Pornocalypse Comes For VR Porn On Oculus Headsets
Today’s headline at The Virge focuses on the way that Oculus, the Facebook-owned leading manufacturer of virtual reality (VR) headsets, is forcing its users into the Facebook social media ecosystem, and appears perfectly willing to soft-brick its own hardware to punish the reluctant or unwilling:
You’ll Need a Facebook Account to Use Future Oculus Headsets.
Oculus will soon require all of its virtual reality headset users to sign up with a Facebook account.
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Starting later this year, you’ll only be able to sign up for an Oculus account through Facebook. If you already have an account, you’ll be prompted to permanently merge your account. If you don’t, you’ll be able to use the headset normally until 2023, at which point official support will end. Old headsets using non-linked accounts will still work, but some games and apps may no longer function.
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Facebook also says that all future unreleased Oculus devices will require a Facebook login, even if you’ve got a separate account already.
Yes, that’s a clear violation of our nation’s anti-trust laws. No, anti-trust enforcement isn’t really a thing these days, which is how they can get away with it. Moving on. Antitrust in tech is a fascinating subject, but it’s not the ErosBlog beat.
Pornocalypse? Now, that’s our beat. From the article:
The new changes apparently consolidate Facebook’s management of its platforms. A new privacy policy will be administered by Facebook itself, not the separate Facebook Technologies hardware subsidiary, and “Facebook will manage all decisions around use, processing, retention and sharing of your data.” Oculus will also adopt Facebook’s core community standards rather than use a separate code of conduct, and Facebook will add a new “VR-focused” section to its standards.
Emphasis added by me: “Oculus will also adopt Facebook’s core community standards.” Boom. Headshot. That’s the ballgame. #Pornocalypse comes for Oculus. It’s right there in the Facebook community standards:
The very first time I ever mentioned virtual reality porn on this blog was in 2016, when I quoted Mark Mann at The Walrus for the proposition that VR porn was a compelling use of virtual reality:
When it comes to porn, VR is so engaging that viewers “forget” it’s a simulation. The penis I saw through my headset, for example, seemed to rise from between my legs. It wasn’t an unnaturally large member, and the owner was caucasian, so it was believably my own. The model was life-size and more than life-like. It was so much like being alone in a room with another living, breathing human that my mind didn’t bother to contemplate the difference.
In a nutshell, that’s why porn has been a big driver of headset sales from the beginning. Porn is always a driver of new and expensive technologies, especially if you’re marketing the fancy new gadgets (and you always are) to well-off young tech-savvy men. And that’s why it’s always been a truism in tech that, if your system doesn’t have porn on it, your system is broken. In my 2013 The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All post, I quoted some 2008 words by Ethan Zuckerman that he attributed to his late-1990s experiences at Tripod, an early web hosting and prototypical social media company in what was called the “portal” space:
I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media — it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work.
Porn has really worked well for Oculus/Facebook. The headset company had its origins in a successful 2012 Kickstarter, got bought by Facebook in 2014, and released its first consumer product in 2016. Thus, Facebook has been in complete control, throughout the product’s rise to prominence in the world of VR porn.
You might reasonably ask “What prominence?” So, let’s do a little experiment to assess that. Type “VR Porn” into your browser. As I write this, the first result is, no shock, a site called VRPorn.com. (They have, more than once, been ErosBlog advertisers.) One click (on “How to watch VR Porn”) takes you to their hardware page. Oculus products make up three of their ten supported platforms:
It’s the same old weary pornocalypse story. Tech companies (even ones like Facebook, which has #pornocalypse backed into its very bones) cheerfully allow porn during the initial stages of a new technology or social media project. Then, once the product reaches a certain stage of maturity, they decide it’s time to “go respectable” and push all the porn off the platform. Dance with the ones what brung ya? Hell no! We don’t even know those dirty perverts!
#Pornocalypse comes for us all. Today (with delayed/deferred rolling implementation stretching to 2023) it came for all the people who dropped large coin for an Oculus headset in the expectation of watching porn on it. Facebook says to you: “Sorry, suckers!”
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I’m afraid you’re right, Bacchus :-(
Even though Tumblr is once again sexy-times-friendly, this is All kinds of new shite
Is once again what, now?
