Cyberpunk 2025: Night of the Dedsec
Part 8: Watch Dogs 2 and celebrity CEOs
Cyberpunk’s purview of “lowlife and high tech” focuses on how rapidly evolving technology affects society. Don’t get me wrong, that part’s important, but it largely treats “technology” as this force that exists outside of humanity. And cyberpunk is important — this is the eighth installment in this series after all.
But technology is not independent. It’s not an outside force. Technology (and access to technology) is made by humans, and it reflects and embodies their beliefs, values, and biases. Overwhelmingly, those beliefs, values, and biases are those held by unconscionably wealthy, middle-aged, cishet, white men.
Something that cyberpunk as a genre missed, I think, is the cults of personality that would grow up around tech billionaires. We were so worried about the technology and its impacts that we didn’t even think to be concerned about the people controlling it.
We need to talk about Roblox
Roblox is wildly popular. It’s operating at a loss of about $1 billion, but it’s still bringing in about $4 billion in revenue. As of 2024, 40% of Roblox players are under the age of 16. According to the Roblox Corporation, half of American children under 16 play Roblox.
Roblox is also not a game. It’s a free-to-play multiplayer online game creation system. The games (“experiences”) you play on Roblox are not created by the Roblox Corporation.
Everything you do on Roblox is user-created. And those creations are unregulated enough that child safety on Roblox has its own wikipedia page. There are concerns about everything from political radicalization to financial exploitation to sexual predation of minors. The problems are big enough that it’s actually a little tricky to find news articles on any of it because the first page of search results are all law firms ready to represent you and your children in any of the many lawsuits. [Ed. note: Is that good?]
Roblox has parental controls for in-app transactions and doesn’t allow adults to DM children under 13. To further reinforce their parental controls, Roblox recently rolled out an AI-powered age verification system. Users now have to submit a video selfie that the system uses to determine the user’s age. Under 13, they lose access to anything not deemed (by the Roblox Corporation and its mods) age-appropriate. If they’re 13-17, you have to add “Trusted Connections” to unlock full chat functionality.
Sounds like a step in the right direction, right? Except, the AI is shit. And it supersedes the parental controls from before.
Wired found numerous cases of the age verification getting its guess wrong. And you can get around this kind of age verification with photo mode in Death Stranding 2. And, worse yet, nefarious actors can already buy verified preteen Roblox accounts on eBay.
This is happening the same week, by the way, that Google is stopping the practice of emailing 13 year olds with instructions on how to turn off parental controls.
The company behind Roblox’s age verification AI is named Persona. As of 2025, a major investor in Persona is the venture capital firm, Founders Fund, which was founded, in part, by Peter Thiel.