2026-07-25
It's been 1 year today since the generously-named Online Safety Act's age verification duties went into effect in the UK. The widespread outrage about it seems to have died down, and the country is continuing on the normal trajectory of slow, painful degradation of privacy and free speech.
I have still never verified my age and never will. If I turn off my VPN, plenty of websites become unusable (if they weren't already unusable to me due to requiring JS), either because they require me to doxx myself or because they outright block the UK (like Imgur and SpaceHey). There's an old list of sites that died or blocked the UK here, although it's presumably outdated and certainly incomplete.
I've barely ever gotten any age verification prompts, though, not because they aren't common, but because I don't use websites that require them (other than through alternative front-ends). There are still plenty of small sites that exist outside the surveillance capitalist panopticon, like the one I'm posting this on, and I'm sure they'll continue to exist in the future.
Retreating into the "nerd" corners of the internet seems to be the best survival strategy for the modern web. It's like Eternal September has been reversed, not because of computer-illiterate people leaving the internet, but because of them sticking to a small number of mainstream sites, leaving the rest of the internet for computer people.
As for my own site, I have made no attempt to even care about the OSA. I don't care whether my site complies with it. I'm not digging through a mountain of deliberately impenetrable, dense legalese written by authoritarians simply so I can run a blog. Besides, when a law is sufficiently unjust, you have a moral obligation to disobey it.
Anyway, I predict that everything will keep getting worse. The general public will become more and more supportive of mass surveillance, laws will get stricter and we'll have to start hosting hidden services on the TOR network or I2P. Then they'll make those illegal, and my 1337 hacksaw cyberpunk fantasy world will begin.
It'll be like The Matrix. Or V for Vendetta. Or maybe Tron?