Big tech was built on the porn industry

0:00Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like. And that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0, depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments.

0:37You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.

1:20The New Statesman.

1:26Patricia, it's Olly Dugmore at The New Statesman. We're going to be talking about porn, aren't we? Lots of porn, sexual data, the actual kind of financial infrastructure that exists around these porn companies and in many ways how the sort of adult entertainment business actually really laid the foundations, shaped, designed, shall I say the entirety of the internet? Is that too much of a claim? I mean, obviously we'll talk about it over the course of a conversation, but there is this, I feel like it's a taboo and I feel like it touches the lives of nearly all of us. Certainly once you get to the sort of younger demographics in our society, there's this pervasive thing that there is a, people don't really have day-to-day conversations about porn or, you know, any of that sort of stuff.

2:16And yet it's there. It's a really big part of culture. It's a really be part of people's sexual lives and i think it's a very live very important conversation and i'm really looking forward to having it with you so uh yeah i'll see you at the studio later bye

2:34hi ollie um yes i'm really looking forward to having this conversation with you it um it sounds a little bit like a conspiracy theory sometimes um at first but uh once you get really into the details of how our virtual world was built up. Yeah, I think you can start seeing the fingerprints of early porn entrepreneurs everywhere. We live in a world where as many people have instantaneous access to porn as to clean water. At peak times, close to a tenth of internet traffic is devoted to streaming adult content. But while porn has quietly taken over the world, it seems that this industry is no longer just about sex.

3:24It's about clicks, attention, data. And while the ubiquitous and instantaneous access to pornographic content has impacted our sexual habits and relationships, it's also deeply changed how we see the world and our own place in it. The porn industry was the blueprint for the attention economy and the forefather of personal branding. It's also one of the starkest examples of our phones knowing us better than we know ourselves. I'm Oli Dugmore. You're listening to The Exchange from the New Statesman. I'm joined in this episode by Patricia Nilsson, Financial Times reporter and author of Guilty Pleasure, the Pornification of the Internet, the Economy and Everything Else.

4:04I hope you enjoy the conversation.

4:10Patricia Nilsson, hello. How are you? Hello, I'm good. Good. We're very glad to have you here and very glad to talk about the book. And, you know, I am really interested in obviously the specifics of how porn is shaping the Internet. And there's a story of porn, perhaps is the story of the Internet. But I also really want to talk about kind of shame as a force and perhaps the sometimes symbiotic nature of the relationship between the publisher and the consumer. Because I think sometimes it's really easy, right? Like when I talk about the Daily Mail sidebar of shame sometimes, and it's very easy to be like, well, you know, some editor at the Mail Online has put this together.

4:54These stories are basically like women in bikinis or people's divorces or, you know, whatever it is. But at the end of the day, they publish those things because we click on them. We click on them in the tens, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions. And I think sometimes it's very easy to sort of point the finger and go, well, the person publishing this stuff is the person responsible for it. And that's perhaps slightly overlooks the relationship between the person who makes a thing and the audience, the people that consume it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's something about there's something about the way we're so anxious about what we're consuming, but we're not really admitting to ourselves that what we're watching is, you know, is engineered to arouse us.

5:43And I had this sort of big aha moment. It's sort of, I have this, I opened the book with this, the scene of, I went to this porn party once and I ended up meeting a porn producer. And this was in Prague, which has become a very important hub for porn production and a sort of tube site era because you can shoot things very cheaply there. and it's also become a hub for what some people call hardcore of hardcore or i would call humiliation porn which is very much centered on the humiliation of one of the porn performers most often um the woman um and and the scene and i was i was asking this porn producer about it and i said well you know like i mean you know do you think that's this type of porn is like why you know people people outside the industry perhaps think that the industry is a bit perverted and he got really and he got really angry and he got really animated and i remember he sort of like he you know he took off his sunglasses and he was just like he told me like do you think i want to shoot this kind of shit and he said like i don't think this is sexy i don't like this at all um this is not the kind of porn i would like to to do but directors today are completely directed by data you know and this is what people click on like this is this is why porn you know porn looks like this because this is what people want and he you know he pointed his finger at me and he said you are the perverts and that was for me this this this moment where i was like oh my god what if he's what if he's right you know what if all these things we're saying about for example the porn industry and and yeah and it's so you know it has this all these issues with women and so on is it the porn industry that has issues with women or is it you know is it us before we talk about that story right just tell me tell me about the process of writing the book like how long have you been writing it for yeah a long time too long i don't know i've um yeah i've spent a lot of a lot of time thinking about porn um it really began it really began sort of in 2019, 2020, when I was a fairly junior reporter at the FT and I was covering media at the time.

8:03And I was sort of trying to think about, okay, what does that mean? And are there stories here that other people are not doing? Could I think about this beat in a different way? And that's when I started thinking or sort of thinking about porn in this way for the first time. And it just sort of struck me that I actually didn't understand how this business works. I mean, pornography is sex work, you know, these people pay to have sex with each other, it's filmed. And these videos are then becoming free to watch. And there's so much porn, there's just so, so much porn online. So who is making money from this?

