The Cybernetic Sex Worker

Gabriella Garcia on the perennial love affair between sex work and telecommunications.

Author’s intro: Though just published in September 2021 for Dirty Furniture Magazine, this article was originally written over a year ago when Decoding Stigma was just beginning to coalesce on the idea of creating a space for sex worker-led liberatory design. Much has happened in that year, as documented in our Substack archive as well as far beyond what we had the capacity to share, with members of Decoding Stigma pursuing projects independently — or more frequently along an array of ongoing collaborations. In a way this piece is the cumulative theoretical foundation upon which our working group was built.

As we observe International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers on Friday, December 17th, I hope this article not only serves to help hold accountable the socio-technical designs that perpetuate this violence, but also serves to celebrate the incredible radio imagination of sex workers toward a future in which observing this tragic day is obsolete.

There are so many I must thank for helping make this piece happen. See footnote for acknowledgements.¹

The Cybernetic Sex Worker

This article was originally published as “You Have Fallen in Love with a Whore” for Dirty Furniture Magazine Issue 5: Phone.

Each year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) holds the Pioneer Awards, celebrating leaders who epitomise its mission to promote the protection of civil liberties in the digital realm. The 2020 awards honoured Mistress Danielle Blunt, a professional dominatrix, sex worker activist and public health/tech policy researcher. She gave her acceptance speech dressed in a leather skirt suit with a harness peeking out from her blouse, and live-streamed it in impeccably high image quality thanks to the lighting equipment she had set up for shooting video from her pandemic-safe virtual dungeon, with a submissive dutifully holding her cue cards. 

Introducing her, EFF staff technologist Daly Barnett described Blunt as someone who ‘refuses to draw discrete boundaries between theoretical technology activism and [its] material impacts that the most marginalized individuals experience’. The award recognised Blunt’s efforts as co-founder of Hacking//Hustling, a collective of sex workers, survivors and accomplices working at the intersection of tech and social justice to interrupt state surveillance and violence facilitated by technology. With Hacking//Hustling, Blunt has cultivated peer-led research teams that have uncovered the catastrophic effects of the erasure of sex worker communities from digital platforms. 

Blunt is part of a growing sex worker rights movement committed to the protection of human rights, labour visibility and digital privacy. The movement highlights the fact that the stigmatisation of sex work has been used to justify technology that ultimately profiles and further harms at-risk communities through surveillance, censorship and discrimination. These hostilities trickle up the echelons of society, suffered first by the marginalised then rapidly developing into the status quo. In defiance of social and political ostracisation, the sex worker’s voice is now among the loudest calling out the devastating damage to society caused by surveillance economy platforms. But will this call be heard? 

Network/Sex Work

In 1990, John Perry Barlow founded the EFF as a response to threats to free speech and privacy in the nascent digital realm. From Barlow’s pioneering perspective, cyberspace offered a new frontier, a ‘global social space’ developed by its users, out of which an ethics-based commonwealth would emerge. This space would be built ‘independent of the tyrannies’ of the State, which Barlow believed would use the internet as a tool for what Edward Snowden calls ‘turnkey totalitarianism’ by giving governments the ability to exhaustively surveil, censor and penalise their citizens at the press of a button. All this Barlow outlines in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, penned while attending the annual World Economic Forum in Davos. The Declaration defined the basic tenets of cyberlibertarianism – the foundational free market, anti-regulation philosophy upon which Silicon Valley convened to build the World Wide Web as we know it today. 

Missing from this historical narrative of the internet, however, is the role sex workers have played in its development. The sex worker has always been a major stakeholder in telecommunications. As Melissa Gira Grant notes in Playing the Whore, ‘Prostitution is a communications technology. It signals.’ The term ‘call girl’ most explicitly exemplifies this, coined when city brothels were some of the first establishments to install telephone lines. 

