Fossil is today announcing its new Gen 6 smartwatches, its first range of devices powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Wear 4100+. The new platform will, Fossil promises, offer a number of quality-of-life improvements including faster loading times and the ability to fast charge to 80 percent in half an hour. In addition, the new watches will offer continuous heart-rate tracking, a new blood oxygenation sensor and a new built-in wellness app for more reliable activity tracking. Oh, and users will be able to make tethered calls thanks to an integral speaker and microphone combo, should you need the feature.

Naturally, Fossil has made it clear that these Gen 6 watches, unlike the current (and older) models, will be compatible with Wear OS 3 and users can expect to receive the update due in 2022. The new watches will launch in two sizes: a 42mm case with three color options, while you can get four different paint jobs if you opt for the 44mm case. Both devices, however, will get a 1.28-inch round AMOLED display (326 ppi), with 8GB built-in storage and 1GB RAM. Since a big part of Fossil’s sales pitch is customizability, you’ll also get a wide variety of strap choices to help make these devices more suited to your personal style, too.

The Fossil Gen 6 watches will cost between $299 and $319, with pre-orders open right now.

HP, the world’s second-largest PC vendor by market share, says that the new Pavilion Aero 13 is designed for Generation Z. Youthful, vibrant post-teens who love entertainment, communication and — COVID notwithstanding — travel. It’s ironic, then, that when you examine this machine from that perspective, it becomes a less attractive proposition. This is actually a pretty nice laptop, but I doubt it’s top on any Zoomer’s wish list.

Hardware

Daniel Cooper

The focus here is on making a machine that is as thin and light as possible while still offering a decent amount of power and connectivity. Weighing 2.2 pounds, about the same as the 14-inch LG Gram, the Aero is HP’s first low-end machine to pack a taller 16:10 display. It carries a pair of USB-A ports with kick-out covers, HDMI-out and a single USB-C socket alongside a 3.5mm audio jack and the barrel power connector. I’m still torn over the throwback power connector, which on one hand is acceptable and cost-effective, but, again, does your average Gen-Zer not want to minimize the number of chunky charging plugs they’re carrying around?

Build quality is solid, with no flex or creaks when you hold it open with one hand and wave it around. The one place where I’ll take marks off is in the display hinge, which is designed to push the laptop deck up off the table like ASUS’ ZenBook. It just feels a little bit less sturdy than you might expect, which you’ll need to be mindful of if you rest your weight too much on the front of your hands. The malleability of that hinge feels just weak enough to make me paranoid.

Keyboard and trackpad

Daniel Cooper

The Pavilion Aero 13’s keyboard is well-engineered and satisfying, with a fair level of travel and a good hit at the end of your press. Interestingly, you need to pony up extra for a model with backlighting, which is either miserly or smart cost-cutting, depending on your perspective. It may not be the same quality as HP’s higher-priced laptops but it’s certainly not a chore to write with.

Except for, and I am being needlessly grouchy here, HP’s inclusion of a function row along the rightmost side of the keyboard. Most 13-inch laptops, for obvious reasons, try to cut down on superfluous keys that you may only find on more spacious models. And that’s fine, because it’s rare that I ever find myself needing to use Home/Pg Up/Pg Down/End when I have other keyboard shortcuts (and, you know, a trackpad) available.

I get why HP insists on using them here, but it means that you’ll have a learning curve when coming off pretty much every other laptop in this class. And, if I were king, I would have opted for a standard layout with more breathing room, not to mention full-size up/down keys with more space around them. After more than a week using this thing, I’m still hitting the home key instead of backspace, dramatically slowing my typing speed, much to my frustration.

As for the trackpad, it’s bigger than on the 2020 model that this replaces, and has a decent click with tolerable accuracy. The lack of a touchscreen on this laptop isn’t, in my opinion, a huge issue given its size and class, so long as the trackpad is solid. And this trackpad is very much that, and there’s not much else to say about it as a consequence.

Display, sound and webcam

Daniel Cooper

This machine carries a 13.3-inch HD display, although because of its 16:10 ratio, that 1,920 x 1,200 resolution is actually WUXGA. I don’t think anyone would need a 4K display on a machine like this, but you can configure it with a WQXGA (2,560 x 1,600) screen should you need to. The 400-nit panel can balance any strong summer light, and the matte screen means that you avoid a lot of glare.

