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silveradeptBecause the state of Mississippi has no idea what protecting children online actually entails, and are instead hoping that queer content will simply disappear off the Internet so they don't have to see it, but are threatening fines of $10,000 USD for each time a minor accesses something the state considers age-restricted, which goes far beyond the official and still-in-force Miller test for obscenity, Dreamwidth will be temporarily unavailable in the State of Mississippi starting September 1, 2025, and lasting until the State of Mississippi is injuncted against enforcing their overbroad and unsafe law. Because the state requires not only age verification of minors, but permission slips obtained and then all of that identifying information and documentation to be retained, along with special flags set for minor accounts that will make it obvious to a casual profile viewer that they're looking at a minor account (and therefore a possibly very juicy target), Bluesky has decided they are blocking Mississippi from using their service until Mississippi can be told that their law is overbroad, unconstitutional, and does the opposite of what they want it to do. The reason that this is happening in the first place is because despite at least one Justice saying outright that the challenge to the law was likely to succeed on the merits, the Supereme Court of the United States allowed it to go into effect because the conservative majority (or Justice I-Like-Beer-and-Boobies himself) said that the plaintiffs hadn't demonstrated sufficiently that they would be hurt by the law. Which sounds much more like an encouragement to Mississippi and others to pass these laws, even if they are eventually shut down, than someone taking into account the likelihood that the law will be judged unconstitutional and permitting preliminary injunctions to stay in effect while the case is argued, so that the state doesn't get the opportunity to try and collect its fines.
And while there will be arguments suggesting that federation, like the AT Protocol Bluesky is built on, is a useful way out and around laws like Mississippi's, and/or the idea that VPNs and similar technological disguise tools will become commonplace in states that pass these restrictive laws, reflecting the adage "The network sees censorship as damage and routes around it," such arguments assume things that are not actually in evidence about the technological expertise of the average user. (Insert the relevant xkcd here.) You can actually see it at work in a now-frozen discussion thread on the![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_news post, as someone blithely throws out the statement that learning and knowing how to use a VPN should be one of the tests of adulthood on the Internet, and that for less-technical users, there are browsers with VPNs built in that they could use. (None of which is Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox, we note, but are instead browsers that would have to be sought, like Vivaldi, Tor Browser, or Brave.)
My professional expertise is with people who are non-technical, and people who will freely describe themselves as unintelligent and/or hostile toward using computers, smartphones, and other technological devices. Things that I can do without a second thought, like reading error messages and knowing where to look, or finding the expanded options menu and knowing which option to select to undo a terrible automatic formatting decision, or even walking people through the process of getting their documents uploaded to our print server so they can retrieve and print them, are things that others are doing for the first time, the fiftieth time, and often in some form of rush, hurry, or other deadline that they have to meet. So not only do I have to guide them through these processes, I often have to do so calmly and in a way that will work in the remaining time allotted to this project. Which is often less time than I would have wanted to do it with.
These are not unintelligent people. They are dealing with something outside of their expertise. Some of them, I suspect, would be able to help me unjam a typewriter ribbon faster and more accurately than I could myself, even with the help of a video tutorial, because they have thousands of repetitions on unjamming typewriter ribbon and have seen the general spread of how ribbons get jammed. If I suddenly needed to communicate over amateur radio bands and construct a field operation for transmission and reception on those bands, the local amateur radio club can do that, since many of them they practice it at least once a year and are additionally licensed to transmit over those bands. Some of them can diagnose when appliances are about to fail, or when vehicles need urgent maintenance, just by listening to the sound they make. They have expertise, and many of them have probably made money putting that expertise to work.
