A Sexual History of the Internet With Mindy Seu

Companion It's hard to concentrate when you're worried about your health. It can feel like there's a wall between you and the rest of the world. Like you can't be fully present. Hello, AXA Health. How can I help? At AXA Health Insurance, we build our teams with people who care. So when you need us, we're here to support you. For cover that cares, search AXA Health Insurance. Pre-existing conditions are not covered. The internet, very much from the get-go, was kind of suggested as a utopic fantasy space. It can be anything that you imagined. And like, within this very puritanical environment that we're all raised in, especially in the US, of course you're going to try to find these anonymized outlets online. Like, look at the potentials for that. Welcome to PopCelibus. I'm your host, Christiana in Backway Medina. Over the past few decades, our devices, that's phones, computers and smartwatches, have basically become a part of us. But what if I told you that every type of technology, from the first JPEG to the first livestream to the first cryptocurrency, has a human story behind it, and more often than not, that story is a sexual one. Today, I'm joined by artist and technologist, Mindy Sue, to talk about her lecture series and book, A Sexual History of the Internet, and how sex workers have directly and indirectly influenced modern technology. Welcome to the show. So happy to have you here. Very happy to be here. This is exciting. I think your work is incredible. Thank you. Came across it a couple years back, and I was just like, she's great. I think you're one of the most out-of-the-box, interesting thinkers of our time. Oh my God, wow. I do, I love what you're doing. I mean, from your work with the Cyber Feminism Index, to what you're doing now with your book and your live lecture, A Sexual History of the Internet. I want to get into that because we're here to talk about sex and its influence on the Internet, but I think first we kind of have to get into cyber feminism. Can you explain what that is? It sounds futuristic, but it defines the here and now. I'm going to start with the etymology. If you look at the prefix cyber, it first emerged in the 1940s with Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics. In the most casual one-line description of that, it's essentially not only are you impacting a system, the system is also impacting you. So it's about feedback loops and this kind of thing. Also quite militaristic, so that was then reframed. Cyber then reappears in the 80s in William Gibson's Neuromancer, the science fiction novel. This was important for a lot of reasons. It kind of predicted these sensory networked online landscapes well before they existed, but they were also very filled with cyber babes, fembots, depictions of women, robotic assistants, things like this. So in 1991, VNS Matrix and Sadie Plant coined cyber feminism unbeknownst to the other and their promise was basically like, how could women basically rethink what cyberspace could be? What would this future utopia look like from a women's perspective? And is this almost pre-internet, or is it thinking about technology? It was very pre-internet because the World Wide Web emerged in 1989 and then this was coined in 1991. So then the 90s was Web 1.0. Early browsers and no search engines and very bespoke websites and things like this. Dialog, AOLCD ROMs, yeah exactly. So they come up with this term cyber feminism, right? Explain that a bit more. I think it really comes down to two things for me. Everyone's definition is quite different and they wanted to keep the definition open. For me, it's not only about disseminating feminism online. It's also about being critical of technology. So for example, hashtag me too was feminism distributing through an online channel like hashtag activism. But it's not actually critical of technology specifically, whereas maybe Gamergate is both. So for me, those two polls need to be there or else it's just feminism at large and it gets too unwieldy. And for the people that may not know, Gamergate was a movement that emerged to really critique the online gaming space and its relationship to women and sexism in particular in gaming, which is pretty prolific. Well, because sexism is everywhere really. Everywhere and every industry. There's a lot of sexism in gaming and it kind of, I think it preempts what the moment we're in now, right? With MAGA and Trumpism and the Manisphere. Gamergate was a pre-manifestation of where we would end up politically almost. Well, we started to see these whispers of like all the sexism and other just patriarchal norms embedded into these primary companies. And then now we're kind of having, we had a moment in what, 2016 to 2021 where people were really grappling with that. And now it seems like it's toggling back where it's, we're seeing the rise of MAGA and more fascism and this return to traditional values and pro-natalism and all of this. I feel cyber feminism is kind of the backdrop and the foundation to a lot of your intellectual work. But now I kind of wanted to get into like a sexual history of the internet. And I'd love for you to walk us through a bunch of big moments when sex and specifically sex workers have influenced the evolution of the internet. And you talk about Carol Lee, I think her name is, who coined the term sex work. And I'd love to for you to talk about that because I'm really interested about what is it about sex itself that means it kind of has this symbiotic relationship with the internet. Because I'm going to be real. Like when I first came across you and this idea, I was like, are you sure? And then I got into, I was like, oh my God, she's right, right? It's really insidious. It's really insidious. But let's get into it. Let's break it down. Let's break it down. Okay. So if we think about the origins of the internet or like online infrastructure, it really has its militaristic origins. The US government and a bit of academia like Stanford and UCLA were funding these big tests for developing protocols, developing technologies like head mounted displays. All of these things were trying to push forward the US defense force like ARPANET and things like this. And is this like kind of Cold War-y or is this? This is all mid-century. Yes. Mid-century. Okay. But if you think about sex and war, they're really mechanisms of power. So this is probably why we see so much sexual assault as a defense mechanism in wartime or just generally in patriarchal environments. That also means that even regardless of that specific level of assault, when you have a bunch of male engineers, they're young, they're making jokes, these sexual innuendos just happen to creep into the history. Yeah. So one of the first nodes on ARPANET was on a Sigma 7 computer using the Set X operating system, but they truncated it to sex OS as a joke. Okay. So there you go. So there's like bro-humor, which invariably involves dicks and sex and women. And it's just like making jokes for themselves because at that time, I'm sure all the rooms were very male dominated, even though women were the first literal computers. Yeah. There were women who would make computations and they were called computers before we had actual computers doing this kind of thing. But this goes into a lot of digital things that you might think of, think of the JPEG. So Alexander Sarchuk and his team at USC was testing out compression algorithms and they used a photo of a Playboy model, Leneforsen. And it was the only time she ever