The downward-firing B&O-branded speakers hidden under the edges of the laptop deck provide acceptable audio. They sound a little better than on some ultrabooks I could mention, but it’s still thin and reedy, with tinny equalization presets and nonexistent bass. This is audio you can put up with rather than enjoy during all of those Netflix and Chill sessions where you actually watch Netflix and Chill.

Daniel Cooper

Perhaps I’ve been reviewing too many laptops of late that have some sort of webcam shutter, but the omission here surprises me. The HP WideVision 720p HD camera is at least sharp enough that people can see your face properly when you’re using it. Even better, it handles most light well enough that blow-outs are occasional rather than ever-present, which is good considering how much we all need to Zoom each other right now.

Software

One thing to note is that HP pre-installs a number of apps onto its laptops, including McAfee, LastPass and ExpressVPN. This means you’ll start getting pop-ups after installing Chrome, telling you that plugins are about to be installed. That I think this is an unacceptable thing to happen, even for a relatively low-cost laptop, should go without saying.

Performance and battery life

Both Intel and AMD have made enormous strides toward integrated graphics units that don’t suck. This is thunderingly relevant in the ultrabook market where thinness and portability are prized over pretty much everything else. After all, even a few years ago you couldn’t have done much more on a machine of this class beyond mash the odd spreadsheet. Now you can expect passable, even quite pleasant performance on a wide variety of tasks, from intensive Chrome browsing to video games.

The model that HP sent to reviewers retails for $999, and includes AMD’s Ryzen 5800U with Radeon Integrated Graphics, which packs 512MB of dedicated DDR4 VRAM. Rounding out the spec list is 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, which sits on the higher end of what you can expect to get for this sort of money. Certainly, the benchmarks make this thing look a lot less powerful, but I suspect the Aero simply isn’t set up for intensive gaming. It’s worth saying that even the fan noise isn’t that aggressive under heavy load, too.

That said, I was able to play Fortnite pretty smoothly on this machine with the graphics set to Medium, and an evening’s marathon session of Two Point Hospital passed without comment. Certainly, if you are happy with undemanding titles, you’ll be able to squeeze a lot of fun from this machine. GTA V’s benchmarking tool was able to produce a fairly consistent 30fps, and if you dial down all of the visuals, you can get this running fast enough to play in a pinch.

Battery life is similarly resilient, with this machine clocking in at 9 hours and 43 minutes in our standard rundown test. When untethered from power, I didn’t feel any nagging urgency to head back to a socket while using this thing, and you should expect this to last for the length of your working day. And, to be honest, if this had conked out any sooner I would be screaming from the rooftops about it, since the whole point of an ultraportable is, after all, to be portable.

Price and the competition

Daniel Cooper

As I said, the model I’m testing costs $999. That’s a fair price, especially if you try to configure a similar spec list with some rival machines in the same category. There are some alternatives, and if your priority is a slender, lightweight machine, then LG’s Gram 14 can be picked up for $799.99. It has a 14-inch WUXGA display and weighs 2.2 pounds. Sadly, its specs fall far short of HP’s offering, with an Intel Core i3-1115G4, 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. You could also opt for ASUS’ ZenBook 13 OLED, which packs a Ryzen 7 5700U, 8GB RAM, a 512GB SSD and an OLED display for $899.99.

If you’re feeling picky, you could do worse than to wait for more AMD-toting laptops to enter retail channels in the near future. I expect that we’ll see models similar to Lenovo’s ThinkPad X13 and Acer’s Spin 3 with comparable internals coming very soon. At which point, you should have your pick of any number of high-quality machines that can do jobs similar to this one.

Wrap-up

Daniel Cooper

This isn’t a fair comparison at all, but in my head I keep thinking about Dell’s XPS 13 which, for many people, is either the gold-standard ultrabook, or in the top three. And, right now, that on both specs and price, the Pavilion Aero 13 is a more compelling choice. When you look at the base model XPS 13, which starts $1,019.99, the only thing that HP loses out on is aesthetics. In almost every other regard, I’d much rather have this Pavilion Aero than the XPS and that, to me, is wild.

