The way we sort of interact with each other online now is we’re consuming each other, you know, we’re consuming each other’s image more than sort of interacting with each other in in a way we would do in an offline in an offline world.

Another way in which pornography has changed in the internet era, is that it’s become very very extreme. And when I say extreme, I mean it’s become sort of sexual acts that used to be very niche, and sort of were very much part of the BDSM community, and sort of you know, set of masochistic fetishes have become very mainstream, and are sort of almost everywhere in in pornography today.

And I find that very interesting because of course you’re seeing as well that the rise of of these types of or the normalization of these types of sexual acts, which I think very much has to do with the way, in a user-generated economy, you just need to shock, I mean that just becomes one of the most important ways of of getting people’s attention.

Younger people are having […] more violent, more sort of uh masochistic sex than we used to. And I think that the specific rise—I think there’s something specific to that masochism that you can see also beyond pornography and sex.

You can see, it very much, in our online culture. I think that you can see how um the way, the way we are interacting with with algorithms is very much pulling this this out; And I think you can see that in the rise of figures like Donald Trump or someone like Andrew Tate, and a lot of the language they’re using, a lot of it’s about humiliation, it’s about um [Oli Dugmore: subjugation?].

Yes. And and I think we’re going back to the sort of your previous example with shame sidebar, and that the Daily Mail runs “there’s something tickling about it.” There’s an ugly side within all of us where we like we we like to to see someone suffer and be humiliated.

And I think the way we are interacting with profit incentives of the platforms where we live more and more and our our lives on; is just it’s really pulling that out of us.

There’s an American phrase in content creation—which is American because [of the way] it’s pronounced—[that:]

“There’s riches in the Niches.”

The point is that basically the more specific your content, the the better it is going to be at finding an audience.

It’s it’s far better to be hyper specific about something you think there’s no way there’s a mass audience for this thing, than to be a generalist and dilute something that you’re make that you’re creating to therefore actually not have appeal.

What I’m saying is that the media is is changing, because it’s not static in this way anymore.

What we are consuming is changing depending on how we are reacting to it and this is unprecedented, and this is is having a really big impact on our culture.

Pornhub was was identified as a leader of what you can call data creativity a long time ago, which was sort of using data to inform what type of content was was going to be produced.

[And] that’s what Amazon, and Apple, and and Spotify, and all big content creators today are doing: not having sort of human-led decisions in this way, but very much being like this is what the data is. This is worth making and um and and this not.

I call [this phenomenon of us completely absorbed within our phones and devices] the masturbatory business model of the internet because that’s what we do. We pick up our phones to self soothe and to gratify ourselves.

[…] I think you can see especially [see this] with chatbots for example. And how they are designed to just make us feel seen, to sort of make us feel good, to like to speak to these fantasies that we have about ourselves.

I mean chatbots are essentially sex workers.