appeared nude. They just used it as a test image and it was analyzed billions of times, was used on all sorts of computers and mechanisms and ends it up as the JPEG that we know. She has been credited but also received no financial attribution. And she didn't consent. She didn't consent. Yeah. She eventually theft and extraction. And it got to a point now where if you use her image in like a computer science journal or something, it's completely banned. But for decades, she was the primary test image. And she basically kind of disappeared and doesn't do press interviews or any of this. One of the first computer generated ASCII art. So ASCII is a drawing style where you use characters as pixels. So imagine like an image of you made up of like multiplication signs and periods. As a joke, they were testing out computer generated imagery. They printed a 12 foot long mural of a nude woman and put it on the wall of their boss's office at MIT. And that became one of the first examples of computer generated art and ended up at MoMA. Like it's just part of the history. Can we talk about how sex workers have influenced the evolution of the internet and why sex itself? Yes. So Carol Lee, as you noted, coined sex work. But there's so many correlations in Web 1.0 to present Web 3 where sex workers were really innovators in this space. So of course there's in person on the ground sex work. With the advent of Web 1.0 in the 90s, a lot of sex workers started building out their own web pages for the first time. At this point, it wasn't as restricted in police as we see now. So they were like coding. They were coding. They were building their own websites. A lot of their work led to chatting, to higher bandwidth for streaming images, things like this. Like women doing experiments online. Of course, this was then co-opted by like Big Porn. But that really pushed forward like men wanted to chat with on like camming models. So then they built out chat fields, things like this. One of the reasons for VHS's development. So if you look at contemporary times, because the work of sex work is so policed and villainized on mainstream platforms, think about like the MasterCard controversy being pulled off Pornhub and things like this. Sex workers, I think, are natural innovators and they would push forward a lot of the new cryptocurrencies that we saw on Web 3. Interesting. In like 2016-ish, my friend, as Risa Raya Padgett, who's a linguistic anthropologist, she studies how at that time there are cryptocurrencies emerging as like speculative products. But sex workers were using them as actual like currencies. Like Ali Ivnox was pushing forward Spank Chain, which was a very common cryptocurrency. There was TIT coin. There's NAFTI. There's all of this. And is that because they don't want their income to be traceable? Like what is it about cryptocurrency that works better than fiat currency for like a sex worker? Cryptocurrencies have changed, right? Like in the beginning with cryptocurrencies, blockchain, decentralized protocols, people were really treating this as like a liberatory technology. Like we can redefine what banking looks like. Decentralization. Yes, exactly. Like this system isn't working for us, whatever. And there was a couple years where that really was the sentiment. And then it kind of shifted into this like, unfortunately, this brodome that we see now. But still with cryptocurrencies, it's largely untraceable. It's very easy to extract into your own wallet without a proper institution. It is more volatile, so people cash out more, but your money isn't being policed. If you had money stored in PayPal, for example, and they found out you were doing a version of it, which we can unpack because that's very broad, then they could just empty out your account. And they would just lock it, which also means you would lose it. So this kind of thing was very problematic. At this point, people aren't really using cash so much, so you have to kind of rely on these digital currencies. But this is where it gets more insidious. What exactly is sex work? Like who defines what that is? That's a good question. I have feelings, but I want to hear your view on it. But it's also like, what is sex? Like if you have a non-normative sexual preference, sexual orientation, you've already had to examine what sex is because it's no longer penetration for procreation. Yeah, but I think that most people aren't asking themselves those deeper or bigger questions. Do you know what I mean? They're just like sex, the notions of what sex is, what virginity is. We have a shorthand for it, we accept it, we don't interrogate it. Staying the question like, what is sex? I don't think most people really think about that. Well, it's interesting because if you, regardless of whether they're actively thinking about it, this kind of points back to cyber feminism where it was really trying to understand the human as a computer. And there's language, there's metaphors of language that are similar in both. Think about cult deprogramming or like, I have no bandwidth right now. These are terms that emerge with the advent of computers and we now use it to talk about ourselves. But with sex, okay, if you're not actually doing penetrative sex, if you're just having oral sex, is that sex? If you're sexting, is that sex? Well, I would say to me, sex work is like, if it's your main source of income. Sure. But what about like only fans models who are just doing it as like a side gig? I mean, it's supplemental, like, because I, well, this is sounding pretentious. Once me and my friends are having a conversation about like, what's a writer? And I'm like, of course, there's like a writer in the philosophical sense. Then we're all writers. But like in a stricter sense, when you fill out your taxes and they're like, occupation, if you like a writer, then if it's your main source of income, I consider something to be your job over your calling. So there may be some people who have a calling as sex worker, but it's not their job, right? So if it's how you make your money, then I consider you sex worker. And to me, the spectrum is like from stripping to like only fans to like, maybe it's like, if you're in LA, you're on a blade, which we know is a completely different reality. But I think there is a, not to be like, there's like a spectrum of that work, but if it's your major source of income, then. Yes. And as you, you're kind of pointing it, it getting professionalized to a certain degree because there's a lot of different. I mean, if you're an amateur sex worker, you just have a hobby that doesn't pay. No, no, but I don't know about this because you tell me, regardless, regardless of like only fans models, let's say they have a separate account on only fans. We can unpack only fans too, but we'll come to that later. What about Instagram models? Like some of them soft sex work, but see now we're adding these prefaces. I do. Like soft pseudo loose, cause like even escorting, right? So I'm sure you're on the, if you're a woman on the internet, you see these women who are like, I want a high value man, they're into high pergamy or like their trad wife, aspirational, and they're doing these things to get men. Right. And so there's this whole thing about like you go to maybe a hotel or a bar or a restaurant and you kind of scope the scene and look around, which is something that like prostitutes do when they're like trying to scope out for clients. And I consider that like soft escorting, whether you know you're doing it or not. Sure. So like, I think there is language. