text stringlengths 0 3.45k |
|---|
You can never trust the setting nor can you trust just the medium or means of communication. JW: In a way I’m very laissez-faire about technology, but only because I seriously believe in structure: structure as something that is created by the treatment. There is the same laissez-faire attitude about technology in Freu... |
For Freud, technology and progress seem to be at odds with the pleasure principle. The idea that they create more happiness is wrong at best, and a destructive illusion at worst. This is something that you hear in analysis: patients come up against the illusion that technological life is supposed to make them happy, ma... |
The question is whether they make this disappointment personal—whether they see it as their own failing to find the happiness that they think everyone else must have (FOMO) thanks to all this wonderful technology, or whether they encounter something else about what it means to be human. A small robot with a caterpillar... |
Over the past few years, the US government has deployed these robots to disrupt the most famous technical achievement of Mexican narco-trafficking cartels: border tunnels. These underground miles-long structures have ventilation systems, electrical grids, and pulley-operated secret entrances and exits. Cartels spend mi... |
The popular fascination with these tunnels runs deep. Journalists obsess over their design. American films like Fast and Furious and television shows like Weeds feature detailed reconstructions of them. When famed cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman escaped from prison (the second time) through a tunnel, both Taiwa... |
For years, technophiles have argued that robots are the key to shutting down narco-tunnels. Citing developments by the Idaho National Laboratory and Canadian robot maker Inuktun, a 2009 Wired article claims that robots could be “the greatest weapon to emerge from the government’s attempt to stamp out the trade in illic... |
1. The internet has served Eros from the beginning. Once upon a time, the men who commanded the most powerful army in the history of the world decided they were going to create a giant, invisible apparatus for sex. They did not know the apparatus was for sex. They thought they were building a computer network that woul... |
Then a funny thing happened. The researchers started using the network to talk about their feelings. The researchers had many feelings, especially the male researchers—and they were mostly male. They felt lonely. They felt randy. They wondered if anyone was listening. Having grown up in a society that told men that the... |
The men loved to write emails. They wrote millions of them. They articulated their excitement, their sadness, their rage. They flamed and fanboyed, joked and trolled, made friends and enemies. They shared their fears and dreams. Like the egg avatars of Twitter howling diatribes into the void of their ten followers toda... |
You never can tell how people will use a network. 2. Almost any technology can be used for sex—and probably has. The first humans we recognize as human used the first tools to paint a woman copulating with a bull on the walls of a cave. Not long after the invention of the photograph in the 1830s, the French poet Charle... |
Pornography has become ubiquitous to the point where it is the paradigm for all human experience. Nourishment, shelter, and violence can now be made “food porn,” “real estate porn,” and “war porn.” And if your kink is to insist that you’re not a pervert, but just want to keep track of the latest in pervert praxis—if yo... |
This endless variety raises the question: What even is sex? Once we acknowledge that it can mean more than baby-making in missionary position, how far can sex be extended? The social VR app that lets a stranger seduce you through an avatar—does that count? The sext that makes you come at a touch? “What is technology?” ... |
3. It will always be in the interest of the men who own the machines to say their machines will make the world a better place. But they have a point. The internet has been a godsend for countless people who were poorly served by more standardized forms of sexual culture—from queer teens to divorcees to professional dom... |
On the other hand, capitalism is pretty adept at cooptation. It is, as they say, complicated. An app lets you source whatever strain of sex you want—or at least play a video game about people within a ten mile radius who might have sex with you. But it only lets you make some choices. Most choices it makes for you. It ... |
You can make money for Barry Diller while you sit on the bus. You can make money for Barry Diller while you sit on the toilet. When you tell the internet what you want, the internet remembers. Somewhere, a company is building a library of every longing on earth. A record of every fetish, every crush, every passionate a... |
What an erotic, and terrifying, vision: our desires all crammed together, sharing the same strips of disk, indefinitely. My dick pic next to your love letter, your Google search for tentacle porn next to my flirtatious Facebook message. One soup of sexuality, expanding at the speed of human thought. |
It will make an odd monument for future archaeologists. What if you knew, in excruciating detail, the wildest fantasies of a third-century Chinese farmer? We will be extremely well-known to future generations. Will they find us as fascinating as we find ourselves? 4. We owe it to ourselves and our lovers to think throu... |
