never comply

30 Jul, 2025

Tired of this constant barrage of censorship hidden under the guise of protecting children, MasterCard/Visa monopoly setting the global standard of what is and isn't acceptable, and frequent attacks on encryption in EU law as well.

Being online isn't worth all that. You aren't getting my ID for services like this. And I wish more big services would just pull out temporarily and geoblock instead of bending the knee - would love to see the hell the MP's would be living in if Meta, X, Google, Wikipedia, XBox, PlayStation and more would just not be a thing anymore in the UK for now, even rendering devices near useless. Boycott that shit! Let them squirm and undo it under pressure. The UK isn't even that huge of a market compared to others. All companies get by complying with it is suddenly having the responsibility thrust upon them to store this very sensitive data, process it, and make the "correct" decision - despite all the risks that the ID picture could be edited, it could be someone else's ID, AI verification failing and estimating someone to be older or younger than they are, and more. That, or needing another third party to do a service for them. It only creates problems that the clowns who enacted it won't help with.

This doesn't even just affect the big players - think about your forum admin, your Mastodon instance maintainers, and more. Together with the rise of vibecoding and unsafe apps, this is the worst thing you could do. How does anyone read these stories and think "We should let them possibly have to do age verification and collect IDs or biometric features too!". It's a privacy nightmare that doesn't protect any children.

As if that wasn't enough, we are losing important media because money rules the world and not even the ones with capabilities to stand up against it (like Steam) will do it. Important media isn't always clean - it may be gross, gory, sexual, horrific, repulsive, questionable, weird. It can be queer. It can be critical of states, of capitalism, of politics and political figures. I love weird and freaky games, even the ones I have no interest in playing.
They'll always start with things most people can get behind ("Of course you'd want to remove incest! That's wrong! If you're against that, you probably love incest!") and move it up a notch, especially if it's coming from religious extremists. It's always "the unacceptable things" while they continually increase what is unacceptable.

You may be in favor of removing stories containing incest - but that not only removes media critical of incest and calling it out, it soon covers all sexual games (as it happened just now), then it moves on to horror media and shooters because it "glorifies violence" (as horror games have also been partially affected now), which also tends to affect media that depicts the realities of war to criticize it, which often includes political criticism. That opens it up to things we had to re-negotiate over and over again politically since decades now. Queer topics have always been under heavy scrutiny because of supposedly being "too sexual" or "inappropriate for children".

Unfortunately, this slippery slope is very real and not just a fallacy. It's sadly the continuation of a long time of promoting the mindset that the media you consume is who you are and what you personally love and support, which has already spurred book bans. It's the logical conclusion of the immature opinion that reading Lolita by Nabokov makes you a pedophile.

This stuff is worsened by the fact that we barely own media anymore - they can freely remove it from your device library most of the time, or they remove it from their catalogue and you lose access. No physical copies available. You cannot seriously want half your Steam library or Kindle library raided for bullshit like this. We are in the midst of fighting for more consumer rights about getting to keep the products you paid for, and yes, that includes media you find questionable that others own. If you don't want to lose access due to licensing issues or premature retirement of the game or the fact that this single player game somehow needs server connection to be playable and they shut the damn servers off, then you don't want it removed based on vague themes it may or may not have just because of politicians or a payment provider either.

Consider these events for your future purchases: Let's for example pretend you have the digital-only PS5 edition (no optical drive) and you love playing games via the PS+ subscription included games and possibly even PlayStation Now, while the other games you have on there are digital license purchases from the PS Shop. Suddenly, laws are enacted in your country and MasterCard/Visa is freaking out; the things you were playing get removed and restricted, your library is affected too since those are just licenses, and to continue using your PlayStation account, you need to send over ID or do age verification via a third-party app. What if you don't want to? Not complying bricks large parts of your device, because you'd need to verify identity if you want any more games than what you are now left with on-device. Compare this to a PS1 or PS2, where you just had a device, some discs, and were able to play without any sort of interference by the company behind it, and could just buy more in physical stores.

My consumer choices aren't even better than this; I too have to ask myself how functional my Steam Deck will be if my Steam account is ever locked down, banned, deleted or introduces measures that I don't want to comply with.

The current moves are a disaster for freedom of speech, artistic expression, creation of online spaces away from the big apps, and consumer rights. I hope more services just threaten to leave until the OSA is amended or taken back, and I hope more consumers refuse using a service with such unnecessary surveillance and control. It's the only way to revert and possibly prevent copycats.

I hope alternative payment systems (that aren't crypto¹) manage to emerge or regulations get put in place so payment providers with such a huge amount of power cannot just set the cultural standards. I wonder if we truly at some point have to retreat into an alternate web via onion sites, gopher, gemini, etc. and pay everything with paysafe cards purchased in a physical shop, but I guess none of these would actually truly evade or solve the problems. Take it as your sign to always support removing DRM, archiving, piracy and more as these are the only ways left to even keep media around that is easily just lost forever in moves like this.

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Published 30 Jul, 2025

#2025 #tech