Sex Worker-led design report: We believe in the freedom to fucking dream
Incredible conversations are possible when space is afforded to those who are categorically silenced
We believe in the freedom to fucking dream. We practice imagination-driven synthesis of ideas for the future, and believe that creating a space to joyfully worldbuild nurtures the spirit of the movement to decriminalize sex work.
This is the second of a series of blogs that will serve as process documentation as we build our first collaborative/interactive platform, Browser Histories. If you haven’t already, please read our first post for an overview of our project development phase, including background context for what will be discussed below.
Reflecting on “process as prototype”
This post will focus on our paid SW/accomplice research and design cohort, which has been the central component of Browser Histories. To recap: while the interactive Browser Histories archive is our required deliverable for the C/Change Lab, the process of designing this community cohort will serve our larger goal of exemplifying what it looks like to have sex workers involved and compensated at every level of a digital media project. We hope to extend this sentiment beyond the grant timeline by designing our platform to act as a sort of digital commons or locus around which community can gather, making the archive a representation of something that exists beyond the tangibly interactive collection (but more on that in our next post).
Designing the cohort & workshops
Any descriptive details will be kept vague in order to protect the identities of our participants. Any specific quotes or artifacts are shared only with strict permission from the creator.
Our cohort consisted of folks who have directly interacted with Decoding Stigma in the past, as well as a few folks who had previously participated in focus groups for the second iteration of OnlyBans as part of our partnership with that project. We had a mix of those coming from lived experience in sex work, as well as accomplices who have been deeply involved in the movement to decriminalize sex work. We established multidimensionality in background, experience, interest, perspective, expertise, and identity, which set us up for incredibly rich conversations from the jump. Prior to meeting, we made it a point to have one-on-one conversations with each of our cohort members to identify what would make participation specifically valuable to them. Responses included requests to use the collaboration to further a personal artistic practice, the desire to have the project serve as a nexus to communities of the Global South, experimenting with curriculum design or new technologies, and simply seeking space/time among community.
While we have hosted workshops facilitated by others in the past, this was our first opportunity to design and test our own workshop series. When first brainstorming for the series, we were still in the mindset that Browser Histories would exemplify formal co-design in which the project emerges from the community we had gathered for this cohort. But this didn’t sit right with the fact that we had a preordained project that came out of our collaboration as Decoding Stigma partners. Formal co-design practices would actually step us backwards in our process, and ended up feeling too clinical for a project that had more intention toward social practice than design justice.
Being transparent about our defined scope actually gave us the freedom to ask the question, “what could an R&D space look like if it was focused on dreaming, rather than doing?” To answer this question, we looked for inspiration from liberatory frameworks such as adrienne marie brown’s Emergent Strategy, Caroline Sinders’ Feminist Datasets, Sasha Costanza-Chock & Joana Varon’s Transfeminist Technologies, and BUFU collective. We were thus able to design a workshop series that “protected” our cohort from the burden of structural prototyping decisions, instead focusing the sessions around playful speculation, joyful worldbuilding, and the art of gathering.
Our first workshop was the one session that included necessary formalities. This is where we put a lot of our consultation into practice, as it was the first time we were formally responsible toward a whole hierarchy of stakeholders outside of our internal team of two. We began by providing background on the grant project and our partnership with OnlyBans, with transparency about required deliverables, timeframe/budget limitations, institutional stakeholders, roles, and expectations. We also presented community agreements and accountability processes for feedback (we are indebted to Hacking//Hustling Principles of Unity, SFPC code of conduct, Recurse Center social rules, and Red Schulte for informing our framework), making sure the cohort was all on the same page about participation before activating the workshops.
Workshop #1: Foundations - Framing the Experiment
Our first dreaming session centered around a world-building exercise inspired by a 1995 Prostitution Education Network interview with Mike Godwin, who was first counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation at the time. This conversation occurs just one year after the internet becomes commercially available to the public, and Godwin is situated squarely in the rosy cyberlibertarian ideology espoused by friend and EFF founder John Perry Barlow. In this interview, Godwin responds to questions about legal speech and surveillance in the context of potential sex worker uses of the then-nascent public internet. He predicts legal protection of speech regarding sex work advocacy and education, as well as an “appreciative audience” for sex worker autonomy due to the early internet’s libertarian bias. When asked about the potential for police to use the internet to entrap sex workers, Godwin responds, “I doubt [the police] are staying after hours to play this game--fortunately, the skills it takes to hang out on the Internet are greater than the ones it takes to play Sega.”
Obviously this is not the internet we know today. Even before SESTA-FOSTA drove the systematic shuttering of sex worker-friendly digital spaces—including those which facilitated non-commercial community expression, education, and aid—police were using the internet to surveil sex worker activity since its inception, as well as unconsensually scraping troves of sex worker data for today’s AI-driven carceral technologies.
For the purposes of our workshop, we wanted to sort of “pinch time” and imagine an alternate reality in which thriving communities built by sex workers were allowed to flourish.
We used prompts including:
When has a technology made you feel more safe/belonging?
How is community accountability enforced in a world that rejects carceral surveillance technology/paternalistic moderation systems?
What skills have you developed as a SW/accomplice that you think can be embedded in technological systems?
