I Am Begging You To Use A VPN

There is a wave of authoritarian crackdown of free speech around the globe, and marginalized communities are taking the brunt of the abuse. The villainous UK government has instituted mandatory age verification rules, and it has already had a massive chilling effect in just a few days.

Nobody wants to upload their ID to watch porn, and they shouldn’t have to. And even worse, YouTube is going to start demanding ID or credit card payments if you want access to anything they see fit to block. This is a massive breach of privacy, and nobody should doubt that Google, the biggest trafficker of personal information on the planet, is thrilled to have an excuse to collect even more invasive personal data.

And over at Reddit, it seems that huge swaths of LGBT related posts are completely inaccessible to many people. It’s fucking dire.

Under the guise of “protecting children,” sex workers and queer people are being disappeared off the internet. It’s absolutely vile, and nobody should consider capitulating for a second. Under no circumstance should you ever send a scan of your ID to watch a YouTube video. Grow a spine.

Just because the UK is in the news for their authoritarian crackdown on free speech, don’t think for one second that the US isn’t guilty of this same bullshit. Similar draconian laws are effective internet porn bans in many Republican-controlled states, and we’ve even had to beat back similar anti-porn laws here in Delaware where Dems control all levers of government.

And since we’re a video game-focused site, we can’t skip over the fact that payment processors are effectively eliminating the ability for many adult-oriented and queer games to exist at all. Both Steam and Itch have been strong-armed by their payment processors into taking down content that isn’t illegal, but the payment processors find icky.

As much as I find every aspect of the cryptocurrency hype machine loathsome, the singular aspect of crypto that I have always found compelling is that the likes of PayPal or Visa have no say in how you spend your fake internet points. We would definitely benefit from a digital cash system that didn’t have all of the baggage and perverted incentives of the crypto world.

I’m absolutely not going to buy Bitcoin or any of the other nightmare “currencies,” but the ultra-conservative machinations of governments and private companies makes our current payment schemes increasingly untenable. I don’t have a good solution here.

If you’re queer, an activist, an immigrant, a sex worker, or you simply demand to be able to use the internet unbothered, I am begging you to invest in a VPN. Not only do they allow you to route your traffic to another country that doesn’t have these nightmare laws in place, but it also keeps prying eyes off your web traffic.

I’m personally a big fan of Mullvad, but you should use any VPN that you trust to help secure your connection and provide better privacy. Open source tools like uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and Tor are also must-haves for getting the snoops out of your business.

VPNs and privacy tools can’t solve every problem, and certainly won’t bring back NSFW games on certain market places, but they do make your internet experience better while making it harder for the worst people in the world to see what you’re doing. Fuck ’em.

Image credit: Aleksei Sabulevskii