Substantial documentation places sexual labour as the driver of mass communications technology. In The Erotic Engine, journalist Patchen Barss directly links the distribution of sexual material to the development of communications technology, including photography, home video and cable TV. ‘Pornographers’, Barss contends, ‘were the technological pioneers who figured out how to make money from a new medium before the mainstream saw any profit potential.’ Money made in the erotic market of 1980s proto-internet bulletin board systems (BBSs) literally paid for the material infrastructure that paved the way to the Web, as consumer demand for pornography and video games fuelled the push for better computer graphics, faster processing speeds and greater data bandwidths. All this made internet ubiquity a possibility. From there, a thread spinning at the rate of Moore’s Law weaves adult content creators into the pattern of innovation towards the popular internet. They were also the first to invest in designing protocols for commercial search engines and livestream video, and to secure third-party payment processing.

Early digital communities organised by and for sex workers were radically successful examples of the Cyberlibertarianist future Barlow hoped for. They generated inclusive systems of self-governance that protected their members while challenging the very same State-sanctioned hostilities from which Barlow hoped to defend the internet. Whisper networks formed, creating digital catalogues of abusive clients and experiences of violence at the hands of law enforcement. Reliance on third-party management, aka ‘pimps’ and ‘madams’, declined as workers connected directly with clients through independently posted online advertisements. Identity tracking through digital fingerprints discouraged client-perpetrated violence against sex workers soliciting online. Whether through the ability to independently produce sexual content or to solicit online from the safety of home, digital mediation made sex work an attractive source of income for those who might never have thought of participating in sex trades before. 

Most critically, an international, intersectional decriminalisation movement in response to the violence experienced by sex workers at the hands of clients, managers and the police coalesced online on a scale previously impossible. Sex workers and their allies organised digital platforms that offered legal, medical and harm reduction resources. These visible alliances worked towards legitimising the trade. While the internet as we know it today was popularised by – and made accessible through – the sex industry, it simultaneously provided a venue in which those ostracised by the systemic and often state-sanctioned weaponization of sexual stigma could gather. 

Settling the Frontier 

Today, there is little evidence of the ethics-based self-governance Barlow envisaged would arise from those pioneering the New Digital World. Instead we live in a cybernetic dystopia riddled with algorithmic bias, viral misinformation and the erosion of privacy by way of data mining. What’s more, none of this was actually instigated or enforced by the government as Barlow predicted, but rather through a surveillance economy driven by private sector platforms. These ironically continue to thwart state intervention except when the government invests in and protects them, usually through public-private partnerships that provide user data to help develop surveillance technologies for law enforcement. How did this happen?

Rather than pointing to the State, Barlow should have been looking at his peers. He missed the important fact that his utopia was occupied by techno-privileged early adopters, who seized on the opportunity to freely capitalise without oversight or accountability. Zeynep Tufekci documents this phenomenon in As the Pirates Become CEOs: The Closing of the Open Internet, which traces the growth of  ‘walled gardens’, or privately owned digital spaces acting as public commons. According to Tufekci, ‘the open Internet that held so much generative power took a turn toward ad-enhanced platforms’ such as Facebook or Google, which ‘enabled, and forced the creation of massive, quasi-monopolistic platforms, while incentivizing the platforms to use their massive troves of data with the power of computational inference to become better spy machines, geared toward ad delivery’. In short, this state of affairs has corrupted the evolution of the internet: it has gone from being a place of cyberlibertarian possibility to one of corporate tyranny, in which a handful of platforms are in a race to obtain the biggest user dataset possible. 

In this deterministic dystopia, digital communities have become commodities to be siphoned off and sold, and their members are the ultimate product. 

Digital Character

‘What social groups are classified, corralled, coerced, and capitalized upon so others are free to tinker, experiment, design, and engineer the future?’ This is the driving question behind Ruha Benjamin’s Captivating Technology, in which she brings to light the injustices caused by technologies built to ‘classify and coerce certain populations’. Tech development, Benjamin argues, is distorted by what she calls a ‘carceral imagination’ in which technology ‘actually aids and abets the process by which carcerality penetrates social life’. Amazon’s camera-equipped Ring doorbell, for instance, now delivers its video footage warrant-free to over 1,800 police departments across the United States through Neighbors, its ‘neighbourhood watch’ app. 

