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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25588 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.

How sure are we this was done by religious groups, rather than, say, feminist ones? Or even that this actually is somehow politically neutral? If they can exert control over payment processors, focusing on porn would show a poor judgement of priorities. Not that it hasn't happened before, of course, but I am wondering if this isn't reflexive finger-pointing.

It's frustrating to me but a lot of people seem to gravitate towards religion of some kind.

Just embrace it, bro. Trying to force humans to go against their nature is the common thread between all the dystopian social and political projects we've ever seen.

The atheist movement in the 2000s seemed genuinely anti-religious.

I don't know if I agree on that. It might have been comitted to shitting on Islam as much as it was to shitting on Christianity, but it was no stranger to bizarre religious beliefs.

itbwas no stranger to bizarre religious beliefs.

What do you have in mind?

There was a pretty big memetic overlap with rationalists, so all the mumbo-jumbo about uploading your body and freezing your brain was pretty popular, but Scientism is the elephant in the room here, I think.

I agree with @WandererintheWilderness. Speculation about future technologies is in a separate category from religious beliefs.

Soft disagree on that one.

Much of it is very plainly wishful thinking in the face of mortality.

One of my last AAQCs was about how tiresome I find the "you're only speculating about possible future technologies because you're afraid of death" "argument". As I argued there, even if that's the underlying psychological motivation for why people are speculating about said technologies, it doesn't really tell us anything about how likely said technologies are to come to pass.

When someone's speculating about how different future societies might be to our own, before accusing them of wishful thinking, just think about how bizarre our society would seem to someone from five hundred years ago. I'm sure hundreds of years ago when Alice said "in the future, we'll be able to treat infections easily, and smallpox will be eradicated, and amputation won't be the first port of call for damaged limbs, and only a small proportion of women will die in childbirth", Bob would be there to condescendingly pat on her head and tell her that her childish wishful thinking would get her nowhere. Or, as a comic recently shared in these parts wittily put it, "ME GO TOO FAR!"

As I argued there, even if that's the underlying psychological motivation for why people are speculating about said technologies, it doesn't really tell us anything about how likely said technologies are to come to pass.

That's true. And it may as well be true that after death, we all go to heaven. I wouldn't know either way. Granted, one of these may well become observable one day, unlike the other.

"ME GO TOO FAR!

That things never yet ceased to amuse me.

how tiresome I find the "you're only speculating about possible future technologies because you're afraid of death" "argument"

It's not an argument, you're correct. It's part observation, part speculation, on my part, something I find interesting in its own right. I don't mean to make any point about what future technologies will or won't be capable of. I also don't intend to pry open the brains of third party futurists to try and find out whether I'm even right or wrong about my theory. It's just my completely personal view that I'm putting out here for the sake of a conversation about the parallels between futurism and religion. If that isn't interesting to you, but futurism itself is, then I understand that but I also think we can have our cake and eat it by just having both discussions, with no need to shut down one for the other.

I'm sure hundreds of years ago when Alice said "in the future, we'll be able to treat infections easily, and smallpox will be eradicated, and amputation won't be the first port of call for damaged limbs, and only a small proportion of women will die in childbirth", Bob would be there to condescendingly pat on her head and tell her that her childish wishful thinking would get her nowhere.

Yeah, guilty as charged, I'm a Bob. I leave it to the Alices to prove me wrong.

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