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Dispatches from the War on Horny/Payment Processors: the other shoe has dropped for Pixiv.
A year and a half ago, Pixiv made signs that they'd be clamping down on content on some of their services to appease Visa and MasterCard. Today, Pixiv announces that US and UK users will face restrictions on content they can upload. (Specific details here.)
Currently remains to be seen how much this affects the Western artists who are on Pixiv, but it doesn't bode well. Some think this portends a coming era of digital pillarization, and while I won't rule out the possibility that things will get so walled off that VPNs become a necessity, it's hard to say how likely that actually is.
EDIT: This may be the rationale for the change.
I will ask the same question that I've asked repeatedly: if porn is so bad and the NWO wants to get you addicted to it, then why do they make it so very difficult to distribute? Why does it seem like they're clamping down harder over time? Even pornhub can't take credit cards anymore, they only accept ACH transfers and crypto.
Porn (in the very broadest sense of the term) is one of the only authentically countercultural genres of art today, as evidenced by the severe institutional restrictions it faces. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Because they don't want people making and distributing porn independently of party control. Even the "liberatory queer sexuality" team want it managed like the government affiliated "kids BDSM" clubs in Germany.
Or the Sozialwerk.LGBT+ club for kids 13+ in Switzerland that made the news recently, with the big box of sex toys on the table.
These groups don't want natural sexual expression, and certainly don't want it tainted by capitalism! They want it broadly repressed and its release carefully managed by Licensed Queer Social Workers.
Please explain to me how the existence of a single "government affiliated kids BDSM club" is evidence they don't want people "making and distributing porn independently of party control"? Homemade, freely available porn gets billions of views every day on reddit and twitter, and of course there are many dedicated porn sites.
To be explicit, your reasoning is deeply flawed and your conclusions are nonsensical, it's like a rdrama comment. It's the 'one single coherent actor is behind every single news headline that annoys me and that thing is the PedoNazis' theory of politics
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Germans being sexual degenerates is hardly a recent development.
But they're also one of the worst offenders attacking popular content for arbitrary reasons. They'll order takedowns of "big titty high school ninjas 7", but give government art grants to obese men dressing up in latex women masks to perform home castrations and penis bisections on themselves.
They want to ban independent production of pornography for the same reason they ban independent schooling: so it can be run by men like Helmut Kentler.
Perhaps government actions are often arbitrary? Maybe the person who did the former has different values, and has a different job, than the person who did the latter?
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I think do_something has the more accurate perspective on this. Yes, the sorts of people raising hell about sexually-explicit LGBTQ educational books being challenged in libraries are ironically against many things that are sexual-but-anime-flavored (and Lord help you if you like lolicon/shotacon), but the truth is probably more that the ascended progressive movement has many facets to it, not all of which are on the same page.
The explanation that fits is that the progressive movement is against straight male sexuality. The objectionable sexual anime-flavored things are generally that. Drag queen story hour, explicit LGBTQ educational books, and the other examples of them promoting sexuality to minors aren't.
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I think there has been a change in recent years, brought on the effects of children having 24/7 access to porn during the pandemic. The porn is blamed, rather than government policy that prevented children from doing anything other than sitting down in front of an ipad and browsing the internet all day, but hey ho what are you going to do.
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answer is simple, there is no NWO
again, there is no central ruling cabal but many forces in play. Some push porn and that nearly all deviations are fine, some run financial puritanism or their lawyers told them that not processing problematic porn payments would be a good idea. And many more in between.
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Porn is a huge liability as some subgenres are risky or even illegal. From relatively small things similar to other content platforms such as copyright issues but to wacky stuff like gore and bestiality to outright illegal content such as child abuse or revenge porn. There are other items that are similarly problematic be it "bath salts", gambling-like businesses, legal drugs and so forth.
Legal drugs is just because of federal policy though, right? If Congress repeals the federal weed ban tomorrow, it’ll be sold at Walmart and CVS in months. The reason weed is still a shady business is because banks can’t do business with them because the feds say it’s still illegal, they just don’t enforce the law against states that have legalized.
Sure, what they share with porn is that they are age restricted and represent health or other legal risk to customers and in general are mired with similar web of local/regional/state regulation. Similar issues exist if let's say small craft beer company wants to open webshop and searches for payment processor. Nobody wants to be on the other side of a lawsuit when kids get alcohol poisoning by buying booze with mum's credit card.
