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Dispatches from the War on Horny: Has the popular Japanese website Pixiv been colonized by the Western Social-Financial-Complex?
Today (well, yesterday as I write this), Pixiv announced that, in cooperation with Visa and MasterCard's policies (well, okay, they say "Brand Protections of Card Networks," but you probably know what that really means and which card networks they're referring to), they will be forbidding certain content from their Booth, Fanbox, and Request services--of note is "sexual exploitation of a minor." If you aren't already, sit down and get (un)comfortable, this is going to take some explaining.
Now, because of the recent Twitter shenanigans, you may have come across these blog posts by Matthew Skala and Ethan Zuckerman about Pawoo, Pixiv's Mastodon instance, and both its sheer popularity as well as how comfortable its userbase is with lolicon content (and how that makes other Mastodon instances chafe). Well, loli content is once again the source of conflict over at Pixiv, and the East-vs.-West dimension seems like it's also at play here.
The new guidelines seem tailor-made to ban loli and guro (AKA gore) content (which, as a reminder, is fictional art), with the former being, well, just plainly popular for what is likely a whole bunch of cultural reasons I can't get into here. While these guidelines focus on payment-based services that Pixiv provides (Booth is a storefront akin to Gumroad or Storenvy or Etsy, Fanbox is a subscription service akin to Patreon, and I presume Request is Pixiv's equivalent to Skeb, a website for commissioning artists), it's not inconceivable to think that this will sooner or later also apply to the regular art-sharing side of Pixiv, the main site itself.
While I can't really link to them (or at least the Sankaku article collating them), there's already some reactions from Japanese users suggesting that Pixiv will have a Tumblr Porn Ban situation on their hands, as users pre-emptively flee the site before they get kicked off and leave for competitors like Nijie (another art-sharing site) and Fantia (another subscription platform).
One other reaction has been to ask "why not avoid this conflict?", as Pixiv could either just not use Visa/MasterCard (like what competing site DMM did), or, more feasibly, implement workarounds like using points purchased with credit cards (like what DLSite and deviantArt do), or even adopt crypto payments. However, it's also likely that Pixiv is completely fine with this, and here's where things get spicy:
Oddly enough, a few months ago, Pixiv instituted DEI-type policies and sensitivity training, which I presume is quite the rare thing to see from a Japanese company. Now, without going way "beyond the wire" epistemically, it does seem like Pixiv has somehow picked up the Western memes of DEI and incorporated them. This likely made them more open to playing by the rules of Visa and MasterCard, not just on paper, but also spiritually. But, again, I don't want to get too into the weeds of cultural colonialism from the West--it could just be that Pixiv really wants the money that flows through the Visa/MC networks and aren't too willing to rock the boat on this matter. I don't think this is the newest form of imposed American hegemony on the Japanese way of life, like Commodore Perry or the post-WWII occupation and reforms (which arguably built the environment that allowed hentai and lolicon to emerge in the first place), but it kinda does feel like it. (Though see also)
There is certainly no shortage of culture-war red meat when it comes to the modern culture clash between America and Japan WRT general social justice issues, from how Japanese Twitter's trending tab was populated by politics and similar current events until Musk took over, to the aforementioned Mastodon/Pawoo conflict where both sides were of completely different mindsets, and the various controversies over censorship and localization with Crunchyroll's anime distribution and Sony's treatment of Japanese games.
And of course, I don't think I need to re-link articles about Visa vs. PornHub or Patreon restricting adult content or so on. You might already be familiar with how PayPal and the credit card companies basically ban porn and other adult content (citing its high risk of chargebacks), whether outright or through sheer inconvenience (there was a comment I saw recently about how a medium-tier/size payment processor for a porn site had to keep re-routing around damage in the form of network bans, plus also the little things like not being able to use PayPal for some sites and services). Financial deplatforming comes in second or third place to regular social media deplatforming in terms of how often it gets discussed, but it's not very far behind.
Just from the practical/ethical standpoint, PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard are so huge and dominant that they probably should just be common carriers, especially considering the non-NSFW areas where they have influence (namely speech and such; dissident shitposters and Russians are probably well-aware of this reality). PayPal can freeze your account and hold onto your money for no good reason (and you especially better hope they don't catch wind of you doing sex work or selling NSFW art commissions), and your only option is to enter arbitrage, if you can.
But there's also the poltical dimension of this: these three companies are part of the massive American/global financial hegemon, able to kick off actors and users at-will, whether they be lowly prostitutes or even entire countries. Having one large actor dominate much of the world's wealth is very likely bad on its own, but the pay-to-play ESG corporatism being used to draw the lines of social acceptability is extra-worrying. The anti-porn policies of 1st-world payment processing may be rooted in social conservatism, but they play nicely with the liberal-progressive strong-arming many worry about. For any country more worried about losing access to international money because they crossed some cultural or social red-line of the West, there are only three options: embrace crypto (and subject yourself to the non-stop boom-and-bust cycles it suffers from), voluntarily disconnect from the global finance system (with all the hard work that entails), or admit that we all live in America.
