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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.
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.
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.
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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