The Age of Verification

It wasn’t perfect. But it felt free.

Before TikTok. Before facial recognition. Before every website needed your phone number, your postcode, and a blood sample just to show you a list of biscuits, there was a quieter internet.

I met the internet on a DOS machine at a friend’s house. Usenet felt like a secret attic: text-based, unpretty, and absolutely electric. Then my school got a single modem for a Windows 3.11 computer and I used it to build my first personal website on FortuneCities, a Geocities rival that never got the love it deserved.

Then we got the internet at home and I discovered IRC. ICQ. LiveJournal. I started telling the internet who I was — or at least who I might be.

For a closeted queer kid in a small town, that was like discovering fire in the mountains. Life went from 2D to 3D almost overnight, and I went from thinking there was something wrong with me to knowing that I belonged. That I wasn't alone. That I was okay.

But of course, it was also messy. Taking off the rose-tinted glasses, the internet of the mid-90s was slow, filled with mostly static pages and forums with ten layers of nested replies. I could be weird and anonymous and loud and experimental and terrified — but above all, I was naive. The safety I felt in these nascent online spaces was entirely fictional. That's something that tech companies and governments have spent years trying to "fix".

But all they've done is broken more.

Whatever nostalgia tells us, the internet of the 90s and early 00s wasn’t a utopia. It had trolls and scams and spaces that were anything but safe. But the answer was community. Context. Moderation. Teaching kids how to navigate danger. This seemed like the obvious path forward as the internet grew to be a bigger part of all of our lives.

Instead, we've ended up treating every user like a criminal in waiting. Rather than protecting each other by showing up, we've normalised a locked down experience that expects us to give up our privacy and our data in the process.

And so I’m in mourning. Not for the rose-tinted nostalgia internet of the late 1990s, but for all the possibilities that we haven’t managed to realise. At least not yet. Because here we are in 2025, and the UK’s new age verification law has arrived. It sounds innocuous, even responsible: keep kids off harmful sites, check everyone’s age. Simple, right?

Except it’s not simple. It’s sweeping. It’s vague. It’s invasive. It’s the kind of legislation that treats privacy like an inconvenience and trust like a flaw in the system.

Under the new rules, websites may be required to check your ID just to prove you’re old enough to access certain content, or any content at all. Not just porn. Not just gambling. Everything. It’s a system that outs vulnerable people, opens the door to mass surveillance, and hands the keys to the digital kingdom over to whoever can afford to manage the checkpoints.

All in the name of “protection.”

But protection without freedom isn’t safety. It’s just control in a nicer outfit.

I miss the belief that a digital community could come together and figure all this out as a collective. I miss the days when we hadn’t given up yet. It was full of promise, even when it was full of problems. And I still believe we can reclaim some of that. Not by turning back the clock. But by fighting for something forward-looking and humane.

If you’re in the UK, I strongly encourage you to write to your local MP. Read up on the new law age verification law. Support organisations like the Open Rights Group and Privacy International. Ask awkward questions. Make noise. And, crucially, question any site that asks you to give up your privacy in the name of protection.

We should not have to give up anything in order to be protected.

If you’re building things, whether websites, games, platforms, or art, please build them for humans. Resist control, make weird corners and leave space for pseudonyms. Let people breathe.

We don’t need a perfect web. We just need one worth logging into. One that treats people like people. One that gives space to self-discovery and information exchange over profits or pandering.

At the end of the day, we're all in this together. Let's build a future that's safe, warm, and above all, human.