Why are artists a subscription service? To chisel the sculpture of David, Michelangelo took over three years. Can a ceiling mural be painted, a novel written, or a video game developed in a month?

Yet artists are, according to Patreon, production mills set to monthly schedules.

Who benefits from this model of payment? Answer: The person who takes money out of every transaction between artists and their supporters.

It is telling that Patreon does not allow a creator to disable indefinitely his billing. The billing of Patrons re-enables itself each month to siphon the maximum amount of money from people in the name of “supporting the arts.”

And why shouldn’t billing be continuous, never-ending? A leech grows fatter from sustained blood flow in the host.

Just as the option to remove yourself from Facebook is hidden under layers of confusing menus, so too does Patreon hide from you the ability to free yourself from their claws. How a company treats you is always how they see you, and art websites want to take from your pockets all of the value that they can.

Adult Content Bans across the Internet

A middleman injects himself between your transactions for art. He is known as Visa, MasterCard, Discover and AMEX and he determines what you can buy and who you can pay for it.

Through his money transfer systems he dictates the terms of all art websites:

Adult art is being shaped into one acceptable form of monetized expression—decided not by you. There is no website for artists to emigrate to because any website that uses the system is bound by the system.

Adult websites have always operated with taboo restrictions but those restrictions get narrower each day. Your taboo adult art account exists only insofar as it goes unnoticed.

Money, not Art

I do not believe as other artists do that my art should pay me. I believe in the opposite: Compensation is an idea tacked onto the art and it is not in the nature of the work itself.

To be made, art needs time and energy. There is always a cost and never a guarantee of remuneration.

As an artist becomes dependent upon his art for his income, however, his livelihood is at stake and he learns to protect it. To afford to live he must never step outside of the guidelines set for him by his money handlers; he must never create contentious art.

The system is designed in this way to give lenders judgment over taste and culture. The invisible hand of the market–economic censorship–coerces artists into an obedience of acceptable expression, as determined by those who can withhold access to money.

To make art that says something contentious an artist must pay for it. The market is built to reject him and to make costly the expression of unacceptable ideas.

Websites that rewrite their terms-of-service to redefine adult content do it not to protect artists but to entrap them. A policeman follows a car until the driver breaks a law, but with a million laws on the books, your guilt is certain.

The Why and How

Companies are modifying your behavior to change your thinking. By using their subscriptions, you treat artists like a commodity. They are training you to see art as commerce.

The goal is control. Media companies like Disney or Netflix can set guidelines for artists and shackle them in-house. But outside of their production houses, artists cannot be controlled. Unless, of course, the companies funnel them into a marketplace governed by their rules of sale.

Patreon takes 12% of every dollar that you give to me but I refuse to empower them. In a rigged game, the only winning move is to not play.

If you wish to support me, I accept Bitcoin. Decentralized currency is outside of the control of payment processors. It allows free trade between buyers and sellers and by using it you starve payment processors of money, of power.

You are the gold; companies amass us to generate power. Individually we are small yet we remain pure gold. Never forget your power.

Companies want you to devalue yourself and forfeit your power to them, like an art subscription that you forget to cancel.

Use your power to fund what you believe in. That is the world that you create.

– ChadChan3D, March-29-2024