askchapo

"Protect the children!" is a very good Trojan horse to sneak surveillance in. We're not ending online anonymity in order to make persecution of dissidents more easy, we're doing it to protect children from the harm of seeing a boob and who can be against protecting the children?

Christianity, Evangelical Protestantism specifically. It’s just the rise of Puritanism, fueled by queerphobia, that you can see in lots of other aspects of life as well. Hell you can even see it if you talk to Zoomers, fashion is becoming more “modest,” they’re uncomfortable with sexual material in movies and advertising, and they’re more prudish about PDA. They’re also having less sex than previous generations.

This isn’t the fault of the zoomers, they’re downstream of this cultural push, they’re just a group you can look at to see the changes clearly.

This should be fought against in everyday life, as well as the more obvious policy aspects. Dress sluttier. Make out in public. Don’t be ashamed of sex and porn. Be horny on main.

I mean, they're monetizing access to the access to it. Many of the states haven't banned it, they've introduced private third partiee to handle age verification. It's just another paywall industry that's gonna grow and fester with its own lobbying and legislation.

flailing about birth rates + enclosure of the internet commons + increasing repression against queer folks (they're just going to define any depiction of a same sex couple or a trans person as "porn") + increasing surveillance + pushing online sex exploitation into deeper precarity for even greater exploitation (just like they did to drug producers and prostitutes) + punishing the few (very very few) women who managed to turn their exploitation into success + removing a source of potential supplemental income so people work harder + they just think it's yucky (even though they all watch porn)

christianity brainworms and an excuse for expanding the panopticon.

Can't get people to gamble when they're jerking off.

I think there's not much to it* beyond moral panic against queerness, in tandem with the selection of trans folk as the domestic pariah group.

Of course, porn and the sexual exploitation that has always existed within that industry existed unchecked for many years, but it will continue to do so despite these performative bans. We should all be very much on board with the understanding that the empire which has used soft power to pressure capitalists into compliance (de-banking, regulatory fines, tax benefits) is a client of exploitation, not an incompetent opponent to it.

What this campaign aims to do instead is make access to expressions of bodies outside of the window that the state provides via traditional media much, much harder. Capitalism has survived 300 years by using convenience as the ultimate pacifier of the proletariat, so making something less convenient is a conscious decision we must take note of.

The policies are also convenient for asserting the (American) state as an empire.

We have seen how the Federal Reserve can bend the world economy to its will by altering a few numbers on spreadsheets: among other things, the entire Chinese local government system borrows against the dollar for its massive infrastructure/economic programs! The rate has been used twice this year to bring the Chinese govt. to deals that have become the inflatable armbands of American economic buoyancy.

Meanwhile, how does the US manipulate the economies and politics of its vassals? Well, the graciously-provided payment system that is an American duopoly between Mastercard and Visa for one thing. If the American government shifts domestic policy in one direction, it can mimic this across the Anglosphere by directing its payment services to do this, too.

Debanking is an insanely powerful tool, and along with advertisers (who are primarily driven by US political culture) the US can effectively pull the rug on anything it wishes. Trans people being made a pariah allows the empire to galvanise allied fascist movements that were stagnating with racism alone, and the banking/advertising industry turned about-face to support this at its command. Just look at how many companies suddenly dropped pride culture, and with it followed with quiet complicity with the Neo-Gestapo and Israeli bloodlust.

I know I started this with "not much to it beyond..." but I stand by that! The simple fact is this is the US Empire doing what it has done since it become the primary villain of humanity - manipulating its domestic politics and exporting the new order to its vassals along the tendrils of the international bourgeoisie.

Internet control. Putting a name and ID to every single action people take online. Ending online anonymity. Making the internet, a safe, advertiser friendly, sanitized space. And of course more importantly than that control of the masses as capitalism's cracks grow wider. They must not be allowed to organize, they must not be allowed to cheer CEO's getting shot without being identified and immediately publicly punished.

Every other push failed. Yes at the very bottom of it is the Evangelical Christians and that whole thing but it's not actually succeeding because of them. It's succeeding because it's useful to various other groups. To the intelligence community, to control of the public and the interests of the national security state, and finally this time it's of interest to the tech companies who have long resisted this because it adds more value to ads shown to people if you know who they are and everything they do and because there's no more room for growth so more blood must be squeezed from the same stone. The big porn companies like Pornhub are for ID for porn because they can afford to do it cheaply at scale and it gives them insight into habits data they can sell and more importantly it imposes burdens on small start-ups and threatens their profitability or ability to operate. Rule one of monopoly capitalism is pull up the ladder behind you and impose as many barriers as you can on smaller upstart competitors through regulation.

Loss of narrative control is key to why now. Luigi, but more importantly the widespread support for Palestine, the complete loss of control of the narrative for the zionist side among the young people. The realization that CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, NBC, CBS news and control of them to repeat the hasbara is no longer enough because young people don't watch or pay attention to that. They're worried that the next narrative they lose control of is a much more important one.

Empire's chickens are coming home to roost, the fear of a gen-z rebellion over economic problems means total control and an even more powerful police and surveillance state must be established. Make no mistake, they'll ban anonymous no-log VPNs as soon as they finish mandating ID across the country for porn with the excuse kids are using them to get around their ban by appearing to access sites from Canada, Mexico, etc.

It's appealing to false consciousness and lets a broad range of people feel like finally something good will happen. Things such as: Raise in Misogyny, Male Loneliness, Infertility, Violence and so on, that's all been linked to pornography. Most of us can probably "feel" like it's true to some extent as well, if we're being honest.

I'm not against regulations. But there's definitely been an effort to blame things on pornography, instead of material conditions. So you can say "Let's ban this!" and many people will be on board.

I'd like to see regulations made to protect pornographers and prevent exploitation in the industry. I'd like to see cities being built to encourage people to meet together in meatspace and experience old fashioned love, I'd like to see a world where you don't need to worry about having time and space to raise your children. A world where no man woman or child is forced to sell themselves for the sake of cash. My propositions are difficult to achieve, they take time, they're much less popular than "Let's ban this thing!"

Probably all sexual policing is a result of the crisis of the family in capitalism, which as a rule "worsens" over time.

Hand wringing about moral decay, being seen as doing something about misogyny and femicide, some recent headlines about normalised sexual violence (e.g. choking without consent and training), excuse to expand the surveillance state/test censorship technology/legal powers against an industry that is hard to defend vs socially acceptable ones.

to spite me personally

An excuse to internet censorship, the circumvention is so easy and well known I doubt even the politicians think they're having a significant affect on porn consumption. But who really knows, I'm not in those weirdos heads.

I wonder if some of it is on the "Retvrn to tradition" spectrum.

They won't bring back the unionization, the 90% top tax bracket, or the single income household, but they're happy to oblige bringing back the 1950s morals and social norms. That doesn't cost the billionares anything.

It's funny how the capital types forgot that porn is a fairly powerful economic innovation engine. Every key internet tech, from chat services to SSL payment processing to video to broadband availability was implicitly turbocharged by its smut potential. Even the current golden calf of AI is trying to climb on the bandwagon and hump it.

I've just realized it's most likely one of many ways they are going to try and fight the shrinking economy due to low fertility rates, aside from surveillance of course.

The weed's too strong and the porn's too hot.

Trying to juice demand for the LLM industry's recently publicized "pivot to smut"

Porn gets new shit first. It’s working out the kinks of new surveillance tech.