EDIT: Since this kicked off a whole sub-thread in response to Hlynka, I would just like to state for the record that while I don't really care for Lolicon at all, I am fully aware that it will likely not stop there, and even an otherwise vanilla-but-still-NSFW image might eventually not be allowed. Slippery slopes, Murder-Ghandis, "the line must be drawn here," "first they came for..." etc.
I know this is probably going to come across as uncharitable I find it difficult to get mad about about pedos and gore fetishists getting forced underground, if anything this strikes me as one of the DEI/LGBTQ/BBQ movements few redeeming qualities.
Don't make me tap the sign.
Scoundrels should be oppressed. The fact that honest people can be falsely portrayed as scoundrels, and the necessary mechanisms of justice turned unjustly against them, does not change this reality. Auto-immune disorders can't be resolved by simply switching off the immune system.
Scoundrels should have justice coming to them, for the bad things they actually do, no more, no less. Doing more than that, because they're bad people who deserve being treated badly, is not justice, and it's not what the justice system is supposed do to, and it can get out of control quickly. That's not autoimmune disorder, that's leukemia.
As long as you're keeping to justice, punishing scoundrels for scoundreling, not for existing, honest people have little to fear. Once you cut down the law to get at scoundrels who "hide behind it" by abiding it, it doesn't protect honest people anymore either.
Another issue is that scoundrel can mean bad people, but it also can mean icky people. Lolicons are the latter.
You appear to be approaching the question from a context of laws and other highly legible systems of formal rules. If I'm understanding you correctly, the idea would be that there's a clear separation between the legal rules and the justice system, and the various sorts of informal social consequences for lesser transgressions, with the idea being that the latter are perhaps less important and can more or less be ignored. If someone's not breaking the law, they should be left alone to do as they please, and we should in fact maintain a broad commons of unpoliced social space where people, generally, mind their own business and live and let live.
The problem, as I see it, is that people can do harmful and selfish things that make life a lot worse for everyone around them, and it's not possible to actually codify law against all those things. There's always going to be leaks, cracks, failures of encoding or enforcement. Also, there's a lot of social interactions that the law is simply too slow and regimented to meaningfully police. I observe that social consequences, even very serious social consequences that ruin or even end lives, have more or less always been part of our social structure. My guess is they always will be.
Society needs cohesion to function. broad commons of unpoliced social space where people, generally, mind their own business and live and let live was tried. It collapsed very quickly, and it is not obvious that it can or should be rebuilt. Live-and-let-live failed because it allowed a variety of social harms to spread unchecked, until people found the situation intollerable and began throwing their weight behind various forms of crackdown. And this is the pattern: your laws and social systems have to actually keep things running smoothly, or people will simply tear them out and replace them wholesale.
It is not obvious to me that this is actually true. I know that libertarians and Enlightenment idealists of the first water think it's true, and even desperately want it to be true, but many of the arguments they present seem to me to cash out in various forms of just-world fallacy. Censoring people doesn't seem to lead to you getting censored in any sort of causal fashion. Riding roughshod over the law to secure necessary results doesn't actually force woeful outcomes. Sticking it to the outgroup doesn't by any means result in someone else getting to stick it to you, thus restoring the balance. The Soviets broke every rule, and simply won, killed everyone who got in their way, ruled half the world for the better part of a century, and then more or less quietly died off. There was not and will not be any triumphant counter-revolution that does to them or their posterity what they did to others. Lincoln cut down a variety of laws, because the situation seemed to demand it... and his side won, and imposed their will on the losers, and there was no consequence of any significance that resulted.
It's very comforting to imagine that those who exercise power receive strict karma for the way they use it... but this does not appear to be the case. If you use power benevolently but ineffectually, others can take power away from you, and how they use it has nothing to do with how you used it.
What protects honest people is a cohesive society of other honest people who share their values and their understanding of who is and is not a scoundrel, and are willing and able to punish defectors appropriately. Lacking that, all the laws in the world will not save them.
The distinction does not seem sustainable at our present social scale.
I don't think you understood me correctly, I made no such distinction.
My point applies equally to informal social punishment: You should punish bad actions, not "bad people". At its basis, that's an ethical principle. No one deserves punishment for existing.
There seems to be another misunderstanding here. By "honest people" I'm not referring to the people who want to oppress scoundrels, in fact I believe these people are very often not honest. I'm thinking people who are minding their own business, innocent people.
My point is not that oppression is shortsighted due to risk of backfiring, but ethically fraught due to risk of hurting innocent people (as well as on its own merits in a vacuum). And it does seem obviously, trivially true that if you cut down the law (or non-law principle), it can't protect people anymore.
That said, the risk of backfiring is higher than you believe. Purity spirals, the revolution eating its own children. You talk about the soviets, but "the soviets" includes many people who did not in fact win in the end. Trotsky lost the power struggle with Stalin, and suddenly Trotskyists were considered scoundrel. Yezhov led the great purge and fell to it himself. Not everyone gets to be Stalin, so even the person who doesn't care about hurting innocents might consider self-interest.
You can't sustain an understanding of who is scoundrel. As you say yourself:
The issue is that if you go after bad people and aren't fair to them, it becomes hard for supposed scoundrel to defend themselves.
This also means dishonest people gain power, because they can falsely accuse honest people of being scoundrel. The solution is to go after bad actions, and fairly, so the accused gets a chance to correct potential mistakes.
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