I for one, welcome our nanny state

There is a phrase that's come up more in the tech punditry recently: nanny state. This comes up when discussing any sort of regulation on technology. "Oh, you want social media platforms to be regulated at all? Guess you want to live in a nanny state. Meanwhile I, a big brain boy myself, think individuals can make good decisions and don't need some governing body telling them what they can and can't do."

At the same time, a lot of people who think this way also love the nanny state and will fight tooth and nail to protect it. Prominent tech pundits will call people "morons" if they think that people should be trusted to install apps outside of the App Store. They love the nanny state when it's corporations doing it, and they hate it when a government does it. Except when it's AI…then it's good when the government does it, bad when corporations do it…it's a lot to keep track of.

Look, I understand there are risks when you let people install software from outside an app store's walled garden. I would actually be okay with Apple requiring App Store distribution as long as they stopped requiring their own payment method and would only block apps for safety and security reasons, not business or content reasons. But these anti-nanny state warriors are tricky to pin down. They want absolute control over how adults use their computers in some cases but not others.

I don't know. How about we tell them that the EU mandates that Apple approve all apps on iPhones? Then suddenly they'll think it's the worst idea in the world.