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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25647 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.

Some people have blamed activist religious groups on aggressively lobbying the payment processors for this crackdown.

Can we look for specifics here? This comes from Collective Shout, which is not a religious organisation, and in their FAQ claim that the accusation that they're "easily offender, prudish, moralisers, or religious fundamentalists" is a deflection tactic used by others in bad faith.

As a prudish religious person myself, I don't think there's anything bad with being one, but the idea that we specifically were behind this seems false.

They are listed as an Australian pro-life feminist group. Pro-life tends to map to the right, feminism to the left. Both sides of the GamerGate coin are trying to tie them to the other side, though there's always a risk mapping another country's left and right to yours. That said, I don't know that the evidence is there that Collective Shout is really responsible for Visa's behavior, or a convenient scapegoat.

Good correction. I had a surface level recollection of the details, and the article I read was probably a left leaning author so putting the blame on religious people was probably better in their mind than putting the blame on feminists.

I mostly don't want to go after any of the groups that might have moral objections. For both practical reasons and philosophical reasons. I'd rather just remove the tools of censorship so that no one can use them.

They are shriveled up old feminists, it might as well be a religious organization as far as I'm concerned. Their holy sacrament is dressing up the women and their original sin is patriarchy or whatever.

See below - I think that precision when it comes to identifying an opponent is instrumentally good.

I am personally uninterested in the exact ideology behind restrictions on communication between consenting adults. Besides, targeted media is one to which both feminism and Christianity have objections too. I will note, however, that self-idenfication standard is not absolute, person can be a nazi, without claiming to be one, for example. A Christian organization will find allies among those on the left more easily, if it puts its objections in leftist-coded language.

Edit: If one lived in a society with poweful faction of Christians, one would be incentivised to put ones moral statements in terms of Christian vocabulary, even if one was not a Christian. Likewise with feminism. Thus mere choice of words is not that good of a test. In my opinion a better one would be finding a piece of media about which Christian and feminist opinions differ, and see Massed Yell's evaluation of it.

I am personally uninterested in the exact ideology behind restrictions on communication between consenting adult

Ok, then let's blame it all on liberals and libertarians.

Naw, if we're just making up who's to blame, lets go with the Jews. They're used to it.

Did libertarians (libers) have anything to do with A) payment pricessors coalescing into a handful of entities and B) payment pricessors feeling empowered to block lawful transactions?

US had for a long time light anti-trust regulation, a point libers were in favour of. But there is a network effect at play here, more powerful than the former argument. Thus A is more due to economics, than ideology.

B is a consequence of Operation Chokepoint, that lawsuit against PornHub where a judge considered Visa not obviously not involved. There former is a point where libers can say with pride they were opposed, the latter is more difficult. If Visa picks and choses who it deals with, and one of those it picks violates the law, holding Visa complicit is not obviously against libertarianism. But the fact that payment processors are not common carriers is at least adjacent to libertarian values. As libers are apt to consider freedom of association important, they consider common carriers something to resist. I am sure you are familiar with these types with regards to social media censorship.

But I admit I overstated my point. If one knows the cause, one can better argue it. And libers played a at best a bit part.

Did libertarians (libers) have anything to do with A) payment pricessors coalescing into a handful of entities and B) payment pricessors feeling empowered to block lawful transactions?

Why are you suddenly caring who gets blamed?

Because witch hunts are a thing. And blaming the wrong target, especially blaming someone much weaker than the actual culprit, leads to witchhunts.

Yes, that's my point. When it was people blaming Christians for the actions of a feminist activist group his response was

I am personally uninterested in the exact ideology behind restrictions on communication between consenting adults. Besides, targeted media is one to which both feminism and Christianity have objections too.

When @ArjinFerman jokingly blamed it on libertarians in response, he wrote a 4 paragraph response trying to clear them of blame on the issue.

I'd argue that factional differences among one's opponents are relevant for understanding those foes, even if for only tactical reasons. If nothing else, if you approach this particular drama by concluding you need to attack Christians, you're likely to be quite ineffective, because they weren't the ones who got this done.

For what it's worth, my view on the object level issue is:

It's rather shady to go after payment processors specifically, as a way of putting pressure on other platforms. Collective Shout would have been better or more honest to make their cases to Steam or Itch.io directly.

It would be reasonable for platforms themselves to make decisions about what they want to host, including NSFW content; there would be nothing in principle objectionable about Steam or Itch.io making such decisions.

I think it would be best for society overall if a platform like Steam made a decision not to host porn. This is because I think it's socially beneficial for porn to be at least somewhat taboo or embarrassing; since Steam is the default game platform, what it hosts helps to set the standard. So I think Steam shouldn't host NSFW games for the same reason that YouTube doesn't host porn. Itch.io, on the other hand, is pretty heavily into the pornographic/NSFW space already, and it makes more sense for it to lean into its niche.

That said I do not think the government ought to compel Steam or other companies to offer or hide certain content, from the top down.

I am willing to accept tactical compromises on issues like this - for instance, Steam hosts porn currently, but Steam tries to avoid hosting 'hateful' content, and if the definition of hateful continues to expand, I could see a case for total content-neutrality as a compromise. However, at present I think total content-neutrality is unlikely to happen. In principle, though, I agree with you that total neutrality would be a decent Schelling fence.

Collective Shout would have been better or more honest to make their cases to Steam or Itch.io directly.

They have in the past and Gaben has told them and other similiar busy bodies to pound sand time and time again. Even that one time when journos threw a hissy fit about the game Hatred existing. The pr people managed to convince a drone in valve marketing to pull the game off the store, as soon as Gabe found out he re-instated the game and fired the guy who did it.

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