Telling them, "Ah, well, you just need to add a VPN to your browsing and you'll be fine" is a meaningless string of words, because they don't have the context or the first clue about what a VPN is, much less how to obtain one and use it correctly. Explaining to them the nature of federated protocols and the ways in which someone can choose any client software they want to access their socials from is setting an infinite array of jam in front of them and telling them to pick their favorite flavor and buy a jar of it. People use things that are easy and well-designed before they will use anything else, even if "anything else" is something that's built on better tools, is more ethical, or is otherwise a morally or technically superior choice for everyone to use. So the options are either to gain that technical expertise or rely on the expertise that someone else has gained and hope they know what they're doing. (This is one of those things where it would be cool for public library computers to all sprout VPNs and Tor clients, but library IT is almost certainly overtaxed as it is and they would not be able to take on the additional work of maintaining such things without more budget. I personally believe there's probably at least one manager's salary and position that can be sacrificed at any given time to provide better services and more employees who can make those services run better, but I don't get to make those kinds of decisions.) And adding things like VPNs for privacy and protection will also introduce complications to their processes and procedures, because learning how to do it on your desktop/laptop at home is different than figuring out where in your phone or tablet settings you have to put the information to use the VPN and/or how to set up your VPN app so that it's always on and getting used. Their other apps and sites may go "you're using a VPN, you have to turn it off before I'm allowed to work," and so it becomes juggling even more things in your head about what works, what doesn't, and how you're supposed to manage all of this when all you want is to just get to your destination and use the site or app. It could be mitigated somewhat if site and app administrators used things like HTTP 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons when it applied, and the browser / application went "okay, so in receiving HTTP 451, I'm going to suggest that my user turn on their VPN, if they have one, choose somewhere other than [Geolocation of their IP address] and try again." Because that would make it much easier for the user to know what to do. (Of course, it might also expose someone to legal liability if someone else said "hey, they're encouraging their users to go around our governmental block," so YMMV, consult with a lawyer, etc.)
Secondly, the people who are being most hurt by this decision in the state of Mississippi are the under-18s themselves who are purported to be protected by this law. Minor accounts are supposed to be censored from seeing whatever the state deems inappropriate for them, and for a state like Mississippi, that almost certainly includes the existence of sex and safer sex practices, the existence of queer people, the existence of trans people, and anything else that Christian theocrats have deemed inappropriate for children, because it conflicts with their view of the world and how they believe children should be raised. Most children's access at home and at school is regulated in one way or another by either their parents (and whatever parental control options they choose to enable or nannyware they choose to install on their children's computers) or by state and federal rules about what has to be filtered on computers children have access to upon pain of losing federal e-rate discounts and reimbursements or state funding for education. Public library computers may be less filtered for under-18s than school computers, but they are still filtered, and most filtering software is built by people like the Mississippi state legislators and by default turns on restrictions that are probably at least as severe as this law's requirements. Children and teens seeking information about their own lives, feelings, preferences, and decisions they want to go forward with will find themselves bereft of the company of experienced adults and the informative websites and pages they have left behind for people to read and gain understanding from. And despite the persistent belief in many of these spaces that removing the visibility of these subjects and peoples is equivalent to making them not exist (often with an underlying desire to make those people not exist as well), most of the studies I've seen about gender identity and sexual preference not only say that people continue to exist even in places that refuse to acknowledge their reality, they say that children have a fairly well-defined identity and idea of their preferences regardless of whether they have the language or the forums to express them.
