Considering how much time and energy we, as a population, squander watching pornographic entertainment online, it is suspicious that it is free of charge. And a prized commercial demographic, males aged 18 to 34, are leading the way by a comfortable margin. They are hitting the cyber-skins almost three times as often as their next closest competitor, males aged 34 to 55. So why aren’t capitalists capitalizing on it?
Part 1: The Set Up
Have we ever known American capitalists to leave any stone unturned if there might be a nickel hiding underneath that they can flip into a dime? Hell no. And that is not an indictment, it is simply stating a fact. Capitalists chase every dime for the same reason that cheetahs chase impalas on The Serengeti; it is what they were created to do. Acknowledging that reality, consider that for hours and hours of every day, of every week, of every month, of every year, millions of Americans are captivated by the images on their screens. And they never have to pay a penny for the privilege. Wide open access to something so marketable is un-American. We pay billions of dollars a year for water for Christ’s sake.
How many of us started paying for an AMC subscription three years ago so we could re-watch Mad Men and forgot to cancel it? Meanwhile, AMC has collected ten bucks a month for years and without our noticing. And in the years since you last paid to watch Christina Hendrix exploding off your screen with that blazing red hair and coke-bottle-body, you’ve watched girls who look just like her putting in that work, in every position and in every scenario imaginable. For free? That math is not math-ing.
Granted: if you are a true connoisseur of the adult entertainment arts you can buy special access to whatever you happen to find… special. Or you can directly support your favorite Only Fans girl who is (wait for it) working her way through school. But other than that, internet pornography is pretty much a Golden Corral all-you-can-eat buffet of T-and-A. And just like our favorite national buffet chain, once you have paid your price of admission, it’s ON. You can consume until you bust. For adult entertainment, the one-time, lifetime price is for something you would have to pay anyway: a computer device and access to the net. And it’s on forever. Consume until you… bust.
Steven Underwood
If there is one thing you can be sure the Jesus Freaks and Project 2025 geeks won’t achieve once they take over, it is the criminalization of monkey spanking. The masters of the tech world and the net world have a reason for being so generous to allow us to have what we love (or search) so much in such abundance. Or maybe they are making an investment that makes no sense on paper, but will make all the sense in the world once it starts to pay off. Like some billionaire asshole buying a social media platform for twice the sticker price, when it turned out he was actually buying the next president.
Part 2: The Take Down
The core critique in this section is aimed squarely at the rapacious capitalists, technocrats and oligarchs who have wormed their way into the minds, lives and loins of a generation of young Americans. Especially young American men. The young man who finds himself spending hours of his precious time staring at a parade of cheerleaders, secretaries, teachers, and cheating MILFs lining up to pleasure him gets no grief from me.
I completely understand becoming hooked on these images and the hyper-stimulation they are designed to create. As hard as Gen X guys worked to find our dads’ Hustler magazines, or to make those squiggly-lined images on Cinemax straighten up for 7 or 8 seconds so we could get a GOOD look at what a naked chick in motion looked like, our heads would have exploded if we had what these guys have now.
Had I come of age at a time when I could watch a film production that replicated me having sex with my dream person, I don’t think I would have ever left the house.
I would not have given a damn about what information was being gathered about me, how it could be used, or anything else going on in the world. I doubt I would check into anything too strenuous because I’d be bleary-eyed and exhausted from all the cyber-sexual activity. And whoever held the power to feed me those images, or controlling the apparatus through which I access them, could steer me pretty much anyway they want to. I wouldn’t know it, and even worse, I may not care; at least not nearly as much as I should.
Isn’t ownership of a nation of young men, even if it is only a third of them, worth a helluva lot more than 10 bucks a month? That is why porn is free. And while I recognize the value of explicit adult entertainment, using it to groom young men for technology dependency and corporate control is terrible. That is the equivalent of selling heroine to a pregnant woman.
Part 3: The Autopsy
Technically, this qualifies as a conspiracy theory; as some readers are predisposed to reject my thesis that corporations have a vested interest in creating a population of automatons programmed to do only two things: buy and comply.
This is a classic trojan horse scenario. The enemies hiding inside are the lethargy, disconnect and desensitization that neuters millions of men before their nuts have even dropped. The surreptitious mission to catch and kill the drive of our masculine youth keeps them from ever becoming a threat to power, and always susceptible to corporate enslavement. We should never forget that when a people are enslaved, they must first break their bondage before they can even attempt to compete with their enslaver. So every minute of bondage is a minute where the competitive gap between enslaved and enslaver widens.
Before proceeding, a definition of ‘enslavement’ in this context is required. I am not referring to the Kunte Kinte from Roots style of enslavement; this is more akin to the Rosie from The Jetsons style. Never thought of Rosie the robot maid as a slave, you say? Granted, Rosie was a machine, but her cartoon character modeled human behavior.
Rosie existed strictly and solely for the purpose of serving the needs of George and Jane Jetson. And despite possessing no independent thoughts or capabilities, Rosie demonstrated strong emotions of both sorrow and fear, just as a human servant would have.
So yes, even though The Jetsons version was cute, clean, non-violent, high-tech and futuristic, Rosie’s circumstance was as much an enslavement as her flesh and blood counterpart who was captured in Ghana, shipped to Virginia, and renamed ‘Toby.’ And that is what Musk, Zuck and the other billionaires have in mind for our young men. They want it for all of us, but just like in American slavery, the young and growing have greater market value than the old and fading. Not only that, they are easier to train because you can start grooming them early to accept the walking brain-death that settles in when a person draws more energy from the screens that man made than from the sky that God made.
The most important tool in that grooming is the smart phone; the most transformative invention of the last half century. The power of that little computer in all of our pockets is greater than those huge computers that NASA worked with in the eighties. And that awesome power has been aimed at our young men to build a dependency on technology that borders on affection. And for most of them, it starts with their first introduction to the wonder of womankind on their little screens. Even when they migrate to big screens later, the phone is where it starts because the mobility provides the privacy essential for them to get lost in the fantasy; so lost that they lose touch with reality.
And by the time they wake up, it will be too late to escape without burning down what remains of reality and starting all over. Envision some haggard and road weary young man, a half century from now, collapsing to the ground like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes. Except this guy will be cursing the toppled Capitol Dome in D.C. instead of the Statue of Liberty.
Because the failure to protect these young men when they were unable to protect themselves falls squarely on their government. Congress was too enamored, intimidated or fascinated with the mythology of tech-bro billionaires to do their jobs and block harmful and addictive content from children. And so those children became adults enslaved to algorithms.
And lest the point of this diatribe gets lost, algorithms are just people. People who are throwing rocks and hiding their hands. An algorithm reveals the motivations of a person, not just the functionality of a program. And a person, or several persons, decided to make pornography readily accessible because the algorithm is where the greed, lust, vanity, and wrath of humankind can run amok. Unrestrained and un-regulated, it is suffocating our humanity. Sadly, we have been groomed to see it as progress, treat it as inevitable, and ultimately to surrender. And nobody can deny that surrendering is a lot easier when it comes gift wrapped in a fantasy three-way with your dream girls.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of David Saint Vincent's work on Medium.