More restrictions, from all directions

A friend who is in his 20s recently told me he was asked to show ID in order to be allowed to buy a video game at a Walmart store. I had never heard of anything like that before, and although I don’t buy video games, I decided to Google the question. Sure enough, Walmart and K-Mart are both carding purchasers of “mature” video games == apparently after pressure from government officials:

In May, Sessions, Brownback and seven other senators sent a letter to executives of Kmart and several other major retailers encouraging them to pull the games off their shelves or prevent their sale to anyone younger than 17.

There has long been a well-organized movement to enact new laws prohibiting sales of “mature” video games to minors, and bills are pending, although I am happy to see an interesting sort of alignment in a recent Supreme Court decision:

Washington (CNN) — The Supreme Court has struck down a California law that would have banned selling “violent” video games to children, a case balancing free speech rights with consumer protection.

The 7-2 ruling Monday is a victory for video game makers and sellers, who said the ban — which had yet to go into effect — would extend too far. They say the existing nationwide, industry-imposed, voluntary rating system is an adequate screen for parents to judge the appropriateness of computer game content.

The state says it has a legal obligation to protect children from graphic interactive images when the industry has failed to do so.

“As a means of assisting concerned parents it (the law) is seriously overinclusive because it abridges the First Amendment rights of young people whose parents (and aunts and uncles) think violent video games are a harmless pastime,” wrote Justice Antonin Scalia for the majority.

[…]

In an unusual coalition, Scalia’s majority opinion had the support of Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Sotomayor.

We need more such unusual coalitions if freedom is to survive.

Across the political and social spectrum, there is a constantly creeping tendency to censor a growing number of things, many of them completely innocuous.  Because the censors are mathematical in nature, they have about as much common sense as the TSA screeners:

A BASTION of openness and counterculture, Silicon Valley imagines itself as the un-Chick-fil-A. But its hyper-tolerant facade often masks deeply conservative, outdated norms that digital culture discreetly imposes on billions of technology users worldwide.

What is the vehicle for this new prudishness? Dour, one-dimensional algorithms, the mathematical constructs that automatically determine the limits of what is culturally acceptable.

Consider just a few recent kerfuffles. In early September, The New Yorker found its Facebook page blocked for violating the site’s nudity and sex standards. Its offense: a cartoon of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eve’s bared nipples failed Facebook’s decency test.

There’s more, of course, and it’s from “You Can’t Say That on the Internet” which Glenn Reynolds linked earlier.

Factor in the war against spam, and it can get even crazier. I can’t begin to count the number of times I have had to change words and spelling in blog posts and comments, and on many occasions I have been blocked from sending email.

Sheesh. Being told what to do by zero-tolerance human tyrants is bad enough, but robotic tyranny is just crazy making.

Perhaps that’s the whole idea.

“Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.” Whoever said that got it right.