Terms Of Service – Bike Snob NYC

In curating this blog, I do my best not to bore you with tedious matters of administration. Rather, I prefer to bore you with the tedious minutiae of my life as it pertains, however tangentially, to bikes. And in that respect I’d daresay I’ve been very successful–in boring you, that is.

Nevertheless, as a one-man operation, every so often I need to apprise you of what’s going on behind the so-called scenes, and this is one of those times. As you’ll recall, about a year ago now, I started groveling for accepting donations on this blog. (Don’t worry, this is not me asking you for more money. I mean you’re always welcome to give me more money, but that’s not what this is.) I did so by incorporating a “Payment Block,” which is a feature WordPress offers its publishers specifically for this purpose, and which is linked to a payment processor called Stripe.

This was an easy and straightforward solution, and it was working just fine until this morning when I got an email from Stripe informing me that they were closing my account because “it is in violation of the Stripe Services Agreement.” This was a surprise, since up until now I’d mostly been getting emails from them in which they kept trying to get me to borrow money against my blog’s earnings.

So I went back and forth with WordPress via chat, and with Stripe via email (in the former case I confirmed I was chatting with an actual human, in the latter case I suspect I was corresponding with a bot or some sort of AI entity, but who knows), and the upshot is that I didn’t get a whole lot of useful information from either of them. But subsequently, I’ve been looking at Stripe’s “Restricted Businesses list,” which includes stuff like the following:

• Genital prosthetics
• Sex accessories and lifelike sex toys
• Adult services, including prostitution, escorts, pay-per-view, sexual massages, fetish services, mail-order brides, and adult live chat features

And while I’m not involved in any of that (on this site, anyway, for all you know I may have others), I guess I am accepting the following, which I now see is also on the list:

• Content-related tips and gifts

So why does WordPress offer you a Payment Block and buttonhole you into opening a Stripe account so you can accept tips and donations on your blog if that’s something Stripe doesn’t allow? I don’t know. Maybe the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, or maybe Stripe just recently changed its terms of service–after all everything’s been just fine for the past year. But even more confusingly, in one of their email replies Stripe said the reason for the termination is that I’m in involved in “Crowdfunding,” which I’m not, although crowdfunding sure seems like a loosey-goosey concept if you ask me. Isn’t anyone who accepts money from three or more people (three’s a crowd as you know) for anything technically crowdfunding? And if you really want to be confused, then chew on this:

So Stripe doesn’t allow crowdfunding payments, yet they are the payment processor for Kickstarter, the mother of all crowdfunding sites.

And on top of all this I had an appointment with the dermatologist this morning, and so now you can begin to appreciate how busy I am.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I’ve removed the Payment Block, and I’m letting you know this mostly because some of you have given or are giving on a recurring basis via the Payment Block and therefore through Stripe. As I understand it they don’t kill me until February 23rd, so anything you’ve given should reach me just fine, and I’ll receive anything they process until then. I’m also assuming that after February 23rd these bastards can’t keep taking your money if you are giving on a recurring basis, but I’ll make sure of that in the coming days, because the last thing you need is to deal with any bullshit because of some stupid bike blog. In the meantime, anyone who’s absolutely dying to give me money can still do so via Paymo or Venpal, and in the near future I’ll sort out a new payment processor, but that’s what’s going on, and so here I am letting you know.

Oh, and everything was fine at the dermatologist.

By the way, these tech companies really have us by the balls or vulva depending on your genitalway, because they offer people like me a fantastic service (I publish myself, I “monetize” myself), we become dependent on it, and yet as soon as they decide to rescind some aspect of their service we’ve really got no recourse. Something similar happened to me way back in the early days of this blog, when for reasons unknown to me Google decided to terminate my AdSense program and not pay me the balance in the account. As in this case, there was no transparency, my appeal was blithely dismissed via email, and the whole thing was infuriating. However, I had an opportunity most normal people did not, for not too long after, Google invited me to talk at their Mountain View headquarters, and I got to confront them directly:

[The video should take you to the relevant portion, but if it doesn’t, it starts at 2:44, or here.]

After that someone at the talk did end up helping me, and I did get my account back, but I had to publish a book and go on a national publicity tour in order to do it.

By the way, I wasn’t kidding about trying to storm the Google headquarters in New York City, I really did try to get in there and talk to a human. Also, as I’ve probably mentioned elsewhere, I actually did work for Michael Moore–I was his assistant in, I believe, 1997, and here’s a picture from the New York Times of me flanking his considerable flank:

Keen observers will note I don’t look as happy as he is. One day I’ll tell you all about it over drinks.

In any case, not to over-dramatize what is mostly just an inconvenience, but it is worth thinking about where we’re headed. What happens when all your accounts are administered by AI? What happens when the AI unilaterally decides to terminate one or more of your accounts? What happens when you go to spend your digital dollar at the supermarket and you can’t buy any more meat this month because you’ve already exceeded your carbon allotment and we’ve got to save the climate? What happens when you can be instantly de-platformed and demonetized for violating some vague and ever-changing terms of service? Request further review all you want and it’ll still be denied. We’re outsourcing our autonomy to the digital realm, and if it wants it’ll render you as impotent as a locked Vanmoof:

[Via a reader]

Fuck it, I’m going off the grid and moving to a geodesic dome.