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's a version of it where we're saying soft sex work is not as salacious as like real sex work. That's not what I'm trying to imply. I just think there's like degrees and there's variations to it. Of course. Right. There's degrees of nudity. There's degrees of harm and violence, potentials for violence. There's degrees of who has access to more money or whatever this is. But I think that it's important to consider how it bleeds into lay people. Right. Like, yeah, regardless of whether I consider myself a sex worker or not, whatever is impacting them will likely impact all of us. Can I say something? Yes. There's a really profound part in your performance where you say the reason to be online is to sell something. And that like hit me in the ch- I was like, oof. Yeah, because Tina Horne said this. Yeah. Exactly. And it's like someone who I'm someone that uses the internet a lot and uses it to spread my work, but wouldn't necessarily think I'm selling something. But you're saying that just like there is like something at the core of being online and being on the internet that is that selling of yourself, which is adjacent to like sex work, basically. I don't even know if it was the selling of yourself, but it was this code switching that would happen. Even you put yourself on screen, you were adopting a different character. The rise of cam girls, like is that sex work? Even though you're not touching another person? It's all to say all of this is very, very blurry. One of the people also cited in the book is Mistress Harley, who was an IT professional, now dominatrix. She coined tech dom. She pushed forward this very niche strand of BDSM called data domination, where she basically gets remote access to her submissive computers. Does she hack them or they just let her in? Well, you always have a consent plan, whatever that looks like. And it's mutable, of course. She could then access to whatever they consent to do. That could be looking at hidden folders. That could be accessing bank accounts. That could be posting things onto their public social media. But they never do in-person meetups. There's no nudity. There's no touching. Why is that considered sex work? Interesting. See, this is the thing that I think we have to tease out here, because she is being punished, quote unquote, as a sex worker, even though she's not participating in sex as it's publicly defined. But it sounds to me like there's a degree of sex work that doesn't involve sexual contact. Of course, like financial domination, pay pigs, this kind of thing. But doesn't it still then fall under the umbrella of sex work? Because then I'm like, then what is it? This is why it's dangerous, because if we rely on the US government to tell us what is moral through the law, we are all screwed. Oh, yeah. It's not a question of morality for me. No, but it's not about morality or not. Let's say legal or not. Right? However they define sex work, which they don't really have a very clear definition. They're also openly able to villainize and police certain people if it falls under this thing. Yeah. So how are they meant to behave in this kind of setting? I think it's really hard because, for example, in the 70s with the rise of these obscenity laws, there were a few films that came out that were considered obscene. They showed no depictions of sex, but they showed interracial couples, because at that time that was illegal. So we shouldn't allow the US government to tell us what is obscene without clear conversation with people in the space, because it will impact the rest of us. I hope a takeaway from this is to not relegate sex work into a very clear category, because it's very insidious. It creeps into everything that we're doing. We likely experienced this too. Like, if we're on Instagram, maybe one degree of policing is you say something or post something that they don't like, so it's just algorithmically made invisible. No one really sees it. A step above that is it gets erased or deleted or removed, because Instagram has very opaque community guidelines or whatever they consider obscene. There's rumors where if you do something that's illegal on these platforms, it's then jailable. So if I post something that Meta doesn't like, then is that suddenly jailable? You can see this trickle down effect that gets really dystopic very quickly. But don't you think we run the risk of diminishing the actual work of sex work when we widen the definition so much? I think about the young women on the blade who are physically having sex with clients. They actually have no legal protections. Forget the exploitation piece, but it's very, very hard work. For me, it's the difference between being in an office and the CEO works in the office and the cleaner works in the office. But those are very different experiences. Of course, sure. So please just say, well, they're all workers. But I'm like, well, the CEO has health insurance, he has his salary, he has his respect. However, the cleaner has a very tenuous relationship with money. This is a great breakdown. I think that everything I described earlier about the expansiveness is maybe about trying to deprogram in our brains what is sex and why we are different from other people. It's trying to be an empathetic device. But as you're saying, the opposite end of that is regardless of how we're deprogramming ourselves, it's also a very real field with very real legislation and very real repercussions. The definitional creep is something that we kind of seem like even the idea of being neurodivergent or on the spectrum. People are like, I have an ADHD diagnosis, I have an autism diagnosis. And there's people who have children who are severely autistic and people are like, hey, what it means for me in my day to day life is just different from your social anxiety. Of course. But now it's become what society then leans towards is the sanitized version of that thing. So it's the really pretty, blonde, only finance model who doesn't do the work we consider gritty or doesn't do the sex. It's bad Barbie. Bad Barbie is who we know when we think of only fans. And we're like, yeah, because she is a sex worker because we have this creep and we have this wider definition. But then we're not talking about the girl, the woman who is like, this is their wage. I follow a lot of sex workers on TikTok. And it's deeply fascinating seeing the highs and lows of the income they bring in. And some of them get really angry at the strippers that come online and count all their money. Because they're like, well, it's not like that every night. And it's like, I sometimes have to work other jobs. So I think that's why for me, it's not like I have deep empathy about our very narrow definitions of what sex and sex work is. But then I guess my concern is like, for the sex worker that does need compassionate legislation that needs, I believe they should have pensions. It's hard work. Oh, sure. Do you know what I mean? It's like pensions, health insurance, like especially in this country where you don't have a national health service, right? These are things sex workers deserve. But if sex work becomes this thing that like, oh, if I just have an Instagram account, I'm a sex worker and that's who we're advocating for, then it's like, what, what? You know? No, no, no, of course. And I think that two truths, right? On the one hand, we can have a more empathetic response where we see our relationship to these people and vice versa. And on the other