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Porn is inherently low status. Even in the 80s, being caught going into a porn store to rent a VHS was the height of embarrassment, made fun of on sitcoms etc.
It’s not just that horniness is embarrassing. The level of cringe was much greater that, say, merely catching your friend picking someone up at the bar for a one-night stand. The idea that you watch porn instead of actually getting laid makes you - in the eyes of much of society - a loser.
This is what really makes selling porn online so difficult to make profitable. Terms like “post nut clarity” (which, yes, has a real-world meaning but is most commonly used in relation to porn) speak to the shame of the whole enterprise. Men don’t want to feel like the kind of men who pay for porn.
There’s more deniability when it’s free. If I relentlessly make fun of Disney adults for 10 years and then go with my brother and his kids when they invite me along, my cognitive dissonance is limited. If I spend $300 for a ticket and rock up with Minnie Mouse ears and a rockabilly dress and a Snow White tattoo, I’m going to feel like a fucking loser.
Men don’t want to pay for porn because it makes them feel like losers. I don’t see why that’s not the obvious answer. When men had to pay to access it, more swallowed their pride. Now that it’s free and plentiful online, only the most committed coomers do.
I guess so, but again, there has been massive social change since then in that regard, including dating and so on. For example, the notion that the Sexual Revolution might have deleterious long-term social consequences was almost completely fringe back then, as opposed to today.
In the 80’s? The days of the moral majority? Opposition to the sexual Revolution was if anything more mainstream than today.
The Moral Majority indeed got a lot of attention. On the surface it could indeed appear that the Christian Right is influential. But the social reality was that the abortion rate, the rate of adolescent sex and alcohol consumption, violence, and teenage pregnancy were all peaking in the late '80s and early '90s. It was also the time when the distribution of porn in VHS format was becoming normal in the first place.
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In Japan this behavior wouldn't even be noteworthy. The tattoo might be seen as gauche, unless of course it washed off and was applied to your cheek or something. I knew a girl once named Mitsuki because her mother loved Disney--in Japanese Mitsuki is a play on ミッキー or Mickey, where the ッ there represents a pause, unless it's a big ツ in which case it's just TSU, as in Mitsuki. She's a lovely girl, I still follow her on Instagram.
But we were talking about porn, sorry for the derail. It's true a non-Japanese person engaging in this (Disneyphile) behavior would probably be seen as a square peg--probably not a fucking loser though. More like a white girl in a kimono. Noticeable, but not in any bad way (I'm talking Japanese perception here). My former girlfriend (not Japanese) used to walk around Osaka age 25 wearing a Curious George backpack because she imagined she could get away with it here. And true enough, probably she did. But I knew better.
Edit: As for porn, it's illegal here to show genitalia in porn, so there's a giant underground, of course. I think the same stigma on porn buyers that you mention applies here.
2nd edit: After reading the pocket pussy comment below, I reflected on the ubiquity of the Tenga in Japanese drug stores. I've never seen anyone buy one though.
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Tangentially related but this paragraph reminded me of a passage from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity:
I prefer Diogenes the Cynic to C.S. Lewis on this count:
While Diogenes is a little intense as an example, I think it's much healthier to think of the sex drive as something natural which needs attention from time to time, rather than making it the central focus of your life, or something shameful. I prefer moderate indulgence to sanctimony.
I might take that, if the offer was credible, but I hope you understand why I soured on the promises of only moderate indulgence.
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Lewis in heaven, looking down at mukbang, disappointed that his imagination was so limited.
Really the food analogy is spot on.
Feeling hungry - no shame
Eating a bit of junk food - no shame, everyone does it.
Overindulging on occasion - understandable, forgivable, but not to be lionized.
Eating 15 double cheeseburgers a day for six months and gain 100lbs - commit seppuku immediately, kys to rid your family from shame.
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Can't get away from ol' Lewis on this forum. I prefer Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg "Never be ashamed of who you are". Walk out of that porn store with your pocket pussy held high. It is the act of acting shameful that brings the scorn. Walk out to your Ferrari in a nice suit and people will even try to copy your bold pocket pussy purchase.
