💋 4.20 - Sex Workers Built the Internet
An oral history roundtable tracing the early days of an internet built on desire, erotic labor, communal care, and animated gifs.
From search suggestions to streaming video to encrypted online banking, the internet as we know it today was built on the back of sex work. Yet official histories overwrite the feminized, criminalized labor and communal innovation that made the internet desirable, accessible, and profitable. Join experts Gabriella Garcia, Tina Horn, and Sinnamon Love for an oral history roundtable to launch Sex Workers Built the Internet, a publication that urgently retells the internet’s past—and its possible futures—by centering sex workers’ experiences, voices, and activism.
Hosted by Decoding Stigma and Hacking//Hustling. Sponsored by the SexTech Lab (SPE). Funded by the NSSR Dean’s Office.
April 20, 2022, 12-1pm ET, Zoom
Speakers
Gabriella Garcia (she/her) is the co-founder of Decoding Stigma, a cross-institutional working group that calls for the inclusion of sex worker voices in all spaces that purport to be designing the future. She recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at NYU's Interactive Telecommunication Program (ITP), where her research focused on the co-history of commercial sex and media technology. She sits on the Community Advisory Board for Urban Justice Center’s Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP).
Tina Horn (she/her) is the creator and writer of the sci-fi sex-rebel comic book series SfSx (Safe Sex). She also hosts and produces the long-running kink podcast Why Are People Into That?! and was the host and co-writer of the Wondery podcast series Operator. Her reporting on sexual subcultures and politics has appeared in Rolling Stone, Playboy, Hazlitt, Glamour, Jezebel and elsewhere; she is the author of two nonfiction books and has contributed to numerous anthologies including the queer horror collection Theater of Terror and We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival, which she also co-edited. Tina has lectured on sex worker politics and queer BDSM identities at universities and community centers all over North America, and works as an on-set consultant for theater, film, and television including the dominatrix scenes of Pose. She is a LAMBDA Literary Fellow, an AVN nominee, the recipient of two Feminist Porn Awards, and holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @TinaHornsAss and visit TinaHorn.net.
Sinnamon Love is a 26-year veteran sex worker, community organizer, Black Feminist Pornographer, and an @avnawards & @urbanxawards Hall of Fame Inductee. In 2018 & 2020, Love served as a Fellow at the Sex Worker Giving Circle, the first-ever organization founded to put sex workers in a position of grantmaking to sex worker-led organizations. She is the founder of the BIPOC Adult Industry Collective, an organization dedicated to bridging the wage gap in the legal sex trades through access to mental health resources, financial assistance, and peer-to-peer education.
Moderator: Livia Foldes (she/her) works in the latent space between art, design, technology, and activism to interrogate and reimagine technologies of intimacy and control. As Decoding Stigma’s co-founder and creative director, she brings grassroots research and radical theory to accessible platforms and creates playful, subversive imagery that overwrites dehumanizing media images of sex workers.
Hosts
Decoding Stigma is a collective of people within the Venn diagram of sex work, technology, and academia, working to prioritize sexual autonomy as a necessary ethics question for futurists.
Hacking//Hustling is a collective of sex workers, survivors, and accomplices working at the intersection of tech and social justice to interrupt violence facilitated by technology.