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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse"
January 30th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
It’s not a perfect article, but I can’t really complain about any coverage of the #Pornocalypse that opens with my line about it:
If you sift through #Pornocalypse for even a short while you will see a familiar message cropping up again and again: ‘The pornocalypse comes for us all.’
It may not yet have the tradition and durability of doom-laden portents like ‘The End Is Nigh’, but the Pornocalypse is real; it’s happening every day and affecting a great number of people.
While the adult biz has always been wary of the mild witch hunt vibes that provide its background noise, the past few months have seen attackers from all sides try and cut the power that lights up the sex business.
That’s from Pornocalypse: The End Of The F*cking World? by Joseph Viney at BaDoink.
I’m quoted at some length, as is Ms. Naughty, who offers her own formulation of Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet:
“The warning I would give anyone who deals with adult content is this: don’t trust your business to a third party. Because they will inevitably try to censor you. Buy a domain, host it yourself (on an adult-friendly host), make sure you have total control of that content. Your livelihood is too important to trust to a “free” service. There will always be someone who complains and then you’ll have someone on minimum wage making major decisions about what porn is.”
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January 3rd, 2015 -- by Bacchus
In her lengthy intro to a pair of business articles written by sex workers, Violet Blue writes about some of the business challenges she faces as an independent businesswoman in the business of writing about sex. I can’t speak to the challenges specifically faced by women, but there remain many resonances in this that are bitterly familiar to me, a man in the business of writing and blogging about sex and porn:
I’ll just put it this way: If it wasn’t for sex censorship by so many major companies, financial institutions, tools and platforms, I’d *only* have to face the typical set of challenges all women face who run their own business. The limitations of censorship, plus the danger of doing business with companies who routinely deal unfairly (and occasionally behave harmfully) to independent businesses/businesspeople (whose business might be sex-related), has absolutely hurt me as a businessperson.
That’s everything from having my name blacklisted in search engine autocompletes, to getting accounts revoked without actually breaking any rules, being disallowed to advertise (or take advertising) through everyday channels like AdSense, worrying payment processors and social media sites (and more) will delete my account, unable to plan around Amazon and Google who may de-list (or deep-six) sexuality searches without notice, being unable to do a Kickstarter or put an app about human sexuality in Apple or Google’s marketplaces, constantly being reported on sites I have accounts on simply because some people think what I do is wrong, not being able to use any of the decent mailing list companies to have a newsletter… I could go on.
I just write about sex. That’s it.
I’m not even a sex worker, a porn maker, nor have I ever been a porn performer – what they (mostly female entrepreneurs, natch) go through trying to run their businesses is so beyond unfair, it paralyzes me with anger sometimes to think about it.
So I have to approach business differently; none of the formulas – or even tools and services – available to everyday, independent women in business are actually available to me. I imagine that if the playing field were even, I might be as financially stable (or even thriving) as many of my friends are.
She’s not wrong. At least once a week I have some business notion in the adult space, and 99% of the time that notion doesn’t survive five minutes of serious thought. “That would be great, but there’s no reliable way to get paid without PayPal or credit cards.” “Awesome, but I can’t finance the start-up costs, not even with crowd-funding.” “How on earth could we market such a thing without access to social media?” “No way would that app ever get into the app stores.” Yes, there are workarounds and expensive middlemen (they do always seem to be men) and kludges and sneaky back doors and potential ways to bootstrap. Nothing is impossible, but in time it begins to feel like running a marathon in a fat-suit.
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September 10th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Under fire from a variety of different directions, the crowd-funding platform GoFundMe, which had hitherto been one of the most relaxed of the crowdfunding platforms, just banned a whole raft of different types of fundraisers. This Washington Post article has the whole story. The part that’s relevant to the sex-positive world: as part of the changes, GoFundMe substantially beefed up its prohibition against fundraising that touches upon any of the adult industries. Here is what the GoFundMe terms of service had to say on the subject as of August 24:
You may not use the GoFundMe service for activities that … relate to sales of … items that are considered obscene [or] certain sexually oriented materials or services.
