And I want to ask you, in all the work you're doing in trying to tell stories about technology and uncover these archival histories and truths, what has the abstraction, what do you think it has cost us?

Okay, so many layers.

Great question.

Well, first I'll start with some citations.

I was at a bar with a friend, Melanie Hoff, and she described the phone as a sex toy in just like this offhanded way, which is great because she teaches this class called The Cybernetics of Sex at the School for Poetic Computation and is very much think about these sexualized technologies.

And the computer mouse's vulva was described in an essay by Ali Na, The Fetish of the Click.

But both of these things, I think, are concrete examples of embodied or tactile technologies, as you're saying.

And how do we capture or wrestle that back from these fascist tech bros?

Can you please tell us how the project came about in the first place? Why you thought it was important to document cyberfeminism explicitly? And when did you realize that it needed to become a book?

So it's so funny that that project, it feels like it was yesterday, but I guess it was seven or eight years ago now.

So again, in my 20s, I was part of this like very DIY, DIWO, do it with others, like hardware hacking, software hacking, creative tech group.

And when I went to grad school, I was doing this fellowship at the Harvard Law School called the Berkman Klein Center for the Internet and Society.

And here I saw that people were thinking about the same things, but approaching them from opposite directions.

So my artist friends were making work about it.

And then the people in this fellowship were very policy legislative people.

AI even more dangerously is at this

I wanted to ask you if you could tell us just more about a sexual history of the internet and what you're doing with this research, what this story of telling histories of the internet through desire lines and the evolution of sexuality in terms of the evolution of technology is.

So A Sexual History of the Internet is a lecture performance that takes place on your phone on Instagram.

It's also then replicated as a performance script facsimile that people can buy as an artist book.

And that artist book is also a financial experiment.

So the script that you would see during the performance is told in a series of chapters.

The first chapter tries to unpack, or if anything, ask the audience to question what exactly is sex and what exactly is technology.

If you are part of a queer community or are part of a queering practice at all, People kind of understand from the start, because the people they love or have sex with or are aroused by doesn't fit into the standard heterosexual definition, they've already been prompted to question, what does sex look like? What could a relationship look like? All of these things.

Yeah,

in order to be able to discuss things that the algorithm won't allow us to talk about.

Yes.

But this works on two- the two ends.

So on the one hand, it won't trigger the algorithm for content moderation, but it also won't trigger the algorithm for virality.

And because these tools need eyes in order to disseminate, you end up kind of talking to a very, very small group of people, unless that's being shared as actively as possible, but it's more of a manual effort rather, than an algorithmic one.

Mistress Harley, who created Tech Dom, a subset of, of fi- financial domination, she always talks about how sex workers are a bit othered, right? We kind of put them in a separate category, but they are the canaries in the coal mine of a lot of the things that we will be affected by.

So an example that Mistress Harley gives is, right now you're talking about shadowbanning.

Um, why do you think so many people want to have relationships with non-human companions? And do you have any concerns about that?

And so I'm... why did you do that or like what was the plan or what what weren't you getting from this kind of practice you were building for yourself that you

like I wanted the criticism the reading the writing the theory and the research I you have a sort of research uh two by four and obviously that that applies to teaching as well it's not like a core the primary focus it does remind me of this amazing woman, Ira Rogoff.

She's the director of visual culture at Goldsmiths.

I went to her lecture at MIT's art culture technology program, and she talked about becoming research and how currently we might describe it as project-based research.

You have all of these different projects, but they all are culminating in a singular research thread.

And while I was learning from good people and working with great clients and using that tech, as I

Do all these, I'm wondering how all these things fit together if they do.

I think if you ask me in a year, I will have a much more clear answer for you.

Um, I want to turn to A Sexual History of the Internet, um, and it'll be the lecture that you're delivering later, as I mentioned, but how does sex and sex workers in particular relate to the development of internet technology?

I think you can see it from multiple sides.

So in the very beginning, computers were women.

They were women secretaries and mathematicians who would do calculations by hand, and that later became machines doing this kind of computation.

Um, but if we start to think about the advent of a lot of these digital tools that we're using, maybe it's built off of extraction and a bit of jokes.

So f- Lena Forsén, at the time published as Lena Sjöblom, was a Playboy model, her first and only nude image.

She...

And also particularly because you zone in on how, um, them working really or finding ways to work really pushed forward, uh, technological advances.

Yeah

...

even Fariha Róisín writes, "Who was wellness for? How do we have access to these things? How can, uh, desire be expanded? For what exactly is considered obscene?" It goes back to that question.

If we're trying to understand the gamut of desire and what that includes, it should also be an openness to all the different subsections of where people's desires are rooted and where that comes from.

Um, the quote that Melanie is referring to is really pointing to this, this rise of eugenic thinking, right? There is the perfect-

Mm.

But it's meant to kind of help the listener understand that we are all part of the same struggle, where a lot of this is being, um, utilized without our permission, commodified, and then sold back to us.

I think it's a really important thing to note, because Mistress Harley, who is a data dominatrix also mentioned in both books and performances, her way of trying to help listeners situate how we are all implicated in this is through this idea of black boxing.