The Dystopia of Now
In 2026 the information ecosystem is more advanced than ever before. It is also more chaotic and hostile due to a combination of corporate heedlessness, social ignorance, and state overreach. The current pattern of state-mandated age-verification is just another link in a chain of intelligence, cybersecurity and ethics clashes that have their roots in 1950s “Red Scare” McCarthyism.
Prior to the internet and the information explosion, the late 1940s through to the early 1970s saw some of the grossest state-sponsored violations of democratic ideals and human rights in recent history. FBI Director Hoover justified the threat of communism to initiate warrantless wiretaps and mail tampering, compiling lists of possible subversives. This was reignited by the 2001 9/11 attacks in the form of the Patriot Act. The Apple vs FBI case, or the subsequent DOJ vs Facebook, and Russia’s three-year attempt to unencrypt Telegram are the most recent engagements, but the battle for the human right of privacy is never-ending.
A History of Invasiveness
In the 50s the government leaked what was, for the time, derogatory information, to employers and compliant journalists. This eviscerated privacy and ruined lives without the need for due process. Behavior that wasn’t criminal, but was socially stigmatizing was utilized to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” such criminal figures as Dr. Martin Luther King, or remove LGBTQ federal employees. This state run surveillance was called COINTELPRO, and in the words of Senator Church “Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that.”
Writing in the Gray Area 