The consequences are complex. The internet can make sex workers safer—and more vulnerable to police surveillance. Smart sex toys can create new forms of pleasure—and enable corporations to spy on our intimate lives. Dating apps can make it easier to disclose HIV status—and harder to meet someone from a different class ... |
These are a few of the themes explored by writers in this issue. We hope you like it. (We hope you more than like it.) With online dating and matchmaking, what sorts of problems did you deal with that were technically very difficult but might not seem that way on the surface? Or, on the flip side, what sorts of problem... |
OkCupid has always been very algorithmically focused. It’s pretty unique among the dating sites in allowing people to participate in defining the matching algorithm—each person picks out exactly which questions are important to them, how important they are, and what their ideal answers would be to each of those questio... |
There’s a lot of nuances that are pretty tricky there. One of the interesting ones is the human psychology of match questions—understanding what it is that you want. When you go through the process of answering questions, maybe you’ll answer some questions in a way that is consistent with what you really want, but you ... |
So that’s one of the big challenges: understanding what someone is really trying to say when they’re answering questions about their preferences. How did you all deal with that? The first step we took was looking over all the different questions, and identifying which questions lead to confusion from a statistical pers... |
We focused on how effective questions are at splitting the population. The ideal match question is something that people feel very strongly about the answer to, but which also splits the population pretty evenly, so that about half the population feels very strongly yes and half feels very strongly no. Questions like t... |
But interestingly, some of those questions that appear to be very important to you might be based on a misinterpretation. There could be two different interpretations for the question, and you just answered one of them. Then the population is evenly split on a question not because people feel strongly about the answer,... |
We also examined messaging patterns as a backup, and correlated answers to other questions. So if the question is an outlier compared to many other questions, we’ll tend to count it less; or if messaging patterns don’t line up with answers to the question, we would sometimes use that as a reason to remove the question ... |
Many of the questions are user-generated, so what’s nice is that as people answer the questions, some rise to the top and get popular, and some don’t. That makes our task easier—we’re focusing on filtering through which questions are good and which need to be removed, rather than having to think of what new questions s... |
So the community plays a role in generating the questions that people find important. Yeah, and it’s really neat to see how those questions spread. Often a new issue would come up, like a new president or a recent news article, and the way people feel about it can be quite important in understanding their personality. ... |
There’s been a lot of discussion around “experiments” on users done by data-driven product development organizations like Facebook and OkCupid. A big question that always comes up is the ethical considerations of these sorts of tests—the impact these tests have on the user, independent of the goal that you’re trying to... |
When you set up and ran experiments on users, what were the ethical considerations that went into them? Were there any experiments that were considered “off limits” that you decided not to do because they crossed some ethical line? That’s a really interesting topic. Running experiments was a very important part of our ... |
At OkCupid, our philosophy was not to just experiment because we wanted to. Often there is this problem with data science and analytics in general—leaders of the company want answers to a particular question, so they’ll ask for experiments to get at some deeper understanding, but there won’t be specific decisions that ... |
We always took a decision-first approach. We would come to some key question. Do we want the product to be designed this way or that way? Should we make this change or that change? One change we debated quite a bit was our rating system. Originally we had a rating system that allowed people to score other people from o... |
The ethics around experimentation really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with the question. The goal should be improving the product for people, and you should focus on not degrading the experience very much for any one person—don’t hurt someone too much for the experiment. Maybe a little bit of degradation... |
I think you get into the hot water if what you’re doing looks more like a psychology study than trying to make a product decision. Like: wouldn’t it be interesting from a research perspective to see what happens if people are exposed to this situation? That can be a little bit sketchier unless you go through the standa... |