hand, we can understand it as a distinct discipline that has very real legislative repercussions and try to advocate for that in that form too. But I think in order to advocate or be allies or whatever you want to call it, it requires this decoupling between that this is very different from me. Yeah, I like that because I think sometimes of this tendency to see sex workers or anyone that like occupies a position of difference as those people over there, they do that thing rather than being like, well, actually, you're more connected than you would think. Yes. I'm curious because like, you know, that Gabrielle Garcia quote about from e-commerce to streaming video content creators, the internet as we know it was built on the back of sex work. I'm curious, why do you think so few people know about this techno history? Because like we know about the modern tech founding fathers like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, but we don't know about the sex workers and the women really who have like influenced this technology, the evolution of the internet and actually even giving us the language to talk about what we're talking about today. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because even the grandfathers you listed, the fathers, they're so contemporary. Yeah. But like, where does computing even start? Like the grandmothers of computing might be like Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper and some of these grandfathers might be like Joseph Weisenbaum, Vince Serve, Tim Berners-Lee, Ted Nelson, whatever it is. So whenever I see these echoes in the past few years, we've seen big booms like 2020. Metaverse is the future. Yeah. 2022. It's all about blockchain. Oh my God. Yeah. 2024. It's all about AI. And all of these waves have very, very clear historical roots. So I think it's understanding that technology is finally catching up. Like it's incredibly technically proficient right now, which we had much harder time with in the 80s, let's say. But this stuff isn't really new. So similarly, we can start to see that role in some of the fear-mongering or anxiety that's being produced or the opposite end, like the techno-avangelism of this thing we'll say. Oh yeah, save the world. But why don't people know about this sexual history of the internet? I think partly it's because if we think about a public record, for the most part, we prioritize a textual record. This is where academic citations come from. Things have to be peer-reviewed, vetted, published in reputable journals. All of this in quotes. Come from the Academy or like the mainstream press. Right? Those are who we look to for these. So if something is considered taboo or just not in vogue, it typically transfers through oral histories, through community citations, through things that are much harder to track. I really believe in gossip. Oh. It's like an information sharing network. It's not gossip, it's oral history. Absolutely. I love gossip. It is a social citation. Love gossip. If people, the people who say they're against gossip, you'll understand that it's so sexist. Yeah, they're always men. The root of gossip I just learned comes from Godzip, which basically stood for the female best friend or midwife. If you think about how this percolates up and then develops a negative connotation, just shows how much we villainize. Well, you don't have to tell me on gossip. I'm a gossip evangelist. Everyone should do it. Then mapping this to technology history. Okay, well, there you go. It just gets buried. Yeah, it gets buried because I never thought about the relationship between gossip and sex workers and the way- History writing. History writing. It really depends who writes the histories. Okay. And what I love about what you've done, you are writing that history and you're indexing it and bringing it all together. You talk about the physicality of actually the technology we use. It's not just the abstract, it's the physical objects. You compare phones to sex toys and say, on our phones, we sexed, we send nudes, apps scan our environments for erotic encounters, our phones respond to our touch, it's pressure sensitive, it vibrates. That bit made me laugh. And I think the retro rotary phones are phallic if you squint when you look at them. But I don't think people make such a clear connection between the phone itself and sex toys or how Alina, I think her name compares computer mouses to fetish objects. Can you tell us more about that? And it's like, is that something you always intuitively knew from the first time you were using phones and computers being like, this is something to do with sex or was it like you had a specific moment and it all came together for you? No, I think this is after years and years and years of trying to understand how you would actually define technology. Like it's very, very hard. What is sex? Who knows? What is technology? Who knows? Like the bounds are so loose. But this kind of points back to cyber feminism. So cyber feminism basically insisted that this cold, sterile militaristic internet was actually visceral and slimy and embodied and part of an ecosystem. Like sending an email has a carbon footprint. There's rare earth minerals in our phones that are mined in regions that have absolutely no governance. Yeah, children. Not to mention like the problems shipping our e-waste to Guangzhou, China. And it's leading to like nominal rates of or extremely high rates of cancer and radiation, this kind of thing. So not only is it material, then we're also trying to think, okay, how do we then make embodiment a bit more conceptual? Dildonic, which sounds like either the root is dildo, was coined by Ted Nelson in computer lib dream machines, which some people consider like a tech Bible of sorts. This later turned into Tela dildonic by Howard Rheingold, who also coined like virtual community in this kind of thing. So Tela dildonics at this time in the 80s, they really felt like, oh, we are going to be able to have intense sexual haptic experience through our devices. And we see this to a certain degree, like remote controlled dildos and vibrating underwear, things like this, but their vision of it was so much more utopic. So I think that even if it never reached that potential, it's still very much- The residue of it- Exactly. Is there. They tend to it. The phone is an extension of the human body. There is this concept in media theory where tools are extensions of the human body, like a pencil is an extension of the hand, a wheel is an extension of the foot. And when you start using these tools, it trains the brain. However, if I use a broom to sweep, I can also turn the broom upside down and use it to break a window. This is a breaking or a subversion of the tool. And that also then retrains the brain to not kind of accept the conditions where tools are presented to us. So I think similarly, we have to kind of understand that all of these tools can be broken and misused in some way. And we don't have to just follow the conventions that are presented to us. With the phone as a sex toy, okay, the phone is an extension of the human body. It's basically an appendage. It vibrates. I sexed through it. You send nudes. You're making me feel very boring because I don't send nudes. Okay, regardless of what the- I don't sex much. Even though I have three kids, I don't sex much. The royal you sends nudes. Whoever watches porn, whether it's audio porn or the like, there are so many different ways to feel desire through our phones. And the biggest sex work in is the