Patricia Nilsson

That’s a big question. I’ll say two main things.

Firstly, if we talk about porn from the perspective of a traditional feminist critique, whether we should be for or against — I think I write at some point in the book that, to this day, we have not resolved what sex actually means to women. That’s the elephant in the room. I find what someone like Ellen Willis has to say very interesting: that women should be formulating their own sexual desires and fantasies and taking part in the world as equal beings. But the reality is that it’s still a world dominated by male experiences.

As to whether these debates aren’t really relevant nowadays, I think we’re so focused on sex that we have failed to form a better understanding of what pornography means today. Why is it so shameful, so taboo, to be a sex worker? The idea that you’re selling yourself? What does it mean to be a sex worker in this digital economy, where we have a paradigm of platform labor where we’re all more or less encouraged to monetize our image and to vie for attention online? A lot of these aspects you could see from sex workers, especially cam workers more than thirty years ago: thinking about your online persona and building a virtual self to attract attention and sell a fantasy other people can consume.

That is the core of platform labor today. So I think that a lot of the conversations we’re having today about sex work, especially pornography, miss the point that we have a virtual economy that’s now completely dependent on this type of self-exploitation, which goes way beyond the purely pornographic.

Patricia Nilsson

When I say that the logic of porn shaped the business model of the internet, I mean that some of the first people who started making money online were making money in pornography. I remember speaking to this guy, who made a lot of money in the ’90s, who told me, “I never wanted to be a pornographer. I just wanted to make money on the internet. Pornography just happened to be the way.” A lot of these early sites were the first ones to play with how to attract huge amounts of people online — to get them to stay for as long as possible and return as often as possible — and how to make money from their attention.

Take things like affiliate marketing: when you host a link on your website, and then if someone clicks on it and goes somewhere else, you get paid for it. Fabian Thylmann — the German dude who is known for inventing tube sites’ business model by bringing Wall Street money into it — didn’t build tube sites. What he did was build one of the first affiliate marketing softwares, which essentially enabled tube sites to track people’s behaviors while on the platform. Or, if you look at camming, it pioneered live streaming. It was the place where people first got to experiment with such things as pay-per-minute models, taking people into private rooms, and using prepaid tokens for tipping. These are all driving the business model of platforms like Twitch and TikTok and attracting more and more people into this virtual economy.

But camming also brought a completely extraordinary notion of the online persona: the idea that we can be whoever we want to be or whoever the person on the other side of the screen wants us to be. This doesn’t apply just to ourselves but also to how normal it has become to consume others, to consume the image of others. By that I don’t only mean watching porn or following your favorite influencer on Instagram. Everything has become this form of consumption. This is how we date; this is how we follow our friends. I live in Germany now. I used to live in the UK. I know what’s happening in many of my friends’ lives because I’m consuming their feeds. So that’s what I mean when I say that the logic of porn has seeped through the internet and influenced everything.

Patricia Nilsson

Just before we get into Section 230, since you have mentioned it, what I mean when I talk about the “masturbatory business model of the internet” is that the entire virtual ecosystem is designed to be masturbatory to the extent that watching porn essentially is satisfying a psychosocial need on your own by staring at content that has been algorithmically engineered to appeal to you. That is what watching porn is today. And that is what being on your phone is today as well. You know, they’re the same thing. Are you familiar with gooning?

Patricia Nilsson

It’s not such a crazy thing as it is made out to be. Gooning is the extreme end of a spectrum that we’re all on in one way, shape, or form. That’s what I mean by the masturbatory business model of the internet: what we’re really doing is being caught up in this loop of self-gratification and self-soothing. That’s why we pick up our phones. We want to soothe ourselves.

On Section 230 and freedom of expression: I am not an expert on the issue of regulation. I am not “Section 230 ride or die.” I think it’s obvious to everyone that there is something deeply wrong with the online world, and that we need to change it somehow. At the same time, I argue in the book that regulation of the internet has, in many ways, historically been driven by an attempt to regulate pornography, and that has had a lot of unintended consequences. Section 230 was intended to stop private companies from having too much power over what individuals can say. And with the erosion of Section 230, this is exactly what we’ve been seeing.