Responses included:
How digital communities expanded thinking of participation in erotic labor as having potential to be radically political and as a space for knowledge production
How early internet forum mods were better equipped for enforcing localized community accountability than today’s universalist sex-negative content moderation
How sites of surveillance produce subversive networks and communication
Hope for demystifying/normalizing sex work to reduce the weaponization of sex stigma, as well as help sex workers pursue healthcare without being stigmatized
Dreams of a future where sex workers run a “client verification department” as bureaucratic and boring as going to the DMV
How blogs written by sex workers threatened moral policing by neutralizing the shadow of the obectified/dehumanized sex worker under which carceral policies are created
It felt good to kick off our series sharing some of the more beneficial uses of technology in our lives, and think about how those aspects could be nurtured. Our current technological landscape is fairly dystopian, so it is important to recall that our community comes from a lineage of instinctual cyborg anthropologists subverting and perverting systems of control in order to survive and thrive.
Workshop #2-3: Community
Initially we had planned four standalone sessions, each focusing on a different aspect of research and design (e.g. ideation, visual moodboarding, community interfacing, etc) toward a prototype informed by the cohort, but ultimately built by us. Instead, sessions evolved into one long conversation that zeroed in closer toward a common interest in designing a community space. Thus, our second and third workshops became a two-part conversation, and we converted the time proposed for the fourth workshop into time dedicated to an at-home activity between these two conversations.
Our second session deconstructed conventional notions of “The Archive” in order to reconsider how archiving can rise out of localized communities and shared experiences. Institutional archiving practices generally objectify artifacts as “cold” or “static” to be viewed from a distance or requiring some sort of rite of privilege to access, whether by merit or money. We reviewed university libraries and journals, as well as anthropological museum exhibits as examples of this. But if we expand beyond conventional notions to redefine the archive as a “memory space,” we are able to recognize archiving practices as having potential to come out of or facilitate community. These collective memory spaces take form as community libraries, murals, altars/ritual/rites of passage, food stories, parades/performances, zines, crowdsourced indexes and collections… They are often local, subtextual, occurring “in response”, active, and participatory. We also looked at examples that subvert conventional archive spaces to express (oft-erased or overlooked) community-specific memory. We view Browser Histories as living in such an overlap, as it’s using a conventional presentation as a digital archive, but usurping the space to platform stories that are silenced or erased in order to uphold the status quo.
We then spent the rest of the session reflecting on personal experiences of when a memory collection space made each of us feel “in community.” We collected our responses on a collaborative vision board, incidentally creating a collective memory space of personal memory spaces. We visited our experiences in digital communities, spontaneous gatherings, art jamming communities, time capsules, non-communicative collaboration spaces, secret hideaways, non-linear continua of belonging, holding multiple identities, shared ritual gatherings, and underground networks for knowledge sharing. We thought about how these memory spaces feel/smell/appear, who gathers there (IRL or in-spirit), how people participate, and if it’s a place of return. We touched on themes that recurred across our reflections, like pleasure, desire, ritual, spontaneity, timelessness, liminality, collaboration, performativity, vulnerability, sweetness, grief, coming together over difficult times, and invitation. Memory spaces often hold contradiction: a place to be both broken and loved, the ability to simultaneously express hope and grief, to be together alone//alone together.
This provided context for the at-home activity offered to participants in lieu of a fourth workshop, designed by community partner and OnlyBans creator Lena Chen. The exercise asked our participants to create a personal memory space or archive that expressed their individual relationship to technology, which may or may not intersect with a relationship to sex work. Each participant activated their space with an intention (such as abundance, safety, community, etc) before collecting artifacts that represented a relationship to technology in either a physical or digital space. We came back for our final session with our responses, communing as archive stewards to share what we had gathered. Participants expressed intentions toward collaboration, hope, autonomy, and warmth. Artifacts included images (found or created for the exercise), sacred objects, playlists, texts (found or composed for the exercise), and personal projects.
We wrapped our session with one final collaborative brainstorm, coming back to the prototype for cohort-led ideation and feedback. We asked questions such as: how can this archive resist erasure? Platform community? Serve alternate histories or futures? Who is this for? Who needs to see it? How can we invite participation? Responses included thoughts about activation through partnerships/events/communal practice, potential for engaging senses/activating the physical realm through virtual participation, ideas about how the archive can be “community first,” need for a space that allows folks to tell their own stories, how one project can hold different parts for different audiences, and considerations of the labor required to maintain an archive long term.
Reflection
Thoughts from Gabriella, looking back now that the “dust has settled”
I’ve been procrastinating on writing this reflection for two months now, effectively delaying the the publishing of this post for just as long. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to accept the ephemerality of it all, mostly because I’ve been overwhelmed by the idea of putting my feelings down on paper. To put it shortly, these cohort sessions were the highlight of my entire 2022. There was a lot of “scaffolding” built around supporting these conversations, including literally building the Browser Histories platform itself, all of which was very exciting and truly an achievement. But the hours we spent together in community divined a sacred sanctuary in an otherwise fairly traumatic year (on personal, community, and global levels). Creating space for using our imagination, commiserating over loss, making magic, feeling safe—that was the true gift of this project. How can this kind of gathering be considered radical when in fact it feels like home?
It recalls Decoding Stigma’s early days, when we gathered only for the fact that we shared space on the sex work/research/tech Venn Diagram, without much intention or toward any specific goal. A lot of these early meetings were spent reflecting on needs and desires as “radical” individuals stranded on institutional islands, often straying away from any sort of formal agenda to simply feel connected. Yet even without a defined path incredible collaborations came out of our meetings: from co-authoring research papers, partnering for events, and uplifting each other’s projects from whatever platform available to us.
I suppose I needed to be reminded that building the future starts with the simple task of opening and holding space. With that in mind, I hope that Browser Histories can be used as a calling card to those who want to gather around these ideas. I don’t know what that looks like. But if there’s anything at all in this that touched your heart, please reach out.