The biggest tragedy of the art spheres online moving to Twitter and buying into fear porn endlessly about crypto, then NFTs, then AI, is very obvious. Artists are losing out on a lot of tools to literally survive in the modern economy. The truth is, being bombarded with propaganda 24/7 about how bad crypto is was probably the most self-destructive thing many artists could hear. Let’s talk about why, with a background on how this happened.
During the 2010s, there was a shift away from the “commission” and “YCH auction” style of making money to Patreon and similar sites. Patreon would become a way to monetize internet art and indie games, and especially drawn pornography. For many internet artists, this was a chance to quit their job and make a living off drawing whenever they felt like it. Patreon was controversial for many, as some used it as a paywall. This would hit a breaking point and back in the /furry/ days, the most infamous spammer Bui developed yiff.party. This made online artists angry, because they were paywalling their content. But this also would become a turning point online; the future in the mid-2010s was Patreon. It was a consistent source of money for many, and the e-celebs on the platform could make some serious money each month. Even better, as Patreon is a “lump sum” on your statement, many people tend to forget they’re giving money to some guy who might have taken a long internet hiatus or abandoned his social media accounts.
Well, it seemed to be that way. And then the crackdowns on Patreon, Gumroad, and other sites began where websites got increasingly puritan about what you could and couldn’t upload. This isn’t just one site, this is across the board, and for a very good reason. It boils down to payment processors.
Payment Processors: the root of all evil
Payment processors are very notorious for cracking down on anything they don’t like. Due to the events of the mid-2010s, the corporations decided to help the government snuff out many opposition individuals online and get politically active. Banks and payment processors however had an ace up their sleeve, they could shut down bank accounts and “debank” people, and payment processors could keep people from making money.
While pornography sites were very often caught in this sort of deal, including the high profile payment processor ban with PornHub (over some very real scandals about the site not doing proper vetting and having everything from “revenge”/non consensual porn to CSAM/CP uploaded), one of the first to be caught in this were what one would consider dissident sites. This led to a great ZeroHedge post about the matter, which called for neutral banking laws. Of course this didn’t go anywhere, but it’s worth reading. I’ll post the most damning quote here because it explains it better than I could:
Consider a company like Patreon. They are an online crowdfunding service which handles donations from many supporters to many online content creators. Patreon has its own rules, uses Stripe as a payment gateway and payment processor, agrees to Stripe’s terms of service, and then Stripe coordinates with all major payment networks which each have their own set of agreements. That means every creator on Patreon must obey six different sets of rules. If the gateway were its own company, it would be seven. It is no wonder so many people get banned, as only the most tepid and inoffensive content creators could hope to meet so many different standards!
Patreon must keep Stripe happy to stay in business, and Stripe must keep all four payment networks happy to stay in business. If any one of MasterCard, Visa, Amex, or Discover pass a rule, then it affects the entire downstream ecosystem. If Discover (5% of the market) says an industry or behavior is prohibited, then Stripe must enforce that rule on all the merchants on their service (even merchants who do not process Discover). If Discover were to cut ties with Stripe, then Stripe would lose at least 5% of their transactions over night and any merchants who do want to process Discover cards. That is a large and dramatic blow to any company operating on small margins.
So if you want to upload to a site like Patreon, you have to obey 6 different sets of rules, period. This isn’t just a Patreon issue however. The CEO of Automattic, who bought Tumblr and owns this website, made a similar post as well. In it, he also blames the same people as well for this:
Credit card companies are anti-porn. You’ve probably heard how Pornhub can’t accept credit cards anymore. Or seen the new rules from Mastercard. Whatever crypto-utopia might come in the coming decades, today if you are blocked from banks, credit card processing, and financial services, you’re blocked from the modern economy. The vast majority of Automattic’s revenue comes from people buying our services and auto-renewing on credit cards, including the ads-free browsing upgrade that Tumblr recently launched. If we lost the ability to process credit cards, it wouldn’t just threaten Tumblr, but also the 2,000+ people in 97 countries that work at Automattic across all our products.
Essentially, allowing porn would not only hurt the Tumblr business but the core business (WordPress) as well. Payment processors hate porn like they hate anything too politically loaded. This is why Tumblr will never host porn again unless it’s spun off or sold off to new owners who realized what made Tumblr good (and even then, will it even be as good if the users are gone? Maybe some will come back.) Of course, there’s a workaround for this, and its one artists online won’t like to hear.