brain. So I think that this desire building, if we think about it in that form, the phone is definitely an extension of that. It also then points to like these histories of the computer mouse, which is also in this performance. Yeah, as you talk about the- Mindy speaks about how that middle section, the rolling pin, right? It's analogous to the clitoris, right? That's what you're talking about. But I think that like, so Alina, a media theorist and scholar, has this essay called The Fetish of the Click, which basically paints the history of the computer mouse. It started with the light gun because it was used for these military testing sites. It then shifted to the light pen, which again was very phallic and changed your position or like how you actually use the device. Then a Douglas Engelbart created the computer mouse. So suddenly you don't touch the screen. You're actually- your hand is separated from the screen itself and the shape changed. Instead of it being phallic, it's quite yonic. There's two halves. There's a rolling wheel. Well, the men can find it, which is unusual. I mean, there it's so obvious. What we have now is the trackpad or our devices. So even if it doesn't look yonic anymore, it's still pressure sensitive. It's haptic. Again, this is a very conceptual pattern that Alina traces. But I think it's a helpful way to again examine what are the roots of these things? How is it modeling human bodies? How are humans connected to computers? Anna, off the human body thing, you question why so many of the body parts are named after men. Because I think what I love about what you do is it obviously is like you're focused on like the digital interacting with the physical world. But you are- it's very analog because you like- you're like our actual physical experience like fallopian tubes are named after Gabriel, fallopian, bartholome, after Casper, the Kegel muscles are some bloke called Arthur Kegel. I didn't even know that. And then the G-spot is a German guy, right? Ernst Grafenberg. Right. So there's like this paternalism and misogyny and erasure that isn't just like in the internet, right? It's actually in our physical bodies. Which then thinks, okay, why is this happening? Because our bodies' landscapes to be conquered, it's like territory building and claiming, flag planting if you will. Not to mention the way these are actually learned is has really- I mean the issue of experimentation, particularly on black women. Exactly, black enslaved women who were unconcenting, they felt like these people had less sensitivity to pain so they didn't use anesthesia. Like it was a really sadistic history. Now the majority of women in the US, 85% of gynecologists are women. But Sims is still considered the father of modern gynecology because of this research that he did on these enslaved women, Anarka, Lucy and Betsy, and so many others who have been unnamed. You've made this connection between how sex has shaped the internet. But arguably like the internet has been kind of bad for the sex industry and maybe even our sex lives, that's debatable. You know, the traditional pornography market shrunk with the advent of free and easy access to porn. There's a lot of data coming out about how unfettered and early access to pornography is especially bad for young men and causing addiction. And I'm wondering like how much of that is because of sex influencing the internet or the internet actually influencing sex? Because humans are like, we messed everything up. But then I'm just like, there is something so unique about the internet that if you went back 500 years and told somebody it existed, they'd be like, that's magic. There's no way you can do that. Right? Yeah. There's some amazing porn historians and porn journalists like Noelle Perdue and Sam Lee Cole. Sam wrote this great book called How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex. Like a sexualist of the internet is basically a very, very long essay and performance script. But Sam's book is like a proper essay anthology that brings together these amazing historical anecdotes. So I would definitely encourage people to check that out. Maybe this goes back to the cybernetic origins. Who knows what came first? But it's clear that both are very, very much influencing each other and developing new forms. Like if you think about the rise of certain sex categories, interests, this was only possible with the advent of technology, AI girlfriends, or like virtual reality porn or stuff like this. But on the other hand, like thinking about the embodiment of our tools, maybe that's the reverse. So who's to say? You know, I'm a parent. I've got three kids that they're young. And so if they ever have any screen time, it's by permission and we're present. But as you know, there's a lot of like, not even panic, there's a lot of concern from parents how to help their children navigate technology. How much should they let their children go online? Really appreciate about how you talk about the internet as a literal tool, an extension of the human body. How are you seeing like the embedded sexual nature of the internet affecting women, especially girls? Really curious about that. There are pros and cons. Okay. As there always is. Some pros might be that it really did build out this like idea of a global village, because suddenly people with access to a personal computer could then find the connections with other people that weren't in their immediate proximity. Oh, I met my husband on Twitter. Yeah, incredible. Right? Like all apps are dating apps. But even before this, like imagine being like a queer child in some rural city and you have no one around you, you feel like an outlier and you find this robust community online. Like that's a really beautiful thing. And that's definitely, there are many, many stories in this vein. I think on the other hand, these algorithmic chambers are really pushing like a very standardized form of beauty. And along that beauty pressures, of course, the rise of bullying and how that's hard to manage and monitor. There are a lot of things that have made being a young girl online much, much harder. Related to this though, it's really tricky because when new legislation is passed, it's often positioned as we have to save the children, like these new age verification laws that are rolling out across the US. No one wants underage people to have access to adult content, but to implement laws without consulting the people in the adult industry is extremely dangerous because they're basically rolling out this new thing about age verification in order to access an adult website. You have to first add your credit card and add your license or passport and you have to validate it, like have a video of yourself like with your thing. So well, the US highly polices pornography and things that are considered sex work and patrons of it. So why would anyone want to upload their content to this site? They're then going to find channels and platforms that don't follow these rules, which are then way more dangerous for the people who are on them. Is it like the equivalent of like a back page, for instance? Yes, even back page. Back page was so compliant with police. There was extremely low rates of sex traffic on back page because no one actually wants that, right? But because of the way it's presented and categorized, it was then removed with the rise of Cesta Fosta. So it's really frustrating when the argument is like protect the people, when actually they're just doing everything they can to push a very conservative