You’ve mentioned using messaging patterns as an important metric. But for a dating application it seems like there are many different metrics by which you might measure success. What was your guiding light for figuring out whether a feature was successful or not? Were there different metrics that were in conflict? You ... |
One bit of data that is plentiful is who you view on the site. If you have a matching algorithm that displays options on a page, and someone clicks one of those options to view the profile, that’s a weak positive signal. There’s a whole lot of that happening, and it tells us a little bit about the user, but not much. |
A stronger positive signal is sending a message. Then even stronger than that is having a multi-directional exchange, which implies that both parties most likely were happy about that exchange. The strongest signal of all is when someone deletes or pauses their account. We ask them if they did it because they met someo... |
We combine all these different levels of data based on what the goal we were trying to achieve with the metric was. For example, if you want to have a system that reacts more quickly, then you focus on the more common data, like profile views. But for the most part, we settled in the middle, which means focusing on com... |
One other metric that competes with that to some degree is evenness: what fraction of people on the site receive at least one contact every week. You see scenarios where maybe someone is happy receiving lots of messages, and really likes the attention, so you could have an algorithm that directs a lot of people to mess... |
What sorts of strategies did you take to increase things like evenness? It’s an interesting challenge. Messaging patterns are fundamentally very uneven if you don’t make an active attempt to sculpt or mold them. There are a few lucky people who get a large number of messages, and a very long tail of people who might ge... |
One of the more common techniques is setting a rate limit. If someone is sending a lot of messages, or sending a lot of likes, or thumbs up, or anything like that, they’ll be rate-limited after a certain number of interactions. At OkCupid, we really focused on not doing that too harshly. Rather than hard limiting, we t... |
We found that showing users who had a similar attractiveness level, but also had similar messaging patterns, produced a good balance in terms of both evenness and the total number of quality interactions on the site. I want to emphasize that attractiveness is not the only metric we use. We would always focus on both at... |
On the site there are questions that involve some amount of self-identified demographic data. Were there other under-the-hood metrics that corresponded to concepts that you had to get at from a roundabout sort of way, like socioeconomic status or class? Things that you couldn’t directly ask people, but would end up in ... |
But then we learned about some use-cases from the other side—someone who is Filipino who wants to find other Filipinos easily. We found that that’s a pretty legit reason to search by race, so we added that feature. But in general, we focus on making it an experience that doesn’t discriminate and encourages people to be... |
How much of your approach was trying to enable users to make a selections of matches they felt they wanted, versus trying to encourage people to find matches in ways that a team or the company deemed ethical, like with regards to not being able to filter by race or income? It’s a mix. For the most part we try to cater ... |
One example is that people who are bisexual would often receive messages from straight people that were really not desired. Though they were bi, they weren’t interested in that kind of attention. It would be pretty overwhelming, particularly for bi women. So we added a feature to allow them to only be seen by other bi ... |
How did you model users outside of conventional gender norms? What sort of work did you do surrounding supporting people who identify outside of the typical gender binary? In my experience, OkCupid has always been considered one of the safer sites for people with alternative identities and preferences. That’s something... |
Obviously sexual orientation and gender identity are not binary—they’re a continuum. But at first we simplified in terms of gay, straight, and bi orientation. And we were always thinking about the nine different pairings of those groups, and made sure any experience we created made sense for each of those nine differen... |
On the gender front, for a long time we were aware that people who didn’t identify as either male or female weren’t being completely served on the site, because there was no way for them to enter their identity—the site made you pick male or female. That was a tricky decision, because it was built into the code pretty ... |
Honestly, one thing that is interesting is that from a matching perspective we’re pretty gender- and orientation-agnostic. We don’t try to use the algorithms to pair people of certain identities with people of other identities—we really just focus on personality questions and preferences, then allow people to choose ho... |
You’ve talked about having core principles when you think about the features that you’re willing to develop. In the role of CTO, how did you go about crafting the engineering and product teams around those values? Was there a set of core principles that you aligned around? Were there particular qualities that you look... |