C.S. Lewis would probably agree as he was probably a bisexual if not gay
Your thesis was tested in the Sexual Revolution, and it seems to me that it's more or less bankrupt at this point. The tide isn't going the other way because Lewis Enthusiasts spammed Lewis quotes. It's going the other way because the results of the Sexual Revolution are so obviously, inescapably, unendurably wretched. You can argue either "Simping Is King Shit" or "It's your turn to swipe left" as much as you like; the percentage of people who not only aren't buying it but who are viscerally appalled by the evident results continues to rise organically and exponentially over time.
Shame is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. It's a warning alarm, and it exists to warn you of the existence of a serious problem. Turning off the alarm doesn't make the problem stop existing.
Shame is a low class cultural marker. If nothing is a threat to you then you have no shame. The rich and famous certainly have very little of it if it exists at all, mostly just a cultural nod to the lower classes when at that level, and you only feel it in defeat. It is a fear based emotion that only has the power you give it.
Shame is a human constant in all social classes.
No human has ever or will ever exist in a state where nothing is a threat to them.
For every shameless rich person, I can point to ten drug addicts shitting themselves on a sidewalk without apparent shame. Further, it seems to me that the absence of shame is the marker of defeat, when one is no longer even trying for goodness and virtue.
This at least is true, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, fear is a necessary and entirely rational response, because there are better states and worse states, and many of the worse states are extremely wretched. Rational fear is a motive force, a protective force. Its absence is a sign of insanity.
The drug addicts are on drugs and "have no choice". The rich guy cheating with 8 different mistresses only "feels shame" insofar as he is found out and it affects his status when they play it on the news. He doesn't feel a "natural shame" when he is fucking #6, or maybe he wouldn't do it. That dumb podcaster science guy being almost the perfect example.
That said, I agree with you personally, and I would never cheat on my wife, but I come on here to exercise the rational part of my brain, not the boyscout part. My behavior isn't always governed by reason. Nor is that the case for most people. But a perfectly rational actor would not feel it. I also have to disagree with the fear portion of your comment. Most is not warranted in this day and age, vestigial nonsense, like people who say they won't sit with their back to the door.
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Let's say you fail to keep a promise, a promise made to someone you have a great deal of respect for. Is it appropriate to feel shame then? Or maybe some other emotion?
It might be culturally appropriate, but it has no innate value beyond signaling regret for your actions to others in a group.
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Naming your product orfice.ai is almost as bad as calling your new programming language Lolita...
I hate the current year so much. The awful combination of performative histrionic prudishness and obnoxious, ubiquitous safe-horny normie-fap-bait.
Furries go around naming projects after horse diaper fetishes and nobody gives a shit because uwu programmer socks tee hee, but this gets their panties in a twist?
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Brother, I’ve got to say that I think you’ve been had.
That YouTube video and “oriface.ai” is top tier rage bait. I mean, real chef’s kiss level.
On par with “it’s ok to be white” or “Islam was right about women.” Or any entry into the Sokal affair.
It’s absolutely beautiful, I laughed for a full ten minutes after watching that short video. I couldn’t believe it, it was an absolute miracle of trolling, perfectly designed to infuriate a maximum amount of people and trivially accomplished through ai trickery.
A toast to the geniuses at oriface.ai, May their enemies be made ridiculous. Legitimately the funniest thing I’ve seen online in months.
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Or your image processor GIMP.
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But what you feel shame about is culturally formed. Kids don't feel about being naked or touching themselves until they are trained to do so. Catholics don't feel shame about the things they feel shame about until they are trained into it.
And that means your alarm can be false. Like people who internalize that they should feel shame about approaching members of the opposite sex even respectfully or who feel shame about feeling sexual attraction at all.
So you can't use the alarm to tell you there is a serious problem. All it can do is warn you that you have internalized that X is a problem. It doesn't do much to tell you if X is a problem really.
My grandfather was raised in an ultra strict Quaker offshoot, where any contact with the outside world was seen to be wrong and that music was sinful. He felt ashamed of listening to a choir in the less strict Church of Ireland he later moved to. Is hearing a Christian choir a serious problem he should have been alerted to? Or was his sense of shame miscalibrated because his society was simply wrong?
In other words, I agree shame and shaming is an intrinsic part of the human condition and that it exists to bring together societies through incentivizing behaviors your society see as positive. What it can't do is actually tell you if those behaviors are or are not positive in and of themselves. Because shame is sub-conscious.
