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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26135 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.

On the one hand that's right.

On the other, as we discussed a year back: the nature of the financial system is everyone is tied to everybody else.

Even if one person creates the 'maximum' libertarian payment processing company, the fact is that they still have to tie into the larger financial network in order to transfer funds around. And thus every other node on the network can blacklist them, meaning they can't very easily process payments, EXCEPT amongst their existing userbase.

As I said:

It'd be nice to think of our financial system as mostly as set of dumb tubes that transmit the data representing our money around without caring much about the start and endpoint... with a lot of protections in place to mitigate fraud, theft, and user error. But ultimately a financial company is operated by humans who are subject to legal jurisdiction of some country or other, and have to maintain access to the global finance system if they want to take that money to any other jurisdiction, so in reality the 'rules' are set based on what all participants are willing to tolerate.

Unless you can create a financial system entirely beyond the jurisdiction of any overbearing governments (crypto was supposed to do this, but alas) then realistically, the system will fall down to the level of the least tolerant users.

So yeah, its 'private companies' who can do business with whomever they want, but there's really NO scenario where I can set up a bank or payment processor specifically to do business with degenerates and expect to just be left alone to do so.

On the gripping hand banking is not a free market and the government should force banks to accept transactions which can't be directly proven to be for purposes of crime, and no happy go lucky maximum joy anime pixels on the screen aren't a crime yet.

I guess next you'd also tell them that they can't take credit risk into account when issuing loans.

Yeah, I tried thinking it through in that previous thread.

Basically, you could conceive of a basic 'right to transact' that means that banks have to accept transactions that are under, say $500, maybe up to some maximum on a monthly basis or something, without concern for the source of funds or the destination, as long as there is no evidence of explicit criminal activity.

And the Gov't could provide "chargeback insurance" to said banks in exchange. Similar to FDIC insurance. Government can of course investigate any transactions they deem actually suspicous.

The goal is to just prevent any 'debanking' of anyone merely for doing 'icky' stuff, and allow these niche businesses to eke out an existence.

Banks need the ability to define the boundaries of their business in order to function. They also need the ability to refuse individual customers they don't trust - this is what a credit score is trying to systematise.

If banks were required to open accounts for anyone who isn't provably a crook, then the main beneficiaries would be crooks with plausible deniability.

Why do bank accounts and payments need credit? A checking account (no overdraft) and pre-funded payment do not need credit at all.

If phone companies were required to give a phone line to anyone who is not provably a crook, then the main beneficiaries would be crooks with plausible deniability. Substitute for any other service. Does this sound reasonable at all?

Because of chargebacks. If Alice steals Bob's payment info and sends money to Carol, when Bob notices this he's going to request the money back. If you are Carol's bank, your options are:

  1. Refuse. This gets you blacklisted from other banks, and your customers can't receive money.
  2. Pay it back yourself. This means charging significant fees as fraud insurance, while also allowing criminals to keep their fraudulent gains.
  3. Request the money back from Carol. This is equivalent to offering her credit.
  4. Hold the money until the chargeback can't be requested. This takes multiple months, and most merchants do not want to (or can't afford to) wait that long before actually getting their money.

In practice banks almost always do 2. ‘Overdraft fees’ exist for a reason.

What I meant for option 2 was pay it back yourself instead of getting the money from the customer. While it is true that banks will pay overdrafts initially, the customer is still ultimately on the hook for the money. The bank doesn't say "we paid that for you, don't worry about it". They say "we paid that for you as a loan, now you need to give us the money we sent". Which is option 3.

If phone companies were required to give a phone line to anyone who is not provably a crook, then the main beneficiaries would be crooks with plausible deniability.

I'm pretty sure that under US common carrier rules, telephone companies are largely required to offer service in this fashion as regulated utilities. See also "universal service" requirements.

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".

