Online pornography is often seen as a corner of the web that doesn’t bear much analysis. And yet it can hardly be ignored. Firstly, that’s because of the sheer size of the adult-content industry — a sector that in itself is worth around $97 billion annually worldwide and that, at peak times, commands 10 percent of all internet traffic. But more than that, a discussion of its inner workings sheds light on the mechanisms that govern the special kind of attention economy and platform capitalism that we are all wrapped up in.

In Guilty Pleasure: The Pornification of the Internet, the Economy, and Everything Else, the journalist Patricia Nilsson discusses porn’s place at the heart of today’s digital ecosystem. As the Financial Times journalist explains, many of the technologies meant to hold and monetize our attention were pioneered by porn sites, and we can even say that digital life in general operates according to the same logic of endless titillation.

For Nilsson, “online culture runs on the onanistic logic of porn.” In this new creator economy, everyone is forced to perform a heightened and often openly sexualized version of themselves. In an interview for Jacobin, she spoke to Bartolomeo Sala about what effects this is having on relationships, users, and creators themselves.