And just like with feeling shame about a choir, the seeds of the sexual revolution lie in the fact that if you shame too much it becomes just as much of a problem as shaming too little. We historically shamed too hard and too deep and as with all oppression, a revolution will form. The previous norms of sexual shaming were crushed, because they were not moderated, because so many people ended up being shamed that they were in fact able to overthrow the shame mongers. That is the lesson I personally think all ideologies need to learn. Shame too many people (whether for sexual immorality or for racism or sexism or whatever), then there is a tipping point.
You might argue the results have been wretched, but obviously enough people felt the previous situation was ALSO wretched enough in order to overthrow it.
It doesn't seem to me that the shaming norms immediately prior to the Sexual Revolution were particularly strict, from a historical perspective. Nor does this comport with my understanding of how revolutions generally work; they generally don't happen when conditions decline past some critical threshold, but rather when things are getting better, but people think they should be getting better faster. Is that not your understanding? In any case, it's hard to believe that 1950s America leaned harder on shame than, say, Puritan America. Why didn't Puritan America result in a Sexual Revolution, under your model?
Historically speaking, I do not see the Sexual Revolution being driven by people who had been shamed reaching a critical mass. Rather, what I observe is people who were not being shamed buying into the idea that the shame-enforcement system they were already on the right side of could be dismantled without cost or consequence, that the fences against sexual misconduct were pointless and that tearing them down would have no downsides and only benefits, because We Had Progressed. Without a broad-based commitment to the big lie of Progress and all the "little" lies that supported it, the sexual revolution would not have happened. Without Enlightenment champions like Marx and Freud selling unmoored Utopianism to an Enlightenment society desperately eager to believe them, the sexual revolution doesn't happen.
Likewise, I think this is why the Sexual Revolution and the rest of the works of the Enlightenment are not going to last much longer. The lie only works when it hasn't been tested or when the results of the test can be concealed. We've been running the test for decades now, and the systems that work to hide the results are breaking down. Once our society completes its current trajectory, the ideological precursors that created and maintained the Sexual Revolution will no longer be capable of sustaining any degree of credibility.
Is it culturally formed, or is it culturally deformed? We agree that people can be made to feel shame about things that should not be considered shameful. The question remains whether there is a coherent cluster of behavior that is naturally shameful to humans, which can be altered through significant effort, or if it's all just a random walk. I think it's the former.
I'm sure kids aren't born being ashamed of nakedness or of touching their genitals. On the other hand, they aren't ashamed of casual cruelty either; they have to learn that other people exist and to empathize with them, but that doesn't mean that empathy itself is a cultural construction that we can take or leave as we will. I think modesty is similar: you aren't born knowing it, but you learn about it soon enough unless others expend a great deal of effort trying to hide it from you, and even then sooner or later it'll be back.
The Sexual Revolution pitch was that we could remove shame from sex completely, that everyone could have all the sex and everything would be fine. That pitch has been gradually walked back as the resulting disasters become increasingly undeniable. The relatively slow pace of that walk-back has been, in my view, only achievable through large-scale deceit and the intentional obfuscation of the horrors the Revolution's architects unleashed and refused to recognize.
Really? I think that a bunch of people will feel vaguely burned by the SR as adults and retreat towards conservatism, but this won't lead to lasting change and the youth will be even more progressive and sex-positive and weird, and the cycle will repeat just like it did the past two generations.
Nature changes with time, though, for some people at points in history it was natural and healthy that it was shameful to not own a proper number of livestock. Now, that's not true anymore. People look at their situation and try to judge what should and shouldn't be shameful. Instincts in our genes are evolved, too, and as the environment changes the value of an instinct changes. Better to justify the kind of shame you want than just say it emerges naturally.
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There was a clear utopian dimension to Marx. I've never heard anyone argue against that.
Freud is a more complicated case. He also had some utopian impulses and was on record as thinking that the release of repressed sexual instincts would be a positive social development, but this was also tempered (especially in his later work) by a recognition of how the self-contradictory and self-destructive nature of the psyche can upset utopian social aspirations (it was really Lacan who took this aspect of psychoanalysis and ran with it, and he was consequently much more overtly politically conservative than Freud, but the seeds of it are already visible in Freud).
I recommend reading Freud's essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle before you write him off completely.
