Gerard Van der Leun on Thu, 30 Apr 1998 21:40:45 +0200 (MET DST) |
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<nettime> Trouble In Pornutopia |
Trouble in Pornutopia If you wanted even more proof that nothing makes a situation worse than Congress' meddling, you don't have to look much further than the boomtown of Pornutopia on the World Wide Web. Pornutopia is everywhere on the Web these days. Pornutopia erupts in the Usenet newsgroups built with endless promises and links and "free" image files of everything from Kate Moss' left nipple to "Goldicocks and the Three Bares." Pornutopia surges in tsunamis of bandwidth and rolls over huge amounts of paid corporate "research" time from coast to coast. Stock market analysts browsing for "Barely Legal Teens" may well miss the essential data that tells them a stock-market crash is about to happen. Pornutopia erupts into email in the form of poorly Photoshopped attached images of genuine movie stars involved in various sexual acts. (I don't know about you but I wouldn't want an image of Meg Ryan in the shadow of a penis just popping up on my home email viewer.) Since the defeat of the ill-conceived Computer Decency Act before the Supreme Court last summer, Pornutopia has developed faster than a scalded goat. Yup, the gold rush is on in Pornutopia as every wannabe pornographer in the world slaps up a Web site fed with streams of Asian and Swedish and San Fernando Valley porn. Graphic, organized into categories, and the one burning reason for middle managers locked in their offices around the globe to badger the company coffers for faster and faster Internet connections. ("Dammit, tell those trolls in accounting that I need to seeing streaming videos of Debby Doing Dallas and Suburbs right now! I don't care how much it costs, just get it done!") But like every boomtown, Pornutopia is now heading for a bust, and not one that is surgically enhanced, but one whose title is Chapter 11. You see, the great thing about sex on the Net is that it sells (Big surprise, right?). In any new medium, one of the first successful areas of commerce is sex -- stag films, X-rated video cassettes, 900 calls. But the bad thing is that sex in a new medium initially sells so well that it sucks in the amateurs as well as the pros in large numbers. And, like anything else, the market for sex on the Web is only so big. If you have a million customers and a hundred sites, you've got a thriving retail industry. But if you have a million customers and a hundred thousand sites, many sites are slated for going out of business sales. For thousands of mom -and-pop pornographers throughout cyberspace, going out of business is now just a matter of time. What once looked like springtime for porn on the Net has become, through the very nature of the Net, a boneyard of boners. Any casual consumer of porn these days can see the signs. One site promises free pictures and suddenly, to compete, all the sites offer free pictures. Then the middlemen climb aboard and offer pages of hot links that advertise the benefits of hundreds of sites all with free pictures of week, the day, the hour and, currently, the moment. This of course is not enough for the rather finite, jaded and easily bored pornhounds of cyberspace. Soon there has to be the promise of more e and more bizarre images and film clips -- snakes, horses, amputees, the same 24 inch silicon penis that had 200,000 miles on it the time Marilyn Chambers retired -- anything to entice and excite, yet again, those for whom a day without a dildo shot is a day without sunshine. The result is that Pornutopia is less and less like an elegant bordello where all desires are catered to and all obsessions satisfied, and more and more like a cheap carnival freak show or a small town dirty book store in the strip mall right down by the bus station just across from the trailer park. Not that there's anything wrong with this, but when you get a whole cybercity made of this stuff, virtual real estate values tumble. And so they have. The endless proliferation of small time porn palaces has resulted in a price war. What started six months ago as a standard price of around $15- $20 a month for "membership" has now tumbled to $3.95 for "multiple memberships." In addition, the endless networking of banners and blinking images and animated gifs of above-average blow jobs by the well-endowed of both sexes has gotten so out of hand that, in search of just one free image, the hapless porn hound can watch window beget window beget window in a seemingly endless circle -jerk of titillation until one forgets not only where one is but where one came from and watches helplessly as the computer wheezes to a halt and crashes into the ground yet again. This is an utter and excruciating bore at InfoHighway cruising speeds of T1, and must make the hapless browser using his or her new 56K modem from a home connection want to empty a full clip into the computer. The Net result of all these desperate efforts to corral and manipulate those in quest of sex on the Net will be a vast die-off of the less well-funded and focused of the sites as, at last, even the most optimistic among the amateur pornveyors discover that although sex does sell, too much cheap sex is just another way of enriching companies like Netscape, Cisco, Intel and Microsoft while beggaring themselves. Once the die-off is well underway, the current rosy predictions for the Web as the way-new medium for making money will suffer yet another setback as august journals such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal emit baffled articles about how not even sex sells on the World Wide Web. They'll be wrong, of course, and will miss the fact that sex, well done and with a flair for what is erotic rather than merely base, will always sell. The death of sex on the Net will occur not because of sex itself, but because too many monkeys at too many keyboards uploaded too many images that were, in the final analysis, always the same. If the pornhounds of cyberspace wanted a Pornutopia that was always the same, they'd just logoff and go sleep with their wives and girlfriends. Which maybe isn't such a bad idea in the first place. --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl