LOS ANGELES — A new initiative by Archive.org — in partnership with many leading digital rights organizations — is sounding the alarm about creeping censorship by projecting a dystopian 2046 version of the internet, including severely restricted access to adult material.
The initiative’s website is called the Way Forward Machine, in reference to Archive.org’s best-known site, the Wayback Machine, a search engine which archives past versions of webpages.
According to a recent article by culture news site MEL, the futurists and digital rights experts advising the project concluded that, 25 years from now, would-be porn viewers will encounter “endless pop-ups that demand a string of verification documents, like driver’s licenses, birth certificates and voting records.”
“Some sites — including social media across the board, not just porn — will even demand scans of your thumbprint and retina to proceed,” MEL’s Jake Hall wrote.
Hall concluded that “what little porn you’re able to access in 2046 might be light-years more vanilla than what you’re used to.”
The Way Forward Machine was created by Archive.org in partnership with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Witness, Fight for the Future, Wikimedia and other noted digital rights organizations.
FSC’s Mike Stabile told Hall that “what we’re already seeing across the globe is that countries are instituting stricter and stricter verification rules for access to adult content.”
To read “This Is What Porn Will Look Like 25 Years From Now,” visit MELmagazine.com.