đ Newsletter #007 - Of Age-Gating, Belonging, and AI Being Blazing Fast đ (at Enshittifying)
⨠In This Edition â¨
- đ Short-Form Content: Of eyeballs for "human verification;" yes can I please get a venti oh shoot I didn't prompt it right; and age gating đ¤ Android getting locked down đ¤ anti-3D printing bills.
- đ° Long-Form Content: Age Gating isn't It, Fam
- đ Good News!: Open printers and repairable e-readers; the people are pushing back on slop factories and mandatory ID apps; the EU bans their staff from using AI-generated visuals in official comms; disentangling yourself from "Sign in with Google."
- đ¯ The Post-Script: Do I belong in tech anymore?; Sam Altman and eyeballs; and how our digital devices put our privacy at risk.
Image by Egor Vikhrev on Unsplash. Glitched.
đ Short-Form Content
Chatbots ("AI")
- So, uh, there is now a human verification company that has partnered with Zoom to verify that who's on the call is actually... humans, and not robots. That's 2026 enough alright, but get this: This company is owned by Sam Altman. Yep, that Sam Altman. Of Open AI fame. Which builds LLMs and agents and such. So basically, robot on the call, human on the call, it's a win either way.
- PS, this "World" app... thing... is a descendant of the "Worldcoin." Yep.
- Apparently you can now "discover drink ideas with ChatGPT" on the Starbucks app. I personally think the baristas are going to looooooove having to prepare whatever wild concoctions get dreamt up by their LLM-addled clientele.
- Allbirds, a shoe company (?), now also does AI. Because that makes sense.
- As always, AI is, like, super fast at everything. đ And so it is also super fast in terms of how quickly it is enshittifying: The squeeze has begun, and the bill is about to become due. A loooot of companies are probably about to regret shovelling this particular kind of asbestos into their walls.
- If you're using Copilot, and you're in the EU, it seems Microsoft is helpfully automatically opting you in to allow "flex routing", which may make your data be processed outside of the EU. You should probably opt out of that. Or, uh, of the Copilot chatbot entirely. Or Windows entirely.
- About two weeks or so after the entire source code of Claude Code "leaked," Anthropic's new it's-so-good-we-can't-even-let-people-use-it model has been accessed by unauthorized parties. Why yes, I would absolutely give this type of software all sorts of permissions and let it run free on prod!
Non-Chatbots
- If you run a bar, and you skip straight past the "scan this QR code to see our menu" to "you will have to check us out on Instagram for our cocktail list," you should probably take a lil timeout and spend some time thinking about what you have done. (And as a customer, rest assured that my shadow will not darken your doorstep ever again.)
- Age verification proposals are truly everywhere right now.
- It may or may not be a coincidence that this is happening at the same time as Google planning on locking down Android (as well as a bunch of anti-3d printing bills being brought forward).
- Meme of the week, maybe even the month, by Jonah Aragon: Do big tech companies understand consent? Yes / Remind me in 5 days.
- On that note - can we circle back to age verification? I like this proposal by Tlapka - Give the corporations a taste of their own medicine:
age verification but it's just a dialog box that asks "are you old" and the answers are "yes" and "maybe later"
đ° Long-Form Content
Age-Gating Isn't It, Fam
So. The Liberal party here in Canada - the party that now has a majority in the federal government - has adopted a motion to ban children under 16 from social media.
Age Gating isn't It though, because:
- it is a thinly-veiled surveillance information grab
- it's a digital sovereignty issue
- online communities can be Good, Actually
- ... it's probably not going to work (we've gotten more data on this since I published the article)
- age gating means dancing around the real issue of holding Big Tech accountable.
Read the full article here.
And lastly - especially if age gating is being suggested, proposed, or otherwise discussed in your area - The time to speak up is now.
đ Good News!
- The Open Printer is a project that is about to go live. It'll be a printer you can repair yourself, and that you can fill with whatever ink you like, instead of the DRM'ed unicorn blood we all know and do not love. The fact that that sounds wild tells you how far we have strayed from the light. As cr00ky said on Mastodon, someone has apparently read Enshittification.
- In further good hardware news, Rakuten has partnered with iFixit to make their e-reader devices Kobo Libra Colour and Kobo Clara be repairable, and to provide repair kits and guides.
- Bonus: Kobos, unlike Kindles, can even hook into public library borrowing systems (if they use Overdrive/Libby - some conditions apply, YMMV, yadda yadda yadda)!
- People take time out of their days to show up at council meetings and protest planned slop factories. Such as, for example, Will Hollingsworth protesting a data center proposal in Ohio with an eloquent, passionate, and smart speech addressed to his local council.
- Sort of related to this, India is dropping their proposal to mandate the national ID app on smartphones after a lot of pushback.
- Staff at the European Union are not allowed to use any AI-generated imagery in official communications. This includes the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU.
- If you're the kind of person that used to click "Sign in with Google" a lot, but now you don't like that anymore and you'd like to get rid of it: There's a way to see all the services you've used Google SSO with, which can be a great starting point to disentangle yourself from it.
- Hot tip: While you're changing your logins, consider switching to a more privacy-friendly email service, and explore aliases!
đ¯ The Post-Script
Following & Reading
- This beautiful, haunting, and hitting-a-lil-close-to-home article titled Do I belong in tech anymore? by Ky Decker.
- Ars Technica's How our digital devices are putting our right to privacy at risk, by Jennifer Ouellette.
- Privacy Guides' Sam Altman wants your Eyeball, by Em.
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