Do you have any requirement for what constitutes as "government run business"? For instance a small restaurant is already subject to insane amount of government meddling - from zoning rules, food safety regulation, employee regulation or anti-discrimination laws etc. so it can be considered as largely government run business, as most of the decisions are mandated or heavily influenced by government.

Which leads me to my next question as your explanation provides an interesting dichotomy - the closer the government involves itself in a private business, the less "politicized" it should be? This is impossible, government involvement is already politicization of that business. Did you mean something else?

"Politicized" in this context means for the business to act against its customers based on politics.

This does not make sense to me. Deep down majority of businesses "act against customers" - they want to extract as much money from them for as little cost as they can get away with. One can definitely consider this stance as a highly political one, at minimum businesses are not supporting communism or similar political stances.

What do you mean exactly?

No, that isn't true.

  1. You have principal/agent problems where the people working for the businesses get a chance to personally gain by promoting their politics, even if it hurts the business.
  2. It's not true that businesses want to make as much money as possible. Rather, businesses who don't don't compete well and eventually lose. It can take a long time before the business actually goes broke. Disney has lost a lot of money by putting woke in Star Wars and Marvel, but such losses aren't going to drive Disney out of business for the forseeable future.
  3. Owners spending money on wokeness (and making the business, and indirectly themselves, lose money) is ultimately no different from owners spending money on, say, baseball games and directly losing money on them. The owners gain personally. (Related to #1 and #2, if the business is big.)

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.

Operation Choke Point. Also the Biden administration leaning on social media to censor inconvenient truths. There's more than a little government coercion hiding behind the mask of private companies making internal decisions.

Operation Choke Point was an actual conspiracy to unbank people in just that manner. They made sure to coordinate it using in-person meetings and to not document anything in order to frustrate possible investigations into their actions. Like a band of criminals. It is insidious.

And now when we see the same pattern, we're supposed to believe that THIS TIME it isn't political, it's just the moral paragons at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs wouldn't dare involve themselves with "smut". LOL.

It could be completely internal but then there's the Civil Rights Act and over a half of a century of discrimination against white males (particularly right leaning) in the private sector.

Or it would be if

1) The pressure being applied to them wasn't possibly being applied clandestinely by governments, as with Operation Choke Point. This is speculative, of course, but well-precedented.

and

2) There weren't barriers to entry, very much caused by government, to building a new payment processor without these restrictions. This is the "just build your own international financial system" objection.

This is the "just build your own international financial system"

And not just "build your own international financial system" but "build an international and national financial systems on every served country down to the street level" as banks tend to be unwilling (usually due to government pressure) to even transfer money between the official and inofficial financial systems.

This is the "just build your own international financial system" objection.

As much as I'm not a huge fan of cryptocurrency stans --- it has spurred a bunch of interesting cryptography research, and there are a few reasonable uses, and a bunch of speculators who seem to care about neither --- I have to give them "and they took that as a challenge" on this one.

Well that’s the Hegelian dialectic of freedom innit?

“I think everyone should be free to do whatever they want.”

“Ok then I’m free to make you my slave.”

“Wait that’s not what I meant.”

Of course recourse to a “nonaggression principle” already admits that 1) there are certain other “natural” principles that must be allowed to impinge on the purity of absolute freedom, which leaves open the possibility that there are further “natural” principles that remain undiscovered, and 2) we are in want of a definition of “aggression”, which of course immediately drags us into hopeless complications and confusions.

The natural principles are in one sense a result of natural selection, and in another sense, properties of abstract rationality itself. This is quite literally where social structure emerges from: groups that constantly kill each other by using physical force to resolve disputes are naturally out-competed by groups that preserve their members by resolving disputes in other ways. The laws that emerge might seem messy at first, but all sane laws ultimately just boil down to some flavor of universal quantification: there is a "naturality" to solutions like "person A cuts the cake in 2 pieces, but person B gets to choose which piece is theirs." (to be more mathematically formal, the naturality is if you switched person A and person B, you'd still get the same answer--that the cake is cut in half--which is why this answer is, in some peremptory sense, "better"/more fundamental/more natural than all other answers). This is essentially the Golden Rule / Rawls's Veil of Ignorance / etc. etc. To the extent our complicated mess deviates from this underlying principle, it's just a buggy system -- and any people less myopic and better able to deal with the bugs will be more efficient, and thus ultimately be capable of conquering us, further manifesting the underlying natural structure.

