America Has Become a Digital Narco-State
paulkrugman.substack.com
paulkrugman.substack.com
Work out a zero knowledge way to verify age, and implement it. It won't be easy, but it also won't require breaking the rules of mathematics as per most of the governmental requests to 'safely' backdoor encryption.
The Swiss citizens just approved a system like this.
is it feasible? is it likely given government's desire for more surveillance?
personally I think the best approach is to empower parents - require ISP's and ISP supplied routers have means to filter, ensure child friendly filtered SIM cards are easily available etc.
Briefly, here's how it works.
• Your government can issue you a digital copy of government identity documents. This copy is cryptographically bound to a key that it stores in a hardware security module that you provide.
In the reference implementation and the implementations undergoing field testing the supported hardware security modules are the security modules in Apple mobile devices and in many Android devices. They plan to support more, such as stand alone smart cards and external security keys like YubiKeys.
• There's a zero knowledge protocol that lets you demonstrate to a website that (1) you have a digital copy of a government ID document that is bound to the hardware security module of your device and that you were able to unlock that hardware security module, and (2) that ID document says your birthday is far enough in the past that you meet the site's age requirement.
Parents have all the power they need, they just refuse to use it.
Have parents actually pay attention to their kids and not give them unfettered access to technology. Boom. Easy.
The parents are the second factor that nobody is willing to discuss because the parents are addicted to the exact same technology.
Social media bans are like GLP-1s: we know that will power is not a thing, so we use an intervention to help the human. Same deal. “Just do better good luck” is not actionable.
“We have seen the enemy and he is Big Tech.”
These complains about parents not doing enough are from another alternative reality.
rotten.com was an interesting education.
I had a good upbringing and generally attentive parents on the whole, though, so I was already a well balanced young human.
Maybe Trump just wants USA to be "Russia but Better". Maybe he's imagining himself saving the world from "leftism" or whatever. Maybe he just wants money. Maybe he's being blackmailed.
Doesn't matter. What matters is that he's making the world a much worse place.
It's the same as it was with Putin. He told everybody loudly that The West is the enemy. People assumed he's doing it for internal politics reasons. There's no point guessing people's motivations, just listen to them, and when they tell you you are their enemy - believe them.
I think the simple answer is he doesn't know that "objective truth" is a thing, it's all just words and power-play for him, whatever (seems to him will) work in the moment without any regard for long-term planning.
Like how current AI gets criticised for not really being smart despite appearing so when you don't pay close attention, modified by how biological nets get good with far fewer examples than ML requires.
They seem to do so for almost everything - except the Epstein files. Those seem to be a bridge too far even for the MAGA crowd.
1. Heroin itself was marketed as a "non-addictive morphine substitute", and sold to the public. It didn't become a controlled substance until 1914 (according to Wikipedia) 2. The opioid crisis was basically started and perpetuated by Purdue pharma, again marketing Oxycodone with the label “Delayed absorption as provided by OxyContin tablets, is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug.” and other more egregious advertising. 3. Britain went to war with China twice to force the Qing dynasty to allow them to sell opium there. 4. President Teddy Roosevelt's grandfather made a ton of money in the opium trade.
It's supposed to be sort of shocking hypothetical, except actually that's basically the history of the actual drug.
- Let's limit children's use of social media and screens.
- Great! Let's do it.
- We need to identify who is 18+, so here's your digital ID for everything. And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job.
- WTF!
- That "WTF" just cost you 100 social credits.
“We’re protecting the children!”
Relevant Honest Government Ad: https://youtu.be/ZxRB5qWphJE?si=iT_3v1LyDvUu1UPL
Social media for teens has been studied, we know what it can cause psychologically, the humans programming it are incentivised to make them addicted to it, and addictive they are by using any manipulative technique to increase engagement, and attention spent.
What would you like to see as evidence for it to be regulated as "not for children" like tobacco, and alcohol?
> The committee’s review of the literature did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level.
Having read through the couple hundred page report, causality was not established and the studies found both positive and negative effects in different subgroups.
Given banning social media might cause harm to a some groups of children, perhaps decisions on whether to forbid use are better left with parents for now.
https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/27396
or the one pager for Parents: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27396/Social_Medi...
But at least this site does perform moderation and so far it has not been toxic like most others. Plus if someone disagrees with you, just about all of the time, that person comes across as respectful.
We should do meet-ups from time to time.
Beyond the clickbait title I am not gonna judge is analysis (he is probably right) but ask the question:
Where were those people 20 years ago? before Meta became a 1.68 trillion business and others became some of the largest companies by marketcap?
Because any room temperature IQ person already figured out a long time ago social media were addictive. No need for a Nobel price. Ironically this is why people get their information from anybody on social media, precisely because they figured out they are not getting any real insight from Paul Krugeman.
As always, it takes bold leadership to bring about change, and it is not always available.
I got the impression they were pretty freaked out by some of the stuff they saw going on initially. I can't believe they got on board with it to the extent they did.
I remember being delighted with FB initially. It was a wonderful way to keep in touch with extended family and wayward friends.
But then I discovered how difficult it was to control my 'timeline/newsfeed' or whatever they called it. There was a small menu attached that allowed you to Sort By Latest or some such... but it wasn't sticky, and so you always had to select it, and it eventually disappeared completely and... you saw what they wanted you to see.
Originally FB would send you an email whenever someone sent you a message on Messenger, and the email contained the contents of the message, so you didn't even need to login to FB, and I enjoyed having that... But that too didn't last long. When they turned that feature off I realized they were all about themselves and their goal of user engagement, and the value-added (for me) dropped to zero.
Sometime after '15 I disengaged. I left the account alive but haven't been on but thrice in 10 years.
