Visa Should Not Be A Moral Arbiter

Visa, and other payment processors, like MasterCard, are saying no thanks to Australian anti-pornography group Collective Shout. Now, I support deleting incest rape 'porn' off Steam and Itch. I'm keen on that. Delete away. Good riddance, see you later. Interactive Sex - Incest Family should never have been on any platform, let alone developed or even thought of.

But Steam and Itch are clearly only deleting this stuff because PayPal or whatever doesn't like it. Steam and Itch are not doing this out of a moral belief that these games are misogynist piles of trash, they are doing it because you threatened their money pile. If the money pile were left alone, these two large game stores would be happy hosting depictions of hideous sexual violence against women.

Now, let’s see…today it's tentacle rape porn. Tomorrow, it is I don't know, a radical feminist video game. Debanking and threatening payment processors has become the preferred method of those wanting to hamper the income or the speech/publications of others that they don't like. Like Ira Glasser and his Skokie Neo-Nazis, I'm left defending the indefensible, because that's a threat to the freedom of speech. In this case, it’s a direct threat to my freedom of speech.

Visa, MasterCard, and other examples of the greatest money-sucking middlemen companies to ever exist, should not be moral arbiters of any kind. I don’t trust their judgement on Doritos, let alone the great debates of our time. These are companies that only care about money. I do not want Visa deciding what I can and cannot buy, or what shops can or cannot sell, because Visa is a private company and I have no democratic input into Visa. Or MasterCard. Or the Japanese Credit Bureau. Or PayPal. We should not asking private companies to decide these things. Who and what gets access to the public square and the marketplace of ideas is an issue that belongs to the body politic.

It is beyond me why anyone who would call themselves 'gender critical' in any capacity is celebrating this, given that threatening payment processors is what our critics love doing to us.

As a strategy, sure, it works. And it's certainly horrifying to see the gaming world rise up to defend digital depictions of raping your sister, or to see them claim 'queer developers are the most affected!!!' because lesbians and gays clearly have something to do with what women-hating deviants code one-handed and post on itch.io1. It's worse to see this stuff euphemistically referred to as 'NSFW games' when most of the content was objectively vile and illegal in some countries. It's disgustingly amazing to see how many 'gamer' men and 'indie devs' have clear and obvious pornography addictions, even if that was obvious from their patterns of consumption and oeuvre, respectively.

What's even worse than all of that is deciding we should empower payment processors to be the moral arbiter of the world's transactions. No. No full stop. God no. What are you even thinking? Are you mad?

You've ceded the civil liberties high ground to the guy who thinks developing poorly written, illustrated and designed misogynistic pornography in RPG Maker with one hand makes him pornographic gaming’s Proust.

Just no.