Somewhere between your mouse click and a purchase, a private boardroom full of executives quietly decided what you’re allowed to see, support, or sell. They don’t run your favorite website. They’re not elected lawmakers. But if Visa or Mastercard doesn’t like the look of a transaction, that transaction ceases to exist. That piece of content, that creator, that platform: gone.
There are a lot of complaints in tech circles about who’s getting deplatformed by YouTube this week. Meanwhile, the most consequential censorship in the digital economy has nothing to do with social media and everything to do with whether a little plastic rectangle will greenlight your purchase. And there’s no appeals process. No trial. Just a silent ax falling from a credit card duopoly that nobody elected and nobody seems able to challenge.
Take the recent purge of over 50 adult-themed games from Steam, the dominant digital PC game store. No new law had passed. It was a threat from Visa and Mastercard, quietly relayed like an old-school mafia warning. Valve, Steam’s parent company, made it clear: “We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks.”
In other words: “We’d like to keep making money.”
Valve didn’t wake up with a sudden newfound sense of moral hygiene. It was the payment processors. They pulled the fire alarm, and Steam complied like any rational hostage trying to keep the electricity on.
That’s what happens when the pipes of global commerce are guarded by a pair of unaccountable financial institutions that somehow got into the censorship business without anyone noticing.
Visa and Mastercard are no longer just companies. They’re gatekeepers of moral acceptability.
One day your art is fine, the next it’s too spicy for the algorithms; or worse, for the boardroom optics team. And if they decide your platform has crossed some invisible line? That’s it. No explanation required. No appeals offered. The economic oxygen gets cut off and there’s no recourse.
It’s one thing to be beholden to government regulations. It’s another when your business is held hostage by a pair of logos with an embossed hologram.
Hellbound and Down 