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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.
It definitely annoys me that "access to the financial system writ large" has become so utterly critical to doing anything useful that it immediately has a totalizing effect on what anybody can do, anywhere in the world, even on the internet.
Maybe there's one bank/payment processor that holds out and willingly acts to handle the 'controversial' transactions, but that just removes things one layer back, as other banks and processors will eventually blacklist that bank. And thus rendering that bank mostly useless for any other purpose. If it doesn't shut down it'll struggle to remain solvent.
Lets say that some pornography company was wealthy enough it could 'become its own bank' and processes payments on behalf of users and extends credit and otherwise runs all its own transactions and only has to interface with the financial system to purchase the services it needs to operate. Once it is known as the 'porn bank' it'll probably be impossible to find any other financial services willing to interface with them unless they comply with all the sames restrictions the other banks are working under... which defeats the purpose of 'self banking' to begin with.
It comes down to the fact that the financial system is a tightly connected web, and the main value any bank or payment process can provide is access to the network, so maintaining that access is their primary concern.
From the moral standpoint, it bugs me when there's very little evidence(indeed, I've seen none) that digital artwork depicting heinous, illegal, or otherwise disgusting acts is actually causing harm to nonconsenting parties. The reasons we find CSAM objectionable and worthy of legally crushing are generally not present when it comes to digital art. One party or group wants some art, the artist produces it and gets paid, nobody else even need be aware of what it contains!
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.
Anyhow, this is ultimately the impetus for the protagonists in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon to create a private, heavily anonymized bank/data haven in a location outside of the U.S.' sphere of influence. And in order for them to pull it off it required a chain of events that seems even more fantastical now than it did then, such as finding an island nation that is independently wealthy yet also politically stable enough to act as a headquarters for such an endeavor.
It’s largely the fault of the Clinton admin, which began the push to essentially put the SEC and IRS in charge of the entire global financial sector after a panic about rich people not paying taxes. Step by step they destroyed Swiss banking privacy, went after tax havens (not to destroy them, just to make sure they handed every shred of data over to the American government) and eventually established the current regime in which every bank in the entire world that might remotely engage with anyone doing business in or around or via the United States is subject to the whims and reporting requirements of the American government.
The US extradites foreigners for financial crimes even if they had no American victims, did not occur on American soil and had nothing to do with the US, simply because in some vague or distant way they relate to the US financial system. It is bullshit, but who can stand against America? Its European and Asian vassals certainly can’t.
I had noticed that under the current regulatory regime, the U.S. government in theory should have information pertaining to literally every large monetary transaction that takes place with any regulated bank attached to it.
So almost all of them.
Also can't help but feel like this will eventually enable an end-run around the need to actually investigate crimes and make arrests to enforce the law. Instead they can just haul you in to ask why you made that strange $5000 transaction on July 23, 2026 when you happened to be visiting a known purveyor of badthink?
Frustrating, but inevitable because there's no way that government would CHOOSE to turn blind eyes to the wealth of transaction data that is now electronically accessible.
Eventually? It already happened.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/federal-government-flagged-transactions-using-terms-maga-and-trump-financial
Fincen started to fight money laundering and international tax fraud. Now it's being used to make dossiers on domestic political opponents. Shop at Cabelas, you're on a list.
All the worst case scenarios have already happened so fast nobody noticed. The Democrats have complete institutional control of the government and zero qualms about abusing it.
Guess I can understand WHY China, Iran, Russia and such would not want to be plugged in as part of the U.S. extended financial network, since that's basically giving them root level control of your citizens' finances, let alone your government's.
And with the implementation of the Corporate Transparency Act, it is also way harder to hide behind corporate structures.
Pretty crazy how while constant culture warring was going down during Trump's term, the Fedgov just quietly picked up all the tools it needs to surveil every aspect of the financial system from top to bottom without any alarm whatsoever.
I've thought for a while that partisan infighting is the true opiate of the masses. But not in the sense that it makes us happy and relaxed.
The booze-and-meth of the masses. Get 'em all riled up and take away inhibitions so they get distracted brawling each other.
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