Imagine having the news broken to you by E621.net, a furry porn website. E621.net (click here to see furry porn lol) has a disclaimer covering today's topic: how the state of Arizona is balancing on a knife-edge as the Governor contemplates whether or not to Veto this ID Age Verification Bill. E621.net is an archive of furry porn that is fiercely moderated by its community of nerds who dedicate their spare time to finding, categorizing, and tagging countless pieces of furry porn for quick queries by potential consumers. Featuring a blacklist and virtually every possible type of furry and furry-adjacent pornography you can think of, E621.net is potentially the most "slice of the internet" a furry porn website can get, and its controversies are many.
You're gonna wanna read-on from here. I'll link the two relevant articles and a PDF I have about Arizona's current Bill and the broader problem here:
- Yesterday April 1st 2024, Bill goes to Az State Governor
- February 2023, Bill enters first drafts.
- (edit)Project 2025, which is the GOP's Trump/Christian Nationalist Theocratic Agenda.
- I'm watching for the next Media Release Kate Hobb's organizers put out online in a Legislative Action Update. The present bill HB2586 was not listed in her most recent action update.
CW's: U.S. Politics, Policy, Grim Portents and discussion of Pornography online. Also, SFW Content, NSFW Blog. Thanks, let's go.
[April 3rd 2024 Edits]: Small revisions for readability, extra linking, and clarification of my conclusion so that it's less "welp we're about to get murdered lol" and is actually what I meant to say... plan for websites you like to go offline.
E621.net's relevance for the Furry Fandom, and as an indicator species for extinction as part of systemic Queer Erasure.
Worth the notation is a quick point that E621.net is effectively property of Bad Dragon, the Dragon Dildo Company, a proudly Arizonan Export which has operated in Phoenix Arizona since before I was even 18. When Athus (the former boyfriend to popular artist Narse) died in a car crash, it was on I think I-10 near a famously squirrely interchange across like 6 lanes of traffic. So as a resident of Tucson who has lived there for 28 years coming this Summer, I can tell you that our state history has been spotty at best and humiliating at worst. Controversial members of the Furry Fandom like Varka are also involved in Bad Dragon, and due to allegations of Zoophilia AFAIK not ever legally investigated many people in the Furry Fandom have sworn the company off. Not helped is how the winding and knotted (snerk) tapering tale of this silicone penis and penetrable toys company often finds itself through possession of E621.net to be at risk of Obscenity Law interpretations, owed only to its position in Arizona and relatively low profile that it hasn't been targeted. It is one of the many archives (such as Rule34.paheal.net) which lets users upload almost anything so long as it is not illegal in the state of Arizona or by direct U.S. Federal Law.
So aside from hosting a lot of furry porn, E621.net has a lot of risk by merely existing anywhere, let alone if the State of Arizona demands to see their papers / decides to look into their operations. Meanwhile, our Democrat-caucusing Governor sits poised to decide the fate of a not insubstantial portion of the Furry Fandom, marking another opportunity for the Theocratic Rightwing of the U.S.'s political ecosystem to gut another state's pornography industry in the name of 'protecting children' who are often not taught anything other than abstinence-only sexual education. Let's not mince words here: This is bullshit, and if our Governor doesn't Veto this, it's going to kill a not insubstantial part of the furry fandom for a fair amount of time. Here's the news itself (click the link here) where the information is covered. It's been such a long road that the first news of this bill's agenda (the ID portion) was alive and well during August of 2023, well after I'd shouted about this exact thing in May of 2023 when Furaffinity expanded their content blacklist to match many aspects of National Obscenity Law (you can read that by clicking here).
Spreading problems with Bad Dragon / E621.net being in Arizona were this bill to past exist even further in their implications; I'm told F-List.net also has servers dependent upon the same infrastructure, but couldn't confirm this in time for publishing this to Cohost. The international implications are clear however: E621.net and Furaffinity.net are closely linked to the Furry Fandom, and by extension those two locations are critical to many people who are in the broader internet Queer space. While plenty of young-in's start out on Twitter or Tumblr these days, it's worth the notation that Furaffinity.net and E621.net only continue to add users and gain additional daily traffic, plus the non-stop volume of artwork posted on either website (often with mirrors of Furaffinity/Twitter artwork posted to E621 for archival). E621.net has a problem or three with what content makes it to the website, if or if not it passes the sniff test of their "quality" gatekeepers, and often works will be tagged with indicators that are not always representative of the content within. For example, my character who is trans and intersex would be tagged as a "gynomorph", with "transgender_(lore)" in the far far extreme end of the tag-list. It's not uncommon for artwork depicting Pokemon or other cute characters to be slapped with the overly broad "young" tag as well, creating new headaches for artists whose works didn't meet the former cut for "cub" / "teen" (both of which being tags for furry characters implied/specified to be under 18).
