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Comment by Wobbles42 | Hacker News Reader

The purpose of a system is what it does.

Undermining data protection and privacy is clearly the point. The fact that it's happening everywhere at the same time makes it look to me like a bunch of leaders got together and decided that online anonymity is a problem.

It's not like kids having access to adult content is a new problem after all. Every western government just decided that we should do something about it at roughly the same time after decades of indifference.

The "age verification" story is casus belli. This is about ID, political dissent, and fears of people being exposed to the wrong brand of propaganda.

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> The purpose of a system is what it does.

How far does it go? Are all bugs features? Shall we assume that Boeing (via MCAS) and Ford (via the Pinto) were trying to kill their passengers? There's a difference between ulterior motive and incompetent execution of expressed intention.

You are missing the profit driven angle. Age verification companies and their lobbyists are pouring massive amounts of resources into lobbying for mandatory age verification. And the reason why can be pretty simple. They get richer of off violating people's privacy, especially when those privacy violations are legally required.

Exactly. So many comments here about technical solutions are missing the underlying government/authority problem, or are actively a part of it.

No, this is proven false by reducing this theory to the individual level. Anyone who has tried to design/imagine -> actually build something, be it an artist, architect, song writer, programmer, or otherwise, knows there is inevitably a gap between design and realization. No one involved in that process would at any point consider the gap to be part of its “purpose”.

People do hide their intentions but that doesn’t give us a license to reduce complex system dynamics to absurdities.

Bugs get fixed when systems are iterated on. They also tend to be single results from single mistakes, not compound end results of the implementation.

Design features tend to persist.

The phrase/idiom "the purpose of a system is what it does" maps best to situations where a multiple decisions within a system make little sense when viewed through the lens of the stated purpose, but make perfect sense if the actual outcome is the desired one.

It is an invitation to analyze a system while suspending the assumption of good faith on the part of the implementors.

> Bugs get fixed when systems are iterated on.

It’s not that simple. Especially not in politics but even in the domain you’re referencing, have you ever seen Mozilla’s bug tracker? Once your project is so big and involves so many people you move beyond fixing everything you want.

There may be central planning at play, in this case I assume there is, but to claim it necessarily is relies on an oversimplification that doesn’t exist in human political machines that are a giant ship of theseus essentially. There’s no identity -> management capacity proven anywhere enough to make that kind of claim. Institutions inherit and have emergent behavior driven by the dynamics of their constituents/individuals. That includes the inability to create imagined outcomes reliably. The platonic intent and physical regimes cannot be integrated.

> The fact that it's happening everywhere at the same time makes it look to me like a bunch of leaders got together and decided that online anonymity is a problem.

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public." - Adam Smith

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