In this ad-based surveillance economy the entire experience of the internet is one of being taxonomised and prodded, pried into for information, and subjugated to the ideals of a hegemonic system. Benjamin exemplifies this through her description of the digital character, ‘a digital profile assessed to make inferences regarding character in terms of credibility, reliability, industriousness, responsibility, morality, and relationship choices’. Benjamin traces how marketplace lenders follow the digital footsteps of these characters – their social media activity, transaction histories, location data – to determine a person’s creditworthiness. But assessed according to which standards? As Benjamin explains, these technoscientific designs are informed by hegemonic norms and standards historically defined within the context of white male supremacy, thus perpetuating deep, discriminatory disparities along race, gender and class lines. 

Benjamin is at variance with Barlow, who didn’t understand the potential material impact of commodified networks. When he claimed cyberspace as ‘a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live’, Barlow believed that physical coercion could not occur in the digital realm. However, the surveillance of our digital lives – whether for policing or for selling – directly impacts the ways that people can move through the world, both digitally and physically. 

Canary in the Coalmine

The elimination of sex work online is sold to the public as ‘cleaning up’ the internet for the safety of its users. It’s hard to argue against the idea of making it a more hospitable place. But when you dissect the insidious reason why – which is to extract, collect and sell as much user data as possible for the benefit of a few corporate giants – it becomes imperative to probe into how sex work became the prototype for policing cyberspace. 

A regular tactic has been to conflate consensual sex work with messages about sex trafficking in order to garner public support for the surveillance and censorship of online behaviour. This blanket censorship was codified into US law with the 2018 passage of the SESTA-FOSTA Acts, which amended the Communications Decency Act so that online service providers would be held criminally liable for any use of their platform that ‘promotes or facilitates prostitution’. The argument was that this would help curb child sex trafficking, an assertion that has since been proved false. The laws created the internet’s first US government-sanctioned censoring instrument, instigating websites to make definitions of obscenity even broader in order to protect themselves from SESTA-FOSTA’s sweeping scope. This resulted in the banning of much lawful speech, from forum discussions about alternative sexual identity, through sexual health and education materials, to resources promoting sexworker safety. 

Worse yet, through algorithmic content moderation software, the sex worker has become an object model on which surveillance technologies are trained. By proving that they can target and weed out society’s chosen ‘deplorables’ with precision, walled-garden platforms advertise their ability to meticulously extract and classify user data, a desirable feature for companies that want to push users towards their products. These technologies parallel – and inform – technologies for predictive policing, protest surveillance and migration control. 

The evolution from the Cyberlibertarianist ideology of the internet to a corporate one has been especially devastating to sex workers. In Erased, a community-led report highlighting the impacts of platform policing, Hacking//Hustling found that reduced access to online spaces for sex workers has led to a 73 percent increase in financial instability, as well as a 34 percent increase in experiences of violence at the hands of clients. Further, financial tech platforms such as PayPal or Venmo algorithmically assess user profiles and online activities to identify and ban customers who have ever engaged in sex trades, even if they do not use those platforms for income. 

In a sick twist, Big Tech has figured out how to pimp the entire world, both using and discarding the sex worker in the process. This parallels Ruha Benjamin’s overview of carceral technologies that end up applied to civil society. What is built on the premise of ‘protecting the public’ only first affects the marginalised before bleeding into the general population, reproducing social hierarchies and reinforcing biases along the way. Key issues such as data surveillance and censorship that sex workers have been calling out have finally begun to have traction. Documentaries such as The Social Dilemma and The Great Hack are finally mainstreaming conversations about the devastating damage to society caused by surveillance economy platforms. But how much harm could have been avoided if we listened to what sex workers had been telling us years before?

Digital Vice Raids

It is helpful to think of this platform sanitation as an extension of ‘urban renewal projects’, more commonly known as gentrification. In The Gentrification of the Mind, Sara Schulman describes how, on the brink of bankruptcy in the 1970s, New York City began to design urban renewal policies with the objective of attracting affluence back into the city after the exodus of its tax base to the suburbs. ‘White flight’, which was at least partially encouraged by a manufactured ‘“fear” of or alienation from urban culture, from multiculturalism, gender nonconformity, and individuated behavior’, had driven working class whites out of the city in search of suburban lifestyles. In hopes of re-attracting those who had fled, the city provided tax breaks for the development of luxury condominiums, and quelled remaining fears of urban culture through the ‘quashing of public life’. 

