Reverse Cowgirl

– the ever-perceptive Ms. Breslin – has posted about a Claire Hoffman piece in Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com which notes precipitous declines in revenue at commercial porn sites, occasioned by the emergency of three free-download sites, in the nature of YouTube: Megarotic (megarotic.com), YouPorn (youporn.com), and Pornotuben (pornotube.com) (note links broken due to the positive correlation between porn sites and computer viruses and the negative correlation between porn sites and computer security. Ed.)

Link to Claire Hoffman’s piece on Portfolio.com.

WNYC’s On The Media– ran an excellent piece in 2002

interview with Jonathan Coopersmith, Douglas Rushkoff, and others making the case that pornography is often the driver of new communications technologies.

For my part, I’d put porn on a plane with two other markets which have different, but no less intense, needs for innovative advantage: illicit markets, and military/law enforcement uses. More my area of knowledge – I can easily name examples:

• There’s no end to examples of military organizations as first adapters of new technologies: two -way radio, the fax machine (during WWII – before the War Department figured out what to do with telecopiers, they used them for a while over radio – placed in vehicles in the States – sending new information to soldiers and officers who were in vehicles, driving around, making death notifications to the families of service members who had been killed) ((Personal conversations with the late Jack Fitzstephens, whose first military assignment in WW II was in “graves registration” – following behind troops, clipping dog tags, preparing bodies for burial. But not so far behind that he didn’t get shot at)).
• As soon as there were phones, organized crime (bootleggers, gamblers) used hijacked phone lines – called “cheeseboxes” in New York – so that when authorities followed a phone line to an address – they’d find an empty apartment – with a wired connection to another phone line – sometimes appearing in another apartment or nearby building – which redirected the calls. They could shut the line down, of course – but by the time the connnections got sorted out – targets and evidence had been moved away.An NYPD source has provided me with an explanation of “Cheesebox” as the name – one of the early such setups was hidden in a closet – the wiring then hidden in what had been a shipping crate for cheese.
• The first mobile telephone I ever saw or used was in law enforcement. (The person I had personal knowledge of using a car-based “radio telephone”was a United States Attorney General; this may be public record now, but not when I came by the information, so we’ll hold the name for the moment, it not being necessary to make the point);
• Let’s not forget what immediate use urban illicit drug-selling organizations made of pagers and then mobile phones;
• The first reported use (that I’m aware of) of a “silent,” vibrating pager was by Richard Helms, then DCI, who was reported in the early 1970’s as been “paged” at dinner parties by the then state-of-the-art “beeper.”
• The FBI was using portable audio recorder hard drives before anyone thought to add “i” to “pod.” Well

before.

Sex, drugs, and espionage in the same piece. We’ll try to keep connecting these things as often as possible.

I’m not sure, though – about the extinction of porn as a business – perhaps this is a just a lull before some newer, better porn medium – with some sort of DRM – makes people willing to pay more for better.