The Enclosure of the Digital Commons: Global Age Verification Laws & the Death of Online Privacy

WORDS by PENELOPE DARIO

In a global paradigm increasingly governed by facial recognition scans and IP bans, the act of logging on to watch porn is starting to feel more like applying for a passport than accessing adult content. If you’ve tried to visit Pornhub in the UK this week, you might’ve already noticed.

On July 25, 2025, the UK’s Online Safety Act officially came into effect, mandating that thousands of platforms—not just adult sites, but dating apps, Reddit threads, and even Twitter-like spaces—begin collecting government ID, banking info, or biometric facial scans to verify users’ ages before they can access “18+ content.”

You read that right. To see some T & A online legally in Britain, you now need to submit a selfie to a third-party firm that may or may not have the cybersecurity capacity to protect your identity from a leak. And if you think that sounds dystopian—congrats. You’re paying attention.

These systems aren’t just invasive—they’re medieval. We’re living through a digital witch hunt, dressed up in Silicon Valley drag. It brings to mind Belladonna of Sadness, the 1973 animated masterpiece by Eiichi Yamamoto, set during the feudal closure of the commons in medieval France. In it, a peasant woman named Jeanne is punished for seeking joy, autonomy, and love outside the rule of landowners and clergy. Her fate unfolds in psychedelic spirals, but the message is crystal clear: repress the erotic, and you control the soul. Nearly fifty years later, the gallows have gone digital—but the ritual remains the same.

This isn't alarmist—it’s simply true. This happened in Louisiana last year. It’s happening again in the UK. And if you think you’re safe behind a VPN, think again. Reports of users being doxxed, blackmailed, and outed are already trickling in. 

These aren’t just bureaucratic safety nets, these screening methods are part of a rising wave of state-sanctioned shame and surveillance masquerading as “child protection.” Sound familiar?

That’s because it’s an echo of the Nordic Model—the legal framework exported from countries like Norway, Sweden, and Iceland, which criminalizes the purchase of sexual services but not their sale. In practice, this turns everyone involved in the sex trade into suspects: landlords, drivers, translators, roommates, and friends of sex workers have all been targeted as “pimps.” It destroys housing, isolates migrants, and makes everyone more vulnerable. 

Now, that same logic is being applied digitally.

In Norway, new discussions are underway to criminalize the purchase of custom erotic content if the buyer is located within the country—even if the performer is abroad and consenting. The emphasis is on targeting demand, not understanding context. It’s not just about who’s producing the content anymore—it’s about who’s watching it, what they’re watching, and where they live.

Across the Atlantic, It's Already Here.

Back in the U.S., eleven states now require age verification for adult sites—many via third-party apps that ask for a driver’s license, social security number, or real-time selfie scan. Several of these verification services have already leaked data, affecting tens of thousands of users. And with the looming shadow of the EARN IT Act, end-to-end encryption for private messaging may be next on the chopping block.

Let us be clear: sex workers don’t want minors watching their content. But these laws have nothing to do with keeping kids safe. They’re about controlling adult sexuality, normalizing surveillance, and erasing erotic labor from the digital commons.

As I wrote earlier this year:

“If a child drinks a bottle of toxic household cleaning products with a warning label, parental neglect is put into question. Bleach doesn't suddenly become outlawed.”

So why, when it comes to sex, do lawmakers treat all adult access as suspicious?

The enclosures of the digital age echo the enclosure of the commons in early modern Europe, when land that had long been shared by peasants for grazing, gathering, and living was suddenly privatized, and fenced off for profit. What followed was mass displacement, the criminalization of subsistence, and the birth of the wage economy (see: Silvia Federici’s Caliban and The Witch for more on the transition from feudalism to Capitalism in Europe.) Today, we are witnessing a similar process online: the enclosure of the digital commons. Spaces once used freely for expression, connection, and sex work are now gated by third-party ID checks, corporate moderation policies, and legislative surveillance. Erotic labor, like communal land, has become the first target—because it is unruly, self-directed, and impossible to fully control. But make no mistake: this isn’t just about porn. This is about the systematic dismantling of any space where people gather outside the jurisdiction of state and capital.

We’ve seen this before. FOSTA/SESTA. The shutdown of Backpage. The criminalization of cash apps. These are all chapters in the same story—a story where the people who sound the alarms first are the ones no one wants to listen to.

But the consequences don’t stop with us.

Age-verification laws disproportionately affect queer people, disabled people, kink communities, and anyone with sexual interests deemed “deviant” by conservative standards (not unlike the Ugly Laws—state ordinances put in place in the U.S. from the 1860s to 1970s that banned people with visible disabilities and diseases from being in public space, effectively criminalizing disabled people). Now, these age verification laws  criminalize pleasure. They outsource risk to tech companies. They compromise user privacy (your privacy!). They establish databases of desire (yes, you’re on a list!). Your masturbation habits are now a liability. 

Following the 11 states in the US, Pornhub has already blocked IP access in the UK in protest, refusing to participate in what they call “performative safety.” They’re not alone. VPN usage has spiked by over 1,400% in England since the law’s implementation, and digital rights groups are calling this what it is: a mass experiment in normalizing censorship.

From Louisiana to London, Oslo to Oklahoma, the message is clear: you can’t have sex, even by yourself, without state supervision. Every click, every kink, every whisper into your phone is one step closer to a permanent digital record.

But as I wrote in our State of the SWunion manifesto:

“We are the canaries in the coal mine and the objectives for our activism are more far-reaching than our own community.”

So here’s your reminder: this isn’t about porn. It’s about power.

If this all feels mythic, that’s because it is. Watching the state contort itself to punish erotic autonomy—whether through biometric age scans or encrypted message bans—recalls the persecution of witches, both literal and figurative (from the birth of Capitalism in Europe as a counter-revolutionary movement against heretics i.e. peasant women which has acted as a blue-print for colonialism and the ongoing subjugation of women). In  Belladonna of Sadness, Jeanne is assaulted and exiled by Feudal lords on her wedding night when she and her husband can not pay their tax. She is reborn as a force of ecstatic resistance and a healer during the time of the bubonic plague. Her body becomes both weapon and canvas—an archive of trauma, yes, but also of pleasure, rage, and revolutionary beauty. At the end of the film, Jeanne is burnt at the stake for refusing to bow to the lord and exist within the feudal system.  Like Jeanne, we are being asked to bow, to hand over our names, to sign away our desire in exchange for the illusion of safety. But also like Jeanne, we understand that power is most terrifying when it is shared because it becomes ungovernable and impossible to shame.

Petit Mort was built from that same fire. We’re not just a magazine, we’re a living archive—a spell cast against forgetting. But we’d be lying if we said we weren’t weary. The air is thick with smoke. The censorship is creeping and we are watching the horizon, hoping our signal fires don’t go out in this wave of erotic erasure. If Jeanne is what happens when a woman is forced to stand alone, then Petit Mort is what happens when we stand together.

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