Gentrification is often sold to the public as making the streets ‘safe’ but the question is, for whom? Schulman duly notes that neighbourhood ‘safety’ comes at the expense of its original inhabitants, for whom the neighbourhood is now dangerous. Grant connects sex work’s movement into the private sphere to this quashing of public life, which occurred through crackdowns on deviant sexual behaviour in semi-public spaces in order to make room for real estate and private interest development. ‘Through zoning and through fear-fueled bias, sexually oriented businesses have been isolated from “legitimate” businesses’, which Grant notes were simply ‘neighbors’ among ‘sites of labor – theaters, food carts, camera shops, shoe shine stands, hustlers’.

So the policing of behaviour becomes financially motivated, and there’s no one better to guarantee a homogenised morality than the vice squad, a division of law enforcement specifically designed to discipline moral offences. Vice patrols  were created in the late 1800s to infiltrate spaces suspected of encouraging immoral behaviour, which were often established by those who had drifted towards urban centres in search of upward mobility. These spaces – legal brothels, immigrant-operated businesses, dance halls that allowed for interracial mingling – grew out of a collective experience of disenfranchisement. 

Immoral behaviour was criminalised under the false pretence of saving (white) women from the presumed horrors of coerced sexual labour. In The Virtues of Unvirtuous Spaces, Alexandra Levy writes how the legislation based on this surveillance, codified finally as the Mann Act (known then as the White-Slave Traffic Act), was ‘aimed at combating “trafficking in women,” but… was actually used to punish against all kinds of heterodox sexual practices, including miscegenation, polygamy, adultery, and promiscuity’. Besides the horrifically racist enforcement of this law on consenting interracial couples, the ‘slavery’ from which it promised to save (white) women left no room for sex work as a choice, whether it be the more lucrative alternative to underpaid female industrial labour, the consenting means by which someone got passage to the US, or a matter of basic survival.

It should be no surprise then that part of FOSTA is actually an extension of the Mann Act, expanding it to create a new federal crime ‘prohibiting the owning, operating or managing of an interactive computer service, such as a website, with the intent to promote or facilitate… prostitution’. From this angle we can see how the Mann Act, which prosecutes based on the movement of bodies through space, skews to designate interactive computer services as vehicles capable of transport in order to legally justify the surveillance of digital space and the policing of digital selves. 

If we concede that order in cyberspace can be obtained by physical coercion, why don’t we call the shuttering of sex-work-friendly spaces online what it is? These are vice raids. This makes digital gentrification only the most recent iteration of a long tradition of criminalising behaviour in order to pave the way for private interests. 

Radio Imagination

At the time of writing the world has spent over a year in various stages of Covid-19-related isolation. Yet all the lockdowns in the world could not wipe sex work from the face of the planet. Sex workers on the privileged side of the digital divide moved their work online, joined by thousands of newcomers who entered the digital sex industry after losing their jobs. Less than a month into the total lockdown of New York City, The New York Times reported a major increase in digital sex work, noting that trade-facilitating platforms experienced spikes in sign-ups. OnlyFans, for instance, disclosed 3.7 million new accounts created between March 1 and April 10, 2020. 

The pandemic mainstreamed what sex workers have known all along: when push comes to shove, people will dismantle the status quo in order to survive. This moment in time makes space for a ‘radio imagination’, a term coined by Octavia E Butler and applied by Ruha Benjamin to define a ‘methodological touchstone for ethical engagement with technoscience, where the zeal for making new things is tempered by an ability to listen to the sounds and stories of people and things already made’.

So what of these ‘things already made’ by sex work, things like, literally, the internet, fostered into being due to the potent combination of an instinct to survive, the body’s creative force and the height of human imagination, also known as fantasy? What can be discovered if we explore the metaverse that the sex worker calls home, where reductive binaries are relics of an antiquated religion, and the pursuit of expressive connectivity drives evolution? Would all that be so bad? 