Project 2025, MasterCard Policy, ID Laws...
So, what's the deal with Obscenity Law? I know, stand-up comedy routine isn't exactly becoming of me but I have to ask the question in the event you haven't read my deep dive That's Obscene! (NSFW) which covers some of the basics. I have a series of observations about how Queer Spaces Online particularly Fandom Spaces tend to end up as the targets of puritans and theologians, and none of the things I have to say are new. People often site the Stonewall Riot of the 1960's as the pivotal moment that Queer Rights became asserted in public knowledge and politics, and they're right to do so as during the era preceding the riot is where we get U.S. Obscenity Law and regulations on the sale and distribution of pornography that "lacks any serious artistic merit". To say that a fictional illustration of sexual behavior (with real or imagined persons/animals/etc) is not somehow a 1st Amendment Protected expression is basically an entirely Theologian invention. Their arguments range from placid such as Pornography being as addictive as opioids or other narcotics, into the absurd like how basic representation of LGBTQIA+ characters in media is a step too far and propaganda that is brain-washing innocent children. It goes without saying that despite the conviction rates, general trends in U.S. Criminal Proceedings, and historical trends in law; these same Theologians argue that Queerness fundamentally involves some kind of child sexualization. These same advocates of anti-pornography and anti-LGBTQIA+ policy have a frequent pattern of committing homosexual acts of indecency with illegally hired sex workers, and molesting children in places of worship or at home.
Glass houses withstanding, the tendencies here are worth the discussion purely for the sake of analyzing the risk to Fandom Art and Queer Expression. We're facing unpreceedented risk of deplatforming at a time in which virtually everything on the internet is under siege if it so much as presents female nipples. Ever since the start of the drama targeting Tumblr via the Apple Store's insistence on banning suggestive and erotic content (and allegations of CSAM circulating through the platform, which was true and could have been targeted more deliberately to discourage it), there has been an existential struggle for the hosts, creators, and consumers of pornography. There also is a war over the risk of harm that pornography access to minors potentially presents, despite there being a pretty clear precedent that it doesn't influence minors remotely as much as early contact with adults in spaces that expect mature adults. Your average Minecraft Youtuber probably grooms more children than any typical Queer online, often times the victims remain teenage girls, just like the Real Life world, where they are routinely the most common victims of inappropriate conduct and assault by adults. As more and more of the U.S. social space is occupied online as a response to housing insecurity, poverty, increasing cost of transit and the disastrous sprawling of U.S. cities and low-density suburban housing, we're likely to see this trend of online targeted grooming to be facilitated in new and exotic ways, especially with the new opportunities predators have via use of AI systems to simulate youthful appearance.
Out the other end is the fundamental question: what version of the internet will be safe for people under the age of 18? The answer is: no version of it. Period. Dot. Nothing is without risk, I thought about this fact as I rode in a Ferry while stuck in an automobile between destinations on the island-riddled coast of British Columbia this weekend. People die and are maimed all of the time by mundane and frequently utilized technologies, but the internet gets fresh scrutiny as a new domain of the highway banditry, scam, sexual assault, and regular old abuse/murder/etc that characterizes the Human Species. We had so many variants of these issues prior to the internet, but the new factors as discussed above are only the tip of the iceberg thanks to how AI / Machine Algorithm generative technologies are creating entire new domains of illegal content and attack vectors to target victims of all stripes. I wish my essay about AI systems happened already, I keep needing to talk about these issues and not having enough succinction to describe them in depth. Frankly, the AI situation is going to ruin a lot of things for everyone and you're likely to see someone you know targeted with a customized ransom-scam or with a targeted photomanipulation likely within the next year, maybe two. Globally, we're headed into WW3 in the conventional war kind of sense, making information warfare and the once-hypothetical "Fifth Generation" of warfare pressing and relevant to common civilians the world-over.
