My opinion is that technology is rapidly advancing without with a comparable advancement on the social and cultural level. We still exist in a very hierarchical society, and as such, this technology, as you note, is controlled by a few who want to use it to regulate human behavior according to a synthetically created "consensus" reality.

Hence, in a way, the material reality we know is, in one sense, every bit as crafted as the digital world of VR in that it's designed to be an ideal world for the few, not the many. Yes, I fully believe that there are Objective Truths in the realms of biology, physics, and even psychology. However, one of these obvious Objective Truths is that human nature is malleable to social influence, and those who control the media and digital technology do engage in very actively molding our perceived reality in many ways. This ironically includes the idea that Truth is completely malleable. As a result, we do not live in a world of minimal laws and rules that work for everyone, but one that forces most of us to work for a few.

Even my friends the Libertarians are going from full-out supporters of the system that governs the rules of material access to something more akin to a love-hate relationship with it, hoping to find a way to force it to produce a set of civil liberties that can be reconciled with the few controlling how material compensation is governed.

Why is the AoC "protecting" latex? Because as I and others have often said, these laws and rules are less about protecting actual young people as they are with preserving a Paradigm and forcing society to conform to it. It's ultimately about controlling younger people and maintaining their servile place in society via controlling their Image, not keeping them "safe" from predators. There are more democratic ways of going about that, but the moral crusaders are authoritarian at heart, and they clearly find democratic principles (such as freedom of speech and due process) to be an inconvenience to their crusades. And as also noted before, reconciling this powerful, deeply ingrained emotional sentiment with a hefty respect for civil liberties is putting Libertarians and those on the classic left in a hefty bind and weakening their overall platforms. The authoritarians know this, which is why they so heavily shame and blame those who do not adopt the sentiment and engage in futile attempts to incorporate it into their civil libertarian worldview.

Too many civil libertarians in this day and age accept the Paradigm as part of Objective Truth and natural law rather than the synthetic cultural creation that it is. One of the difficulties created by our current hierarchical society is to how to differentiate between what is Objective Truth and what is Crafted Reality.