big guy / little guy
Well, Google rolled out its new payment service this week. But you cant use it to buy porn or items of a sexual nature. Damn those right wing religious fundamentalists in congress! Those politicians just hate anything having to do with sex so they used their power to force Google not to accept payment of sexualy oriented stuff.
That is why it happened that way? Isn’t it?
Actually there is a whole long list of items you cant buy with Googles new payment system. Some of these have to do with sex. Others are of questionable financial status. Like marketing schemes or infomercials. Others are on shaky legal ground. Fake ID or hacking tools or copyrighted media. Overall the list seems more based on what can keep them out of legal battles rather than any statement of morals or ethics.
Besides, I doubt google would crack under government pressure against sexual items without putting up a fight. When the feds wanted one million random search terms from google, under the guise of combating porn, google went down kicking and screaming.
Ok, so maybe the new google payment system isn’t being pressured by the federal war on porn. But we all know eBay is! Right? They were forced to remove all items of a sexual nature from their listings. Oh those evil conservative christian politicians! How dare they oppress our freedoms.
Er. Actually thats not happening either. All the naughty stuff is still there under the Everything Else/Mature Audiences category. All you need to do to access it is to log into your eBay account and prove your over 18. There is no pressure from the government, nor from anyone else, to get rid of items of a sexual nature. The items of sexual nature are still right there.
So what the heck is going on here anyway?
What is going on is narrative folklore. Stories that are told from person to person so much that people assume they must be true. Urban legend. People that study these things point out that these stories fall into very specific motifs. In this case it is the ‘hero’ archetype. The brave lone individual battling against the large corrupt group. Batman fighting organized crime. Luke Skywalker fighting the empire.
Its a standard theme. A professor of mine in college called it the “Shane effect†after the old western film Shane. The lone gunman standing up against the large corrupt organization of the local land barons. There are many other examples.
Christopher Columbus as a lone visionary standing up against the all too powerful church that was teaching the earth was flat. (The church was saying no such thing. Most people knew the earth was round dating back to the time of the Greeks.)
Thomas Jefferson as a poor farmer standing up to the mighty military of the British empire. (Plantation ownership was big business back then. Jefferson was one of the richest and most influential men in North America)
John T. Scopes as the brave science teacher battling government enforcement of creationism over evolution. (Scopes was the football coach and it is questionable if he ever even set foot in a science classroom. He planed the whole thing with some local businessmen as a publicity stunt for the town.)
The pattern is quite familiar and lovingly American. We love to root for the underdog. The good guys are always the lone individual hero and the bad guys are always the giant organization. Yet the actual facts of history seldom break down so cleanly into this good-guy/bad-guy pattern.
Consider. I have heard the story from several people that the government is cracking down on credit card companies, preventing them from processing transactions for porn related stuff. Much in the same pattern of the government crackdown on google and the government crackdown on eBay. The people that repeat this story never seem to know what the specific bill was that was pased by congress. But they are certain that the government is a huge organized group forcing the actions of the ‘little guy’ credit card companies.
But just over a year ago, it was the other way around. The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act changed the way that people could file for bankruptcy. Now in the actual law there was a provision called the means test that protected the poor and destitute. It hurt the rich and didn’t affect the poor in the slightest. In sharp contrast, the story everyone repeated was that the huge organized group of credit card companies were just being greedy and didn’t care about the poor. They used their power to lobby congress and force their will on the ‘little guy’ congressmen.
Depending on the event, the ‘little guy’ changed. For the so-called war on porn, the little guy was the credit card companies being forced by the powerful government. For the changes in the bankruptcy law, the little guy was the government being forced by the powerful credit card companies. In each case, the truth of what was going on doesn’t fit so neatly into the generic template of “huge well organized group forcing their will on othersâ€.
People in the kink community like to think of themselves as the little guy being oppressed by some huge powerful group. But there seldom is such a villain. Its just storytelling. A story that fits a well known and well studied structure.