Hatreon

» see hatreon.us as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Hatreon was an American argument conducted entirely on American platforms, and it never had an edge that reached here. I am writing it down because the way it died is the most interesting fact about it, and because the mechanism has since been used on people who have nothing to do with it.

The summer of 2017 was the deplatforming summer. After Charlottesville in August, hosting companies and payment processors and social networks all started enforcing terms of service they had been ignoring, sometimes within the same week. Patreon and Kickstarter removed accounts. GoDaddy and Cloudflare dropped the Daily Stormer. A category of person who had assumed the internet was neutral infrastructure discovered that it is a stack of private companies with lawyers.

Cody Wilson was already famous for something else. In 2013 he had published the files for the Liberator, a pistol you could print, and spent the years afterward in court about it. Hatreon was his second act. It soft launched in June 2017 and was running publicly by August, and the pitch fit in one sentence: recurring crowdfunding with no content policy, for the people other sites had removed. The name was a joke he committed to fully, which turned out to matter later.

It worked, briefly and unmistakably. Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer was drawing something like $7,788 a month through it by November 2017. Richard Spencer had a page. Identity Evropa and Nordic Resistance were each clearing a thousand dollars a month. The Southern Poverty Law Center put the whole site at roughly $25,000 a month. That is not a large business. It is a functioning one, and at the time it was the only one of its kind.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what really happened ~

Nobody sued Hatreon. Nobody took the domain. In November 2017 Visa stopped processing its transactions, and that was the end of the product, even though the website kept answering for months afterward. Wilson told the New York Times only that "a major credit card company" had cut him off, and by December the pages had a notice on them saying pledging was disabled.

He did try to keep it upright. In January 2018 he tweeted that there is a difference between being down and being out of business, which is the sort of thing you say when you are out of business. Payments never resumed. By early February the site could not process a pledge at all, and other vendors were declining to serve it. The domain went eventually, unmourned, and Wilson's own life took a turn in September 2018 when he was charged with sexual assault of a minor and picked up in Taiwan after leaving the country.

~ what it proved ~

The lesson Hatreon taught is not about the people who used it. It is that the internet's actual chokepoint is not the website and not even the host. It is the four or five companies that move money, and they answer to no first amendment because they are not a government. You can own the domain and run the servers yourself and still be switched off in an afternoon by a risk department you will never speak to.

That mechanism did not stay in 2017. It has since been pointed at adult performers and at legal cannabis businesses in states where cannabis is legal, at whole categories of people whose only shared feature is being filed as high-risk by an underwriter nobody elected. Hatreon is the clearest early demonstration because the site had no other weakness. There was nothing to sue and nothing to report to a host. There was just a card network deciding it would rather not.

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