The Inquisitors of the Digital Age

A Libertine Rebuke to the Censors, the Moralists, and the Priests of Safety

Once again, the old play begins. The curtains rise, and onto the stage stumble the same cast of trembling hands and furrowed brows: senators, regulators, bureaucrats, priests in all but name. They wag their fingers, clutch their pearls, and warn us — always warn us — that desire is dangerous, that pleasure must be caged, that freedom must be monitored “for our own good.”

Today their script is called the Digital Services Act in Brussels, the Online Safety Act in London, and the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act in Washington. Different costumes, same dreary performance.

They may call this “safety.” We call it surveillance.
They may call this “decency.” We call it tyranny in drag.

The New Inquisitors

In the European Union, the DSA demands identity verification for access to adult content. In practice? A database of names, faces, IDs — a ledger of desire, ripe for abuse.

In the UK, the Online Safety Act dresses itself in the language of child protection while drafting every citizen into a registry of consumption. “Who watches what” becomes a government file.

And in the United States, Senator Mike Lee and his joyless cohort are salivating over the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act, a piece of retrograde theater that would resurrect the rotting corpse of Comstock laws and empower Washington to define what millions of free people may or may not see.

The Real Danger

It is not pornography that endangers us. It is not desire, nor kink, nor lust.

It is databases brimming with our private lives. It is fragile digital walls guarding our faces, IDs, fetishes, and fantasies from thieves, hackers, stalkers, blackmailers — and from the greedy eyes of the State.

The true obscenity is not that someone seeks pleasure in the arms of a stranger, or on the stage of a webcam. The true obscenity is that free people are being forced to catalogue their desires in order to satisfy the trembling morality of politicians.

The Stench of Hypocrisy

And who are these crusaders, these sermonizers, these so-called “guardians of morality”?

Men and women whose own hypocrisies drip from them like spoiled perfume. Bureaucrats who line their pockets with corporate favors. Politicians who thunder about purity while sneaking into scandals of their own — scandals hidden behind sealed files and broken investigations.

(Do you smell that, dear reader? That is the scent of Epstein’s unmentionables, rotting in a locked drawer, carefully hidden lest the public learn which of its leaders were regular guests on his island of sin.)

The Libertine Response

We laugh at their hypocrisy. We sneer at their pious sermons. We scorn their desperate clutch at control.

Desire is not a crime.
Pleasure is not obscene.
Freedom is not negotiable.

A Call to Defiance

Do not be silent. Rebuke them directly. Write to your representative, your senator, your MP, and let them know that their schemes for censorship, surveillance, and forced conformity will not be tolerated. Tell them, in no uncertain terms, that their crusade against free expression is a betrayal of liberty.

Support the independent creators who give us art, intimacy, and joy.
Resist the normalization of surveillance dressed as “safety.”
Celebrate your desires, for they are yours alone.

And if they fear us?
Good. Let them fear us more.