It was really neat to see the grassroots unification around inclusive ideals, without having to push for an official set of “values.” In a way it was easy because the company was small. It was about thirty or thirty-five people when I left in 2014. In a group that size, it is pretty easy to have value alignment without... |
That’s thirty-five people on the engineering team, or in the whole company? That was the entire company. Oh wow, okay. I didn’t realize it was that small. Yeah, that was what so neat about OkCupid: how many people are reached and impacted by such a small team. You’ve spoken before about the internet literally saving th... |
I belong to the last generation of gay people who came of age without the internet. I remember first being shown an AOL chatroom when I was, I don’t know, seventeen or eighteen. That was my introduction to gay life online. But the life-saving qualities of technology for queer people really became clear to me when I was... |
I was teaching at a school in Sofia, the capital of the country. There’s nowhere in Bulgaria that has a vibrant or easily free gay culture—but in Sofia, there’s more of that than anywhere else. One of my students was from a tiny town called Targovishte. He and I became quite close; he was straight, but he became an out... |
Bulgaria is a very wired country: the internet is available everywhere. So these queer kids in these small villages could find each other online, and create these online spaces that became something like their gay bars. The internet gave them access to a different kind of discourse about queer lives and about being gay... |
I have another friend in Bulgaria who lives in a small city, and who spends a lot of her time online counseling kids. And that’s extraordinary. That’s something that would have been unimaginable to me in Kentucky in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I was becoming aware of myself as a queer person. For these kids li... |
What was it like talking to that kid who was your student’s friend? I mean, it’s very painful talking to these kids. Because he was, you know… there is this sense that it’s impossible to imagine a full life in these places. I hope that’s changing quickly in Bulgaria, as it’s changing elsewhere. But even the conversatio... |
As for the kid in the village, he went to university in the West. So it’s nice to think of that story having a much happier trajectory now. When I first spoke to him he was probably fifteen, but he did find a way out. He did find a way to a place where there will be much more possibility for him to live openly. |
I know you’ve also spoken about the power of discovering queer erotica online. I’d imagine that in addition to helping queer teenagers find people to talk to, the internet can also help them find their desires represented. And not just erotica. I remember when I first arrived in Bulgaria in 2009, all of the queer and q... |
That’s something you become aware of in Bulgaria: it’s not just the geographical division that isolates people, it’s also very much the linguistic division. Queer people in places like Bulgaria who know English have access to so many more resources than people who don’t know English. I remember one of the first convers... |
And so, the process of advocating for queer rights in Bulgaria is also a process of translation. It involves creating a language in Bulgaria that can do the work. Because in English, there is a language that is the product of a whole history and tradition of thinking about the expansion of rights. To try to translate i... |
Why can’t those kids who are downloading pirated episodes of Glee find Bulgarian subtitles for them? In East Asia, there are plenty of online communities that take pirated Americans films and subtitle them. I don’t know. I would not be surprised if there are people in Bulgaria doing that. But remember that Bulgaria is ... |
Well, at least for the kids who spoke English, it sounds like the internet played a positive role in their lives. It gave them access to Western narratives of queerness that made them feel a little less alone. Yeah. Although I should say that I have ambiguous and ambivalent feelings about the role of technology in sexu... |
Why? I’ll start with the positive aspects. One of the things that’s most remarkable about the internet’s impact on sexual life is its great diminishment of solitude. What amazes me about the sites that I love—erotic fiction sites like nifty.org, but also sites like Craigslist—is that anything you can imagine desiring, ... |
Because what the internet teaches you is that for every desire, there’s an answer to that desire. That’s a remarkable thing. It can be a disturbing thing, of course, but it can also be a wondrous thing. Before the internet, whole lives could be passed with only a sense of one’s own freakishness. The internet has done m... |
What about the negatives? I’m ambivalent about apps like Grindr. On one hand, Grindr can be a genuinely helpful tool for people: I think it makes things like the disclosure of HIV status much easier, I think it makes certain kinds of conversations much easier. I also think it’s potentially safer than offline cruising—a... |
But what disturbs me most about online cruising, and especially location-based apps like Grindr, is that it seems like a gentrification of cruising. The revolutionary thing about traditional gay cruising is that it is a space that allows for people from radically different backgrounds and classes and categories to come... |
