THIS ITCH.IO USER IS ON STRIKE!!!

“art isn’t about giving people what they want“ – Arcane Kids Manife$to (and thus I don't give people on itch.io a web build, because that's a fucking pain for videos & also Unity just crashed)

I am not an activist. In fact, I am generally not a fan of activists and activist art, which might appear logical as an OCPDer, because nobody is ever allowed to tell me what to do, since my own obsessive-compulsive rules will always be superior. Also, most online activists I’ve encountered were just very mean people lol. I consider activism to be ineffective, especially since it relies on a basic trust in an individual’s agency within democracy, or in some sort of social organization, which is a completely mysterious and illogical field to me (I don’t even understand how people can have friendships, it is utterly bizarre to me as an outside observer lol). I am not for democracy, especially in its current capital-dictated forms, I think there are way better, smarter and more efficient ways to think about managing populations and their resource needs. And thus, I distance myself from political activism that is as of now always tied to upholding the capitalist-democratic status quo.

But anyways, THIS ITCH.IO USER IS ON STRIKE!!!, conceived on 13^th December 2025 and completed on 22^nd/23^rd/24^th February 2026, is a protest piece that could be described as some sort of online activism. Mostly virtual-digital video installation, and you can click on each number in order to read my demands, as listed below. The background music uses a piano version of Bella Ciao, greatly known due to its usage by the resistenza italiana during WWII. The background video is set in front of the address of the Itch Corp. Gumshoe Gooper is an in-universe character from the 2019 video game Hypnospace Outlaw. Also, once again I used my avatar from the elevator speech of my MFA thesis that unfortunately doesn’t really match my real-life hotness & slay, but okay.

You can participate by using the GIF below on your own itch.io page. Also you could make your own artwork with your own demands.

Here are my demands:

1. I demand strict protective measurements against AI scraping and bots.
2. I demand a button for all itch.io users to REMOVE FOLLOWERS in case of harassment or similar phenomena.
3. I demand NSFW projects not to be deindexed per se, and that payment processors or certain activist groups won’t dictate what artworks and which artistic modes are explicitly or implicitly allowed or not. EPIC and Steam banned HORSES (Andrea Lucco Borlera / Santa Ragione, 2025), which has infinitely more artistic merit than some AI-generated furry smut, indicating that actually decent artworks featuring artistic nudity & heavier themes & thoughts aren’t safe from censorship either, and not just within the US-American prudery of YouTube, but within an international cultural mode of prude contemporary neoliberalism.
4. I demand better payment processes for us non-US-American users, the ability to bundle projects and DLCs in a better way, as well as a membership/subscription option without resorting to Patreon and such, where you yet again have to obey to their stupid platform guidelines, and where a great artwork such as my short poetry film der fall durch den gehörgang und zurück ins meer (2018-2022), in which I appear naked, or my great poetry book HOMO SEXUELLE FORTPFLANZUNG (2025) could get into trouble^[1].
5. I demand to get paid automatically and universally for my artistic work under the EXACT premises that I am publishing it under. Compromises for market-demands create invalid rule-breaking and are a disgrace to art, should be forbidden entirely^[2].
6. I demand better customization options for each user’s itch.io page.
7. I demand a more user-friendly interface, and more colours in the visualization of the analytics in the dashboard.
8. I demand a platform for building an audience that takes ludic-spatial artworks seriously as artworks, and doesn’t get caught up in stupid genre restrictions or traditions or the lack of narrative or mechanics or whatever stupid thing people complain about next.
9. I demand a better server protection from DDoS attacks – Cloudflare apparently isn’t enough.
10. I demand!!! Gay games!!! That are not 2D or Visual Novels or cute/soft all the time (I am apparently the only person on planet earth that is bothered by the utter overuse of the cuteness-softness-anthropomorphic-animals or anime aesthetic)^[3], and that are punk and camp and serious and enlightening, and also I demand anarcho-communism, and fuck yeah!!!

^[1] Also generally digital infrastructure that is protected from threats such as the PayPal-mafia & fascist orange man in the US!!!

^[2] Free art within hierarchies of capital just means the exploitation of the artist that is NOT properly compensated by reaching more people and having a wider platform, similarly as streamers getting something for free in exchange for streaming is a scam, because a platform doesn’t automatically pay the bills within our international hyper-competitive economy of attention-cluttering. I refuse to work an INFERIOR & INHERENTLY EXPLOITATIVE day job, because I AM and ALWAYS HAVE BEEN an artist as the rules^TM demand. I have achieved a strict rule-following of 90-100% since childhood, compared to the average sub-optimized human sinner just reaching a rule-following below 50%, and I thus demand from the 21^st century and from GOD* the fulfillment of their part of our holy contract. The longer it takes to get my reward, the stricter I have to be in my assessment of everybody’s obedience to the rules^TM, and subsequent punishment in failing to do so.

^[3] Cis guy, are you feeling alright? At first you bully us t*gyrls out of our cat ears and nail polish, and then you appropriate and use them yourself?!

Until my demands are not properly met, as already detailed in October 2025, I won’t make my work publicly available on itch.io. The only exception to that rule for now is this protest piece here.

Luka*s Friedland, 22^nd/23^rd February 2026