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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.
I've been feeling of late that we've (well, maybe not the youngest of us) living through The Internet going through the entire cycle from "new digital frontier" to "the railroad has moved in and brought civilization". Open rangeland has been wholesale fenced off into walled gardens, and those of us "digital natives" (not really analogous to Native Americans, but the term was bandied about a couple decades back) are sometimes struggling to deal with the massive cultural changes that entails.
Google is talking about disabling side-loading on Android, making users unable to run their own code on their own devices. Social networks are closing access to non-account users. New PC games are even talking about requiring Secure Boot, which limits what you can do with your own purchased hardware. And as you mention, payment processors are swinging their weight around to control what we do online.
I remember reading RMS' short story "The Right to Read" (written 1996) probably 20 years ago. Stallman is a controversial figure for a bunch of reasons --- I suppose all prophet figures are --- but it feels disturbingly prescient in a way that I remember thinking "oh, that can't all happen" at the time, but subtly thinking "oh, this is normal" in 2025. I'm not sure I like the changes, even if I can see why they're taken: security (keep your devices updated, required Internet connections), copyright (although Netflix, Spotify, and iTunes did manage to diffuse the Copyright Wars of the 2000's), or limiting unfettered access to obscene and abhorrent content ("think of the children" hits different once you have kids).
I suppose I'd be interested in reading "closing of the digital frontier" cyberpunk science fiction, if anyone has recommendations.
Only for being too correct. The baseless character assassination he suffered was purely to sideline him so that Google and Microsoft could get the foundation he formerly headed to be more "reasonable" and/or diminish their influence in total.
I think he probably is someone that's hard to deal with in person. I saw him speak once in college, and the most memorable part wasn't his own presentation, but when he showed up at a symposium the next day and started asking questions about copyright licenses in a presentation about algorithms (I honestly don't remember what sort) and not accepting "we haven't gotten to the point of releasing any code, and haven't decided on that yet" as an answer.
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