Hacker News Reader

Comment by BigglesB | Hacker News Reader

Was actually planning to be at GDC this week & while there were other factors at play, the clincher was a feeling that there’s now a non-zero risk of getting caught up in some serious nightmare scenario like this. Seemed pretty self evident that the new administration’s rhetoric even a couple of months ago was paving the way to fascist authoritarianism & I don’t see that changing any time soon.

Tbh, even having a post like this in my user history is apparently the sort of thing that could cause complications at the border! So much for “free speech absolutism”. Makes me wonder how many others will stay silent to minimise that risk & whether that’ll lead to an illusion of support for these policies…

View on HN

It’s the kind of thing I think about before going to China or if I were to visit NKorea. But hasn’t this possibility of hardcore border harassment been a feature of visiting the land of the free (the US that is) for a while now? Phones confiscated and inspected etc..

I suppose so. There have always been stories of those kinds of things, but from the outside looking in, this definitely _feels_ different. Perhaps it's the privilege of my pigment but in the past I've had little issue the handful of times I've travelled across the pond & felt like if anything did escalate it'd eventually make its way to someone reasonable. Now...? Well I guess it just feels like "reasonableness" isn't exactly being projected as a valued characteristic at any level in the current chain of authority.

Is there a newsletter for the games you release?

Not really. I did set up a blog at biggles.games a while back but haven’t been actively updating it for quite a while & there’s nothing about our current project on there yet… probably time to do an update tbh!!

Everything you ever say online can and eventually will be used against you. No reason to tie your real identity into any online forum, including this one. Plenty of reasons against.

With AI pairing even semi-anonymous accounts to real people will become much easier over time.

Its fine if you never plan going to US but who knows the future right, also maybe they will eventually steer back from current direction... I am not holding my breath though. This is 50% of US population, consistently. Don't forget orange man didn't win previous elections only very narrowly, US folks on the ground don't give a nanofraction of a fuck about other nationalities and love this style of government. Out of 3 attempts, he won twice easily and 3rd time almost.

Stay the fuck away from US and any US product in literally any form, best advice for 96% of mankind currently.

> can and eventually will be used against you

That's the nasty thing, you might say something that actually would help you but they can just not use it later. Even a "Hail Trump" won't help me if they decide that I ought to be convicted.

I hear you.

Feels like not that long ago that this would have been considered a fringe paranoid perspective. I used to being an early adopter & getting my real name as a username before anyone else. Plus there was an ego thing back in the day of wanting to be a famous artist etc :-)

But I originally felt pride in showing up online authentically as myself rather than hiding behind anonymity. But I also realise that's a naive approach that only made sense in a more civilised time, perhaps, if even then... online discourse has become so toxic over the last decade that I've definitely self-censored & engaged less & less in the fear that anything I say could well come back to bite me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com