I think the Pavilion Aero 13 is a very good machine, with a solid thin-and-light body and performance that punches well above its weight. For some people, the 5800U running the show is enough of a reason to buy one of these that everything else is broadly immaterial. Do I wish it was priced a little more aggressively? Yes, because I could forgive the learning curve with the keyboard if it was a hundred bucks cheaper. Despite the keyboard and sound, though, it’s a good machine for folks who want a little bit of everything.

Niantic, the developer behind Pokémon Go, has announced that it will reinstate the wider access distance for players interacting with Pokéstops and Gyms. In a tweet, the company said that the radius would return to 80 meters from “now on,” after saying that the distance would be reduced back to its pre-pandemic size.

Go is, after all, a game designed to get folks out and about, which isn’t a great idea when there’s a global respiratory pandemic knocking around. That’s why, as COVID-19 began to bite, Niantic made interaction distances much longer, to discourage groups from crowding in public areas.

In addition, the company also made Remote Raid battles, and Adventure Sync work much more effectively from home, given the number of people who had to isolate. The normal calendar of real-world events were moved online, too, and many of the store deals were slashed in cost.

As Polygon reports, Niantic’s flip-flop here was prompted by social media protests after some of these changes were reversed. The company engaged in dialog with players, with a change in policy planned for September 1st, with players asking for better regard for safety and accessibility.

Saints Row, the class-clown of GTA-esque open-world sandbox games, is no more. In its place is Saints Row, a reboot of the series with a back-to-basics focus on ground-level crime and violence. In the seven years since Gat out of Hell was released (we’re not counting Agents of Mayhem), the world has moved on, and so too must Saints Row.

Welcome to the Weird West

Deep Silver / Volition

The new game is called Saints Row (which we're told has no subtitle, despite the repeated use of the "Self Made" tagline even on the box art), and is set in Santo Ileso (Spanish speakers, does that pun work for you?), a stand in for America’s Four Corners region which the developers are calling the “weird west.” There are Route 66 signs scattered across the landscape and the desert that surrounds the city, with its patchy grass and tall mesas, looks a lot like Arizona. The neon-strewn casino district (El Dorado) seems to be inspired by those found in Albuquerque. And the financial area, at least from the trailers (and to my British eyes) seems to have been pulled from downtown Santa Fe.

Santo Ileso is made up of nine individual districts with each one designed to use a different traversal method. Running and driving will work best in some regions, while players are encouraged to fly a wingsuit off the top of the financial district’s skyscrapers to cover long distances. Or you can steal a VTOL-equipped craft and just make merry havoc all over the city as you go. The game was built in a brand new, as-yet unannounced engine and these new environments are designed to take advantage of the power that next-gen consoles — if we can still call them that — can offer.

The developers say that Saints Row’s focus is, at least early in the game, going to focus on the material concerns of its young crew. These disaffected millennials turn to crime to, for instance, put food on their table, feel part of a community and pay off their student loans. Chief creative officer Jim Boone says that it’s, broadly, a “contemporary” millennial “power fantasy.” It’s only later that the game’s focus switches to the sort of empire-building that, in the previous series, eventually saw your character becoming president.

Deep Silver / Volition

As the game progresses, players can buy property and businesses which opens up new game modes and levels. You can choose where to put those businesses, too, like putting a garbage collection site in the middle of the financial district. The choices you make here will, for instance, engender resistance if you start putting toxic waste next to wherever the one percenters live and work. And, as you take over more of the city, the bigger your power base will grow.

The storyline sees your ragtag quartet encounter three distinct gangs, each of which owns a chunk of Santo Ileso. The Panteros, for instance, are a bunch of muscle-car enthusiasts who try to use their superior strength to defeat you in combat. Marshall Defense Industries, meanwhile, is a local weapons developer with its own mercenary army equipped with a range of sci-fi weapons and superior marksmanship. Then there are the Idols, a group of Kawaii Cyberpunk Anarchists wearing light-up cat ear helmets who overwhelm you with numbers in a fight.