When I think about the kind of people I met cruising in Cherokee Park in Louisville, Kentucky—these were people that everything in my life was organized to keep me from meeting. I think a lot of the radical potential of queerness inheres in its tendency to scramble the usual lines of identification. |
But a location-based app like Grindr is still about putting your body in a space where there are other bodies. Unlike OkCupid, where you don’t need to have any physical proximity to other people. You can just do it from your apartment. Well, people also use Grindr in their apartments. And if you’re in a densely populat... |
But my other problem with Grindr and other online cruising apps is that I think they allow us to determine too much. I subscribe to the romantic notion of Audre Lorde that the erotic is the force that can enable connections across various kinds of difference. That’s a function of the erotic to be cherished—and it’s the... |
When you’re on an app like Grindr, you can filter for a type. That drains away a lot of the possibility that desire has to surprise us—I don’t think any of us actually knows what we want to that extent. So instead of cruising offering a place for interactions between people of different races and different class backgr... |
And that’s something to be lamented. Even though a case can be made that apps like Grindr make cruising safer, that discourse of safety is part and parcel of the same discourse of safety that often accompanies gentrification and that is really code for the hatred of people of color and the hatred of poor people. |
So I do think there are disturbing implications if apps like Grindr purely supplant older types of cruising. But what’s interesting is the way these multiple models of cruising can co-exist. If you go to a cruising place today in New York City, everyone’s cruising in real life and everyone’s also on their phone cruisin... |
To shift a bit, do you think these new technologies are changing how people write about sex? As a novelist, do you see technology changing how sex is being represented in fiction and nonfiction? I think so. It’s changing not only sex writing but also writing in general. I’m interested in the role that affect and especi... |
Are there particular writers that embody that kind of tonelessness? The obvious one is Tao Lin, who is very often presenting text as Gchats and things like that. But more broadly, there’s a sound of certain contemporary American fiction that I find quite compelling. It’s a very moving flatness of tone. The internet did... |
In terms of sex writing, one of the potentially dangerous impacts of the internet on our sexual lives is the fact that most internet porn is quite bad. By which I mean I think it’s uninteresting in the way that it presents bodies as evacuated of personhood. We are in a moment when we are inundated by images of bodies—i... |
And yet it seems to me that as a culture we have a dearth of representations of embodiedness—by which I mean bodies with consciousness, the experience of having a body. I am disturbed by the way that internet pornography accelerates and encourages a kind of arms race of extremism, and how the tropes and symbolism and p... |
As for sex writing, I hate to say that any kind of writing has any obligation to do anything. But in my own writing of sex, I feel very strongly that I want to present not just bodies but embodiedness. I want to present persons. And literature does that much better than visual images—especially visual images of the kin... |
I don’t feel qualified to say how the internet has changed sex writing. But I will say that in my own work as a writer, I feel the need to respond to the kind of pornography that floods the internet. I feel a desire as a writer to explore sexuality in a different way—even if I often want to write with the same graphicn... |
Has the internet also changed what encompasses sex? Not just how people write about sex, but what sex is? Definitely. Technologies like Skype and other video chat apps radically change what it means to be in a relationship. Especially when people live lives that are very mobile, and are often separated from one another... |
Another internet phenomenon that fascinates me is live cams: these websites where you can go and watch couples having sex in a very exhibitionist way. You can see the same couple day after day after day and get a sense of them as human beings, of the narratives of their lives. That’s really fascinating in the way that ... |
Really, our whole sense of intimacy has been utterly transformed. And that’s true even without porn, when you think about how porous our privacy has become because of social media, and how much of our private lives we share. It’s fascinating. And it’s scary. And yeah, I guess I feel as ambivalent about it as I do about... |
I have complex feelings. I mean, it’s the kind of thing that you can talk about forever and ever. How have new technologies challenged the bias toward mononormativity in our culture? Have the internet or mobile apps helped make polyamory more mainstream? Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins: I’m not sure if they’ve made it more “ma... |
But beyond that, everything depends on how we are represented and perceived. This varies wildly across different kinds of coverage and their various audiences. Visibility can be a positive thing: greater cultural representation of non-normative possibilities for love is, in my view, a key mechanism through which our “s... |