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I don't think that was the pitch, because like every change, there was no single one movement responsible for it. What you had was a coalition who wanted slightly different things, one part wanted gay sex to be accepted, another wanted women to have more freedom outside of marriage, another wanted men to have more freedom without getting married, another felt sexual urges in general should not be shamed as much, etc. etc. There were few would if you asked would have said for example, should we stop shaming sex with animals or corpses? Almost no-one wanted to remove shame from sex entirely.
To be clear almost everyone is shamed under the old model. They just use that shame to behave differently. Every kid who felt guilty about masturbation. Every husband who felt shame at cheating, or even having thoughts of cheating. Every woman who felt shame at sex outside of wedlock, or who had a sex drive society felt was too much. Every gay person who felt shame at being attracted to their own sex. All of those groups constitute probably a majority of people. That's what I mean by a tipping point.
Now as for why Puritan America did not change, well Puritan America was a result of people fleeing from cultures that shamed differently. There is a reason we call them Puritans after all! So they in fact are a product of a "Revolution" of their own (among other things of course). But even more the 20th Centuries Sexual Revolution I would say the sexual norms of the Puritans did not last, they were relaxed within decades. It's just in the New World there was a lot of space for people who felt differently to just..go somewhere else. And practice things differently. But that isn't the case in the US anymore.
Just to point out, I do think shame is important, as is empathy. They are evolved mechanisms given humanity is a social species. And they are important in ensuring societal stability. I'm not saying that shaming sex is bad, or that not shaming sex is good. I am saying that our history shows that shame has limits and ANY society or culture that wants its beliefs and conditions to continue is on a tight rope. Can't shame to much for too many, can't shame too little. Both will result in the destruction of your system. The good (depending on your point of view!) news is that also is true for whatever comes next. I think there are signs that the shame mechanisms invoked by "wokism" are also going too far and will fail.
Social dynamics mean we are not good at simply arriving at a pretty good spot and just staying there. We almost always push too far, or not far enough.
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I'm consistently impressed by the reasoning level of people I don't agree with. That is why I stick around.
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Looks like you replied to a comment that was not yet approved. And since we're on the subject - can you also approve my latest post?
Grah. Done and done, thanks for the heads-up.
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Yeah weird given the poster has been around a while now.
It's because his aggregate comment score is in a crater.
We really should disable that aspect of the feature imo.
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People get autofiltered when they accumulate downvotes. I don't know if it was always like that, or we pulled some "feature" from rDrama that doesn't fit us, but it seems like this is how things are now.
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I always find it a pity that CS Lewis' most successful work is Narnia series, considering so much of what he wrote exploring the human condition is so eloquent and excellent.
I feel the same way about George Orwell, 1984 and Animal Farm are great but I find his nonfiction even more insightful.
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The one doesn't take away from the other. All those kids that love the Narnia series wouldn't have been reading "Transposition" if the Narnia books had been less popular.
I momentarily read that as "Transmetropolitan" and was very confused.
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That is a good point. It's easy to skip the introductory literature of an author for their more comprehensive works once you know the depth of their writing.
On the other hand, It's not like Smith or Dostoevsky wrote children's stories, so either way can work?
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Sure, but that doesn't seem like a good explanation for why payment processors would actually ban it. Unless you're alluding to the chargeback theory - but I'm skeptical that that theory can entirely explain their behavior without the need to invoke additional moral/political explanations.
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That's nice and all, but there's quite a lot of us, and certainly more than enough to keep a number of content providers afloat. (Sometimes in surprising ways: the original writer of the Burned Furs manifesto has made a small part-time career in monsterfucker porn.) Fek is at 9k USD a month still, and while I actually appreciate the mechanical stuff he did with Spellbound (cw: technically has one girl, but gaaaaaaay) enough that I kinda want to see it cloned in a not-porn game, given the repeated hiatuses after burnout if anyone was going to get reasonably-motivated chargebacks, he'd be the first hit.
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OK, but is that really analogous to what's going on with free internet porn? Most people aren't getting invited as the personal guest of a paying customer. They're either pirating it, streaming it from some sketchy website that pirated it, or watching free preview stuff. So that's more like you make fun of Disney, but then spend an hour every day sneaking in through the fire escape or watching the free trailers of their movies 100 times because you're too cheap to actually pay for it. And then everyone else does that too, so you feel like a sucker for paying, and meanwhile Disney itself is going bankrupt so they have to cut costs to basically nothing which turns the quality to shit.