8:40And how? and so that that sort of led me to this company behind Pornhub which was then known as MindGeek today it's called um Alo um but it led me to the story to this company and I I just realized that there was no information about it you know it was very difficult to figure out how is this company making money who owns it who runs it all these sort of things and so it just became a It started as this quite straightforward sort of corporate investigation. I was looking at this. Yeah, I was. Anyway, it just started as sort of straightforward corporate investigation. And I ended up finding out or I ended up learning the story of basically how MindGeek had become heavily financialized and sort of in some way taken over by investors.

9:38on, I mean, some of the world's biggest institutional investors on Wall Street and how the company had actually been run for the past 10 years by a former Goldman Sachs banker who was so secretive that very few people even in the porn industry even knew he existed. And this to me was just such an incredible story of how porn, how, you know, the porn industry today has just become so far removed from the actual porn. And so this was, you know, when I started writing about this and I was sort of talking to some of these sort of corporates, you know, the people at the top of the companies were making so much money from free porn, even though people in the porn industry, you know, many people in the porn industry are against Pornhub.

10:27They don't want their product to be out there for free. But these people actually making money off the back of these sex workers, they're so far removed from the actual pornography. And that is something that, you know, that was a pattern that I kept seeing also when I went to, you know, to porn conferences and trying to figure out how it actually works. I mean, there's the story of one of the first porn conference I ever went to. You know, at the end of my first day, I was sort of panicking, trying to think about how am I going to tell my editor that they've sent me to Prague and here I am. And I've spent a whole day at this porn conference.

11:06And I haven't met a single person who actually makes porn, who has anything to do with porn. I mean, these were all like traffic traders, you know, ad tech specialists, payment processors. that is what the modern business of porn is today and it's all you know it's all the sort of the plumbing of the user generated the user generated internet and it was this moment when i started realizing that okay when you when you look at what happened you know at this point when the porn industry met the internet you were actually seeing that porn became you know it became a byproduct it was something that was that was used um to sort of experiment with various ways in which our attention could be could be monetized all right there's there's so much there and i also i also i'm i'm sort of i find the concept of a porn conference also incredibly strange but i i think i'm what i'm going to ask you about is the business model because um there's there's a couple of works I mean, the most obvious one that jumps out to me is probably Shoshana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism, which is a very authoritative book around the attention economy and particularly how social media companies in particular have monetized attention.

12:23And generally speaking, to be very simplistic and reductive about it, they gather as much data as possible and then they use that data to target you with advertising. And they make a lot of money from doing that. now these porn websites these tube sites in particular are some of the most visited websites on the internet like the the web traffic will astound i think i would say people will be surprised but i don't know if people will be that surprised that you know the top 50 websites in the world all web traffic there it's it's it's full right of adult adult content and so they have the traffic they have the attention and then probably most specifically and uniquely they have sexual data they have data that reveals things about the psychology i mean there's entry-level stuff right like ip addresses and the device you're using and probably your sexuality and gender and then obviously your sexual interests as well which obviously is deeply personal deeply private and therefore i would assume highly monetizable tell me about the business model if you sort of Go back looking at specifically tube sites.

13:32So tube sites developed out of something called thumbnail gallery posts. So there were these sites that would just host thumbnails of porn videos. And then what they would try to do, they would try to send people to other sites. I mean, this is basically what's called affiliate marketing today. And so this is something that the porn industry became very good at very early, which is basically attracting a lot of attention. and then funneling that attention, redirecting people's attention. And so in order to have affiliate marketing, you had to be able to track what people were doing. Where were they clicking?

14:10But also eventually what porn sites became very good at as well, where are they hovering? Where are they pausing? Where are they going back? At what point, which videos will someone sort of save for later and watch at the later points? All this type of data is something that porn sites became very good at. So for a very long time, the main business model was just affiliate marketing, but also just classical advertising. But what happened was, I mean, around sort of 2011, 2013, you know, we started becoming much more concerned about privacy. So we started using ad blockers, which meant that the type of data they had to collect had to change somewhat.

14:53But another very interesting shift happened, which was, of course, we started using smartphones. So instead of sort of being on laptops, we were using a different type of device, which made a big sort of banner advertising slots. They were just not as lucrative anymore. And so that meant that these businesses had to change their, the business model had to change to becoming more, not just about, you know, attracting as many people as possible, but figuring out who these people are and making sort of each, you know, each eyeball, each set of eyeballs more, yeah, more profitable and more lucrative.

15:41Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like. And that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0, depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments.

16:18You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Still waiting in line?

17:01Again? That's time you'll never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90 % off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to Stamps.com and use code PODCAST for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply. The question I wanted to ask you before I asked you that one was what surprised you most in the process of writing? Was it someone you met?