Pretty vague, and certainly GoFundMe was never adult-friendly. But the new terms they announced yesterday are rather more dramatically pronounced in their condemnation of porn and sex and anybody who admits to having anything to do with those things:
In order to ensure a positive experience for all visitors, the purpose of your GoFundMe campaign must not relate to any of the following items.
Adult Material
Sexually explicit
Sexually suggestive
Adult services or products
Pornography of any kind
Cosmetic sexual enhancements
Relating to adult industry
Content associated with or relating to any of the items above.
Of course that right there is a badly-written word salad that can mean whatever they want it to mean. But it’s very clear what they do mean: “No smut, and nothing to help smutty people. Go away, smutty people. Go far away.”
The Pornocalypse comes for us all, and yesterday it came for GoFundMe.
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August 5th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Here’s Aurora Snow writing about what it’s like being a porn star with a FaceBook account:
Why did Facebook delete me?
Or, I should say, why did Facebook delete my account three times? Yes, three times.
Exactly what prompts the social network to erase porn stars accounts even when they abide by the rules is something of a mystery. Maybe it’s the hard nipples protruding from a silk shirt or the Wonder Woman pose in lingerie. Or perhaps it’s the shock of seeing a bubble butt popping out of a skimpy bikini. It could be offensive language. You know, like, “Have a naughty Saturday” or “come play with my pussy” (with a picture of a kitty cat).
Then again, maybe it’s just because they’re porn stars.
Regular people frequently post the same content without fear of censorship. Think about how much time you spend posting photos and talking to “friends” in the comments. Some people upload content to Facebook for the perpetual online access it provides. We imagine it’ll be there forever. If your computer crashes or your home catches fire your content remains safe and secure in your virtual scrapbook. It’s all in the cloud.
Unless of course you happen to be a porn star.
I was devastated the first time I was deleted, and dumbfounded each time thereafter. Sure I’ve posted a few bikini photos, but nothing that wasn’t family appropriate. The photos I posted were conservative by porn standards and less sexually suggestive than most magazine covers.
Yet my accounts were deleted when I supposedly violated the terms of use. I lost contact with friends and acquaintances, irreplaceable photos from mobile uploads, and my faith in social media. Maybe my photos were flagged by a religious zealot trying to save my soul, or perhaps one of my “friends” wrote a derogatory comment beneath it. I wrote the word “ass” on a Twitter post that linked to my Facebook account and was shut down shortly thereafter. It could have been coincidence. Since my inquiries as to why it happened were ignored, I really don’t know.
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August 4th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Since I didn’t ever watch Friends back in the day, I really didn’t know who Julia Louis-Dreyfus even was until a fake-nude of her turned up (doubly-mislabeled) during the great frenzy to find nude photos of Sarah Palin after Palin became John McCain’s running mate back in 2008. But Louis-Dreyfus is indisputably a pretty big celebrity. And now she’s been banned from FaceBook for posting her own baby picture. In her own words:
BAN BAN BAN! No, no, no, insensitive material, inappropriate, blah, bla-bla blah blah, and I’m like “what?” And I keep trying to get in, change my password, absolutely not, they think I’m some sort of pervert, posting baby pictures, naked baby pictures. It’s me!
Here she’s telling David Letterman all about it. The baby picture is in the clip, but I’m gonna let Worldwide Pants and YouTube do the heavy lifting of showing it to you, they’ve got a lot more lawyers than I do:
I tell you what, if the #pornocalypse can sweep up Julia Louis-Dreyfus, there ain’t nobody safe. Automatic censorship by stupid robots, I tell you it’s the wave of the future!
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June 25th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Remember last week when I blogged about rumors that Google was disabling certain shortlinks built using the Goo.gl link shortener, if the link targets were porn sites? Well, thanks to a pair of tweets from Rain DeGrey attempting to share a photo from HardTied.com, right now you can see that that little chunk of the #pornocalypse in live action. Here are the tweets:
And sure enough, if you click the goo.gl link in that first tweet, right now Google is serving you this instead of the photo Rain linked to:
The only sentence in the two policy links Google offers that seems even remotely relevant is this one: “Do not use this service for spamming or linking to content that may harm other users.”