If there’s been any change to Tumblr’s porn hostility recently, word has not reached my ears. Certainly all the old porn blogs that got restricted to logged-in-users-only are still hidden when I follow those links. I’d be interested in hearing more about whatever you’re talking about.
I normally head to Tumblr after here, in recent (weeks?) times, there’s full nudity and sex, and not from accounts that are being auto-created to share content. At least as far as I can tell. Yes, I’m logged in, but the array of content that’s now all over my feed is very much like it was before the crack down.
Interesting. I wonder if it’s an actual policy change, or just a behind-the-scenes change in their moderation practices? Oh, well, if it’s a policy change I suppose we’ll hear eventually.
It’s not the same owner anymore. Yet, as mentioned in Wikipedia, “Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg stated that the site will operate as a complementary service to WordPress.com, and that there were no plans to reverse the content policy decisions made during Verizon ownership”.
But, indeed, porn is back.
From time to time, you still notice some content banned… and you just wonder why compared to other published material. Strange…
I have also noticed a bit of what I call “pron” on tumblr, for quite a few weeks now. I haven’t checked it of late, but I noticed that it seemed as though juvenile requests were less likely to produce desired results than a more sophisticated use of search terms. That’s how it struck me at any rate. I was happy to be so pleasantly surprised…
O.K., Now to tackle this pornocalypse conundrum. Is Jessica rabbit sexy? Does this make her sexual content? If sex is an act which leads directly to possible conception, is there any such thing as same-sex sexual acts? Is masturbation a sexual act, or merely perhaps the most pleasurable form of massage? Are breasts sexual, or is their function to produce food for infants? Are male breasts sexual? Should they be covered on the beach and by boxers and wrestlers? If the X-rated film Fritz the Cat is humorous, is its content exempt? Would a digitally created satirical depiction of a United States President with a tiny penis receiving a golden shower from a buxom porn star be protected?
If I, as a person of common intelligence, must necessarily guess as to Facebook’s policy on such questions, would that make their enforcement arbitrary? Will censorship decisions be discriminatory in nature? If so, who gets to decide? How does one get hired to make those decisions, and can I get the job?
Will enforcement be of a selective nature, and be applied 24-7? If so will the day shift’s decisions differ from the night shift’s? Will the weekday employees decisions differ from those of the weekend employees?
Are depictions of Michaelangelo’s David ok? How about the Venus de Milo? Is it okay to depict Venus receiving anal sex from David, or David receiving a blow job from Venus, in a museum after hours? Would that be protected under either the satirical or humorous exemptions? If the censor happened to be female, might she allow Venus to facesit David, or Venus to peg David with a strapon, claiming that she saw it as a valid political statement on the “Me Too” movement?
Whiplash, of COURSE all those decisions are arbitrary. Worse, they are algorithmic. Keywords, a library of previously-banned imagery with a fuzz factor applied to the match algorithm, and a heavy emphasis on banning any content that accumulates a certain number of reports, without any human intervention. When a censorship decision does reach the human level, there is said to be an entire BOOK of contradictory decision trees, all of which require judgment. And this book is applied by underpaid contractors, mostly in the Philippines because English is spoken there, but where the cultural and religious lenses are very different from USA posters. They are expected to resolve a very large number of reports on every shift, and there is effectively zero chance of appeal or recourse from their hasty and unsupervised decisions. In fine, it’s an absolute shitshow.
Every other social media platform has the same problem, in differing degrees. These issues are incapable of machine resolution, and there’s no revenue or desire to pay for humane and responsible adjudication at the scale that would be required. So the algorithms ban anything even remotely salacious, and back that up with search invisibility for anything that’s conceptually *adjacent* to salaciousness. The hashtags show no results, the search comes back empty, the content vanishes from the web behind a “must be a signed in adult to view” filter (and Google is never deemed an adult)…
A shitshow. Modern social media is utterly unfit for adults. The old-fashioned open web is dead, notwithstanding a few hard-to-kill small-time dinosaurs like me and a few more surly Godzillas like Kink.com and Pornhub that are to big to challenge. The only hope out there is a perfectly decentralized person-to-person social media platform that’s at least as robust to censorship as bittorrent. And even that would need way better decentralized discovery than torrent networks have; they rely on open-web torrent listings that are kept tiny by legal attacks that successfully take out every big one. I have heard dozens of conceptual schemes for building truly censorship-proof social media but nobody has built one yet that’s appealing enough to build a usefully-large network.