, you’ll never guess it, government IDs uploaded to prove user’s ages. Part of it is, well, I just don’t want to have to do it.
I remember when one of the rules of the internet was to never use your real name. I was an early enough adopter of Gmail that I probably could have scored the coveted firstname.lastname address, but that idea was anathema to my teenage mind. Even when I first bought this domain and started this blog, it was quite some time before I added my full name to it. But it once was to be on the internet was to be anonymous, why, you could even be a dog.
That all seems like a fanciful dream now. Myriad trackers and cookies follow you from website to website, building a profile of you for advertisers to sell you stuff at the altar of consumerism. Social networks like Facebook — those revolutionary websites where you used your real life name to connect with your real life friends — are now all about influencers and brands and selling you stuff based on that profile of you it’s compiled. To be online is to be tracked, analyzed, and quantified. Popup ads would be a respite.
Discord assures users that age verification will only be needed for users who want to access ‘adult content’ and that most folks will be unaffected. Yet I don’t feel too assuaged by that. For starters, exactly what constitutes ‘adult content’ is a concept full of vagaries, lest we forget Tumblr specifying that “female-presenting nipples” were verboten. Beyond that, I really don’t like the idea that a website can demand personal information from its users if they want full functionality. It’s, well, invasive. This isn’t the information superhighway once promised; it’s just more ways for your personal information to be leaked, bought, and sold by moguls bent on building a panopticon when all you want is a way to connect with other human beings.
There are, of course, ways around these age verification gates. Whether this means we’ll see more draconic requirements instituted remains to be seen, but man, I just want a place to hang out online without having to sign over who I am to some tech company trying to wring every dollar out of their users.
- Okay, but, seriously. What is it with these tech bros and reading Tolkien wrong? The Palantíri are seeing-stones that, within the context of The Lord of The Rings, corrupt their users because the dark lord Sauron is on the other side, manipulating what they see. Mithril is a rare and valuable metal — that ends up causing the downfall of Moria. And the Valar are the benevolent gods of Middle-earth. Naming your venture capital fund after them is megalomaniacal at best. To say nothing of the weapons manufacturer naming themselves after Aragon’s sword Anduríl or the home security/surveillance suite that decided to name itself… Sauron. Maybe these guys are trying to add a veneer of mythicality to legitimize their business? Or are they just nerds who don’t understand the stories they’re reading? Maybe that’s a rant essay for another day. ↩︎
- See prior footnote. ↩︎
Essays, Not Rants! 