Meet the new boss

Deep Silver / Volition

As far as we know, references to Steelport, the 3rd Street Saints, Johnny Gat, Kenzie and anything else from the prior series are gone. Or, at least, will be relegated to the odd, deeply buried easter egg for die-hard fans to root out while they’re immersed in this new world. In their place is a trio of characters that work to support your player’s unnamed and customizable protagonist.

There’s Eli (pictured, 2nd from right), an MBA student who works as the team’s planner, speaking in the language of startups, investment and business. Then there’s Neenah (pictured, right), the team’s driver, who had aspirations of becoming an anthropologist but got sucked into working as a mechanic for Los Panteros. Rounding out the quartet (of which you are the fourth member) is Kevin (pictured, left), a topless thrill-seeking DJ who, like his fellow Idols, loves wearing a Kawaii Cyberpunk helmet and wreaking havoc.

The player character is, as before, infinitely customizable — although it’s not clear how broad those options are. Deep Silver says that you’ll have access to the “most advanced suite” of customization tools ever seen in an open-world game.

One of the questions raised in the roundtable with the game’s developers was that of cultural appropriation. The six people made available for interview were all middle-aged white men, creating a game set in a region where a significant proportion of the population is Latinx or Hispanic. Creative director Jim Boone said that diversity was important, and there was an explicit focus on making the team producing the game as diverse as the characters in it.

Inspiration

Deep Silver / Volition

In terms of what we can expect from the new title, Boone said that some of the major inspirations for this film came from the cinema. He cited three titles: John Wick, Baby Driver and Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbes and Shaw as key influences. From the first, you will be able to spot some of the brutality in the combat and some of the melee takedown moves are cribbed from the film’s action sequences. The experience of driving has been pulled from the second, while the third’s penchant for over-the-top action helped provide a baseline for how stunts would work in the new game.

There will also be a broad degree of Fast and Furious-inspired vehicle customization in which every playable ride can be fixed up. The desert that surrounds Santo Ileso, for instance, has plenty of rough terrain that can be used to crest dunes and chase or evade your enemies. Consequently, players can even jury-rig the game’s garbage truck as a heavy-duty off-road vehicle.

Playing together

Deep Silver / Volition

Saints Row is coming to the PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox One and, for PC gamers, the Epic Games Store. The developers said that cross-platform co-op will be available from the start, and you can play the entire campaign through “untethered co-op play.” One thing that was mentioned was the ability to “prank” your co-op partner, stymying their progress in order to advance your own.

The elephant in the room

Deep Silver / Volition

There are more than a few reasons why Volition chose to make Saints Row, rather than Saints Row V. Boone said that the classic series of games were very much “of [their] time,” with tastes and attitudes having moved on. And it can’t have helped that the company’s last attempt at a reboot, Agents of Mayhem, received lukewarm reviews and poor sales, forcing Volition to make layoffs in its wake.

Lead mission designer Jeremy Bernstein added that the original story, by the end of Gat out of Hell, had burned through all of its narrative runway. When your player protagonist has conquered Earth, ascended to Godhood and escaped hell, there’s not much you can do to top it. Bernstein compared the problem to the James Bond movies circa Moonraker, saying that once you’ve done James Bond In Space, the gritty realism of For Your Eyes Only is one hell of a tonal shift.

But is it still fun?

Deep Silver / Volition

The team wanted to assure us that while the juvenilia that marked the previous series was gone, the irreverence would remain. Bernstein said that it would be pretty much impossible to make a “grimdark Saints Row game” for obvious reasons. And while the developers didn’t elaborate much on silly weapons, like the Penetrator (Saints Row The Third’s infamous Dildo Lance) and the Dubstep Gun (from Saints Row IV), they said one or two had made their way into the title. You’ll also, once again, be able to ragdoll yourself into traffic under the auspices of committing insurance fraud.

If I have a concern, it’s that I always found Saints Row a more enjoyable franchise than GTA because of the emphasis on fun. The challenges soon became repetitive, but the breadth of ways in which you could complete a mission (and the fun weapons) helped smooth the edges. The emphasis here, so far, has been on the difference between the new game and its predecessors, with less discussion on how fun it all is. Maybe that’s just savvy marketing, and the new title will be just as fun and silly as franchise diehards are hoping. But it’s something that I’d like to see more of, or else I’d get the feeling that the title may lose the one thing people are so desperate for it to have.

