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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   25213 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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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.

Texas recently started enforcing HB 1181, a viewer-age-verification law. The sort which intends to make it very annoying to distribute pornography if and only if one intends to run a business in the U.S.. Hosting a server out of Czechoslovakia is, as I understand it, still untouchable.

Pornhub’s parent company responded by cutting all services to Texas. Should a Texan IP address make a request to their site, he will receive instead an angry letter about his lawmakers’ shortsightedness, questionable legal footing, and so on. Other sites have followed suit. The argument goes that 1) the law only hurts the most compliant companies, and 2) it fails a variety of Constitutional protections.

Naturally, it was wildly popular, passing 141-2. It has also survived legal challenges up to the 5th Circuit Court. Even though one of the provisions was struck down as improper government speech, proponents insist that the rest is perfectly above-board.

So far, it’s looking like another step towards pillarization.

Okay, I've looked up pillarisation in the historical sense, but would you mind defining exactly what you mean by it in this context? I'm not 100% on exactly what is being connoted and not connoted.

I was using it in response to the OP. That tweet just says “fracturing,” so I’m not 100% sure what distinguishes it from Balkanization, siloing, or walled gardens.

Pillarization is where individuals within a society live in separate worlds on ethnoreligious lines and was derived from the prewar situation in the Netherlands, where Catholics and the two kinds of Protestants lived extremely separate lives from each other with separate sports leagues, schools, newspapers, political parties, churches, etc. A more current example is probably Lebanon, where Maronites Shiites and Sunnis are functionally the government for their specific groups. Pillarization is a long term goal of a few very conservative Christians in the USA(that’s explicitly what gab is trying to enable) but doesn’t really have much mainstream support.

Balkanization usually refers to a country breaking up into smaller territorial units- like if Texas seceded.

I’ve never heard ‘fracturing’ used in a modern context but it’s a pretty good literal translation of a variety of terms used in the classical world to describe the transition from a democracy to an authoritarian regime- eg the collapse of the Roman republic was referred to as ‘fractio’ by the chroniclers of the day, and the Greek term for the same process is στασις, which means something like ‘standing apart’.

I think but I’m not sure that ‘siloing’ and ‘walled gardens’ are references to individual steps on the path to any of those things.

You have it right on the last sentence; I could have just said "siloing," but that's already been used on different scales (like between platforms or categories, not necessarily between regions).

Would the Ottoman millet system be another example?

No, with pillarization everyone is still under the same government with the same laws. The millets were more like autonomous zones, but defined entirely by ethno-religious affiliation, not by the territory the people lived in. They had formal laws and collected taxes.

Pillarization is more like what the middle east was like before the millet system and now after. People lived in pillarized ethno-religious communities with in the various states, but there was no formal system of legal division at the level of the state.

Probably, yes, but I think pillarization implies that there aren’t clearly dominant and subordinate groups like the various Islamic implementations; Shiites are de facto socially dominant in Lebanon today and moderate Protestants in 1930’s holland, but there wasn’t/isn’t a formal hierarchy.

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