17:37Was it a porn conference? I mean, when you said porn conference to me, I assumed that that would mean like porn stars in an exhibition hall. Seems slightly strange. And so even to hear that it's like tech guys and tech people is already something that I didn't expect. So what surprised you most? I mean, yes, this that the modern business of porn is not about porn at all. It's not about sex at all. It's about attention. And I think that that is, you know, my what I've come what I've come to believe is that, you know, watching porn that is, you know, stimulating a psychosocial need by watching or staring at content that has been algorithmically engineered.

18:27to arouse you and doing so alone, that is what we do on our phones. It is the perfect metaphor for our relationship with our phones. And this is not a coincidence because if you look at a lot of the technologies that are enabling companies to capture us in this way, they're coming from early porn pioneers. And so some of these things are, you know, like talking about like live streaming or instant payments or, you know, tracking, affiliate marketing. I mean, all of these things were sort of, you know, porn sites were early laboratories for these types of technologies. But there's another very important development as well, which is how we relate with each other and ourselves on the internet.

19:24And so the first people who started creating online personas, you know, the first people who started thinking about this strange, this weird thing, which is sort of second nature to us today, which is that we were projecting ourselves, you know, onto the world. The first people who started doing that were cam models. I mean, the first cam site was founded in 1994. And so camming is, you know, camming comes from webcam. It is when you have a sex worker sat in front of a webcam interacting with the customer who is often on the other side of the world. And these cam models were sort of the first who had to start thinking about how can I attract attention?

20:11How can I monetize this attention? How can I fulfill the fantasies that the person on the other side of the screen wants to believe about themselves? And so these types of relationships, this type of parasocial intimacy, this is what we today call the influencer economy and the content creator economy. I mean, I have interviewed a lot of cam models for this book, but for example, one woman, Katya Tiuni, who's this Ukrainian cam model and she runs a studio for cam girls and she also runs a university or a school for cam girls where they sort of do these, you know, basically like small degrees with her and sort of how to monetize themselves online, you know.

21:06and her courses it you know what what they learn is basically how to you know how to be an influencer how to manage like a social media account and i i find that um yeah i i find that i find that very interesting how we have all the way we sort of interact with each other online now is And we're consuming each other, you know, we're consuming each other's image more than sort of interacting with each other in a way we would do in an offline world. And again, a lot of it makes sense to sort of think about how the first people being in this way and trying to portray themselves in this way were sex workers.

21:56it's so interesting that you mentioned each and every one of these trends some which have gone on you know e-commerce is another one right that is absolutely central actually to the the entire economy and i think it's something like 10 to 15 percent of the early initial transactions on like visa and mastercard in the early days of the noughties were yeah worth of point for porn sites right um it seems to have touched everything i want to well i think we'll come back to that cultural social point about how it's affecting all of us although i think i think your analysis is very pertinent but i just maybe if we could um go back a little bit and talk about the history of this because you know you know it seems crazy to say now that that porn was almost like a mainstream thing at one point like it was people wanted to be associated with it it's fair to say that sort of like film premieres and people wanted to be execs and that has changed hasn't it so maybe Could you talk a little bit about that golden age, if you like, and then what has changed since then?

22:56Yeah, absolutely. And I wouldn't really say it was, well, the question is like, yes, it was mainstream. But what I think porn was at that point, it was still seen as something transgressive. You know, it was still seen as something, you know, like by consuming porn, by talking about sex in this way, you were cool, essentially. um and so yeah so this is we're back in the sort of late 60s early 70s you know it was this sexual revolution um you know watching porn and having this sort of really relaxed uh attitude towards sexuality and so on it was very very cool um of course then that ended there was there was a conservative backlash and there's a very strong backlash from feminists um as well and you sort of had there was this era where porn moved away from being on cinemas because it's difficult for us to imagine today but they were like big porn films that were sort of being shown in in mainstream cinemas you know and there was there was something you could it was just there in in society and but when when cinemas disappeared uh porn very much moved into vhs and later to dvds which meant that pornography industry was less visible but you know it's still proliferated in in in private um and then that era again was was disrupted by the rise of of of online and sort of these new online um um you know online porn entrepreneurs but there's something interesting about talking about like porn being mainstream and so on because i don't know would you say the porn is mainstream today it's mainstream in its consumption it's mainstream in the extent to which it's infiltrated all of our lives but is it a part of a kind of you know national discourse or what's generally viewed as like accepted media either for consumption or cultural criticism no absolutely not no i think and i think that's that point actually about like whether or not it has artistic merit is kind of interesting to me because obviously you know clearly cinema is viewed as something that is worth criticism that is worth discussion that has artistic merit and there's this you know like warhol made made a porn film right and so that that question is interesting to me i've been interested like when we say it's transgressive and if cinema is viewed as something that's worthy of cultural criticism and has artistic merit it's presumably quite hard to argue that this then also doesn't have artistic merit or at least feasibly could do what do you think about that question i mean there's uh i mean porn was very much and still is but it was very much studied by you know film critics i mean there's uh one film critic described pornography as a type of you know made a parallel that is like a musical you know where you have like the sex acts or sort of like the dance and singing acts that sort of punctuate the sort of you know punctuate the the overarching narrative and sort of make it more engaging and fun you know and and i mean i think that's why not i think that's um the overarching narrative is like the 30 seconds at the beginning that's a good turns up with a pizza yeah that's a good way of seeing it um of course but but what happened with what you know what happened we haven't really talked about also how the pornography itself changed so what happened when you had the boom of of porn the golden age of porn that's this is sort of era where you start having these big feature films a lot of money in the porn industry um and that you know that has sort of practically disappeared and so what you have now is is you just have these um you know in the porn industry they just shoot scenes and they're very much um you know it's very very it's much faster it's much harder it's much more um visceral and um and the sort of or the sort of sexual cliches have very much changed so again if we're thinking about like a porn cliche being the sort of the sexy plumber or the naughty nurse i mean this is again a sort of sort of stereotypes from an older era and what we're seeing the sort of the sort of tropes that are being played with in the internet era are much different.