The modern state of Google’s anti-spam software: there’s a rule in there that assumes that porn and spam are the same thing. Don’t be evil? My ass.
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June 17th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
This is Violet Blue’s story, and all I know about it is contained in this tweet by her:
I hope and imagine that once she’s done the reporting, it will form the basis of one of her excellent columns for ZDnet.
However, I have some observations.
First, I don’t like shortlinks, never have. They always struck me as a bad idea because they obscure the link target. Every click on a shortened link is a leap into the unknown.
Shortlinks, if you didn’t know, are online services that take a long link and translate it into a much shorter one. Then they maintain a database of the translations and when anybody hits the short link, they are directed to the service, which provides the long link and forwards the surfer onward to that long link destination.
But what happens if the shortener service goes bankrupt, is acquired and shut down, is destroyed by circumstances beyond its control, decides to stop faithfully forwarding some or all links, or is compelled by judicial process or shadowy official menace to stop faithfully forwarding links?
These problems — at least one of which is inevitable in the fullness of time — are behind my second and third objections to link shorteners.
In the long enough run, every shortened link will be broken, even if the site that used it and the site it pointed to are both still there by some miracle. The connection will be lost to history, and lots of broken links in web archives and such will be obscure that would not be obscure if the original, long, somewhat informative link had been used instead. This is a big enough problem that Jason Scot’s Archive Team maintains an always-on spidering project that’s attempting to preserve the destinations of as many shortened links as possible.
More immediately and more urgently, you have to trust link-shortening services, but there’s no reason for them to be inherently trustworthy. Most are free services, so you’re not even a customer they would need to care about protecting to the limited extent that corporations care about individual customers these days. They have the power to redirect a shortened link anywhere they want, or to simply break it, and they can do this on a link-by-link basis, on the basis of disliking certain link destinations (as appears may be the case with the story behind Violet Blue’s tweet), or they could do it to all of the links they’ve shortened. Nothing stops them from doing any of this, and nobody has the right to demand they behave differently or better when they do it.
That’s a lot of power-over-your-communications to give away to a third party in exchange for a little convenience. I’ve never really understood why people do it. As a blanket proposition, I would argue that link shorteners suck.
This thread in the appropriate Google support forum dates to 2011, and a close reading shows that Google’s link shortener sucks a little bit more than most because they’ve long been in the habit of letting an automated algorithm declare certain link targets to be “spam” and then disabling the shortened links to them. That thread is full of legitimate users complaining that their shortened links (often the ones in places like sent email newsletters where the person who created the short link has no editing power to replace it with a working one) are broken. In typical Google fashion, these users are left crying into the wind; there is no recourse and scant hope of ever gaining human attention, mercy, or correction of the “error”.
My speculation and prediction is that Google would claim (will claim, if they can ever be induced to respond at all) that Naked Sword was not targeted specifically; rather, the notion would be that the Naked Sword shortlinks were determined to be spam by the implacable and unaccountable software machine. My own gloss on that is that Google’s rolling #Pornocalypse sweeps all porn before it. The company is so hostile to porn that it increasingly treats all porn as spam. (Anybody who has watched the decline in quality of porn-oriented searches on Google knows what I mean by this.)
There are more and more of these situations in the world where we communicate using services provided by faceless and unaccountable corporate actors. There’s no recourse to be had when they decide that one person, one company, or one industry should no longer be heard. It’s not even censorship, it’s just silencing induced by corporate distaste. Less dramatically, there’s nothing to be done when they program their robots to not really give a damn whether a given porn-industry communication is an unwanted commercial solicitation (spam) or a desired and requested communication. The robots don’t give a damn because Google doesn’t give a damn; the concept of a “legitimate porn link” seems not even to be on their radar.
And thus does the #Pornocalypse come for shortened links.
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