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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25649 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.

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.

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