I wish there had been a call to action and a rise to meet that call like there often is in stories. A moment of clarity, of undeniable need, that drove the hero/community/leader to action against the foe that had appeared on the horizon. A series of events that would create a moment to inspire a movement. A tipping point where the imbalance was so undeniable that it inspired a mad scramble to fix the scale. Reality isn’t like that, unfortunately. Calls to action are usually ignored, excused, or defused, preventing the necessary rise in response in order to preserve the status quo. We’re all too tired, too poor, too scattered, to divided to respond to a call, for the most part. There’s so much between the people who need to rise and the thing they’re rising to meet that it often feels impossible to ever effect change. I know I often feel that way, like I’m fighting for a hopeless cause or that there’s no reason in putting up a fight because I’ll never gain ground, let alone win. Too much bad stuff keeps happening in the US unopposed by those who were supposed to safeguard against this kind of fascism and consolidation of power for me to seriously believe the idea that our current leaders will ever take meaningful action of any kind. It’s kind of devastating, to be honest, because of the things I was raised to believe about this country and people in general that I somehow still clung to after all these years. I don’t know what I’m going to do about these large scale things as they break beyond repair (but hopefully not beyond replacement).

Instead of focusing on that, though, I’ve been doing what I can to participate in a grassroots movement that has slowly been gaining steam. A bit over two weeks ago (one week, as I’m writing this), one of the premiere websites for independent video games, comics, and art removed all adult material from it’s search index. Details were scarce at first, but eventually the public learned that this company, itch.io, had been told to remove adult content from its website by the payment processing companies it depended on to conduct its business (such as Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal). This was a significant blow to a lot of independent creators of adult material who had been chased from so many other platforms by this same song and dance on the part of the payment processing companies (who also have a history of doing the same thing to adult media creators in any kind of business no matter the legality), and it was met with swift blacklash. Thankfully, there were people who understood immediately that the website was not to blame and began funneling the backlash in a more productive direction as it slowly became more and more clear that the relatively small team behind itch.io, who are known for not being the most responsive or great at supporting the people selling things on their platform, was doing their best to comply with these stifling demands so that business could continue in some form and then they could immediately start looking for ways around this restriction on incredibly legal material.

All of this was happening in the wake of Steam removing a bunch of adult games and visual novels from its store in order to comply with those same payment processes, which was claimed as a great victory by an Australian “advocacy” group that claims to advocate for the removal of illegal adult material but, based on their actions, wants to restrict everyone’s ability to access any kind of adult or queer material, often in the name of protecting children or sexual abuse victims. Since this group, called Collective Shout, was so clear about the relatively low number of calls and emails it took to presuade these payment processors, the people organizing the response to this horrible restriction on the rights of adults to spend their money as they wished began to funnel people toward the call centers and companies behind this heinous restriction. Over the week since then, the movement has grown from a group of directly impacted adult and/or queer media creators to encompass a significant part of the social internet. Even I’ve joined in since this is the first time I’ve seen such a clear connection between the actual cause and effect of one of these bans. Typically the platform doing the actual removal catches all of the heat like itch.io started to, but this time the conversation was able to move past that desire to lash out at the point of pain and focused in on the true cause. The whole movement has gotten so big and gotten so much traction that mainstream media is actually reporting on it honestly. They’re also carrying a lot of water for those payment processors still, but they’re at least not villifying the artists and activists yet.

After seven months of uselessly calling my presentatives and various lawmakers to only get platitudes, voice mailboxes, or just hung-up on, it feels so nice to see the tide of action I’m a part of actually have some impact. The payment processing companies are scrambling to respond to this growing crisis and will hopefully continue to scramble now that they’ve been exposed as the true culprits behind so much restriction of perfectly legal adult media over the past decade (and longer, really, but that moves this from “blog post topic” to “the subject of academic research and long-term activism” which is beyond my current scope). Unlike a situation with complex systems that are acting to preserve power rather than prevent abuse the way they were supposedly designed to, this kind of direct action can create immediate change. If we keep it up long enough, these companies will be either forced to relent or fully own the fact that they are going to arbitrarily restrict people’s abilities to buy and sell things. They’ve already been caught lying about how they decide to restrict what they’ll process payments for and that they actually reviewed any of the adult games and visual novels at the heart of this matter (since it has since come to light that the supposedly illegal game was, in fact, not actually illegal nor did it depict the things it was accused of depicting). Sure, they might double-down and the market share they’ve captured might prevent most meaningful consequences to them (look at the way that things are going for Harry Potter shit if you want an example of something that should be reviled still being relevant because people just don’t want to do the work required to denounce it), but there will be no denying it then. New payment processors will rise and then, since societal change would be required for this to have any lasting impact, things will probably turn out the same with this company eventually as well.

This sudden shift from constant, on-going failure to what might finally feel like a victory hasn’t suddenly turned me into an optimist. I’m hoping that this effort will be rewarded so I can claim a small part of some kind of victory this year, but I don’t know that it will have much of a lasting impact. Unless, of course, the soft networks of online communities that are forming around this call to action actually last beyond it, actually see this moment through to its end and then look to the future for what to accomplish next. I doubt that there’ll be much change even if all of these people call their representatives with the same furor that they’ll calling these payment processor call centers, but it might be the spark that shows us all the power of collective action. Not a call to action so much as an example of the power of rising to meet a call to action. We don’t need more calls to action after all–there’s dozens more every single day as the U.S.’s corrupt, fascist government slowly worsens all of existence for anyone who isn’t an obscenely rich white man. We need more people rising to act. More action overall, too. I had hopes that the protests following George Floyd’s murder would accomplish this, but the mainstream media companies did their best to smother the movement and, thanks to the mounting exhausting from police brutality and a pandemic constantly weakening or killing people, they succeeded. This time, though, everyone knows not to trust the newspapers or media companies because they’re on record as capitulating to the most blatantly corrupt man in existence, so maybe whatever movement grows out of this moment will outlast the media smothering. And survive whatever the U.S. government does to quell it. Maybe. Maybe, Maybe, Maybe. Like I said, this hasn’t made me suddenly an optimist, but it has cracked open a door I’d thought shut and barred, so maybe there’s some small hope to be found there.