agenda. And what do you think of like social sites like StripperWeb and MyRedBook and where not like the kind of digital black books for sex workers off of these tabs? Well, these were really important websites in like the 90s and 2000s because sex workers were always little black book. They were trading safety networks. Like I think it was a really important concept that can be pulled into other forms of social cooperation where people will support one another. For the most part, people do not want other people to face any sorts of harm. But very, very early examples of what like a social network might look like, but in a more inclusive sense. Yeah, it's interesting because sex work by its very definition, because it's so police and surveilled, sex workers have to be collaborative to keep themselves safe, right? Exactly. So it kind of naturally engenders this community where you're going to be like, well, that person don't use them as a client or, you know, yeah, exactly gossip. Gossip, oral history, oral history. Towards the end of your performance, you talk about Liara Rourou who coined the term pussy capital. Yes, Liara is a genius. Which I've been thinking about a lot, which comes in various forms like cash and crypto. You highlight though how because of AI, many sex workers are losing control over their performances, their images and their data. How are you seeing some sex workers experimenting with technology to kind of gain more control over their own pussy capital and like, assemblance of autonomy? Because I think the rise of AI, I'm a writer by trade. It's a thing that terrifies people that make stuff for sure, whether it's like very abstract or whether it's like using your body. As you're talking about sex workers as a site of innovation, they're already thinking of ways to like circumvent the technology. Yes, for sure. Liara Rourou is sex worker, tech writer, really important convergence of the two spaces. She has this great essay for eFlox called pussy capital where she also does talks about AI and automation, the histories of these things. If you think about my background's art history or art historical, there are a lot of contemporary artists who are really trying to propose alternate ways. We might think of how our image is presented online or in these data sets or in whatever pool. So Sarah Friend, who's a media artist based in Berlin, she has this project called prompt baby where she trains an LLM on images of herself. She then sold NFTs where the collector is buying access to an image prompt, not to an image. So they would send her a prompt like, I want to see Sarah Friend in this position or I want to see Sarah Friend doing this. Sarah can then accept the prompt, reject it or negotiate it. So it's showing how you have autonomy over how your image is rendered. And it was really successful. But then AI makes the image, she doesn't have to physically do it. When she approves it, then she can generate the image and then they get access to the image. I don't know how I feel about it. Just AI creeps me out. It just creeps me out. That's fair. Yeah. I mean, I love how she's using it. I like women create a scam to make money. Because she doesn't actually have to physically do the thing herself, but the man prompts and then he's paying. Right. That's genius. Well, and like with an automation, even without AI, so much of this work is automated. If you're a client chatting with like a top only fans model, you're talking to the model. Oh, do they use are they using they're hiring people to cosplay as the model and write messages and etc. Do you know what? Can we talk about like the Lily Phillips and the Bonnie Blues on the world? Because I know you have a lot of feelings about only fans, which we haven't got to. So I want to hear about that. You know, they make a lot of money through only fans of platform, but they also do these like pseudo events in the real media tech sense of like Bonnie Blues said she slept with over a thousand men in 12 hours. And Phillips, Lily Phillips slept with a hundred men in one day. There's been a lot of criticism of this work. Like my theory has always been like, they use these pseudo events as stunts to drive traffic to the real model, which is the only fans, right? What does that tell us about like the model of sex work right now? In particular, what only fans has done to it? Well, what's tricky is only fans doesn't have an explorer. So you can't actually discover someone on only fans, gated community. Yes, you have to promote something on a personal public social media platform, which is why you see Algospeak emerge like OF or other code words that's human readable. And then when you're on only fans, then you try to drive people to do subscriptions or pay per view or whatever. I think what's frustrating about only fans is sex workers built up this platform, just like they built up Patreon or many other sites before this PayPal. Yeah, simply influence your once the sites become a robust household name, they basically erase the origins of sex workers who pushed it forward and made it profitable. Like Olivia folds and hacking hustling talks about this in this in this performance script. It's also tricky because with only fans, they technically describe it as a subscription based content creation platform. It's not only for nudes or this kind of thing. So you can have a cooking channel, and you can also post salacious photos. But you have to toggle if it's adult or not. And you can only pick one per performer. If it's toggled towards it being adults, then you have a way more strict content moderation, you have a way higher cut removed, you have a way longer payout period. So again, they penalize you for toggling towards the adult model. And they are even though that's what built it up. But it's also because with Cesta Fosta, platforms are now liable for what is posted on their platform versus before it was the user, which is why like Tumblr had that big blow and everything was erased. So now platforms are just so nervous about what people are posting, they're just leaning towards a way more conservative lilt and just erasing everything. Or like a wider swath. It's just another example of how on the one hand, you celebrate these women and use them as your billboards. And on the other hand, they don't get actual credit or retribution. Yeah, I think for me, like what makes me feel sad, especially when we think about this idea of like pussy capital, it's the capital that these women generated that made these platforms as big as they have. And then they're not extracting as much. And there is that they're having to use their bodies to do it. Like it's just, it's like, it feels like layers of exploitation and they're trying to claw back some autonomy, but they're never going to win as big as like the founder of OnlyFans. Do you know what I mean? It's like it just like in this kind of capitalist transaction, no matter what the sex worker does, they are on the losing side. And really when they are generating like billions in income and seeing maybe a slither of that. Absolutely. And it's just, for those people who are constantly villainizing sex work, it's another example of how we blame the individual for systemic problems. Yeah, sex is such a big part of human nature, right? But so is love. So is birth. So is death. Right? Why sex being so influential? Like, why not love? You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why not just desire? Why not joy? Like there's these other things that are like a big driver of the human