But when the representation is of a single, typically hyper-sexualized, stereotype—or when we are presented for public consumption as a new kind of “other” to gawk at or be outraged by—I feel like we’re moving backwards rather than forwards. Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa: I’m seeing progress. When I first started using dat... |
Last year, OkCupid announced support for an official “Open Relationship” status. I do think this has contributed to visibility and normalization in some circles. But obviously there’s still a long way to go. Ray Hsu: Not all technologies challenge mononormative bias equally. But something as basic as the ability to ide... |
What about abuse? As the internet has made polyamory more visible, do polyamorous people encounter specific forms of hate online? Carrie: Well, I get targeted online for specific forms of misogyny that are related to my being a poly woman. There’s a long list of colorful words that are specifically used for women who b... |
Ray: I receive a fraction of the online hate that Carrie does. Even racist comments about Jonathan and me are directed to her. Jonathan: I agree—this stuff is super gendered. I don’t get much of it personally. The times I receive a lot of abuse online are when I speak out about things like sexual assault policies and r... |
How does technology expand the possibilities for non-monogamous relationships? In the case of OkCupid, it sounds like the decision to add an “Open Relationship” status contributed both to normalization and to the ability for poly people to use the site more effectively. What are some of the other kinds of decisions tha... |
Myself, I use instant messaging to connect individually with my partners, especially when we’re not in the same place at the same time. And this isn’t always a “substitute” for other forms of communication; using written text instead of one’s voice is just different. At least one of my current relationships wouldn’t ha... |
Ray: Compare OkCupid to Tinder: Tinder is relatively inflexible when it comes to categories, whereas OkCupid has more categories for how one can identify and what one can search for in others. I think much of it may be couched in terms of aesthetics: whereas Tinder might seem “clean” and draw from the aesthetics of sim... |
Carrie: I’ve always found Tinder basically useless. Perhaps what Ray is describing here is part of why. Jonathan: The internet trend of the past few years tends to be towards streamlining and simplicity. Which means that things that used to be up to the user to decide for themselves—what order to read tweets in, which ... |
I get why people find it easier to let machines guess what they want. They are good at guessing! But I think that tendency make people a little less critical about their choices. So I still prefer the more complicated interfaces that take a while to learn, but that let you really think about what parameters you’re inte... |
We’ve talked about using technology to find polyamorous partners—but what about scheduling? I know that one of the challenges of maintaining polyamory relationships is scheduling time with each partner. Has technology helped automate any of that labor? Are there specific tools you use? Carrie: Yes, Google Calendar. Any... |
Ray: Google Calendar certainly helps, especially with repetitive events. I would also say that messenger apps help with scheduling, although it’s less about the automation of labor and more about being able to connect and, say, make emergency rescheduling possible. Jonathan: I want an app that reminds me when it’s been... |
Carrie: In The Sims, you used to get a reminder if your sim was letting a friendship die. How hard can it be to make one of those in real life? Carrie, in your book What Love Is: And What It Could Be, you talk a lot about neuroscience. Do you think brain scanning technology has changed our understanding of love? Could ... |
It’s important that we don’t over-interpret these glimpses, though—we are so incredibly far from having a complete understanding of how any human experience plays out in the brain, let alone something as nuanced as romantic love. But we’re getting important clues: for instance, studies suggest that there can be similar... |
In my work, I aim to place these insights into a philosophical context, so that while we marvel at love’s biology we don’t lose sight of the fact that it is also socially constructed. My dual-nature theory of love is designed to accommodate both at once. And, of course, the two interact. For example, the researchers wi... |
Ray: I wonder if brain-computer interfaces will one day help articulate love, in a parallel way to how typing may allow us to articulate love differently than we do verbally. Carrie: Seriously, though, why don’t we have flying cars? Is Logic working on that? How have digital technologies changed the sex lives of people... |
So with that out the way: the internet has opened up so much social space, it’s remarkable. Disabled people have so many robust points of meeting on the web. One wonderful project is the Disability Visibility Project by Alice Wong, which is a fantastic example of how social media has created a source of community build... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.