Yard goats to throat GOATs

Episode 18 of the Rascal Radio Hour finally delivers a tight 60-minute podcast as Chase and Rowan discuss itch.io's abrupt deindexing of explicit and games tagged as "NSFW" or "adult", among others, thanks to pressure from payment processors and right-wing citizen lobbyists from Australia. It's a strange and sad affair with ties to Steam, sex work, and the political wielded by corporations against individuals.

The pair also wade into Hasbro's latest earnings call with investors, where Chase sees the IP-addled brainworms leading to some weird decisions regarding Magic: The Gathering's future. Rowan is deep into trick-taking and also antifascist sex robots. Chase is unpacking boxes. Both of them dip briefly into the Question Dungeon to answer a question about bioessentialist game mechanics with the caveat that they are both white. Grain of salt, please!

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Here's an excerpt:

Chase: It's probably worth mentioning that people had a sort of diametric response to this, where some folks were really fucking angry at itch for folding. A lot of comments on Bluesky and Reddit posts where this was shared were calling them cowards, spineless, that sort of thing. And then there was another strain of like, this sucks. It is probably existential for creators who needed itch.io to host their content. But what else were they gonna do, right?

Rowan: And there's just so many layers to this. Is this complying in advance? We don't know how close MasterCard and Visa were to actively shutting off payments. Like would they have done it in the next 24 hours? And unless itch.io responds to us, we won't know. I don't know how frequently MasterCard and Visa have actually enforced this in the past, where they have actually cut off things because so many platforms have just complied in advance. This is something that's been going on for years now, specifically in terms of sex work. This happened to OnlyFans, this happens across the board, specifically targeting sex work first and then kind of coming down the line afterwards because of these really conservative, really regressive ideas of moral degeneracy.

Where does this go next? Would it have even mattered if itch.io said no? Would it have done anything? I'm seeing these talks on the internet that it only took [Collective Shout] a thousand people to call MasterCard and Visa for them to do this. And now people are doing a counter insurgency program, a counterprotest of like, hey, reverse this policy. But how many people does that take to then pull this back? It's this moment of a very vocal minority who are using bigotry under the guise of protecting people, which we're seeing over and over again in all of these different sectors. We're seeing it with TERF movements. We're seeing it with attacks on queerness and sex workers in general. I joked at the beginning: does it make it so that queer and trans people can't put anything on the internet because that's going to be considered grooming? I don't know, who knows?

Chase: Like you mentioned with a lot of the sex work — because, god, we're nearing 10 years since FOSTA-SESTA in the United States? Maybe not a decade but enough years where that's history, right? A decade of living in the time of using legislation to try to push sex workers and people making transgressive art, queer art, and sex art as far into the extremes and interstices as you possibly can. You can't make it illegal. Well, you can. We'll see under this administration, but before our new normal, you couldn't explicitly make that sort of stuff illegal. That was a very massive legal hurdle to climb over, but you could make it dangerous and really fucking difficult to make art and sell art through things like payment processing, through things like online safety acts, which the UK just passed a new one today. I had to use my fucking credit card to get into my Bluesky DMs because I'm in the UK now. These are the tools that you use to salt the earth so that creating and making a living off of your art is as difficult and onerous as possible. And therefore you just choke out creators. It's effectively the same thing. It happens in a thousand cuts, and people don't pay attention to it.

Rowan: Yeah, and then there is this weird, I don't know, logic or arithmetic you have to make: are we gonna throw these people under the bus so that way all of these other people can continue to make money? Are we going to do it so we can continue to sustain ourselves? Are we going to do it so these charity bundles can continue to exist? Which charity bundles are going to be allowed to exist? Does the TTRPG for Trans Rights Bundle get to continue to make these processes if trans rights are considered porn?