There's loads of porn available for free. Twitter, reddit, boorus, 4chan, discord... People who pay are suckers or have more money than sense.
It is quite commonly seen that onlyfans/livejasmin is more a parasocial relationship than a sexual gratification one, fulfilling an emotional need that the dopamine hit of an orgasm cannot satisfy Similarly, the concept of ownership and personal control over porn consumed materials fulfils an emotional need that jerking it doesn't quite cut. Creating your own porn by filming with/out consent actually falls in the same psychological space as commissioning, paying for stuff other people produce and thus having the transaction... these actions are rightly viewed as deviant and violating of social norms, but they do happen and so long as people exist there will be strange niches beyond our comprehension that will be filled.
True, there are those people who'll spend hundreds or thousands on gacha girls to get their waifu. Still seems like being a sucker.
I gave Genshin a go, there's some fun to be had. Lots of effort went into the game, it's very big and very pretty. But it's not worth paying for more spins on the roullette wheel, as many have remarked: https://youtube.com/watch?v=M5Hfd4wX2GE
Paying for these emotional relationships is still kind of hollow and artificial. Whether it's pokimane or Beidou or some onlyfans girl it's all still fake. The other party doesn't care about you, they care about your wallet. They're exploiting an emotional weakness in a way that a disciplined and discerning man should observe and reject.
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I mean it’s cope all the way down. If I hate Disney and make fun of it, then go with my brother and have the best time and love it and think it’s the happiest place on earth, clearly I do, in fact, objectively, enjoy Disney as an adult. But I can tell myself that I only went to spend time with my nieces and this satisfies the internal cognitive dissonance.
Similarly, we can imagine that a man who maybe isn’t hugely sexually successful (which of course describes most people) might watch free porn because it’s easy and there and free and there’s nothing wrong with a little onanism now and again, but actually handing over his card details to pay for it (or buying Bitcoin or whatever to do it, I confess I’m not sure how it works) puts into more stark relief the fact that he’s choosing to sit at home at masturbate in a dark room instead of engaging in any kind of self-improvement or socialization or trying to get laid or a relationship in real life. Paying is what turns you from a mere man into a hobbyist, a gooner, a connoisseur, a creepy guy with a funny mustache masturbating under a newspaper in a public park.
Again, I’m not defending this logically. It is, like so much of life, pure cope, but spending money on something often has loser connotations. Consider the difference between using a free dating app and paying a matchmaker, for example, the latter makes someone seem more desperate by default.
You might be right, but it really depends on the context. Saying "paying money is for losers" sounds... odd... out of context.
Consider a more direct analogy: the strip club. I don't know if you've ever been to one... I get the feeling maybe you haven't? But the general expectation is that you pay. Basically the more you pay, the more attention you get. It's not only about the sexual attention, some guys really enjoy the feeling of splashing that cash. Others just feel guilty if they don't tip. Usually there's no explicit rule but it would be really weird if a strip club customer just sat there, just watching, not paying for anything. It would be even weirder if they also snuck in the back to avoid even the minimal door fee, and then bragged to all his friends about how "only losers pay the door fee." Or to make it even worse- they didn't even sneak in, they just like, found a window somewhere in a dodgy alley, with a shitty view, where they can kinda see, and that's good enough for them to get off as long as they don't actually care about having fun or tipping the girls or anything at all besides having a quick shameful orgasm. And then everyone else starts doing this too, so the club loses money, and now the only people working there are these crazy drug addicts doing it for "exposure" or whatever.
That seems like a really bad state! And yet that's become sorta the norm for online porn these days. I'm not old enough to have seen era when playboy was big but that seems a bit more um... classy and healthy.
The difference between the strip club and porn is just the “you wouldn’t download a car” meme, though. Obviously if people could illegally download a car, they would. Online piracy is a crime that most people don’t really consider a crime, like driving slightly above the limit or DUI before the ‘80s.
One thing about "downloading a car" is that car companies tend to be huge, faceless entities. It's easy to think that Ford or whatever won't lose any sleep over me personally taking a car without paying for it. But of course when everyone starts doing that, the company goes out of business and then no one has any cars.