27:10So for example, the rise in so-called falsest pornography. So one of the sort of, it's really difficult to go on a tube site today and not come across pornographic films that are between like a stepmother, stepbrother, stepfather, and so on. And it's something that I, you know, sort of going back to why are we watching what we're watching? Like what impulses are the algorithm sort of pulling out? What is it pulling out of us? You know, and how is that influencing what we're actually seeing? Why is there so much falsest pornography out there today? It's absolutely booming. And you speak to porn performers and they're saying like, it's just impossible.

27:55It's impossible to avoid. But I mean, of course, for porn performers, it doesn't make a big difference because, you know, the sex is still the same. I mean, everything is the same. It's just sort of like it's the framing that's different. You know, you tag the video saying, you know, saying that these people have a specific relationship with each other and that, you know, that is the taboo. But I mean, another way in which pornography has changed in the Internet era is that it's become very, very extreme. And when I say extreme, I mean, it's become sort of sexual acts that used to be very niche and sort of were very much part of the BDSM community and sort of, you know, sadomasochistic fetishes have become very mainstream and are sort of almost everywhere in pornography today.

28:47And I find that very interesting because, of course, you're seeing as well that the rise of these types of or the normalization of these types of sexual acts, which I think very much has to do with the way in a user generated economy, you just you just need to shock. I mean, that just becomes one of the most important ways of getting people's attention. But this has very much also influenced how we're having sex. You know, if you're looking at especially younger people are having, you know, again, more violent, more sort of sadomasochistic sex than we used to. And I think that the specific rise and I think there's something specific to sadomasochism that you can see also beyond pornography and sex.

29:37You can see it very much in our online culture. I think that you can see how the way we are interacting with algorithms is very much pulling this out. And I think you can see that in the rise of figures like Donald Trump or someone like Andrew Tate. And that a lot of the language they're using, it's about humiliation. It's about... Subjugation. Yes. And I think we have, we're going back to the sort of your previous example with the sort of shame sidebar and, you know, the Daily Mail runs, that there's something tickling about it. there's an ugly side within all of us where we like to see someone suffer and be humiliated.

30:31And I think the way we are interacting with the sort of profit incentives of the platforms where we live more and more and our lives on is just really pulling that out of us. It's, again, really interesting to hear you talk about these trends, right? before I worked at the New States, when I worked at a social media publisher, we made social media content about politics. Very much not pornography to people listening, but the principles that you just described, they apply. You know, we would talk about, there's an American phrase in content creation which is American because it's pronounced, there's riches in the niches, which is something that I would never say because I would say niche.

31:10But, you know, the point is that basically the more specific your content, the better it is going to be at finding an audience. It's far better to be hyper-specific about something. You think there's no way there's a mass audience for this thing than to be a generalist and dilute something that you're creating to therefore actually not have appeal. Similarly, shock. What did we care about when we were making short-form video? The first three seconds, and actually the first frame. We generally wondered what the first frame of video should be. Those principles apply there. to push back a little bit or to provide, I guess, a counter argument maybe to what you were talking there about BDSM and changes in sexual preferences and actually then being repeated in actual sexual culture, not just in what we're watching.

31:53You mentioned that there was a degree of feminist backlash, right, as porn sort of became more notorious, more widespread. And, you know, there was very definitely a very strong and present strain of feminist critique, which argues that porn basically, you know, relies on arousal as a result of the submission of women and therefore, you know, is a negative. On the other side, you know, there are some plenty of feminists, particularly today, who would make sort of sex positive arguments around the same thing. And I guess the counter to, you know, let's say people are, you know, engaging in BDSM more often in their own sex lives, that at the end of the day, if what's taking place is taking place between consenting adults in the privacy of their own home, who are we to say whether or not that's appropriate, that's bad, that's good.