Contrasting this are ID laws, Bans on Pornography, Bans on Transgender affirming medications and surgeries, Bans on LGBTQIA+ education, and so much more which lingers in the political space. In the U.S., the Conservative Party is fragmenting between Center-Right people who actually understand how the government is supposed to work, and Alt-Right Christian Nationalists who've rallied under Trump and want to gut basically everything that isn't White, Male, and USA-praising while extracting wealth and enabling foreign adversaries like Russia to run amok unchecked. It's frustrating that Isolationism amongst the Alt-Right is applying to the U.S.'s critical geopolitical strategies, and they couldn't do basic shit like isolate when sick with COVID. A veritable war against the very perception of replicable, measurable reality seemingly is playing out within the U.S. Political Stage, even career Democrats like Joe Biden can't help but be snagged in moral compromises such as enabling Israel's genocidal war against the Gaza Strip and Palestinian people. No matter the state of affairs, there is a serious disaster building in the U.S. Political System and the upcoming elections of November 2024 may be more chaotic than those which characterized 2020. It's hard to look at the scene at-large, then back at the "small" issue of Queer Erasure and the destruction of Queer Spaces Online, and not see them linked into these huge webs of contradictory and suicidal political agenda. It's without exaggeration: My Fellow Americans, the Republican Party is fundamentally anti-American down to willfully misinterpreting the Constitution and Bill of Rights in the name of removing rights from people who fought hard for them.
Project 2025 is the GOP's agenda for if Trump and them maintain grips of power and secure the whitehouse again for another Trump term. The absolutely stacked house of the Supreme Court and the many obvious, painfully transparent political favors and posturing that both Joe Biden's administration and many career Republicans and Democrats are making in the name of compromise are being utterly overrun by the worst people. White Christian Nationalism is the single most pressing risk to Domestic U.S. populations across demographic boundaries, regardless of your Sex, Race, Education, Career, and other indicators, make no mistake that this kind of patently Authoritarian agenda which tears down countless artworks, public spaces of community, and many other institutional protections against destruction is meant to destroy you specifically. You, me, everyone who won't tow the line and become subservient, become a surrendered slave or a corpse in the ground, the alternative to resistance against Project 2025 is quite literally the sudden and lurching halt of even our standard of corrupt Democracy within the United States. Strong men like Trump will appeal whoever will give them power, and right now our current best examples of attitudes the GOP is currently rallying behind are epitomized by Vladimir Putin. Putin, mind you, invaded Ukraine for no good reason, TWICE since 2014. You can't cut causality here, there's just no separating the global political scene from how the U.S. needs to conduct itself domestically, because we built a society that depends on the world.
Decentralize your Online Alias, and be ready to go Offline.
Survival strategies from the 1990's and early 2000's for Queer Spaces Online are increasingly becoming the ones we will have to consider. This involves FOSS, Fediverse, anything off-brand, anything that we can do ourselves and build informally, anything that is flexible and can be hosted amongst Peer to Peer circumstances. We have to not only prepare ourselves for the inevitable fall and continued decay of our current infrastructure online but must also consider how we will need to go to ground in real life. Depending upon how things like this go, the U.S. could become an international pariah for Human Rights like its peers in China and Russia -- Texas has certainly put us closer than ever before in that potential version of the future. Canada has problems legislatively speaking that will put it at risk of being taken by the GOP's influence, as their Conservative Party increasingly represents U.S. Conservative's interests and not the interests of actual Canadians. Moving up here for me only puts me on the other side of a fence, I still got skin in the game as I plan to maintain citizenship in the U.S. and still have so many important people in my life (Queer and otherwise) who are trapped. We might have to find ourselves gathering quietly in public, concealing our true selves in plain sight and continuing the fight with our votes. PLEASE, I genuinely beg you, we cannot let anyone in the GOP's new organization through into positions of power within the government. Show up. Vote. Yell at people, it has to happen. While you're at it, plan for the place you like (internet places mostly, but possibly consider group gathering spots like cafe's, parks, etc) to get killed, and what you'll do after they're gone. It's getting tight.