experience. Why isn't that the thing that was like inspiring these engineers or inspiring the innovation? Like, have you got an answer to that question? Framing it that way. Yeah, I'm not quite sure. I think that like, at least for the title of this performance, a sexual history of the internet, sexual because of the root sex is basically it has multiple definitions. It could be sexual, but it can also be sexist. It could be sexist and gender. There's a scientific, intellectual and conceptual take for how to put it. And I feel like it's kind of like a sexy word. But once you look into it, it's unpacked a bit more. But I think it's a brilliant container. Yeah, really thought provoking. Do you think there's something to with sex being taboo? I think part of it is the internet for very much from the get go was kind of suggested as a utopic fantasy space. It can be anything that you imagined and like within this very puritanical environment that we're all raised in, especially in the U.S. Of course, you're going to try to find these anonymized outlets online, like look at the potentials for that. And I think having spaces to explore these fantasies, sexual or not, is very important, especially doing so in a communicative and mutable way. Like, we have to figure out consent systems that allow people to change their mind and reconfigure the norms. As you know, this is a show all about deconstructing pop culture, which I'm obsessed with. And I'm very much like a millennial child of the internet. So so much of my cyber black feminism is shaped by technology. So especially from like a black womanist perspective, how I engage with pop culture, I think, especially my teen years, it was like the early black blocks. So it was like concrete loop, Nicole Bitchie, Crunk and Disorderly. I think a lot of those blogs receded. And when they receded, we lost some of like black feminist adjacent archives. And some of that conversation moved to black Twitter. But like the internet has become a really hostile place for women. Right? I think if I was coming up now, I don't know how much of that theory I would have been exposed to, because it was just like, it was just like all these black womenists who are older than me just speaking all the time amongst each other and using like, pop culture as the vehicle. We're kind of like, in a moment now where women are using digital technology, some of them, for like what we say is unfeminist, I don't like that word, but like what we consider like kind of regressive ways. I think about this a lot in the context of the rise of the tradwife as inspirational people using the internet to kind of just that selling of self in a very like cynical, capitalistic way. I'm looking back and I'm like seeing a lot of loss of like black womanist internet archives and ideas. You looking forward, like what hope do you have for the internet? Where do you think it goes? You know, like just like from a cyber feminist perspective and from like this idea of like sex workers still doing this innovative work, but we're in a moment where people like really hostile to women using their bodies in any way that doesn't please men or please the patriarchy. For sure. The first part of your question is really pointing to how ephemeral these online spaces are. Like as someone who's like interested in archival practices, if you think about these sites in the 90s and the 2000s and now the 2010s, 2020s, Forbes a few years ago posted the stat that like the average lifespan of a website was around two years, which was very short. So this the statement that like when you put something online it's there forever, it's really not the case. Even if it was online for a long time, there's so much inundation that that was a form of erasure onto itself. But in cyber feminism index, there are so many examples of like global forms of cyber feminism that and many of them were dealing with like black cyber feminism, black womenism. There was black science fiction. There were net families in Korea, hack feministas in Latin America, like all these different regions and demographics were really figuring out how to use the space for themselves and their for their community. And there were these really incredible websites, kind of like what you mentioned, Horonet, My Red Book, etc., like online platforms that were inclusive and meant for a specific group. Like you don't have to explain it to anyone else. Of course, these websites are very hard to maintain. Expensive. Expensive. You have to basically have a subscription fee forever to keep websites online. Servers are very volatile. The programming language is constantly degrade. So it's just hard to keep things online. If people listening are interested in this kind of thing, there are sites like Internet Archive, the Way Back Machine, where you could basically every day they have thousands of web crawlers that take screenshots of websites because everything feels like something out. It feels like a science fiction. Yeah, I know. But it's true. It's like saving a house while it's burning down. There's no archival practice built into the current web spaces that we use. And this means all the subcultural content that you're talking about. It's really, really unfortunate. So that said, people then build these communities on what? On mainstream platforms. Like Twitter. Instagram. Well, I'm finding that a lot of people are going into Discord. Yes, Discord is definitely having a moment right now because you don't need to have public broadcast. It can be for a very specific community. I do see some of my Gen Z students really building out this idea of the domestic cozy. What's that? Venkatesh Rao coined this term domestic cozy, which was basically the return of websites that are meant for specific communities that were handmade. So like Insular Warm communities. This is kind of similar to Dark Forest, which was a collective for this project. The undercommons. Like all the marginalia, what is existing there. People are building these sites like Gossip's Web and things like this. But again, it feels similar to like the big push of the open source movement. While there is grassroots momentum towards them, unless you have resources, they're very, very hard to maintain. So starting something easy. Maintaining it much trickier. But again, there are collectives that are thinking about new forms of governments, new forms of social cooperation, how they can pool money to make these sites live on for longer. And I do think that generally the sentiment for our online environments is bad. No one likes what we have. So inevitably something will change. By the way, on either side of the political spectrum, everybody's unhappy. Isn't that the weirdest thing about it? Like I don't, you know, I have friends that believe lots of different things. No one likes the internet. And I'm like, so then what's it doing? This is why the Tradwife thing doesn't make sense because Tradwife reemerged. Yes, because the rise of MAGA and fascism, but also because people are broke. Yeah. Like it's a luxury to be at home and have someone pay for you. That sounds great. Yeah. Yeah. But yet everyone in the Tradwife movement is pushing all their content online and their content creators. That is work. Yeah. There's like, there's like an irony and a paradox at the center for it. But like, I think it's like, I would just speak about a lot of millennial women that, you know, they just burn out. They're really tired. Yes. And they're like, well, I have 10 bosses when I can have one. Yes. And this is a man. Sure. Mind you, I don't want a single boss. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I don't have people telling me what to do. So I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm with you. You know what I mean? But figuring out that model is, I understand why people are stressed about this. Yeah. I don't, I have no judgment towards like the woman that's like, you know what, I want to take care of my kids and my spouse and my family because the world is burning down and no one cares about me anywhere. I think it's a very logical reaction. I just think long term men can't be trusted. So you wouldn't, it's not a good idea to make a man the sole source of income, but that's, but if he dies, you maybe you get an insurance payout, but you know, sometimes men forget to pay their insurance. I don't know. I just don't think it's a good idea. No. Obviously there are pros and cons to this and it's very dangerous and tricky, but I understand the impulse and like the deep dark corners of TikTok. There's this other strand about people who are pro-natalists, people who want you to have kids. They think that this is propaganda from the right wing to basically push this idea of the nuclear family back. Also, because when you have children, you can no longer be radical. Yeah. You'd need money. You have less time to protest. You cannot be anarchists or all of this. So that goes hand in hand with the rise of Tradwife too. Pregnancy radicalized me though. It was so horrible. It was like, it made me so, nothing made me more pro-choice than pregnancy. Wow. I was like, no woman should have to do this if she doesn't. And like, you know, I have a religious belief system. Like I was raised Christian. I'm a believer, even though I'm like very radical in my sense of belief. I've never been like a pro-life because I believe in bodily autonomy. But it was the experience of pregnancy that made me really radical. And then it was experience of my second birth, my child needed to go into NICU, that made me even more deeply believe that America should have universal healthcare. Because I was like, her survival shouldn't be based on a hospital having a certain level of NICU. Do you know what I mean? So I actually think for some women that birth and pregnancy can be like this deeply radicalization this moment. But what happens raising the children makes you so tired. You can't burn the house down. Yes. Exactly. But that anecdote is actually really interesting. Like having such an embodied experience then reprogrammed. Yeah, I think it reprogrammed you. And I think that's why so many women who use the internet a lot are actually like radicalizing in another direction. Like you meet a lot of women who like become free birthers because they were part of the medical establishment and they didn't listen to them. So they were like, well, I only found community on TikTok and Instagram. And now I want to drink raw milk and like, I don't know what the hell they do. You know, I'm in some crunchy careers. But it's just like, you know, the medical establishment didn't listen to them. And then raising kids is a very lonely life. Right. So then you're just on this phone back to what you're saying about the phone being an extension of yourself. Like I speak to so many mums and their only form of any sort of pleasure or interaction is when the kids go to bed, they lay down on their pillows and they're scrolling. Yes. And they're texting. So then when someone looks at that and they're like, how could they let their child use screens? It's like, you have no idea how hard my day has been. Yeah. And the screen is like, it's one of the, it's like, you're either going to become a wine mom or a screen addict. No, there's not been two options. But this is related to, did you read doppelganger by Naomi Klein? Yeah, it's doppelganger. It's similar because it's like, you have people on either side of the political spectrum and they end up with the same belief. They just get to it different ways. Like people who are anti-vaxxers, half of them are like, my body, my choice, which is very crunchy. The other half is I don't trust in the government. So, and they all lead to the same point. Yeah, yeah. We'll converge. Yes. So, Mindy, before you go, where do, what's the next frontier with the internet and sex? Where do you think it's going? Especially with AI? AI is a tricky one because if you look at the histories of automation, there have always been moments where a new technology was introduced and it completely changed the working landscape. So think about the rise of factories, right? It completely changed how we then think about blue collar labor and people were stressed, legislation came and it was more regulated. We see a version of this happening now, but I think what's different is that AI automation for the first time is really challenging white collar labor. So suddenly, it's like, you have higher education, you have access to resources, you're asked to be creative to do things that are not technological, and yet all of that now can be done for us in a certain degree. And it's caused a very existential crisis. Of course, AI automation is also very much impacting blue collar labor, but this is where I see this anxiety emerge. However, I really feel like I cannot predict the future, but because my work is very grounded in histories, if we look at historical precedents, what will likely happen is there is going to be a big legislative push. It will be slow, and yet new regulation, new jobs, new forms of maintenance will emerge. So I don't stress so much about the AI anxiety as much as maybe what we're hearing in media. I also really think it's because tools themselves are not evil. It's how we use the tool. So if you hear something about AI anxiety, it's not because they're scared of AI, it's because that these tools are reflections of social systems. If AI was introduced in a egalitarian society, we would think like, oh, great, this is going to remove all of our labor, we can redistribute leisure, all of this. But because it's introduced in a hyperlate capitalist society, we are like, wow, this is going to erase all of our jobs and there is no safety net for all of us. But that's a critique of a social system, of these oligopolies that have emerged, of this, the rise of the 1%, this kind of structure. And I think we have to interrogate that first before we blame it all on a technology. I completely agree. I'm curious about what it means for the sex worker who's in constant conversation with the internet and therefore shaping us, especially your image. AI can do things with imagery, sometimes badly, hallucinates and stuff like that. Does it make the sex worker more vulnerable? Does it even change the influence of sex on the internet at all? Well, there's a lot of conversations about this. Like Noel Perdue writes about this and speaks about it quite often, but at the end of the day, people really want intimacy. So there will be some people who actively go on revenge porn sites and want deep fakes and want to have an AI girlfriend. But the vast majority of people do want human contact to whatever degree. She notes that even on Pornhub, to this day, the number one search position is missionary, even with all the other things that have emerged. So even if those examples of intimacy change, I think that at the end of the day, humans want intimacy, desire, contact. And this is not going to be erased by technology. Mindy, you've been great. Thank you so much for having me. You can find Mindy's books at MindySue.com.