Most people are unaware of Australia's long history of censorship which continues to this day.
And video games are just art.
So, women, drawing and writing stuff they like, being banned and losing an income stream.
I don’t think drawing or writing porn is exploitative at all.
If somehow the puritanical mob banned stuff like that, I'd be genuinely sad.
The real motivations seemingly have nothing to do with protecting women, which appears to simply be a palatable facade for the true intention to suppress all depictions of sexuality, including the depictions that offer good-faith representation of historically marginalized groups.
I'm genuinely curious to see how this plays out in the American partisan landscape.
Conservatives around the world talk to each other.
I ran an online porn website for almost 20 years. For 15 years it was my primary source of income.
I'm in Canada which, compared to the USA is extremely progressive.
In 2022, after a decade of doing business with a certain bank as this business, never having hidden anything about what we did, my wife and I received an urgent, signature required, overnighted letter from our bank informing us that they were terminating our accounts and that we had one month until we would no longer have access to any funds.
The way this played out was that we had an incoming wire transfer get flagged and they phoned us to ask us questions about the wire. We answered everything on the phone honestly and transparently. We were doing nothing wrong.
A few months later we get another phone call from our branch asking us to come in in person, urgently, and do an "extreme due diligence" check. During this process we had to answer an insane amount of questions about our business activities. They saw a credit card transaction from JetBrains, for example, and asked us to explain who JetBrains was and why we were doing business with them etc.
A couple of weeks later we were informed about the termination with a brief letter explaining that we fell outside of their "risk appetite."
We managed to get an extension on the closure, and for two months we tried in vain to find any banking in Canada that would take us... and we ultimately ended up shutting down a business that represented two decades of our lives.
During that time we reached out to industry insiders, some of which we happened to know were in Canada. They all told us that they bank in the USA.
One branch manager at a bank we met with was extremely empathetic but obviously couldn't put her own job on the line, and she explained exactly what was going on.
The issue is "Know Your Customer" regulations that are coming into effect that are meant to target things like money laundering. These regulations force banks to ask questions that they never really cared about before. This branch manager explained that a local strip club used to say they were a "banquet hall", and everyone at the branch knew exactly what they were but it was "don't ask / don't tell."
But once they start digging into these details because the government is forcing them to, then these things get to their compliance departments. And the policies exist because they're afraid of things like human trafficking and other things.
And our major banks have foreign investors from all around the world. Including from countries where porn is actually illegal.
While you point the finger at puritanism in the USA ... consider that in countries like Iceland, producing porn can land you in jail. Now consider MAJOR investments originating in countries like Saudi Arabia etc. and consider how that might impact your bottom line if they all pull out due to nonsense morality conflicts.
[0] - https://apnews.com/article/fda-vapes-vaping-elf-bar-juul-80b...
I understand the risk tolerance aspect from a bank, they wouldn't want to give a massive loan to a property developer or oil driller going under water. But when it comes to basic deposit services where nobody is asking them to risk their own money, they should be forced to allow any customer who isn't breaking any laws, such as in your case.
If you take that statement at face value (not sure if you should), it's fascinating to think that your business was able to operate for two decades with what I assume are the standard problems people in the porn industry face (e.g. chargebacks from customers unwilling to admit they subscribed in their SO's presence and so pretending it was a scam, etc.)
And yet seemingly none of the bank's risk heuristics based on actual transaction profiling ever went off.
Wouldn't that mean that, in practice, being in the porn industry isn't as high-risk as banks / payment processors think it is?
And would this not then suggest a gap in the market, for an (ideally vertically-integrated) bank + payment processor + card issuer + KYC provider, who is willing to
1. evaluate risk on a customer-by-customer basis (through e.g. continuous dynamic network analysis of transaction flow, with txs annotated with their KYC info) rather than by actuarial categorization; and
2. avoid seeking any investment (at any remove) by parties who would insist they avoid these types of customers?
I'm not sure if Bitcoin is the right answer due to the 51% attack vulnerability. And a network of miners where everyone can join in principle sounds pretty yolo, but it seems the be the one of the few organizations that exist outside of government? At least, it does in principle, the fact that the whole crypto industry is a mix of scams and recreation of the actual finance industry isn't helping that case, but a part of it definitely still exists outside of it.
