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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.
Everything ebbs and flows. Lenny Bruce made a career on censorship and now far worse things are being actively promoted by the large media networks.
The next frontier for pure computing is crypto. I don't mean the financial instruments like bitcoin, but all of the superscale distributed information sharing protocols. Interplantery Filesystem comes to mind.
This will, like everything in life, be both good and bad. Good in that actually free, I-control-all-of-my-own-shit computing plus actual anonymity (until quantum is a thing). It will also be bad in that the bad people will have access to all of this too - there's already cheese pizza on the main crypto blockchain for instance. But how new is this? Modulo math and cryptography have been around long enough that anybody who really truly wants to send out "bad" data (bad in a moral or ethical sense or w/e) has been able to.
There will be a period of transition. I think we're already in it. People who have to learn how to use computers again, at a lower level. It is amazing the number of college undergrads who begin a compsci class and have literally never heard of a "directory structure" before and have never, ever popped open a terminal of any type.
And that last part is the real shame of it. The gamification / subscriptionification of personal computing has destroyed what was (and will be, eventually) a fundamentally liberating technology. A few weeks ago, my Dad (late 70s) bought a new laptop with Windows 11. He was an early user of COBOL (!) back in the day. To see - and help - him trudge through all of the surveillance-ware screens was deeply sad. It was like watching a delta blues musician see Mick Jagger shimmy to "Brown Sugar" at some chintzy Las Vegas mega venue. His simple comment was succinct; "computers aren't fun anymore."
But I remain an optimist, although not one that believes "the good" comes for free or without some metaphysical combat. The bifurcation, I think, will be people who are content to let Corporate BigAI into the very depths of their minds and hearts simply in exchange for a daily (hourly?) dose of DOPEamine. On the other side of that line will be folks who value the human spirits role in intellect, epistemology, and information / knowledge / wisdom cultivation. I think this later group will engage in some sort of "dark-techno-renaissance" where some really hardcore but compelling Linux distros pop up. Perhaps to the point that a crypto-first layer of the internet emerges. A kind of BBS / IRC version .... 2030.0?
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