Saints Row is scheduled to launch on February 25th, 2022 for current and next-generation consoles.

The trickle-down of features from Fitbit’s higher-end wearables to its everyday fitness trackers continues with the Charge 5. This new edition of the device is packing both ECG and EDA sensors, both of which were first found in the higher-end Sense, to better help you monitor your heart health and stress. Charge 5 also gets a few quality-of-life improvements compared to its predecessor, including a new body that’s 10 percent thinner and a new color AMOLED display with an always-on option.

But the real point of this new tech is to integrate the Fitbit into your daily health routines as something more than just a tracker. The ECG sensor will, naturally, help you check your heart’s electrical activity and check for signs of atrial fibrillation. The EDA, or Electrodermal Activity sensor (itself a fancier term for Galvanic Skin Response) is designed to measure the perspiration of your hands, which can be a marker for stress. As with the Sense, users can then be coached through a stress-reduction session if their stats get too aggressive.

Fitbit is also looking to bolster its $10-per-month Premium offering to encourage more of its hardware users to sign up to a monthly subscription. That includes a new Daily Readiness Score, which sounds a lot like Garmin’s Body Battery calculation, which will examine how ready you are to work out. It’ll do that by looking at your heart rate variability, recent sleep schedule and activity to judge if you should hit the treadmill or the couch that day.

Premium will also get a new collection of workouts from Les Mills to help coach you through the workout du jour. In addition, Fitbit is partnering with Calm, and Premium users will get access to “30 pieces of Calm content in seven languages,” with users able to run an EDA scan at the same time as listening to a Calm-created mindfulness session. Or they will be, since the material is expected to arrive at some point in September.

The Fitbit Charge 5 is available to pre-order today, and will cost $179.95 complete with six months of Fitbit Premium thrown in.

Lumen is a crowdfunded tracking device which purports to analyze your breath to determine what state your metabolism is in. Now, the company behind it is launching an app for the Apple Watch to make it easier for you to use the hardware when you’re on the go. Users will be able to use the device and then see the results on their wrist, in a way that CTO and co-founder Avi Smila says “seamlessly integrated into daily life.”

The pitch for Lumen is, essentially, to enable you to learn as and when you should be eating and in what quantities. The system can tell you when you should eat, based on your metabolism, and suggests carb servings, meal plans and macros for the day. Should it be a lack of a smartwatch app has held you back from buying a Lumen thus far, you can pick up a unit for as little as $199, plus a monthly subscription of $19 a month.

Lumen is a crowdfunded metabolism-tracking device which purports to analyze your breath to determine what state your digestive system is in. Now, the company behind it is launching an app for the Apple Watch to make it easier for you to use the hardware when you’re on the go. Users will be able to use the device and then see the results on their wrist, in a way that CTO and co-founder Avi Smila says “seamlessly integrated into daily life.”

The pitch for Lumen is, essentially, to enable you to learn as and when you should be eating and in what quantities. The system can tell you when you should eat, based on your metabolism, and suggests carb servings, meal plans and macros for the day. Should it be a lack of a smartwatch app has held you back from buying a Lumen thus far, you can pick up a unit for as little as $199, plus a monthly subscription of $19 a month.

PayPal is bringing the ability to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies across to the other side of the pond, the better part of a year after it launched in the US. In a statement, the company said that UK-based users would be able to buy, hold and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash via their PayPal account. In addition, the PayPal app will enable users to view real-time cryptocurrency prices and access information about the opportunities and risks that buying such currencies entail.