Crypto and bypassing banks
Just like how the situation with banks has changed, so has the situation with taking payment. Pornhub has not been completely debanked, but they cannot take credit cards. Instead, if you want to sign up for Pornhub Premium, you have to submit payment with ACH, e-wallet….and Crypto:
Another example of a website on the “lists of sites payment processors might not like” is the conspiracy-boomer-right website Infowars. While you can still give Alex Jones cash donations via the store or buy the products he promotes on his store, you can also donate crypto to him now as well. This is done for another obvious reason, he knows whales and supporters of his show might be sketchy about sending him money through a credit card, and might have tons of crypto holdings. So he accepts them as well.
You might be asking yourself why Pornhub and Infowars have no aversion to this when internet artists panic and turn it into a culture war issue against people they hate online, and it’s obvious. Crypto is one way to send money when you lose your banking access. Online dissident groups have learned this the hard way, many of them solely or also take Bitcoin or other cryptos and some of the most paranoid and more watched ones only accept XMR. Why XMR? Well, XMR (Monero) is private meaning that you don’t have to deal with a French programmer suicide situation where anyone can track where the money went. A website gloated at how they were able to easily track the identity and who got money from a suicidal programmer who got in early, likely due to sloppy opsec before his suicide. As a result, at least one person he donated to ended up taking XMR only, and Nick Fuentes claimed he was banned from banks from this (this would turn out to be a lie for clout when his online reputation imploded).
But the thing is, the far-right groups and people who were branded as such because of their viewerbase and who they orbited online (Luke Smith comes to mind) were able to get this because they already planned ahead, or saw where the wind was blowing. Some of them already lost their bank accounts, and others knew that there were many whales using cryptocurrency. After all, they were one of the first groups that Patreon and the like targeted. Nowadays literally everyone in that paranoid crowd loves to use cryptocurrency for this very reason. Even in Canada, many anti-vaccine protesters during the “freedom convoy” lost their bank accounts as supporters got doxed and fired, and many who had learned beforehand lamented the fact they didn’t use this.
And just like that, payment processors then came for the internet porn artists. If you think that any tactics used against unlikable people who take money to complain online about women and avoid working are just going to be used against them, you really haven’t seen where the internet is heading.
The Russian issue
It’s a shame that online, many artists were high on their own supply about how crypto is killing the planet or something. They didn’t take crypto because they heard it was bad from their friends, and in those circles the worst crime one can have (even more than being a sex pest) is to have the wrong takes on current issues online. So as a result, many of them are psyopped against it. Why could this be a problem? Look at Russia.
The Russian economy isn’t that great. It never was before the war either. It was like a lot of third world countries, it has a weak currency and it took a hit after two major events: COVID and the war. Before the war, there were even some companies like Sabre Interactive outsourcing development work there for less money, and Postal III was made by a Russian company as RWS thought they could make a great game for less money (it was a disaster). But also, the commission economy and Patreon were boons for artists living in poor countries like Russia, Southeast Asian, and South American countries. They’re notorious for wages where the minimum is a few dollars a day, so being able to make mad money from furries with big tech incomes or credit card maxing was a dream come true. To quote one person who wanted to make money this way in Mexico, he could live like a king on US dollars.
And then the war happened.
See, Russia escalated a war between separatists and Ukraine that’s been going on since the mid 2010s, which most people had no idea about until it would boil over once in a while such as during the infamous MH17 shootdown. While the TV was talking about the war in Syria and the middle east with the rise of ISIS, there was another one breaking out within Ukrainian border towns, and the most people saw about it was that “Russia funded guys shot a plane down”. For a while this would be a huge international scandal all over 24 hour news networks, given the severity of it and who was responsible. But aside from that, the Ukrainian war got little coverage (I only learned about many bits and pieces of it after 2022, it was that blackholed). Something like NPR was talking about a buk missile for a while and who used it, before going back to your routine coverage of ISIS and the Koch Brothers. That is, until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 with the “special military operation”.
Naturally the USA and ally response was to sanction Russia. The idea was a presumably a matter of 5d chess, to hurt the average Russian citizen so they are pushed against the war being denied access to McDonald’s and iPhones and other icons of western capitalism that were common in Russia. Some websites and programs thought that to punish Russia, it was mandatory to hurt the average Russian citizen by blocking access to RU citizens or coding in booby traps like the infamous file wiper that was on the news (nevermind the fact many are apathetic to Putin with some even disliking the war but not saying it). The idea of sanctions working or not is a mixed bag, the USA and its allies have many citizens angry about gas prices (and in Europe, natural gas prices), and Germany even had to restart coal plants.