To bring this back on topic, Pixiv is mostly a community of small artists. I don't have any specific stats, but I really don't think most of them make much money. For example this guy talked about how hard it was to make any money at all as a doujin artist. You can talk to them on twitter and they'll respond, and the prices they charge for art are pathetically low. When you're talking to a real, individual person, and you can tell that they're struggling to make a living from their art, it feels rather sociopathic to just blatantly pirate it and not support them in any way. But of course all the restrictions on Pixiv make that way more of a pain than it would be in real life.
I've also heard- anecdotally- that they get most of their money from Japan, because Japan has such a strong culture against piracy compared to the west. Even though their country has less money, they support the artists much more than we do. It really shows how fragile this stuff we take for granted can be. I don't want to see the entire internet turn into the equivalent of a dead shopping mall.
You mean... no-one has any new models of cars (except for iterations made by the open source community, who have more free time now on account of not having to pay for a car on account of cars being downloadable.)
But they still have access to all the old models of cars. Because they can download them.
The reason people don't think piracy is stealing is because they have a good intuition for when they're being scammed by being charged monopoly pricing instead of the actual cost of creating value.
Most of my favorite artists live off of donations. That we give to them freely because we like them.
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I mean, I really don't think there's any sort of conspiracy here- it's pretty easy to see why Visa and Mastercard don't want to be associated with this stuff, and why websites bend over to appease them. But the end result is kind of gross. We end with an internet saturated with porn, but it's very difficult to sell it for money, which means that a lot of it is really low quality, disgusting shit, and people who make it can't earn a living. It's also really hard to predict what will get banned and when, which tends to put a damper on porn as a "countercultural genre of art." I feel like we're approaching a point where to get anything really subversive you have to learn japanese and either pay for it in crypto over the darkweb or fly to japan to buy it in cash.
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... Who are you arguing with?
Visa and MasterCard see pornography as high risk because they get a lot of chargebacks, so they charge adult services producers a much higher rate for payment processing.
Movement to the high risk list has certainly been used politically in the past, but this is pretty standard.
I'm arguing against the view, which I have seen expressed by social conservatives often enough, that we live in an irredeemably sexualized society that has thrown off all measure of restraint. Sometimes this includes a conspiratorial component that the pornography industry promotes porn explicitly for its deleterious social effects. This view has been argued for on TheMotte before - "The technocrats pretend to believe in that so that they can trick normies into hypersexual practices that obliterate communities."
In fact the primal fear of sexuality is still operative the same as it ever was, and in some aspects has possibly intensified, compared to previous historical eras. (Not that I'm arguing that this fear is necessarily irrational or misguided. Some things do indeed deserve to be feared. When we are confronted with such a deeply rooted psychological impulse that has endured through so many changes in the outward form of social organization, its etiology demands careful consideration. I'm here to understand, not to moralize.)
Sure, that would be fine if opposition to porn was restricted to payment processors. But it's not just payment processors.
I’m reminded of 1984, where the Party pumps out cheap tawdry pornography, but labors to keep the proles under the incorrect impression that it’s illegal.
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Everyone has some kind of bone to pick with porn, and except for social conservatives it’s usually not the sexual content.
Aside from chargeback theory, there’s intellectual property rights violations galore, ties to sex trafficking, age verification issues, etc.
...which helps confirm my original thesis that it's countercultural!
Consider the time immediately before the Russian Revolution. Everyone has a bone to pick with the Tzar. Does the Tzar represent Culture or Counter-culture?
"Socially dominant but clearly on the way out" seems like a coherent social category to me.
I'm no expert on Russian history, but if enough people hate the Tzar enough, then the Tzar could be counterculture and supporting him could be counterculture as well. I think there's a strong argument that supporting Trump during his presidency was also countercultural for example, despite him being "the most powerful man in the world".
Porn is not the Tzar though and I imagine the analogy will break down quickly if we try to push it too far.
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I think this would be plausible for a wide-spectrum ban on porn, if still uncertain since these companies have little trouble working with businesses that have increased chargeback risks otherwise and just slamming on fees.
I don't think it's remotely plausible for the common levels of specificity involved, here. There may well be higher (or lower) rates of chargeback for incest porn, or hypnosis or forced TF kink, or dragon dongs with too much red dye, but I'm incredibly skeptical that a) card companies have the data to actually know that, b) that these rates are so much higher that they can't be resolved by fees, and c) that there's no more immediate and less-financially-direct motivation.
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