A better question: is the cost of keeping us from doing so in order to preserve ideals of extractive capitalism worth it?

Society’s supposed deplorables have been remarkably good at taking care of one another. They’re necessarily resilient and adaptive, shapeshifting to suit their surroundings. This command of the liminal has become an especially useful skill for sex workers campaigning against the gentrification of the internet. There has been no better recent example of this than E-Viction, a digital riot organized by sex worker art collective Veil Machine in response to the violence experienced by sex workers targeted by technology developed to identify and eliminate them. In a twelve-hour-long act of civil disobedience, E-Viction defied digital vice laws by platforming sex worker ads, performances and resources on an interactive website built by the collective. This reclamation of space presented a momentary glimpse into the pre-gentrified internet before ‘self-destructing’ at midnight, reproducing the loss experienced by the razing of sex-work-friendly spaces across the internet. 

This is technoscientific ‘radio imagination’ fuelled by the sex-worker vision. It is resourceful, ephemeral, confrontational and empathetic. Veil Machine member Niko Flux notes that the use of language historically associated with the tangible landscape has been especially helpful for this mission, because it stresses the material impact of digital action. (note: Flux now goes by Cléo Ouyang) Thinking in terms of eviction, for instance, enabled the collective to imagine what an act of civil disobedience could look like in the time of Covid, in which all interaction has been moved to the screen. Designing this project with definitions of eviction and gentrification also pushed the collective to approach the project as spatial planners. Making an immersive world, Flux says, involves creating a sense of wonder or discovery. ‘It’s like directing movement through mystery,’ she remarks, ‘the things that only happen when there are shadows or alleyways.’ 

Civic activist Jane Jacobs identified how the sterilization of urban neighbourhoods in the name of ‘renewal’ or ‘slum removal’ often had the opposite effect, instead leading to neighbourhood decline. Healthy neighbourhoods require eyes on the street, Jacobs says, ‘eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors’, to keep both residents and strangers safe. This can only be facilitated by creating paths of discovery – short blocks and alleyways – which diversify foot traffic. ‘In city districts that become successful or magnetic, streets are virtually never made to disappear,’ Jacobs writes. ‘Where it is possible, they multiply.’ 

By building a back alley into the restricted space of the internet, Veil Machine showed us what an internet with ‘eyes on the street’ can look like. Flux notes that this requires asking, ‘how do you create something that’s exclusive enough to protect people, but not accidentally exclude people from being able to participate? How can we guarantee funding from ethical sources, and make sure the resources are flowing in the right direction, so that we are supporting our community?’ 

Imagine a world in which these are the types of questions intrinsic to the development of telecommunications, rather than the ones that have led to the commodification of our digital selves. Imagine an internet built by those who innovated out of a need for collective safety, rather than by those driven to conquer a global economy. Imagine a cybernetic future founded by those who are forced to imagine, by those for whom the creative functions of both mind and body have never been severable. Where discrete boundaries can never be drawn, and we are excited by a movement through mystery. Which we may never fully understand but do not have to, because we can entrust our ‘red light neighbours’ with the task of watching over corners that daylight does not cover, signalling outwards to a network that adapts to disruption.

1. Thank you to: Elizabeth Glickman and Anna Bates for commissioning and editing this piece for Dirty Furniture Magazine, and to Chibundo Egwuatu for providing an extra set of eagle-sharp eyes. Amazing co-founder Livia Foldes for helping manifest what was only a dream when this article was first written, and the graphics for this digital republishing. The Decoding Stigma working group for coalescing on these ideas. Danielle Blunt (Hacking/Hustling) and Cléo Ouyang (Veil Machine) for sharing your thoughts & experiences presented in this article. This research is built on the shoulders of giants: Melissa Gira Grant, Zahra Stardust, Lorelei Lee, Ruha Benjamin, Zeynep Tufekci, Sarah Schulman, Alexandra Levy, Patchen Barss. Thank you to the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU for supporting this research.