Meanwhile Russian versions of fast food chains usually dropped the branding and switched suppliers while serving the same food. There’s also some video I saw showing that designer goods and Apple products are still being brought into the country despite sanctions and all (they cost more though due to this). There’s also been intense web filtering going on in Russia as well, and many people I know there are using VPNs or Tor to access English websites. Not even to see what’s going on with the war like the creators might think, but because they want their Twitter. I’ve even heard news reports of companies sanction dodging. Of course, prices for many things went up as a result of this as well from what I heard, but it’s not as bad as it is in the USA.
One of the first groups of people being punished for the crime of being Russian were internet artists using PayPal. As a result of the war, many artists deleted Russia from the bio. There was outrage from artists in Russia over losing access to payment processors over this as well as they really just wanted to survive in an economy where all the jobs pay poorly. That’s on top of the looming fear of being drafted into a war they really don’t want to fight or a military they don’t care about (which is a common issue for artists living in countries like this, I knew one who had a mental breakdown over being drafted in South Korea).
So there was a time when artists moved from payment processor to payment processor, hoping to get somewhere. Eventually I’m sure they found some, but being that Russia is being sanctioned based on a war, there’s a chance they could get dropped again. Some did float crypto, but some furry swopped in to say why it’s bad and many just went with the most convenient option. Given you can’t call Bitcoin for a chargeback, I’m sure many commissioners are sketchy about it too.
But what if the situation there gets worse? What if the no-name payment processor is forced to stop doing business in Russia due to a hit piece or something? The Russian artists will be forced into crypto, which is where the reality hits.
Artists will be forced into using crypto in the end
A common critique about crypto is that it’s a “solution in need of a problem”, and this is doubled up with it being hard to make crypto payments IRL, or withdraw it in many cases, or exchanges acting as central banks and freezing wallets (and forcing users to withdraw in dollars instead). I’m sure much of this was due to “that one coworker” who was desperate to get rich quick by throwing money on a “shitcoin” on Kraken/Coinbase/similar to get rich quick. No really, the people gambling on Robin Hood to get rich from meme stocks pivoted to gambling on cryptocurrency to get rich (and increasingly dodgy crypto casinos like Stake). I knew coworkers who were spending time on the clock starting at the graphs. But the hard reality is situations like this are the problems crypto is ending up solving, especially with Monero.
Monero is especially nice for this very reason, due to its privacy focus. Monero is designed to be a private coin without a visible blockchain, free from the prying eyes of individuals with seemingly infinite resources at their whim. While many exchanges don’t sell it, Changenow.io does and allows you to exchange BTC for XMR. You then send it to your wallet (using something like exodus.io, and you have to send it to the wallet otherwise it defeats the point of using a privacy coin and you can get banned for this even) and boom. You’ll have cryptocurrency to spend anonymously.
Anyhow; you have to obtain crypto and then you can spend it. But once you’re there, you’re also free of payment processors telling you what you can and cannot draw. The truth is, the situation will worsen. Different people have different groups to blame for this, from MasterCard to foreign investors. But playing the blame game and whack a mole with payment processors isn’t going to fix anything. You’ll be forever kicking the can down the road until you’re forced onto it, regardless of what that Twitter post you retweeted in 2021 about crypto killing the globe and being used to fund Nazis said.
My advice if you’re doing art online, especially of a NSFW variety, is to read into how crypto works. Don’t read fearmongering posts on your TL, read into how it actually works and ask yourself this. Your friends are being censored left and right, so why stay on something that is bound to rules when you can use crypto? As neopuritanism online increases from both sides, this will have to be done.
Some internet artists on the Fediverse already accept crypto, but these are an outlier and (usually also draw sketchier material). This isn’t a shock either. See; these internet artists are either on the fedi as they got pushed off mainstream sites for drawing said material, or they were tech savvy enough to know about crypto. After all, that’s why they’re on the social network where everyone tells you to use Linux as a custom if they’re not pushed off Twitter.
This is the future, and it’s going to be there if you like it or not. The artists drawing legally questionable art already had to, and soon the goalposts will be moved to the point the average furry porn artist has to when he wants to draw hypno art (which Patreon banned). Crypto will still be there when you have to use it. After all, PayPal infamously bans porn and many furry artists complain when theirs is banned. Which means in the end, the plan B will come sooner than later. In 2018, it might have been fringe political posters online having to take it. In 2024, it’s going to be porn artists.
Pawlicker's Pleroma Experiment Blog 