While we should not underestimate the creativity of the under-18s to find ways around filters and to obtain information and knowledge from trusted sources in their peers and adults on how to more effectively bypass such systems, or what vulnerabilities there are in those systems that can be exploited, there is always risk involved. Perfect OPSEC is difficult even for trained intelligence agents, and so there's a strong likelihood that circumvention efforts will be noticed. The Mississippi law chooses to punish providers for any circumvention efforts that get through, rather than having something ready for grownups to help them understand what happened, and to give them the tools and education so they can make informed decisions and have relevant conversations with their children about what's out on the Internet, what dangers there are, and to impress upon their children that when dangerous things happen, they need to be told about it. (Most grownups botch this talk, and others like it, by demonstrating to their kids that they are going to punish first (possibly only) and then lecture about what they expect the child to obey, rather than making any attempt at understanding the whys and the reasons and trying to find reasonable consequences for what happens. All it does is tell a child that this grownup is not to be trusted with anything important, because anything important will only result in lectures and punishments.) I'm sure that if you asked them, the legislators would say they were all in favor of parental control instead of state control of things, but they often end up being very much in favor of state control when it comes to something that offends their personal morality. (And we'll set aside for now how often legislators and politicians who rail the hardest against certain things turn out to be connoisseurs of them.) The services that choose to refuse service to Mississippi is the system working as intended, rather than an unfortunate and unforeseeable consequence of the system, and I'm sure that the legislators responsible for crafting this law will crow that their law has meant children are not being exposed to predators and malign influences on platforms that "admitted" they couldn't clean themselves up enough to conform to the law and thus deserve to be cut off.
This digital campaign is also no doubt in conjunction with a physical one to ensure that the trusted adults in a child's life in Mississippi aren't allowed to talk about their lived experiences and identities, either, lest they be called "groomers" and "pedophiles," and that trusted resources, like public libraries, can't furnish this kind of information to those who ask without suffering the same kinds of accusations and threats to pull their funding entirely for having offended the personal morality of a legislator. Whether in fiction or age-appropriate nonfiction, certainly. With Mississippi being a state that is last among the fifty in terms of connectivity and broadband access, places like public libraries and schools are likely the most common and most used points of Internet access for Mississippians and the under-18s, and having large swaths of the Internet unavailable to them will impact their scholarship and their personal lives alike, and having less access to printed resources and people's experiences will similarly impoverish them and make it harder for them to live and study to their fullest capacities and to engage in those behaviors of childhood and adolescence that allow someone to join the community of grown-ass adults when their chronological age says they're adults.
So, for both kids and adults, it's not easy to engage in privacy-protecting practices and it's even harder to ensure that all of your activities are appropriately private and that there aren't leaks happening somewhere. Most people do not have this technical expertise and they do not feel like they can learn it, either. Many of them also don't have the resources to set up their own rig, get their own connection, and experiment in ways that will help them learn and understand and get more confident in using computers. (And also teach them just how limited and restricted the machines at the public library really are, comparatively.)
Which brings us back around to why Dreamwidth is doing good work with Netchoice to legally and metaphorically politely punch states that attempt this crap in the face, and if they don't listen, to thoroughly punch them in the junk until they give up. There's a real temptation in centrist spaces and richer white spaces to write off the people who are in impoverished places ruled by theocrats and white supremacists as irredeemable, or to believe in the just world fallacy and insist that because the people voted for these theocrats and white supremacists, they must also be theocrats and white supremacists. The belief is then that such a population will have to be outlasted, rather than assisted, and therefore no resources have to be expended to do anything about the situation there. (And it also gives them a nice feeling of moral superiority over the residents of that other area because they're not those folks.) As we are starting to see more nationally, since we have one of those kinds of white supremacists in charge (and his next-in-command is one of the theocrats), and things in other states can more effectively be communicated by official and social media channels, what was sold to centrists and rich white people as "backward hicks who want this" is turning out to be disenfranchisement and redistricting leading to state legislative districts that almost certainly violate the Voting Rights Act, even if only egregious violations ever get prosecuted. Places where churches are the way the community communicates and organizes, but the leaders of those churches worship TurboJesus, Republican Jesus, or decided that they had to ditch the white hoods and the burning crosses, but kept everything else that was racist and secessionist about themselves, so that the pulpit every week is a white man telling other white people that the Black man, the Brown man, and the trans woman are trying to steal their money, their daughters, and their wives, and that the liberals in government approve and facilitate this theft. Places where politicians tell the people that the factory left not because the owners got a better sweetheart deal elsewhere and that they never had loyalty to this place, but because liberals in government let too many people into the country who will work for less than a decent family wage and they took your job, or that liberals in government allowed the factory to go out of the United States so that (Jewish) "globalists" could advance their agenda of subordinating Our Great Christian and Moral Nation to the rule of other countries or the Unified World Government located at the United Nations. The kinds of places with politicians who are so desperate to keep public scrutiny off of them and what they want to do to enrich themselves and their friends that they start saying that the people who teach the children, work the library, and even medics charged with helping children stay healthy are sexual predators of those same children and that books and lessons are dangerous because they suggest the world is bigger and more beautiful than the place where they current are.
