Undercover Geek: (Hyper) text in the city

Written by Charles Ash
Wednesday, 08 February 2012 16:46

So many things that we take for granted today might still have been stuck on the periphery of future-minded tech-writers’ most lurid technological wet dreams (certainly nowhere near as mainstream as they are now) had it not been for that entrenched facet of online entertainment... porn.
 

That’s right, baby, those (some would say) “sordid”, imagination-negating images of stylised carnal “depravity” have been clogging up the interwebs since the very beginning. In fact, I’d wager that it was quite possibly because of porn that we have the internet today. My suspicion is that a bunch of super-geeks who were separated by vast distances and who’d grown tired of their worn-out pile of pornographic magazines collectively said, “Stuff this! Let’s build a globe-spanning, redundant, reliable, digital delivery mechanism for our porn!” and, hey presto, the internet was born and porn of increasing depravity/quality/quantity/sophistication was unleashed on an unwitting humankind.
 

It’s not so hard to imagine that an industry that exploits our most base and animalistic sexual desires and generates billions of dollars in revenue annually (even our local TopTV wants in on the action) could be responsible for driving some of our most important digital advancements. Allow me to elaborate...

From affiliate marketing to e-commerce, seemingly innocuous everyday technologies that allow us to do things such as transact online owe their being and perfection to the nascent online porn industry of the mid-90s. While Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com fame might seek to co-opt the affiliate marketing methodology and claim it as his own, we all know that affiliate marketing was already in operation and in use by myriad porn sites by 1998, when he cottoned on to the idea of sharing a percentage of a sale with people who referred traffic to his site. So effective was affiliate marketing at generating revenue for porn websites that the online gambling industry soon latched onto this new form of marketing, and it wasn’t long before this became the mainstay of the online economy and a way in which hundreds of thousands of merchants and millions of people began making a living.

In much the same way that advances in gaming technology are known to induce severe techno-lust (in all but the most jaded gamers), which in turn boosts demand for faster and more powerful CPUs and graphics cards, the porn industry fuelled an upgrade cycle of another kind. Had porn not been the disarmingly decadent, deviantly indulgent Siamese twin of the corporate internet, we’d probably be content with email and plain-vanilla online chat. Instead, because of the unrelenting advances in video compression and streaming technologies pioneered by the porn sites of the mid 90s, the web has become a veritable multimedia maelstrom of unadulterated pure awesomeness. Once the technologies to facilitate video streaming were in place, it was much easier for the likes of broadband, 3G and other technologies to find a natural home as highly virulent techno-lust took hold of consumers and caused the tech-savvy public to obsess over whose hard-drive and (bandwidth) pipe was the biggest.

But don’t get me wrong... The porn industry is by no means the saintly paragon of technological virtue I’ve made it out to be. In fact, in as much as the porn industry has been instrumental in the development of numerous beneficial technologies, the industry is also well known for its more sinister technological undertakings. Much of the malware, browser-hijacking and spam techniques that saturate the Internet today can be directly attributed to the porn industry’s hordes of black-hat hackers and malcontents who continuously endeavour to maximise their profits from highly lucrative porn affiliate programs. It’s not all doom and gloom though as – similar to the way in which hackers, virus-writers and scammers have created a thriving internet security industry with the likes of Kaspersky, Mcafee and Norton leading the charge – the porn industry spawned the “net nanny” industry. Net nanny software is a class of software that allows strict controls over what sites a user can access from their PC or mobile device. Clearly aimed at preventing kids from accessing adult-only sites (of which porn sites probably constitute the largest number) the net nanny industry generates enormous revenue and creates massive employment, and this is only set to increase with the ever-increasing number of kids with high-end phones.

Without a shadow of a doubt the porn industry needs to be thoroughly regulated to ensure it adheres to the strictest adults-only criteria that technology can permit. Also, pornography is not very different from any other socially permissible modern-day vices – including gambling, drinking and smoking – and is definitely the kind of thing for responsible adults to enjoy in moderation.

I cannot help but shake the feeling though that with mobile phones getting more storage capacity and some phones even sporting 3D and HD screens, the golden age of digital porn is yet to come. Much to the horror of self-righteous pious zealots, HD and 3D mobile pornography

is undoubtedly on the cusp of ushering in masturbation’s golden era... Welcome to the age of the new, erm, "armed struggle" ;-)