The Internet Wants Your Papers

Remember when the internet used to be anonymous?

Not completely anonymous, obviously. Your ISP could still see what you were doing, websites tracked you with cookies, and every other ad was trying to convince you that hot singles in your area wanted to meet you and fuck your brains out.

But there was still a general understanding that the internet was supposed to be somewhat detached from your real-world identity. You made a username, maybe uploaded some stupid anime avatar, and that was that. Unless you were dumb enough to post your full name and address publicly (not that I’d know anything about that), there was at least a thin layer separating your online life from your actual life.

Now every company on Earth suddenly wants a copy of your government-issued ID.

From social media sites to dating apps to porn sites, platforms are talking about implementing mandatory facial recognition. California is even pushing laws that would require age verification at the operating system level. Your computer itself will eventually start demanding proof that you’re old enough to use the internet.

Every single time somebody questions this invasive nonsense, the response is always the same:

“Think of the children.”

That phrase should immediately set off alarm bells in your head.

Any time the government or a giant corporation starts using children as justification for something, there’s a very good chance my privacy and/or rights are about to get steamrolled by some invasive bullshit.

It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. You wrap something authoritarian in the language of “safety” and suddenly anybody questioning it looks suspicious.

You don’t want massive databases full of people’s IDs tied to their internet activity? What are you hiding? You must be a child molester!

Kindly fuck off.

If these people actually cared about protecting children, they’d spend more time going after the rich and powerful degenerates connected to Epstein instead of trying to turn every internet user into a documented citizen in the Online Papers Please System. Funny how the people screaming loudest about “protecting the kids” never seem too interested in cleaning up the elite pedophile circles that somehow keep magically avoiding any consequences.

It’s fucking amazing. The government becomes extremely competent and motivated when it comes to tracking ordinary people online, but when billionaires, politicians, intelligence-connected weirdos, and celebrity creeps are sex trafficking kids, suddenly everybody forgets how investigations work.

Meanwhile, I’m expected to upload my driver’s license to talk to my friends on Discord.

That’s a terrific idea. Because these companies are just so trustworthy, right?

Most of these platforms can barely keep spambots under control, but now I’m supposed to trust them with sensitive government identification documents? Half these companies fired huge portions of their human developers and replaced them with AI-generated code and skeleton crews. Finding an actual human working at most of these companies has become next to impossible, yet we’re expected to believe they’re capable of safely storing millions of IDs and biometric scans without anything going wrong.

Fuck that, I already know how this shit is going to go down.

First comes the “temporary” verification system.

Then comes the mandatory expansion of it.

Then comes the data breach.

Then comes the class action lawsuit.

Then comes the email telling you that your information “may have been compromised” and that you’re entitled to $5.27 and twelve months of complimentary credit monitoring from the same dipshits who lost your data in the first place.

Gee, thanks.

It’s not like this hasn’t happened before.

Discord suffered a major data breach in October of 2025. People’s information got exposed, everybody got mad for about two weeks, then the news cycle moved on and everyone pretended nothing happened. Less than a year later, Discord was talking about implementing a broader ID verification system like nothing fucking happened. And of course, it was “for the children.”

Thankfully, most of the internet called them out on this, and they’ve backed down on ID verification. For now. I’m sure they’ll try again next year.

Data breaches like the one at Discord are happening at an increasingly high rate. Companies like Equifax, T-Mobile, and AT&T have had sensitive customer data compromised. Hospitals, banks, police departments, and even government agencies have been hacked.

At this point, your information leaking online isn’t even treated as some catastrophic failure anymore. It’s treated like another unavoidable thing that just happens now.

But sure, let’s centralize everybody’s IDs into giant databases connected to internet usage. Brilliant plan. Truly genius-level thinking from the same people who can’t stop ransomware groups from turning major corporations into digital hostages every six months.

And if you object to any of this, people act like you’re paranoid.

I don’t think it’s paranoid to not want random companies storing copies of my identification documents. I barely trust the government with my ID, and they’re the ones who issued the damn thing. Why would I trust a social media company run by shareholders and interns, with half its infrastructure stitched together by AI-generated code?

But wait, it gets even better.

Some states are now floating restrictions on VPNs because they can be used to bypass these verification systems.

Now we’re getting to the real meat of this. This isn’t just about “protecting children,” is it? No, it’s about control.

VPNs make people harder to track, and censorship harder to enforce. They also make piracy harder to combat, which is another little piece of this puzzle nobody wants to talk about openly.

Without a VPN, torrenting becomes a lot riskier. ISPs can see what you’re doing more easily, and those annoying copyright notices become easier to issue. It wouldn’t shock me at all to find that major entertainment companies were quietly supporting some of these anti-VPN pushes behind the scenes.

Netflix, Disney, the MPAA, all these giant corporations absolutely hate the idea of people operating online outside their visibility. I can pay $20 a month for their ad-filled service (which will increase in price again every year), or I can pay $5 a month for a VPN and download all the movies, TV shows, and anime that I want. Take your price hikes and shove it.

The internet was never supposed to become this heavily monitored corporate-government hybrid surveillance environment. The entire culture of the internet used to revolve around freedom, anonymity, and decentralization. Now everything is becoming tied to real-world identity verification.

Isn’t it kind of funny how both political parties seem weirdly united on it?

Democrats and Republicans will fight each other like rabid dogs over literally everything else, but when it comes to expanding surveillance, increasing censorship infrastructure, weakening anonymity, or eroding privacy protections, suddenly everybody starts getting along real fast.

I’m not sure why this doesn’t have more people concerned. When both sides of the political machine are moving in the same direction, chances are the public isn’t the one benefiting from it.

Oblivious idiots love to say “Well I’ve got nothing to hide, so why should I care?”. Even if you’ve got nothing to hide, you absolutely should fucking care.

Privacy isn’t about hiding criminal activity. It’s about maintaining boundaries between yourself and institutions that absolutely do not deserve unlimited access to your life.

You lock your bathroom door. You close your curtains. You shred sensitive documents. That doesn’t make you a criminal. It makes you normal.

The internet shouldn’t require you to hand over government documentation just to browse websites or interact with people online. That’s insane. I’m not giving these assholes my ID. I already gave it to my ISP when I signed up for internet access. Why the hell do I need to jump through another hoop to verify who I am?

If enough people keep rolling over and accepting this stuff under the guise of “safety,” eventually the internet is just going to become another fully monitored utility where every action is tied directly to your real-world identity.

At that point, the old internet is officially dead.

And I think that’s exactly what a lot of powerful people want.

Angry_Jerk

Adam “The Angry Jerk” Baker is the CEO of The AJnet Organization and Editor-in-Chief of AJnet Magazine. A grizzled internet veteran of over 20 years, he writes about politics, culture, and whatever else manages to annoy him that day.

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