There are some True Believers in these kinds of slanders and misdirections, and some subset of them do cause problems on purpose for others. Mostly, though, the people who are in these kinds of situations want good neighbors, good services, and good government, and they have only the first of those three (and even then only sometimes), because the second and third are routinely being denied them from people who think of them as little more than rubes or pawns to manipulate for their own purposes. It'll take proper support, structural change, and other places not turning their back on them or writing them off for a generation as backward hicks who want this. It takes having actual accountability and not letting corruption go, and finding and supporting the people who are there and fighting this fight, so they're not doing it alone. We like to believe in the Great Person idea in the States, that all it takes is one very charismatic person to topple things, but that theory basically ignores all the other people who are definitely helping push. We need the pushers, and once there are enough of them, the great people start to appear.
It also turns out that Tennessee passed a similar, if less draconian, law, and therefore Tennesseans under 18 will be temporarily barred from registering accounts on Dreamwidth until their law can be thrown out, because, in a similar way, people decided that while the law was likely to be axed, somehow there wasn't sufficient showing of injury to injunct the law immediately, so instead it gets to cause damage until rendered moot. So this particular conflict has to be fought on multiple fronts, in places passing laws and in places trying to pass them. Having seen the damage that happens when those places are allowed to pass laws, if your locality hasn't done it yet, it may be worth telling them what political ramifications await them if they do.
And while there will be arguments suggesting that federation, like the AT Protocol Bluesky is built on, is a useful way out and around laws like Mississippi's, and/or the idea that VPNs and similar technological disguise tools will become commonplace in states that pass these restrictive laws, reflecting the adage "The network sees censorship as damage and routes around it," such arguments assume things that are not actually in evidence about the technological expertise of the average user. (Insert the relevant xkcd here.) You can actually see it at work in a now-frozen discussion thread on the
dw_news post, as someone blithely throws out the statement that learning and knowing how to use a VPN should be one of the tests of adulthood on the Internet, and that for less-technical users, there are browsers with VPNs built in that they could use. (None of which is Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox, we note, but are instead browsers that would have to be sought, like Vivaldi, Tor Browser, or Brave.)My professional expertise is with people who are non-technical, and people who will freely describe themselves as unintelligent and/or hostile toward using computers, smartphones, and other technological devices. Things that I can do without a second thought, like reading error messages and knowing where to look, or finding the expanded options menu and knowing which option to select to undo a terrible automatic formatting decision, or even walking people through the process of getting their documents uploaded to our print server so they can retrieve and print them, are things that others are doing for the first time, the fiftieth time, and often in some form of rush, hurry, or other deadline that they have to meet. So not only do I have to guide them through these processes, I often have to do so calmly and in a way that will work in the remaining time allotted to this project. Which is often less time than I would have wanted to do it with.
These are not unintelligent people. They are dealing with something outside of their expertise. Some of them, I suspect, would be able to help me unjam a typewriter ribbon faster and more accurately than I could myself, even with the help of a video tutorial, because they have thousands of repetitions on unjamming typewriter ribbon and have seen the general spread of how ribbons get jammed. If I suddenly needed to communicate over amateur radio bands and construct a field operation for transmission and reception on those bands, the local amateur radio club can do that, since many of them they practice it at least once a year and are additionally licensed to transmit over those bands. Some of them can diagnose when appliances are about to fail, or when vehicles need urgent maintenance, just by listening to the sound they make. They have expertise, and many of them have probably made money putting that expertise to work.