We need more digital systems that exist outside of governments. I'm not sure if it's feasible, but stuff like this is egregious.
I wonder what our view on all of this is in a 1000 years. People in the future probably look at us in disbelief with how we practiced our ethics.
I bet you that American organizations were involved in the societal pressure that led this Canadian organization to do this. They're just not as effective in their own country in comparison to places where it's not all about money, and values do matter.
Here is an article from the Reykjavik Grapevine that deep dives on it better than I could: https://grapevine.is/mag/2021/05/07/ask-an-expert-why-is-por...
And for a broader overview, see "Pornography laws by region" on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_laws_by_region
Virginia was the most populous colony during the revolution, did English planter society just disappear and the Puritans made it all the way down to the South?
What about the Quakers in Pennsylvania?
Dutch society in New York?
Poor Scots in Appalachia?
And, in any case, this campaign started in Australia. Were there a lot of Puritans there?
& want to bring back laws that sex would only be used to 'recreate' not recreation.
But let's be real here, they were a bunch of jerks. There's a reason it took no time flat for Rhode Island to exist.
There's a tendency for social liberals to see their view as the only legitimate one. Sometimes they are right. But this is an area where there is lots of international push back from undeveloped, developing, and even many developed socially liberal countries.
Then I realized that it was all wrong, countries accept western liberal democracy only as long as the free aid keeps flowing. And the libdems were in for a rude awakening if they ever ran out of kibble.
Hence comments about the U.S. being extremely puritanical, when anyone can look at laws throughout the world and see that the U.S. is more open on most of these issues than the vast majority of countries.
It’s a very strange form of self-loathing. I’ve discussed it with a lot of people from non-Western countries, and they find this behavior extremely confusing.
That's getting somewhat off topic though. In the context of this thread it's merely the observation that attributing this to "puritans" or "christianity" or "US history" is rather misguided. The US and western Europe are very much the outliers here.
See the Steven Donziger[1] case. It was just done more Americanly. Private corporation threw their full weight at a lawyer defending an indigenous population who had their water supply poisoned. Chevron hired a private prosecutor who had him locked up on house arrest for years.
Similar to this porn case, the censorship and suppression is coming from market interests rather than government, but they're nearly equally untouchable and even more difficult to hold accountable. You can't vote out the leadership of mastercard or chevron.
Like slavery, smallpox, and tipping, Puritanism was Europe's gift to the new world.
Religion and taboo often exist for a reason, because endless self gratification does not lead to flourishing.
You don't have to agree that it should be banned, but you can at least concede it's not entirely arbitrary content like say a sitcom.
So then why aren't those activists going after Instagram, TicTok, X/Twitter, etc. you know, the OG spyware, brain rot and anxiety inducing companies, because that would actually benefit society and not too many people would mourn their loss.
Why are they instead going after a dozen random horny video games nobody heard of? Oh that's right, because those random game devs don't have the power to fight back in court, unlike Meta/X, so it's an easy win for them to collect brownie points, for performative nonsense.
Though Steam is not weak. But small-time game devs probably don't care to fight unless they're making bank.
What makes you think they aren't? Because it hasn't been discussed in the HN bubble?
A habit I've noticed is that a person vulnerable to being addicted to X is more prone to fall back on Y, Z, etc. even when X is fixed. So I only see "this hurts certain people" as a scapegoat. Stairs probably hurt more people in any given day than many activities, we don't base law purely on harm and potential harm.
I'd actually hypothesise that if you locked three sets of teenage boys in rooms, one with only porn games, one with only social media and one with only sitcoms, that the first group would likely emerge the healthiest of the three. I'm basing this on my bias towards activity and that nobody seems to have bothered with actually doing research on porn games, the organisation pushing for these bans included [1], instead proxying research on porn as a whole for this specific category.
Or maybe put another way, if my child was at a neighbors house and one of the parents watched an adult movie with my child I would have a huge issue. If they watched Terminator or something similar, I would have much less of an issue.
They're not even close to the same thing.
What else should we arbitrarily ban based on this criteria? It doesn't seem to hold up to much scrutiny.
Sure video games can be unhealthy. Maybe I'm weird but I would much rather prefer my son plays video games 8 hours a day than watches adult content 8 hours a day. Let's stop pretending like they're comparable.