32:48At the end of the day, if two people are having a healthy, meaningful, enjoyable sex life, it's up to them, isn't it? Yeah. And I'm really glad you asked that because I'm not saying this is bad. I'm not anti-king. I'm not anti all of these things. And I think that a lot of the ways in which we're talking about the sexual lives of the youth today is very similar to how we've always talked about the sexual lives of the youth. I mean, there are like certain sexual acts that, you know, people of our generation have grown up with that our parents would have thought were terribly humiliating and so on.

33:21And so, of course, sexual culture changes, culture changes. I mean, I'm not I'm not saying that's new and I'm not definitely not saying that it's new, that we're being influenced by media. I mean, that is how culture is has always been informed. And we've always had that sort of criticism of this type of media saying it's, you know, it's absolutely it's ruining our youth and so on. All that is all okay. What I'm saying is that the media is changing because it's not static in this way anymore. What we are consuming is changing depending on how we are reacting to it. And this is unprecedented. And this is having a really big impact on our culture.

34:06And so I'm saying, I'm not saying like, you know, people are having, you know, much more kinky sex. This is de facto bad. I am saying like, if we're interested in trying to figure out why our, especially why our political culture has become so, for example, as I would then argue sadomasochistic and why it's looking the way it does. I think we can look at porn. I think we can look at what has happened to our sexual lives and how that has been influenced by pornography and why the pornography has changed in the way it does. And so it's not about making a sort of value judgment and saying like we should be having more sex like this or whatever.

34:51That's not what it's about. It's about pointing out that something is very much changing. And, you know, and you can actually understand why it's changing by looking at the logic of pornography. Well, I guess it's the Breitbart quote, isn't it? I think that politics is downstream of culture. And obviously, I think what was meant by that was a comment about journalism, news media production, almost certainly film, music additionally as well. But then I think quite reasonably, you can say, yeah, absolutely. And then there's also this massive part of culture that is under discussed, hyper personal, tailored to people's own specific interests.

35:31It's a fact, though. What is that doing to our politics? It's a totally valid field of field of inquiry and a strong, strong line of argument. But there is sort of looking at things that the porn industry pioneered as well. I mean, really, it's like the idea of having content that is watching us back. You know, our content, the content we're consuming is shaping itself around us. And this was very much also, I mean, Pornhub was identified as a leader of what you can call data-led creativity a long time ago, which was sort of using data to inform what type of content was going to be produced. And I mean, this is something that, you know, that's what Amazon and Apple and Spotify and, you know, all big sort of content creators today are doing.

36:17Not having sort of human led decisions in this way, but very much being like, this is what the data is showing. This is worth making and this not. Yeah. Dana Mattioli wrote a book called The Everything War about Amazon. and the way the data basically overrides pretty much everything else in their internal decision-making is alarming and very revealing. To follow that point about politics then, and in a slightly sideways way, who regulates this industry? Who regulates the companies, like the performers, the content that exists? Who regulates the tube sites? Like, is it the politicians? Yeah, very good question.

37:04Thank you.

37:08There were some questions that we were preparing to ask you that we were sort of joking to each other. You know, is the IT department going to come and seize the computers that we've been using to put our questions together? That wasn't one of them. That was one of the more policy based ones. Well, I mean, just as a side note, I do remember the first time I went on a reporting trip for the story with the FTA and I had to message the FTAs because I was out and I was about to meet his porn performer. I was trying to Google him and I realized I had some kind of child blocker on my phone and I had to email the FTAs IT service desk and being like, hey, I'm actually working on a story about porn.

37:44Is there any chance you could remove the porn block on all my devices? And they were like, yeah, we've heard that one before, mate. Yes, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but so who regulates pornography? That's a very good question. And, you know, going back to you sort of asked previously, what are some of the most surprising things you discovered in this? I mean, one of it was very much that the de facto regulators of online porn today are the credit card companies. It's Visa and MasterCard. And this has, you know, this is all rooted in sort of the rise of e-commerce. So e-commerce, of course, is inherently important to companies like Visa and MasterCard and banks that process payments.

38:32Because if you're not using cash, it means that you have all these middlemen constantly taking a little, you know, taking a couple of percent off of every transaction. I think this is actually a lot of people don't realize this, but every time you use your card, Visa and MasterCard takes a couple of percent of that transaction. It's really incredible. And as you mentioned before, in the very, very early day of e-commerce, I mean, when there wasn't, you know, there weren't many things you could buy online. Porn was just, you know, it was one of the main things people were using their cards for.

39:11I spoke to someone who worked at Visa in the early notice and he said that 10 to 15 % of Visa's online transactions at that point were pornography related transactions. That's insane. It is insane. Yeah. And so they were like, OK, we want this business, but there are some inherent issues. Because basically Visa and MasterCard, they don't want to police what people are allowed to buy with their cars. They don't want to go in there. They're very much sort of differential to, you know, to local regulations and wherever cars are being used. But there's a certain thing where there is actually very, where sort of international regulation or regulation in various different countries is very patchy and there's a lot of discrepancy.