Telling them, "Ah, well, you just need to add a VPN to your browsing and you'll be fine" is a meaningless string of words, because they don't have the context or the first clue about what a VPN is, much less how to obtain one and use it correctly. Explaining to them the nature of federated protocols and the ways in which someone can choose any client software they want to access their socials from is setting an infinite array of jam in front of them and telling them to pick their favorite flavor and buy a jar of it. People use things that are easy and well-designed before they will use anything else, even if "anything else" is something that's built on better tools, is more ethical, or is otherwise a morally or technically superior choice for everyone to use. So the options are either to gain that technical expertise or rely on the expertise that someone else has gained and hope they know what they're doing. (This is one of those things where it would be cool for public library computers to all sprout VPNs and Tor clients, but library IT is almost certainly overtaxed as it is and they would not be able to take on the additional work of maintaining such things without more budget. I personally believe there's probably at least one manager's salary and position that can be sacrificed at any given time to provide better services and more employees who can make those services run better, but I don't get to make those kinds of decisions.) And adding things like VPNs for privacy and protection will also introduce complications to their processes and procedures, because learning how to do it on your desktop/laptop at home is different than figuring out where in your phone or tablet settings you have to put the information to use the VPN and/or how to set up your VPN app so that it's always on and getting used. Their other apps and sites may go "you're using a VPN, you have to turn it off before I'm allowed to work," and so it becomes juggling even more things in your head about what works, what doesn't, and how you're supposed to manage all of this when all you want is to just get to your destination and use the site or app. It could be mitigated somewhat if site and app administrators used things like HTTP 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons when it applied, and the browser / application went "okay, so in receiving HTTP 451, I'm going to suggest that my user turn on their VPN, if they have one, choose somewhere other than [Geolocation of their IP address] and try again." Because that would make it much easier for the user to know what to do. (Of course, it might also expose someone to legal liability if someone else said "hey, they're encouraging their users to go around our governmental block," so YMMV, consult with a lawyer, etc.)
Secondly, the people who are being most hurt by this decision in the state of Mississippi are the under-18s themselves who are purported to be protected by this law. Minor accounts are supposed to be censored from seeing whatever the state deems inappropriate for them, and for a state like Mississippi, that almost certainly includes the existence of sex and safer sex practices, the existence of queer people, the existence of trans people, and anything else that Christian theocrats have deemed inappropriate for children, because it conflicts with their view of the world and how they believe children should be raised. Most children's access at home and at school is regulated in one way or another by either their parents (and whatever parental control options they choose to enable or nannyware they choose to install on their children's computers) or by state and federal rules about what has to be filtered on computers children have access to upon pain of losing federal e-rate discounts and reimbursements or state funding for education. Public library computers may be less filtered for under-18s than school computers, but they are still filtered, and most filtering software is built by people like the Mississippi state legislators and by default turns on restrictions that are probably at least as severe as this law's requirements. Children and teens seeking information about their own lives, feelings, preferences, and decisions they want to go forward with will find themselves bereft of the company of experienced adults and the informative websites and pages they have left behind for people to read and gain understanding from. And despite the persistent belief in many of these spaces that removing the visibility of these subjects and peoples is equivalent to making them not exist (often with an underlying desire to make those people not exist as well), most of the studies I've seen about gender identity and sexual preference not only say that people continue to exist even in places that refuse to acknowledge their reality, they say that children have a fairly well-defined identity and idea of their preferences regardless of whether they have the language or the forums to express them.
