Censorship has occurred for centuries. But what does it look like now?
Table of Contents
i. Information Dynamics of Literary Magazine Pornography
ii. Psychological Domination of Social Media Algorithms
iii. Replacement of Legal Regulation with Algorithmic Incentive
iv. Exiting the Matrix of the Current Media Landscape
Information Dynamics of Literary Magazine Pornography
Our world today is obsessed with controlling the creation and transmission of data, and few types of data are as stringently controlled as pornography. For example, card networks like Visa and Mastercard refuse to do business with adult creators, and online platforms like Patreon and Ko-fi may disable their accounts for indeterminate amounts of time (1)(2). Payment processors like Paypal and Stripe may also refuse to work with them. This is unfortunate for any adult project that seeks to conduct business on a regular basis, regardless of the type of content offered. A porn studio and a literary magazine that features porn will both face discrimination from financial institutions.
Still, there are payment processors and banks which do accept adult businesses as customers, which precludes the characterization that their debanking is de facto censorship. And to be sure, the nature of pornography does require some form of access restriction. It’s harmful for the psychological development of teenagers and can lead to addiction among adult viewers.
However, there have been disproportionately large forces fighting against pornography, mostly centered around religion. For instance, the historical Catholic prohibition on premarital sex and contraception has led to their vehement opposition to pornography. Some Catholics would even argue that the production of pornography itself bears an existential threat to Christianity, as its hedonistic nature would draw viewers away from God. However, these particular objections are not so different from those made against other types of obscene material (e.g. extreme political speech and violence), which meet similar resistance from religious and secular groups. These objections have also failed to lead to the censorship of pornography, save increases in restrictions via age verification requirements.
Because pornography holds such staying power in our society despite moral opposition, its governing forces must be different than those already described. At their core, current moral controversies about porn center around who owns obscene information and whether it should be permitted to be sold. Free speech and obscenity are the watchwords here. Who or what decides whether the latter deserves to be protected under the former? And what standards does this authority use to determine the behaviors falling under each term in the first place?
I claim that under digital age capitalism, societal governance of obscenity has been relegated to self-policing measures of algorithmic reward. That is: if a type of content generates enough attention, it will be allowed to exist due to social media interaction closely correlating with ad revenue. Conversely, if some content doesn’t generate enough attention, it will be outcompeted by default. Therefore, if the world of literary magazine pornography is going to survive, its community must join together and support its output.
Psychological Domination of Social Media Algorithms
Ever since the end of the Second World War, science fiction authors have been preoccupied with demonstrating how the accelerating pace of technology might lead to humanity’s demise. Legendary author and magazine editor Michael Moorcock tackled this straightforwardly in his trilogy The Dancers at the End of Time, where the male protagonist has sex with his own mother due to how debauched the society at the end of time has become. J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition features protagonists who die over and over again as part of a satire of the mass media’s clinical treatment of violence during the Vietnam War. William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which directly influenced sci-fi film The Matrix, tells a story of a hacker who must navigate cyberspace in order to defeat an artificial intelligence. Now, at the beginning of the second quarter of the 21st century, those fears about technology seem to be realized.
This may come as no shock, but the rush to implement algorithms in social media—or as they’re understood, a feed that can predict exactly which content the user wants to consume— began in the early 2010s with Facebook. The company promised its investors it would boost ad revenues, so it implemented an algorithm that optimized user engagement instead of just serving posts chronologically. The result was a feed that showed less of the user’s friends and more information that entertained or polarized them. Facebook was later found responsible for fomenting political polarization during the 2016 election season, after which President Trump was elected for his first term (3).
Watching Facebook’s success in driving engagement, other companies like Google and Twitter followed suit. Fast forward to today and the average American spends at least six hours looking at a screen daily (4). While watching that screen, around 85% of all internet users view short form video content (like TikTok and Youtube Shorts) every week. In addition, the global average view time of TikTok users is 95 minutes per day (5). As a result of these trends, the attention span of Americans has diminished from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds by the year 2020 (6). Anyone can tell that the attention of internet users is being captured by increasingly addictive social media algorithms. Accordingly, the competition for any new vertical of media is going to be more intense than ever.
Replacement of Legal Regulation with Algorithmic Incentive
It’s reasonable to say that in the place of legal regulation, algorithmic incentives for engagement have taken up the function of determining what obscene topics are acceptable to consume. For example, comic Lenny Bruce was arrested multiple times in the 1960s for performing standup routines with the words “motherfucker” and “cocksucker” (7). Repeating these words today while making short form content would earn the video a viewer discretion warning, but it would otherwise remain available. Consequently, video creators can still benefit from obscene behavior or information without needing to worry about censorship.
In terms of written information, standards of obscenity have also changed over the years. The book publisher Doubleday pulped the American run of J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition in 1970 for making sexually explicit comments about Jackie Kennedy and Ronald Reagan (then only a movie star). Now there are entire websites like Archive of our Own which are dedicated to publishing user-created scenarios involving real people. No longer does moral sentiment dictate which offensive subject matter may be transmitted. Instead, the primary arbiter of its transmission is whether its creators garner enough attention to justify its existence among many other forms of content that compete for the user’s time.
Exiting the Matrix of the Current Media Landscape
The film The Matrix became an instant cyberpunk classic when it was released in 1999. Its plot pitted Neo, the chosen one, against the non-human programs and artificial intelligence which had enslaved humanity for a hundred years. While matrices do hold real mathematical and common definitions, the film popularized another meaning for the concept: a system in which people are embedded yet have little to no control over. At first glance, this describes the situation facing adult creators among a sea of media competitors for consumer attention.
What’s more, generative artificial intelligence is creating what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called “the hyperreal”, simulations which look so pleasing that they seem to replace the real things which they are based upon. With regards to adult creators, AI is solely able to reproduce human pornographic content due to having stolen its images without any sort of permission or recompense. Then, generative AI combines with two other forms of technology—short form content and addictive social media algorithms—to capture audiences that were originally meant for human producers. In other words, the hyperreal devours public consciousness of the real; Baudrillard calls this mechanism the “precession of simulacra”, or the replacement of real things with representations of those things. It’s clear that not only are adult businesses trapped in a simulacral matrix, but that it’s digital by nature.
So how would pornographers and other creators of obscene content be able to ensure their freedom of speech by escaping this predatory technological system? The best way that they can fight against the overreach of simulacra is to foster repeated organic engagement with their work—in other words, human community. Evidence shows that behaviors like endless scrolling are driven by loneliness, and that it induces a feedback loop of seeking depressing and isolating topics (8). Such negativity-focused behavior has even become so prevalent in recent years that it has acquired its own name: doomscrolling (9). Users would have less incentive to doomscroll if they knew they could interact with a community which accepted them.
What are some strategies that small adult creators may use to combat doomscrolling? Unlike large corporate porn producers and hosts who already hold a large fraction of total audience share, small producers must concern themselves with being outcompeted by AI. As stated before, users need a reason to care about those creators in order to keep visiting their page. Fortunately, small producers maintain an advantage in this aspect. They can easily make daily posts and answer messages from fans in order to develop personal relationships with them (hence the branding of the platform “Onlyfans”). They may also engage in other projects, such as a literary magazine, as a form of artistic expression to share with their audience. Whatever the case, makers of obscene subject matter must keep these constraints in mind as they publish their material. It is possible for creators to stand against the digital matrix, but only through banding together with groups of like-minded people and making the case for their media to exist.
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