How porn has been secretly behind the rise of the internet and other technologies

By Ross Benes

Everyone knows about porn’s prevalence, but few realise its true power.

While putting together my new book “The Sex Effect” — which examines hidden relationships between sex and culture — I was surprised by how many technologies have been adopted by the masses because of pornography. VCRs, ecommerce, streaming services, affiliate marketing, and the internet itself all owe a debt of gratitude to the smut peddlers who helped popularise them. Because while the military created the internet, it would not have found a solid consumer base without porn. Think of the military as the inventor and creator of a product and porn as the entrepreneur who brings the product to the masses.

“In myriad ways, large and small, the porn industry has blazed a commercial path that other industries are hastening to follow,” Frederick Lane, author of “Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age,” said.

Although new technologies have usually allowed the porn industry to expand, the internet (even though porn helped popularise it) has been a double-edged sword for the porn industry. It increased porn’s prevalence and popularity, but also facilitated easily accessible free porn and user-created sexual content.

But despite many porn companies going bust over the past decade, the industry hasn’t stopped innovating. Computer-controlled sex toys, virtual reality, and sex avatars are just a few of the products that porn execs are tinkering with.

Porn’s business models have also evolved.

To combat ubiquitous free content, porn companies are creating more live and interactive experiences that require payment. This is done through selling novelty goods from shoots (like the dildo that was used during a specific sex scene), putting on education seminars (to teach couples things such as the dynamics of rope bondage), giving studio tours (live and virtual), opening strip clubs/bars/storefronts/restaurants, live web-camming with porn stars, expanding into podcasts and radio, hosting events, crowdfunding content, and creating custom porn packages in which consumers pay premiums to act as pseudo-directors in pornographic films.

Even though porn has had an outsize impact on the everyday technologies people use, it often isn’t given its due since discussion of porn in society is driven by ideology.

“If it were not for the subject matter, pornography would be publicly praised as an industry that has successfully and quickly developed, adopted, and diffused new technologies,” historian Jonathan Coopersmith wrote. “But because the subject matter was pornography, silence and embarrassment have been the standard responses.”

Although most people have used porn casually, the ones who get quoted in the news about it typically belong to two extremes — pro-porn lobbyists and anti-porn zealots hoping to sway voters to their cause. But until society looks past its steamy content and to its true significance, the actual impact of erotica will remain largely unheard.

How porn has been secretly behind the rise of the internet and other technologies