Buying and selling cryptocurrencies was introduced to all users of the app in the US back in November 2020. Since then, users have been able to check out with crypto, and the feature has also been rolled out to Venmo. The company adds that users can buy as little as £1 of cryptocurrency, and while there are no fees to hold the currency, users will have to pay transaction and currency conversion fees. It’s not clear, yet, if the total limit on how much you can buy is capped at the equivalent of $100,000 (£73,000), as it currently is in the US.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory released a breathtaking panorama of the inside of the Gale Crater, as snapped by the Curiosity Rover. To celebrate the Rover’s ninth — ninth! — year surveying the red planet, the clip shows off where the Rover has been, where it’s going, and what we’ve learned in the last decade. This includes the breathtaking fact that, on a clear winter’s day when there’s no dust in the air, you can see close to 20 miles.

The panorama, as reported by Gizmodo, shows Curiosity’s journey up the side of Mount Sharp, and the detour it had to take in order to avoid a large sheet of Martian sand. As the rover has journeyed up the side, the composition of the rocks had changed from a clay-rich base to one full of sulphide. As Deputy Project Scientist Abigail Fraeman explains, researchers are hoping to learn a little more about how Mars lost its water (the Gale Crater used to be a lake, after all) and how long it took before it became the dry desert planet we see before us.

OnlyFans, the platform that allows creators to sell material directly to customers, will soon implement new restrictions on the publication of adult content. Starting in October, the company will ban the sale of sexually explicit content and depictions of sexual acts. The move does not cover all nudity, but says that specific rules will be outlined in an as-yet unpublished acceptable use policy. In a statement, OnlyFans said that the changes were prompted by “requests” made by its “banking partners and payout providers.” In short, the company’s arm has been twisted by the same big banks that have waged war on online sex work for years.

Big Business

The business can certainly attribute much of its success to enabling sex work and helping sex workers to get paid. Over the last two years, OnlyFans has grown from relative obscurity into a brand that is synonymous with adult content. Earlier this year, it boasted that its creators had earned more than $3 billion, and the platform was name-checked in a Beyoncé remix. It’s believed that the company, which had around 7 million users in 2019, has seen that figure reach closer to 130 million in recent months. And, on June 16th, Bloomberg reported that the site was looking to attract investors in order to raise more funding at a valuation of more than $1 billion.

It is clear, however, that a number of people who both create content for, and use, the site feel that the impending adult content ban is a betrayal. In a statement shared with Engadget, Isaac Hayes III, founder of Fanbase — a social media site that lets users sell their content — summed up the general sentiment rather neatly. Hayes said that the move was “disgraceful,” and that OnlyFans had “made billions off that user base.” He added that dumping sex workers after becoming a household name was “exactly what these platforms do. Discard the users who make it popular once they get what they want.” And in this case, it does seem as if the twin aims of securing more money from investors and retaining access to banking is what prompted the move. It’s a story that we’ve heard several times before.

Deja Vu

The most recent example, and one that we covered extensively at the time, was the cultivation and subsequent dumping of a sex work community on Patreon. Before 2017, the site had passionately and publicly courted sex workers, encouraging them to use its platform. In 2016, it loudly defied PayPal’s longstanding ban on payments to sex workers, allowing users to support content creators through its platform. At the time, Patreon even criticized PayPal’s lack of transparency, saying that its opaque policy “impacts the lives of Adult Content creators.”

This attitude did not, however, last very long. On September 15th, 2017, Patreon raised $60 million from investors, and updated its content policy a month later, seeming to repudiate the sex workers it had previously courted. In subsequent interviews, the updated policy was described as not a big deal, with the company pledging to work with creators to ensure compliance. The general notion was that Patreon would crack down on content that was illegal or otherwise nonconsensual.

A year later, however, and the site would further toughen its rules, saying that any and all adult content — including the famous erotic art project Four Chambers — was no longer permitted. (Four Chambers, the name of a British art-erotica collective led by artist Vex Ashley, was long held as the canary in the Patreon coal mine.) Patreon said that it had stepped up “proactive review of content [...] due to requirements from our payment partners.” In short, the same banks that Patreon had battled so loudly the year before had tied the site in knots, demanding it hunt out any and all content that could be considered adult.

It's worth noting that swerving away from sex work doesn't ensure the future prosperity of a business. In 2019, Patreon CEO Jack Conte told CNBC that its business model was not sustainable, and in April 2021, the Wall Street Journal said the site was still not profitable. Tumblr meanwhile, which under Engadget’s parent company mass-purged adult content from its site in 2018 but left a wide variety of neo Nazi content on its platform, saw its valuation fall from $1.1 billion in 2013 to just $3 million in 2019.

