Thirteen years of shipping code is a long enough baseline to notice a difference that most people only feel, without naming it. The name is trust, or its absence, and nowhere is the absence more legible than in the friction of a build pipeline.
2013: a first website, built alone, deployed without ceremony. 2015 or 2016: a handful of college friends and a small game bound for the App Store, arriving at the exact moment a 版号 is required, a game license, for anything that wanted to exist on a phone. The license rarely came. Before that gate closed, the terrain had been almost frictionless — developers simply built and shipped, the way water finds a slope.
That gate is the origin point. Everything after inherits its logic.
Call the logic what it is: a presumption of guilt, renewed at every checkpoint. Not aimed at me specifically — aimed at the category I belong to: under population, mistrusted, pending verification.
The sequence has a rhythm by now: scan the face, wait for the review, print the document certifying no prior approval is needed, photograph the document, wait two more days for WeChat, wait seven for the telecom bureau, then discover the edit reverted a field you didn't touch.
Meanwhile, on the other half of the same laptop screen: Vercel, Railway, Render, Supabase, Cloudflare — none of which have ever asked to see my face. Deploy to production takes ninety seconds. The account existed before the coffee finished brewing.
And threaded through both worlds now is the same generation of model — AI agents — writing code at a velocity that makes the regulatory apparatus around it look almost quaint, a customs office built for ox carts processing cargo that arrived by rocket.
Every functioning state regulates; the frontier internet in the West simply arrived a decade and a half earlier and has had that much longer to calcify its own compliance theater, its GDPR banners and SOC 2 audits, which are real friction too, just distributed differently — mostly at the enterprise layer, rarely at the level of a single founder trying to fix a typo.
The question worth sitting with isn't whether to regulate. It's where the state has chosen to place its suspicion, and at what resolution — a dragnet fine enough to catch a solo developer's bio edit, or one calibrated to the actual scale of harm.
Bad actors exist everywhere; that's not in dispute. What's in dispute is whether a system built to catch them, applied at this granularity, is actually measuring risk — or just performing vigilance, at the expense of everyone underneath who was never the target to begin with.
A face, scanned for the twentieth time this year, to authorize four words of copy nobody will read. The document isn't checking whether I'm trustworthy. It's checking whether I'll still show up tomorrow to scan it again — and that, more than any version number or content policy, is the actual product being tested.