I campaigned for a while, within my family and circle of friends, trying to get them to rally around an alternative (I started by offering Slack, feebly) but I was unconvincing and unsuccessful.
I remember the horror of Thanksgiving 2016, as I stood in the living room of my niece's apartment, and pondered the array of five family members before me. Easy chair, couch x 3, easy chair... each of them engrossed by their phones. Nobody was talking, everybody was comfortable, there but also somewhere else.
Having principles is surprisingly expensive.
> If we sold it for a dollar at every gas station we wouldn't have nearlythe same problems with it we do today.
Go to Portugal. Heroin consumption is legalized there. And it isn't a pretty sight.
Also, it was MUCH worse when it was a crime.
https://transformdrugs.org/blog/drug-decriminalisation-in-po...
Look at drug overdose deaths for instance.
I’m not saying they don’t need help. They absolutely do. I definitely not for legalizing it.
I had a childhood friend spend a decade in federal prison over it.
Sure, in its clean form it won't kill you quickly, but it is a horrendously addictive depressant with significant medium-term and severe long-term neurological and physiological effects that would in themselves cause poverty through loss of work even if it was as cheap to buy as it is to produce.
It should remain a decriminalised controlled substance and every effort should be spent trying to stop people ever starting to take it — the Portuguese strategy. Not least because if it's cheap and freely available, many, many people will overdose on it.
In an overwhelming majority of cases where drugs ruin a life, I've seen all 3 at once.
They can both ruin lives and people, no arguing that. But a life ruined by drugs is almost always so much more detrimental and all-encompassing than someone ruined by social media, it's just not a fair comparison.
I for one would prefer to buy wine in a Utah grocery store. Or maybe even just a NYC supermarket. Even if it's wine from Texas, though I know that really stretches the meaning of "wine". And I'd also like to carry the bottle publicly as least as proudly as someone can carry their gun.
(oh how easy it is to trigger libertarian impulses. I'm with Voltaire in that one, say what you want. I'll fight - alongside you for your right to do so, and against you when I disagree ...)
Because the USA confuses liberty and libertarianism.
You can tell this is almost universally the case because even libertarians don't think they need to vote for libertarians to reach libertarian goals. They will get them either way.
It's the typical pattern.
If you don't have rules attenuating the runaway feedback loop - some people get a little more initially (talent, money, luck, whatever), then it spirals into A LOT more, which gives them influence over everybody else, which is oligarchy, and that eventually turns into a dictatorship.
The only way to avoid it is to have strong institutions and regulations stopping the feedback loop.
We knew it thousands of years ago, nothing changed. We seem to have to learn this lesson independently in every newly-created domain. It's time for tech sector.
> I suppose an alternative to bans and regulations is to genuinely pursue the elimination of deprivation
How do you propose to do it without bans and regulations?
In the US we have this overly simplistic narrative of pro-liberty GOP versus anti-liberty DNC which I think badly needs to be separated into pro _personal_ liberty positions (healthcare, including abortion, quality public education), versus anti _corporate_ liberty (environmental regulation, financial transparency, etc).
This is a huge problem the US needs a deal with - corporations are artificial beings that aren’t sentient and, therefore, cannot participate in politics. We might need to litigate that with an LLM to make language broad enough to set this precedent and further protect the rights of actual sentient beings.
Note that this kind of “libertarian” also tends to be fine with attacks on women’s reproductive freedom for example, or fine with small local forms of tyranny like the abusive family or community.
This has been a feature of this kind of language for ages. Remember the arguments used to defang Obamacare, which was an already defanged version of some very basic public healthcare system?
The trick is to try to figure out if his current rant is brilliant or idiotic.
Right a lot? Sure! Gonna happen? No!
In the US, it isn't just about social media being vicious. It is, more than that, how it became a plutocracy that controls the government and congress.
And is a plague that the rest of the world is just catching up to. It isn't just the European Union that wants to regulate it. India's government, Brazil's supreme court, Australia, ...
I which we could have a global wake-up. The world would be a better place without social media.
Ultimately these regulations will be twisted to serve the same people. We have seen this with the UK's online safety act, it looks like EU law is going the same way.
I'm really tired when the online community completely ignores atrocities because they don't ever want to make their own side look bad, but talk about the end of the world when it's someone they don't like.
I’m going to stop you right there. Basically the whole opioid epidemic is because herion is illegal. We’d have way fewer deaths if we’d provided safe and legal access to it. And also American companies would have the profits instead of terrorists and organized criminals.
You're arguing that the scale of the opioid problem is a direct result of the associated laws. The quote just states that heroin is harmful to humans.
The path is prescription opioids > addiction > any source of opioid. At least amongst the addicts I've met.
A streetwalker once told me that her dream job was selling cosmetics in a mall. She fantasized about that life. Another was a former RN, until a car accident got her addicted to opioids; she owned a mattress and a change of clothes and a crack pipe.
Heroin is illegal in Europe as much as in the US, yet we do not have a horde of zombies high on fentanyl on our city street corners. What's the difference?
I honestly do not have the answer, but there is a brilliant TV show called "The Wire" that shows how the drug problem cannot be traced to a single cause, but it is systemic and you can place the blame at any echelon of society — which means it starts at the top. It's the result of corruption, collusion, lobbying, overpolicing the addicts yet underpolicing the doctors and private insurance companies that give opioid prescriptions out like candy. It's the politicians pocketing indirectly the result of this trade. It's the narcos being propped up by the US three-letter agencies because they play a certain role in whatever is today's bad dictator to be toppled. It's the massive inequality for some minorities that have often no other choice than start dealing, or start using, to deal with the stresses of increasingly expensive food and rent.
Good luck untangling this knot. You'd unravel the entire structure of modern USA.