This is the first time in a long time on Hacker News that I've not seen universal disapproval to this measure. People are actually arguing for it, even as a devil's advocate? What the UK has been doing is wrong, it is disenfranchising and disempowering people.

The UK is not a democratic or even liberty-focused state anymore. It's always been ruled by a crowd of people who went to privately-funded schools that cost a fortune. Half the government's politicians and staffers can trace their relations back to the same historical personage.

They aren't afraid for their kids with these laws. They're afraid that this ossified, stunted system of power that's been built over 800 years will break, and they will be out of a job with pitchfork-wielding crowds chasing them out of London.

I feel a similar sense of confusion at the overall reaction from HN. Ten years ago there would have been unanimous disapproval.

Has the userbase changed so much? If this is hackernews, what about the general population of developers?

Clearly showcasing that the UK chose their target wisely. Use a disliked entity as the way in the door, and people will argue for it without realizing it's a trojan horse.

It’s not an accident that we just went through one of the biggest cultural revolutions in the software development world. Look at how we treated people like Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Brendan Eich, Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, and even John Carmack. One by one, they were sidelined, pushed out, or publicly flogged for being insufficiently “progressive,” for holding “outdated” views, or simply for the crime of being older white men who had the misfortune of building the foundations of the field before today’s ideological climate took over.

But the important part is that we never really replaced them with anyone of similar weight. There was no next generation of cultural or intellectual heavyweights ready to step in. Instead, the online crowd splintered into political factions, with one side demanding constant ideological purity and the other reacting by withdrawing, going independent, or outright rejecting the institutions they had once built.

In the meantime, corporations managed to capture the new generation of young hackers by presenting themselves as “woke.” Put up the right rainbow flag at the right time, make the right statements, and suddenly the deep distrust people had toward big tech in the 90s and 2000s started to fade.

> The UK is not a democratic or even liberty-focused state anymore.

What on earth are you on about?

The UK is certainly a democratic state, it holds free, fair and transparent elections. Governments change regularly in line with these. The current prime-minister went to a grammar school, the deputy PM went to various 'standard' state schools.

Yes, bad laws and authoritarian impulses can and likely will have far-reaching effects, but that's hardly new or unique to the UK, the US has a history of spying on its entire population as well, from room 641A (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) to the Snowden revelations and Palantir. It also has a load of states adding access restrictions and age checks of one sort or another to the internet.

The people of the UK are largely in favour of these sorts of rules, as they are in a bunch of other places. They may be wrong but that doesn't mean democracy is failing.

This "The sky is falling!" rhetoric is why geeks are very rarely taken seriously in these debates.

I'd assume those are just another symptoms of the Thielverse and where would be a better place to have it seeping into the younger, well fed tech scene than hn?

They know that they'll still be able to get around those "Inconveniences" or create their own elite places while the majority of the general public won't and we're not giving a damn about the general public anymore. That's woke and not trendy anymore.

I mean, this is so obviously wrong. People would be ashamed to argue for it back in the days.

I would believe its a government thing not a people thing if half of UK didn't vote for Brexit.

Democracies can't survive with unfettered free speech. It's called the Paradox of tolerance [1] or sometimes the Popper paradox (after Karl Popper).

I don't know if you've ever seen some of the dark corners of the Internet. This includes 4chan, Kiwi Farms and, well, arguably Twitter at this point. Twitter has really become 4chan. But I digress.

We, as a society, are fine with suppressing certain kinds of speech. We always have. We can use CSAM as an obvious counterexample to free speech absolutism. There's no way to reconcile banning that and free speech absolutism. At some point it comes down to deciding certain kinds of expression is simply unacceptable.

Now is the UK government using 4chan (etc) as a stalking horse for a wider surveillance state? Almost certainly.

We saw a similar thing when Apple wanted to scan all private messages for CSAM. They faced a completely understandable backlash and reversed course.

But we don't have to defend 4chan or Kiwi Farms to oppose a surveillance state.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

> They're afraid that this ossified, stunted system of power that's been built over 800 years will break

And give way to what? You're making a lot of noise that sounds like you want liberation and freedom, but freedom from what? What is it you think the current system of democracy (which has always included intrusions into absolute personal freedom by the way) will give way to? An anarcho-capitalist state? A communist utopia? A breakdown in law and order?

The system WE built over the last 800 years is the most prosperous free society we have ever known. There is no absolute monarch, no forced labor. What do you want to replace it with?

You live in a society of surveillance. Google surveils every single action you take on the internet, as does Facebook, X, and whatever partners they share that information with. That's not a system built by the government "elites" that was built by for profit enterprise in a "free-market". Now the populous at large wants to make use of those same levers of power, and you make it sound like they're responsible for all of it.