40:02And that is on child pornography. Child pornography is not illegal. In many places, it's not illegal. And some places, the age of consent is 18. And other places, it's 16. It can be younger and so on. And so what were these companies going to do then? Were they going to allow child pornography, for example, in countries where it was illegal and so on? No. So they decided very early that we draw a line on we don't allow the purchase of any kind of sexual content featuring people under the age of 18. And so that... Isn't that just like the bare minimum? Sorry, sorry. It's like crazy thing, right?

40:39Yes, but I don't want to be because that was quite a big decision for these companies to make. And you can see now why they didn't want to come in and make these kind of decisions. Because that basically means that they had to go in and sort of every porn site that were using their cards, they would sort of have to check that it was all okay and there were no issues. And so how were they going to do that? At one point, Visa actually had something that they called the windowless room where they had graduates sit in there and just watch porn all day and be on these porn sites and try to flag if there was anything that was breaking Visa's rules.

41:18I mean, it's absolutely, absolutely insane. Another job lost to the AI revolution. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And yeah, and a sort of fantastic twist of porn industry, porn history. They then ended up bringing in this former FBI agent to sort of, you know, get a hold of, you know, get on top of porn, who was actually called Dick Held. And so Dick Held sort of realized that having, you know, all these graduates watch porn all day, you know, It wasn't a very scalable solution. And so decided, okay, we need to start outsourcing this. And that created this system of what we today have, which is the sort of like payments ecosystem of various payment processors who sort of sits between banks and the card companies and the merchants, I mean, the people, the companies that are using cards and sort of making sure that they do not lose access to payments.

42:20Because if you lose the ability to take and make payments, you cannot make a living. You know, the crypto revolution hasn't materialized. We're still completely reliant on these card companies. And so basically, it's created this really weird system of sort of rules penned by these payment processors of what kind of porn is allowed and what's not allowed. um and and yeah and it's it's a very it's a very bizarre bizarre ecosystem and and of course it's it's not just the sort of implication this is not just like hold on wait so you're saying that these financial companies are actually the arbiters of sort of like sexual culture today and they are the sort of people or you know the institutions that have a sort of final say on what is allowed and not allowed and so yes i'm saying that that's and that's a very weird thing in itself but of course it also points to the other issue then of how can porn sites be regulated how can websites be regulated because this is not you know this is not a porn issue in itself it's an issue of like how can a any uh government say um you know this i mean of course the uk has now tried to regulate online pornography and has had some successes in how it's doing it but we are also seeing just how difficult it is to stop for example the proliferation of porn or to stop new websites from coming up or to stop people from accessing what they want to access on a relatively free internet.

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45:38I wanted to ask you about the Online Safety Act and Section 230 as well, because there have been legislative attempts to control this to a greater or lesser extent. So, I mean, maybe you could talk about that because you're talking there about, OK, well, who moderates, who controls, who draws the line, who says what's appropriate to appear on these platforms. And I think most people would kind of intuitively think, well, surely it's the responsibility of the website or the platform to be held accountable for the content that appears on its website. Is that the case? Yes and no. So, I mean, okay.

46:17So, so, so section 230, sometimes it's called sort of, I think that it's called like the, the, the rules that made the internet. And it's basically, it's US regulation and it has influence regulation in many other parts of the world. But it basically says that platforms cannot be held responsible for what their users upload. And it is crucial for the functioning of the internet because we wouldn't have user-generated content otherwise. We wouldn't have social media platforms, but we wouldn't have comments, we wouldn't have reviews, we wouldn't have any type of user generated content. Basically, it wouldn't be possible.

47:04And so we're seeing sort of the first infringements on, well, in the US we've seen the first infringement on Section 230 with SESTA-FOSTA, which is regulation that was meant to target sex trafficking. I mean, I write about this in the book about how SESTA-FOSTA came about. And there's this background story of this site called Backpage, which used to be a sort of ad, sort of like Craigslist or one of these kind of sites. But there was a lot of sex workers were using it. And it was basically targeted for having hosted also ads featuring or made by people who were sort of forcing people into prostitution.

48:00And so this story culminated in basically in Backpage successfully having protected itself by saying that because of Section 230, they're not responsible for what users are posting to their page, which of course was very frustrated to a lot of people who were saying, yeah, but there are bad things happening on your site, you know, and you should be held accountable as a platform because you're profiting from these things. And long story short, we sort of saw the implementation of SESTA-FOSTA, which has basically meant that if Section 230 no longer applies, if there is suspicion not just of sex trafficking, but also of prostitution on the site, which of course has had a lot of very big implications also for sex workers.

48:57But what it's also done is that it's opened up a lot of platforms. It's made platforms liable for what users are posting in a way that they've never been before. Because if you're looking at, for example, going back to the example of Backpage, when, you know, critics of Backpage argue that there were so many sex trafficking cases that were sort of, you know, that led back to Backpage. and defenders of Backpage pointed at exactly the same statistics. And they were saying like, look how many sex traffickers are actually going to prison because here you have this platform, which is being very transparent.