While we should not underestimate the creativity of the under-18s to find ways around filters and to obtain information and knowledge from trusted sources in their peers and adults on how to more effectively bypass such systems, or what vulnerabilities there are in those systems that can be exploited, there is always risk involved. Perfect OPSEC is difficult even for trained intelligence agents, and so there's a strong likelihood that circumvention efforts will be noticed. The Mississippi law chooses to punish providers for any circumvention efforts that get through, rather than having something ready for grownups to help them understand what happened, and to give them the tools and education so they can make informed decisions and have relevant conversations with their children about what's out on the Internet, what dangers there are, and to impress upon their children that when dangerous things happen, they need to be told about it. (Most grownups botch this talk, and others like it, by demonstrating to their kids that they are going to punish first (possibly only) and then lecture about what they expect the child to obey, rather than making any attempt at understanding the whys and the reasons and trying to find reasonable consequences for what happens. All it does is tell a child that this grownup is not to be trusted with anything important, because anything important will only result in lectures and punishments.) I'm sure that if you asked them, the legislators would say they were all in favor of parental control instead of state control of things, but they often end up being very much in favor of state control when it comes to something that offends their personal morality. (And we'll set aside for now how often legislators and politicians who rail the hardest against certain things turn out to be connoisseurs of them.) The services that choose to refuse service to Mississippi is the system working as intended, rather than an unfortunate and unforeseeable consequence of the system, and I'm sure that the legislators responsible for crafting this law will crow that their law has meant children are not being exposed to predators and malign influences on platforms that "admitted" they couldn't clean themselves up enough to conform to the law and thus deserve to be cut off.
This digital campaign is also no doubt in conjunction with a physical one to ensure that the trusted adults in a child's life in Mississippi aren't allowed to talk about their lived experiences and identities, either, lest they be called "groomers" and "pedophiles," and that trusted resources, like public libraries, can't furnish this kind of information to those who ask without suffering the same kinds of accusations and threats to pull their funding entirely for having offended the personal morality of a legislator. Whether in fiction or age-appropriate nonfiction, certainly. With Mississippi being a state that is last among the fifty in terms of connectivity and broadband access, places like public libraries and schools are likely the most common and most used points of Internet access for Mississippians and the under-18s, and having large swaths of the Internet unavailable to them will impact their scholarship and their personal lives alike, and having less access to printed resources and people's experiences will similarly impoverish them and make it harder for them to live and study to their fullest capacities and to engage in those behaviors of childhood and adolescence that allow someone to join the community of grown-ass adults when their chronological age says they're adults.
So, for both kids and adults, it's not easy to engage in privacy-protecting practices and it's even harder to ensure that all of your activities are appropriately private and that there aren't leaks happening somewhere. Most people do not have this technical expertise and they do not feel like they can learn it, either. Many of them also don't have the resources to set up their own rig, get their own connection, and experiment in ways that will help them learn and understand and get more confident in using computers. (And also teach them just how limited and restricted the machines at the public library really are, comparatively.)
