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blazehedgehog
@blazehedgehog

Minorly annoyed with how easily a post can get buried here on Cohost.

I saw a post on here a few days ago asking for an open call for serious writing on adult games and adult gaming. At the time I scrolled past it thinking "that's cool, it's always nice to have elevated prose"

Today lightning kind of struck my brain: more than once across the last two decades have I stumbled upon a back-alley website that hosts all three of the following items:

  1. A vast collection of pirated ROM files for emulators
  2. A vast collection of pornography
  3. A vast collection of... I don't know how to put it, but, like, a very specific genre of reading material?

Point number 3 definitely requires the most explanation, because the reading material I'm talking about is always, like... material for desperate, fragile individuals. It's always self-help books on how to be a stronger man, or how to be a pick-up artist, or how to get rich quick, etc. Information that's always framed as "SECRETS THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW". It's meathead trash, in the same way as, like, dick pills, or Alex Jones brain supplements.

And I just realized that, like... nobody has ever talked about that. It's been this background radiation to me, this thing where multiple websites, dating all the way back to Plasticman's Emulation Zone when I was a teenager, all host very similar types of contraband despite very clearly being operated by different people. And some of this is definitely just that -- contraband. You tell a person its verboten and that means they just want it that much worse.

"They" don't want you to know this stuff, so all the more reason to host it somewhere, right? It's easy to get bent out of shape about censorship.

But how much damage has that done? How many people have been radicalized by this material, some of which is very clearly just poison? And how much of this is intentional? How many of these back alley websites lure you in with the promise of pirated games and terabytes of pornography, and oh well if you look in the back there also just happens to be an entire library of eBooks about the white master race and how women are just subhuman servants to men. At least one of them has to be doing it on purpose, right?

It's the struggles of the punk scene, something that's been ongoing practically since the 1970's. It's easy to get bent out of shape about censorship, but sometimes that's because what's being censored is a legitimate, like, cognitohazard. It's that Garfield meme about propaganda.

In saying all this, this is a big topic, and I personally don't know of I'm equipped to handle it all given my schedule currently.

But I might as well put it out there anyway. Get the ball of public consciousness rolling.


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in reply to @blazehedgehog's post:

You know, this brought back a memory of earlier piracy sites also being linked with shock content in some capacity! I guess as that style of edginess fell out of style, they naturally evolved to cater to the newest trends in edgy content.

I've definitely encountered some of those... barebones FTP websites before, but in my case, it was just conspiracy stuff. And of course, that felt really compelling - BLACK HELICOPTERS and shit - but I somehow didn't fall into the hole as a teen.

But the idea that you can radicalize more bees with honey rather than Mein Kamph and somebody is doing that deliberately with a piracy site is interesting.

Hope somebody posts the long investigative journalism piece when it comes out and I read it.