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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25543 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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There has been a recent crackdown on naughty games on steam and itch.io. The game platforms say the crackdown has come from payment processors. Payment processors have said they don't want their business associated with unsavory practices, and that adult products have higher charge back rates. Some people have blamed activist religious groups on aggressively lobbying the payment processors for this crackdown.

I mostly feel a sense of annoyance. My libertarian leanings have me feeling certain ways about all this.

  1. The biggest problem is that payment processors are usually an unholy alliance of governments, banks, and financial groups. This makes them allergic to competition and new entrants to the market. The Internet has reshaped society over the last three decades and I'd say only 1.5 payment processors came out of it. PayPal, and the crypto market. The term "coup complete" got thrown around a lot in the Biden presidency to describe what was necessary to build a competing Internet ecosystem.
  2. I'm worried this might signal the revival of the religious culture wars that happened in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000's. It's frustrating to me but a lot of people seem to gravitate towards religion of some kind. I think woke culture has plenty of religious elements. The atheist movement in the 2000s seemed genuinely anti-religious. But it seems the longer term strategy is just have a different religion.
  3. Neutrality as a default. This is the end goal. Once you accept that a thing is subject to politics it becomes entirely subject to politics. We are cancelling thots and porn this year. 4 years ago it was lab leak conspiracies. I certainly think some things are more important to not be censored, but the machinery of censorship seems to work regardless of the subject being censored. Once it is built it will be used.

My libertarian leanings have me feeling certain ways about all this.

This is genuinely interesting to me as I think what these payment processors do is exactly in line with libertarian view. They are private companies and they may refuse business to anybody for any reason.

There is a spectrum of private company all the way up to government run "business" (like the post office). Payment processors are much closer to the government run business side of that spectrum. The closer any business is to being government run the more of a problem I have with it's operations being decided via politics.

It's not because I just dislike government. It's because the private market has corrective mechanisms that discourage politicized decision making. The more free market type businesses have the opposite problem, where they can be too heavily incentivised by the profit motive and not consider political things like "maybe this is really evil".

The closer any business is to being government run the more of a problem I have with it's operations being decided via politics.

I regret to inform you that business and politics are inseparably intertwined aspects of the same continuum, if not just one and the same, full-stop.

For better or worse, there is not, never has been, and likely never will be a clean, non-arbitrary divide between the two.

That's why the Bitcoin and crypto-crowd overplayed the selling point of the tech, thinking it provides some pathway to this purified economic system of the future that does away with the broad experimentation and advantages of prior economic systems and mixed economies. Anyone thinking economics is going to completely do away with politics in the future has oversold themselves on an ideology. The problem being that techno-libertarians may want to live in this kind of fantasy society, but normal human beings do not.

As I said things are a spectrum, you said continuum. I don't think I'm asking for an impossible standard. The post office will send any letter between two private addresses, no matter what words you put in there. They'll send it no matter who you are or the recipient is or who they voted for. As far as I know they've maintained this level of non-politics since they were created. Even when they were a much more essential service.

Smut has been legally non-mailable at most times and in most places, including the USA for most of its existence.

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