Which brings us back around to why Dreamwidth is doing good work with Netchoice to legally and metaphorically politely punch states that attempt this crap in the face, and if they don't listen, to thoroughly punch them in the junk until they give up. There's a real temptation in centrist spaces and richer white spaces to write off the people who are in impoverished places ruled by theocrats and white supremacists as irredeemable, or to believe in the just world fallacy and insist that because the people voted for these theocrats and white supremacists, they must also be theocrats and white supremacists. The belief is then that such a population will have to be outlasted, rather than assisted, and therefore no resources have to be expended to do anything about the situation there. (And it also gives them a nice feeling of moral superiority over the residents of that other area because they're not those folks.) As we are starting to see more nationally, since we have one of those kinds of white supremacists in charge (and his next-in-command is one of the theocrats), and things in other states can more effectively be communicated by official and social media channels, what was sold to centrists and rich white people as "backward hicks who want this" is turning out to be disenfranchisement and redistricting leading to state legislative districts that almost certainly violate the Voting Rights Act, even if only egregious violations ever get prosecuted. Places where churches are the way the community communicates and organizes, but the leaders of those churches worship TurboJesus, Republican Jesus, or decided that they had to ditch the white hoods and the burning crosses, but kept everything else that was racist and secessionist about themselves, so that the pulpit every week is a white man telling other white people that the Black man, the Brown man, and the trans woman are trying to steal their money, their daughters, and their wives, and that the liberals in government approve and facilitate this theft. Places where politicians tell the people that the factory left not because the owners got a better sweetheart deal elsewhere and that they never had loyalty to this place, but because liberals in government let too many people into the country who will work for less than a decent family wage and they took your job, or that liberals in government allowed the factory to go out of the United States so that (Jewish) "globalists" could advance their agenda of subordinating Our Great Christian and Moral Nation to the rule of other countries or the Unified World Government located at the United Nations. The kinds of places with politicians who are so desperate to keep public scrutiny off of them and what they want to do to enrich themselves and their friends that they start saying that the people who teach the children, work the library, and even medics charged with helping children stay healthy are sexual predators of those same children and that books and lessons are dangerous because they suggest the world is bigger and more beautiful than the place where they current are.
There are some True Believers in these kinds of slanders and misdirections, and some subset of them do cause problems on purpose for others. Mostly, though, the people who are in these kinds of situations want good neighbors, good services, and good government, and they have only the first of those three (and even then only sometimes), because the second and third are routinely being denied them from people who think of them as little more than rubes or pawns to manipulate for their own purposes. It'll take proper support, structural change, and other places not turning their back on them or writing them off for a generation as backward hicks who want this. It takes having actual accountability and not letting corruption go, and finding and supporting the people who are there and fighting this fight, so they're not doing it alone. We like to believe in the Great Person idea in the States, that all it takes is one very charismatic person to topple things, but that theory basically ignores all the other people who are definitely helping push. We need the pushers, and once there are enough of them, the great people start to appear.
It also turns out that Tennessee passed a similar, if less draconian, law, and therefore Tennesseans under 18 will be temporarily barred from registering accounts on Dreamwidth until their law can be thrown out, because, in a similar way, people decided that while the law was likely to be axed, somehow there wasn't sufficient showing of injury to injunct the law immediately, so instead it gets to cause damage until rendered moot. So this particular conflict has to be fought on multiple fronts, in places passing laws and in places trying to pass them. Having seen the damage that happens when those places are allowed to pass laws, if your locality hasn't done it yet, it may be worth telling them what political ramifications await them if they do.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-01 12:57 pm (UTC)Very good breakdown of it all. I'm completely with you that any answer relying on above-average technical knowledge can only be a stopgap and not a solution. (I've worked with a lot of people myself for whom telling them to "just use a VPN" would be about as helpful as telling them to use a spaceship.)
The people who will be further disenfranchised in states like Mississippi while sites are forced to block them while fighting it out have been on my mind as well.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-01 03:27 pm (UTC)As one of the people in in Mississippi, thank you
no subject
Date: 2025-09-01 05:13 pm (UTC)Regarding people, one of the things the Internet has taught me is that the shorthands and groupings of people are lossy categories, and they tend to be deployed to fit narratives, rather than stopping and taking time to showcase the complexity of any given population. It's how you get things like "flyover country" or "Southern hicks" and "coastal elites." There are more than enough people in Mississippi and Tennessee who want nothing to do with these foolish laws that they could get them overturned and their politicians dismissed, but that would require democracy and making sure that all of those people have their voices heard, instead of having them suppressed. We used to be able to rely on the courts to routinely and swiftly strike down such overreaches, but enough of the bad actors have put their people into the court system that now even the Supremes are committing basic errors so that their friends and pals can accrue more power.
I don't know what the solution is for dislodging people who intend to entrench themselves, but I suspect it will be a lot like pulling ticks out of the body and then keeping very alert for Lyme disease afterward.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-01 05:14 pm (UTC)