"How sex changed the internet" by Samantha Cole 📚

I wrote about sex and the creator economy only a few days ago, and I wanted to go back today to a promising book about this topic. On November 15, Samantha Cole (senior editor for Motherboard) will be released a collection of stories from the billboard age to the current AI bias, or how software engineers develop the jpeg image compression using a 1972 blonde Playmate as a reference for color prioritization.

Just like photography, the movie industry, and the movie industry, the history of technology has been widely influenced by our sex drive. This history is also very cultural. And when discussing China's rise as a tech superpower, very few analysts consider how governmental censorship in this sector also shaped very different ecosystems than in the West. Just like very few consider how U.S. tech platforms vastly relying on a puritan cultural core are deciding for the rest of the world what is OK or not (sex no, undermining democracy OK?)

It gets really complicated when you go from a single person running their hobbyist bulletin board scanning Playboy pictures to this huge machine of moderators making decisions. (...) We have these huge monopolies that are just running the show for us now, and it’s hard not to feel like you don’t have any of that control left. – Samantha Cole