Visa and MasterCard have become the de facto regulators of porn. They don’t want to have this role, but they have it. A couple of years ago, there was a pressure group that pressured them into taking down over ten million videos on Pornhub. Again, you might say, “we shouldn’t have porn uploaded by unverified accounts,” so maybe this is a good thing. But it misses the bigger point that this kind of pressure exists, and private companies can force content to come down this way. And in a world like ours where things are changing very quickly, you may imagine where that leads.

Patricia Nilsson

There’s a quote in the book from Bryce Adams, where she talks about why she decided to become an OnlyFans performer. She says if TikTok is just full of people, mainly women, performing these overt eroticized selves all the time, then logically, why not just make money from it, if I am going to be constantly performing as my sexual self in this way anyway?

I think this is so interesting for two reasons. On the side of the consumer: What happens to us when we are consuming this type of content? Can it actually start replacing reality? I think we’re starting to see that it can. A lot of people who, for whatever reason, have started spending a lot of time online find that nothing in reality can quite match the excitement, vividness, and speed with which they can feel gratified and validated online. And you can see why. If you’re constantly engaged with performers who are excited, optimistic, and positive, then it can feel quite anticlimactic to go out in the real world and have to negotiate real relationships.

However, this is something that I saw very strongly in performers as well, people who are choosing to do this sort of work. A lot of people I spoke to who are OnlyFans performers, or do camming, for example, don’t want to have a real job. That is the driver: the idea of having to go to an office every day and seeing people and having a boss and negotiating with colleagues. A lot of people I spoke to describe having deep anxiety or just not feeling comfortable being with people in person. Being an online sex worker and making money by having these mediated online interactions is just so much safer, because they don’t even have to leave their room.

In the last chapter, I interviewed a performer called Lizzy Capri, who was a YouTube mini-celebrity before she launched her OnlyFans. She told me that the way she sees the world is that we are all either consumers or performers, and she would much rather be a performer, a creator. She was telling me that if she didn’t have the incentive to film herself doing things and share them, she would often lack the motivation to do anything at all. She would just end up laying on her sofa all day.

Patricia Nilsson

I think I say in the book that OnlyFans is the marriage of the pornographic undertones of the internet and the influencer economy that has stemmed from it. OnlyFans performers don’t need to learn any new skills. They are just doing the type of platform labor that we have all been taught to do since being children, which is essentially posting pictures of oneself and being “authentic” — and what I mean by that is this particular sort of performing of authenticity. What I found really interesting in the sort of conversations I was having with Bryce was the way she talks about how people are craving a new type of connection. What OnlyFans offers is this feeling that we’re behind the scenes, that we’re ultimately getting to know the real Bryce.

Patricia Nilsson

For the porn industry specifically, I think it’s very difficult, because most of the content that is being consumed in a place like the UK is not made there, especially now that porn production has been almost outlawed. Take the women who, especially before the [Ukraine] war, were flown into Prague. These are not porn performers; these are just civilians who are brought in and told, “Hey, you can make, like, €5,000 in one week.” That is a life-changing amount of money. So people come in, and they do whatever they’re told. A lot of these women, of course, don’t speak Czech or English. But at the core of this issue is the fact that they are not EU citizens. That is why they can’t turn to the police if anything goes wrong.

The same thing happens in Colombia, one of the countries where the camming industry is growing absolutely the fastest. It’s completely unregulated, and many of these cam models are being forced to work almost every day. A lot of them would want to come to the West and do other types of work, but they can’t. I think very often we want to say, “Women are being forced into doing this, this is sex trafficking.” There are, of course, cases where women are put in coercive contracts they can’t get out of. But to a very, very large extent, it’s women choosing to do this. So the question becomes: Why are they choosing to do it? This can be extended to why so many people today want to be OnlyFans performers rather than, say, going to university and getting a job or working at an Amazon warehouse. What do these choices say about the choices that aren’t made or can’t be made?

All that aside, if you’re concerned about these women who are doing this type of sex work, what you want is legalization. You want the creation of some kind of framework where you can have some kind of standardization of wages and root out exploitative agents and studios. You want to create ecosystems where porn performers and online sex workers can go to the police if something bad happens to them, where they can help each other flag exploitative clients and so on.