The natural principles are in one sense a result of natural selection, and in another sense, properties of abstract rationality itself. This is quite literally where social structure emerges from: groups that constantly kill each other by using physical force to resolve disputes are naturally out-competed by groups that preserve their members by resolving disputes in other ways.

How did you come up with this? The only true "natural" social law is the law of the jungle or might makes right. History is full of stories where peaceful and pacifist societies were wiped out by groups that cooperated exactly in order to gain strength to protect and impose their will. Like this one or this one or this one.

Maybe I expressed myself poorly.

Let me ground it in hard technical reality: consider Bitcoin. Each individual is pursuing their own interest, and it is this collective pursuit of self-interest that compels the effectiveness of the blockchain into existence. If I make a blockchain where only my magic key can mine coins, that blockchain is great for me, and it may even work well without any bugs -- but nobody will use it because there's nothing in it for them. It is difficult to out-compete Bitcoin with an "unfair" blockchain, in the cut-the-cake-in-two-unequal-pieces sense, though we witness innumerable attempts to do so backed by astronomical amounts of wealth and marketing propaganda.

I'm merely contending that these same underlying dynamics are at play everywhere, and that Bitcoin (or any fair blockchain) is just the most formally-grounded vindication of it.

Of course, you may say "But Soteriologian, aren't central banks kinda like a blockchain with one set of magical mining keys, just like you describe?" Yes, yes, just wait. The truth--meaning the underlying, peremptory rational structure of the universe--will manifest itself. It just takes some time.

The truth--meaning the underlying, peremptory rational structure of the universe--will manifest itself. It just takes some time.

Where does this true underlying structure manifest itself? If anything, it is the law of the jungle that manifests constantly all around us for hundreds of millions of years. That it is why it is called the law of the jungle - each individual or a group of any given species only gets what they can keep from their peers or predators or what they can extract from their prey. You may point out to some groups - like hives of insects or packs of wolves or tribes of apes - but even they themselves are subject to inherent law of the jungle in competition with other groups and organizms.

So again - demonstrate how nonviolent voluntary cooperation is some underlying structure of the universe, some primordial social law. And no, the bitcoin example does not cut it. It would be on the level of an example where a cow eats grass and then shits to provide fertilizer as some "underlying structure" - and even then it is not clear if cows do not commit "violence" on grass which just accepted its fate to be regularly and violently culled, with some grass species developing abrasive properties to harm ruminants who in turn evolved more durable teeth and mouth to chew on it.

I just don't get this hippie talk of peaceful underlying structure of the universe.

“Ok then I’m free to make you my slave.”

"And I'm free to kill you for trying. Let's find a middle ground, eh?"

Perhaps we could agree on a compromise where we cede some of our natural freedom to a governing institution in exchange for protection and stability? I've written more about this in my pamphlet, Behemoth.

The only people who might be persuaded by that argument, are the ones roughly evenly matched with you in terms of armaments, which probably does not overlap much with the ones saying things like "I'm free to make you a slave".

This not a one-on-one conversation in reality. The actuality has been hashed out for millennia and many a liter of spilled blood. That's why we have a reasonably stable equilibrium of countries and armed forces/police with a monopoly on violence. If someone threatens to enslave me, I'm going to call the cops.

“I think everyone should be free to do whatever they want.”
“Ok then I’m free to make you my slave.”
“Wait that’s not what I meant.”
"Shut up Slave, that pyramid isn't going to build itself" cracks whip

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