49:45And when law enforcers come knocking, they say, we want to help and we want to provide you with kind of data to root out this issue on our platform. And so, for example, if you look at CSAM content, that is child sexual abuse material, it's really staggering. The vast, vast, vast proportion of CSAM content is being found on various meta platforms. So Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. And Meta, of course, are using a very similar argument to what Backpage was using. They're saying, look, the reason why there's so many reports of CSAM content on our platforms is also because we take it very seriously.

50:33We're reporting this ourselves. So I guess the point I want to make is that we're really entering a sort of era now of the internet changing and the rules that have protected platforms and have made the internet possible the way we know it today is definitely coming to an end. And a lot of it is being driven by attempts to regulate pornography.

51:07And I am not, you know, a Section 230, you know, diehard fan. I think we can all tell that there's something wrong with how the Internet's functioning today and we need to change it. My argument is that by sort of making these small tweaks by saying like, look, we want less porn or whatever, we're actually making changes to the Internet that are likely going to have far consequences that reverberate far beyond actual pornography. we're um we're getting towards the end of the interview and i still i want to talk about shame and i think i want to talk about loneliness as well and i just there's a maybe this is an instructive example that around legislation regulation and shame as a concept there's this story about uh an mp and mind geek that maybe perhaps you could tell but we were joking earlier right about search history and you know being clearly you've had to do a lot of research for the book and it's fine to be clear about these things but these things happen but actually there is this whilst we have this discussion there's this countervailing at like a societal level this feeling that this is something that is personal private you don't talk about and actually in a professional contest uh professional context particularly can lead to you know disciplinary actions at work or whatever like so if you're actually working involved in the business of trying to regulate pornography or at least even just collect information about it it can even stymie those efforts i mean tell me about that um yeah i think that the anecdote you were sort of um mentioning was this um that many years ago before the online safety act i spoke to an mp who was you know who's instrumental and and and shaping this this act and she she told me um um she you know we were sort of talking about Pornhub and I was asking her about MindGeek and she was like you know what I actually don't I actually don't know so MindGeek is that the company that owns Pornhub and I was like how can you not know this how can you not know what the biggest company in the industry you're looking to regulate is cold.

53:37And she was just sort of like, yeah, well, you know, this is not something I can really Google on my work laptop. And I think that is just, that really says it all. I think the reason why, especially, you know, the sort of big question of like, why is there so much porn everywhere? And sort of why has, you know, in many ways taken over the internet? I mean, the reason for that is that we don't dare to talk about it and we don't dare to, you know, no one wants to be the person who puts their hands up and say like, look, you know, I was on Pornhub the other day and I was thinking. There's too much stepmom stuff out there, actually.

54:14There's too much stepdad. I think we need to stop that. Yeah, exactly. It's not going to happen at work, is it? And we're not really talking about it. And I mean, it's one of the last aboos. But I also think when we talk about shame, there is something about how we live with this apathy about how much data is being collected about us. And to some extent, we all know it and we've sort of reluctantly accepted it. And I think that the shame plays a very big role in this. I mean, you know, I think most of us would be the idea that the information that these companies have on us, the searches we make, our sexual preferences, our curiosities.

55:01I mean, it's it is. Yeah, it's extraordinary to think of, really. And I think there's something about, you know, the idea of our search histories being made public, you know, is something that most people would find far worse than, you know, their diaries being read out in public. And so there is this, when we think about the power imbalance between us and the companies that are profiting from us living more and more of our lives online, there is this, you know, part of the power they hold over us is this shame over what they know about us. yeah um so we've spoken about camming a couple times in the interview which obviously prime well i'm not yeah maybe primarily as a sexual component to it right but there is also a strain of uh people talking to cam girls interacting with cam girls that are actually looking for companionship rather than perhaps necessarily sexual gratification or arousal.

56:21To what extent do you think loneliness has to be a part of this conversation? I mean, yeah, we'll start there. Like, talk to me about loneliness. When I spoke to Katya Tsuny, this Ukrainian cam model who I probably interviewed the most extensively for the book. She started camming in 2005 and she was living in Ukraine at that point. And it was her sister who got her to start camming because it was just this incredible opportunity. I mean, this was a time when a lot of people were trying to go abroad in order to earn more money. And camming was this opportunity to basically earn Western level salaries without without migrating.

57:08And so it was just like incredible, you know, sort of incredible universe.

57:16But, you know, what people like Katja were discovering in that point that there was these in the West, there was sort of, to a certain extent, the great sort of material abundance, but a lot of people were feeling very lonely um and so yes cam girls it's about nudity it's about sex um but it's very very much about um validation and about making someone feel seen um and i think that this is a type of sort of parasocial intimacy which is becoming very important in the online economy today. So last year, I think there were a couple of stories. There were some people being like, hey, have you reached peak social media?