Tangled up in Paperwork

Back in April, MasterCard announced that it would further toughen the reporting requirements around adult content. John Verdeschi, Senior Vice President, wrote that banks using its network would need to “certify that the seller of adult content has effective controls in place to monitor, block and, where necessary, take down all illegal content.” This includes rules requiring platforms to keep a record of the identity of every performer shown, as well as who uploads the content. In addition, all content would need to be reviewed prior to release, and all platforms need to run a beefed-up complaints resolution process to take down illegal or non-consensual material within seven days.

As TechDirt wrote back then, as reasonable as these policies sound, they seem intentionally designed to block all adult content, not just the illegal stuff. As it explains, “the new policy [...] makes it impossible for streaming platforms to comply with the new rules. Since they’re not able to prescreen streamed content, they’re [sic] just going to start blocking anything that seems like it might lead to MasterCard pulling the plug.” Mary Moody tweeted, upon announcement of the policy change, that “OnlyFans, MyFreeCams & more are in danger.” As with Patreon, MasterCard's reporting requirements appear to be such a burden that companies would rather avoid the issue altogether than attempt to comply.

This isn’t a new story, however, and in 2015 Engadget laid out in detail how banks were systematically withdrawing access for adult content platforms. This isn’t just prohibitions on working with select adult content sites, but a blanket-ban that impacted individuals beyond their life in the sex industry. JPMorgan Chase shut down a number of bank accounts owned by adult performers, and refused banking services to a company that makes condoms. This crackdown had an disproportionate impact on individual accounts held by women and LGBTQ people.

The Right

This crackdown is part of a broader alliance between banks, lawmakers, right-wing pressure groups and religious extremists. As The New Republic explained late last year, these groups have been able to use the cover of sex trafficking to push an anti-porn, anti-sex agenda. The movement’s most successful victory was the passing of FOSTA-SESTA, a US law designed to tackle human trafficking by neutering the safe harbor provisions of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996. Despite contravening the first amendment, the move has not shut down many groups of human traffickers, but has closed safety services created for, and used by, sex workers, and even forced Barnes & Noble to purge its ebook store of erotica.

Naturally, OnlyFans became a clear target of those campaigners both because of its success and because it contradicted their narrative. By enabling individuals to sell their material to consumers without intermediaries, it was allowing people to make a living. You can also argue that sites like OnlyFans have enabled people otherwise excluded from the workforce — this report from Arousability explains that a person with chronic pain who can’t work a 9-to-5 job found that sex work offered them financial independence they couldn’t have found otherwise.

Alternatives

While creators wait for OnlyFans to detail just what content will be allowed, in its brave new world, many may wish to take their business elsewhere. There are a number of platforms that occupy a similar space in the market, including AVN Stars, FanCentro, Unlockd and AdultNode. Just For Fans, for instance, says that it is a sex worker owned-and-operated platform, and that it will welcome any and all creators that OnlyFans has “abandoned.” Similarly, a number of in-progress projects to build more sex-worker owned and operated platforms are currently underway.

It’s likely that this will be seen as another reason to switch to a blockchain and cryptocurrency-based system as a way of escaping the reach of big banking. There are several, including SpankCoin and Nafty, that offer sex workers the ability to sell content through their systems. And as more major platforms are picked off by a combination of payment processors and regulators, this space is going to grow. 

But there are inherent risks to switching, including currency fluctuations and the risk that a sex work-specific currency can still be excluded from mainstream exchanges. And then there’s the fact that if a platform gets big enough, it gets noticed — and targeted — by anti-sex advocates. Crypto can shore up the finances, but pressure can always be exerted on providers, hosts and platform owners wherever they may be. 

And that often forces creators to leap from platform to platform to keep one jump ahead of the people who want to strip them of their ability to make money. But every time they do so, they risk losing their user bases, and have to expend time and energy to recover the fans that they already had. Either way, until there is better political and corporate leadership who can handle the nuanced situation of online sex work, individuals will often be left with no choice but to keep moving, or sink.