58:03Because most people are actually posting less and less. You know, we're starting to see a bigger distinction between the producers, content producers, and content consumers. But I don't think we've reached peak social media in this way. I just think we're interacting with social media in a different way. And so what we're seeing the rise of is the rise of sort of online personalities. It's a part of the influencer economy, but I'm thinking about like Twitch streamers. I'm thinking about like, you know, people on TikTok. I'm thinking about, you know, in China, for example, you have this rise of e-commerce, which is very much sort of moderated by these, you know, live you know sales women and that they sort of in a way sort of end up spending hours each day watching their their content and something that's come from camming as well is that this is you have that's on these e-commerce platforms you have it on tiktok you have it everywhere is that of course you have these live chats where people can pay to get more attention you know so you can pay to make sure that what you're writing will actually be seen by your performer.

59:23And so it can start to feel like you're having a conversation with them. Like you're like, you know, there's something, as I said before, like having very much pioneered like live streaming as a way for us to interact with each other. And I think that what's so incredible with live streaming now, why platforms like TikTok and YouTube are investing more and more and sort of pushing this type of content is that it's just so engaging, you know, because it makes you feel like when you're watching a live video, it feels like this is really happening right now with me, which it doesn't quite feel like that when you're just sort of watching content on a feed.

1:00:08But yeah, I mean, loneliness, Because I, you know, I spoke another OnlyFans performer, I spoke to a woman called Lizzie Capri, who used to be a sort of YouTube, she used to make YouTube content for kids and then sort of had this like big.

1:00:34well I really think in some way like also a mental health crisis where she felt very constrained by the content she was making and the sort of world that she was part of and then she sort of decided to reinvent herself and wanted to you know in her words want to be a more live a more authentic life and so she launched an OnlyFans and she was sort of talking about her OnlyFans as a way, you know, this was a way for people who had been watching her for, you know, for her entire adult life, like people who wanted to have a closer relationship with her and people who wanted to know her better, but also people who wanted to support her.

1:01:18You know, I think that is a very important component that people who are paying OnlyFans, paying OnlyFans performers they want to feel like they're making a difference in the OnlyFans in this person's life and so when you start having these relationships where you will have influencers then thanking their, you know, saying thank you thank you for subscribing to my sub stack thank you for doing this, I see you you know, you can really make people feel like yeah, like there's something genuine there yeah

1:01:55I'm trying to search around for a positive place for us to end this on but I don't necessarily know if there is one

1:02:06is there anything maybe this is it is is there anything different about this social sexual revolution and moral panic's not the right word backlash concern worry is it different to the ones that have preceded it you know if if is there is there a component of people who might have listened to you know the hour of conversation that we've just had and be really quite alarmed and could reason maybe to not be completely stressed out but i mean is there a positive angle help me find somewhere nice to leave leave the chat if we can um no okay well okay let me say let me say this um

1:03:00um look to some extent i mean the arguments i'm making in some way have been also made by television you know television was super captivating and you know when novels came people were being like oh my god these young people are wasting their lives they're just like you know reading about other people's lives and not living their own lives you know so this would nice this is the type of you know anxiety which has existed for a long time and but i think there's something in it and i think the fact that we're spending so much time now so completely absorbed in our own because i call it the masturbatory business model of the internet because that's what we do we pick up our phones to self-soothe and to gratify ourselves you know and it's a sort of it's a thing we do to ourselves to feel to feel better and and and the moment and And, you know, the issue, of course, with the phone is that it's so it's with you all the time.

1:03:49It's so it's so easy to not be with yourself, to not be intimate with other people, but also to not be intimate with yourself and not be with your own with your own with your own thoughts. And I think that, of course, data is very much a big part of the story. And this is a question that we live with when we've lived with for a long time. Like at what point do, you know, at which point are algorithms changing what we want? And to what extent are algorithms changing what we want? And to what extent are they giving us what we want? Like where is, what is the sort of, what is the balance in this sort of transaction?

1:04:38And I think you can see, especially with chatbots, for example, and how they are designed to just make us feel seen, to sort of make us feel good, to like, to speak to these fantasies that we have about ourselves. I mean, chatbots are essentially sex workers. That's what they're doing. And I think to a certain extent, this is what we want. It's making us feel good. And I think that, yeah, we need to demand more transparency when it comes to internet companies about what data they hold on us and how their algorithms function. There's a massive issue with power and monopolies and oligopolies in this space.

1:05:29But I really think we also need to just take more responsibility and to try and step away from feeding our devices with this data all the time. Because when we talk about platform labor, it's easy to think about, okay, platform labor, so what is that? That is a content creator. No, we're all doing platform labor. Like being on your phone and scrolling, you're feeding this machine your data. This is platform labor. This type of leisure is a type of labor. And I think we need to start thinking about it in this way. Patricia Nilsson, thank you so much for your time. I've really enjoyed the conversation.

1:06:11Me too. Thanks for having me. That was Patricia Nilsson. I'm Oli Dugmore, and you've been listening to The Exchange for the New Statesman. We will be back next week.

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