Prompt: Take SoFi, for example. They refinance the loans of people who went to good colleges. They probably did not set up their business to be super racist, but I guarantee you they are super racist in the way they’re making loans, in the way they’re making lending decisions. Is that okay? Should a company like that exist? I don’t know. I can see it both ways. You could say, “They’re a company, they’re providing a service for people, people want it, that’s good.” But at the same time, we have such a shitty legacy of racist lending in this country. It’s very hard not to view this as yet another racist lending policy, but now it’s got an app. I don’t know. I just think that there is going to be a court case in the next ten years, and whatever the result is, it’s going to be interesting.

Response: When we talk about FinTech in general, does that refer to something broader than advising investors when to buy and sell stocks, and this new sort of loaning behavior? Or is that the main substance of it? FinTech may most accurately be described as regulatory arbitrage: startups are picking up pieces that a big bank can’t do, won’t do, or is just too small for it to pick up. And I think FinTech is going to suffer over the next five years. If there’s a single sector that people are going to be less enamored with in five years than they are now, FinTech is definitely the one.


Prompt: The other side of it is that they’re exploiting a hack in the way venture capitalists think. Venture capital as an industry is actually incredibly small relative to the financial system. So if you were starting, I don’t know, a company that used big data to make intelligent decisions on home loans—which is probably illegal, but whatever, you’re small enough that it’s no big deal—and you say, “Hey, we’re doing ten million dollars a year in business,” a venture capitalist will look at them like, “Holy shit, I’ve never seen a company get up to ten million dollars in business that fast.” The venture capitalist has no idea that the mortgage market is worth trillions of dollars and the startup essentially has none of it. The founder gives a market projection like, “Oh, this is a trillion dollar industry,” and the venture capitalist is like, “Oh, that market is enormous. I’ve never seen numbers like that before.” It’s much more of a clever hack than an actual, sustainable, lasting, value-creating enterprise. One of the biggest flagship FinTech companies, Lending Club, is in a ton of trouble. SoFi is probably illegal. And those are the flag bearers for the sector.

Response: The other thing that happened recently was the San Bernardino shootings—apparently the guns that were used were financed by a loan from Prosper, which is another peer-to-peer lender. And you just think about where this is going to go. Are we eventually going to get to the point where we have the credit models to assess and not give that guy a loan because of the risk that he could be a Muslim terrorist? Is that the society that we will be living in? Maybe. But we’re going to get there with the data.


Prompt: The Future If you had to give a non-technical layperson one piece of advice for thinking about these questions, what would it be? Is it to be more skeptical? Is it to be less credulous when confronted with hype? Because it seems like there’s a fairly small number of people who understand these technologies well, and yet they appear to have the potential to make a pretty big impact on a lot of people’s lives.

Response: I think the most realistic way of looking at it is that it’s not all hype. The technical advances are real—and even if they’re not real today, the relentless drumbeat of progress on hardware and algorithms will make them real eventually. It will take longer than you think—potentially a lot longer than you think—but it will happen. So everything you’re hearing is an early warning sign of what the future is going to look like. Maybe not even in our lifetimes, but yeah, it’ll get there. And the questions that we’re going over, they’re going to be real. It’s just not there yet.


Prompt: So yeah, I would recommend some skepticism, but not complete skepticism. Because the advances underlying this are real. And the rate of progress has kept up, and I don’t see a reason why it’s going to stop. It’s funny, because I think the biggest concern that I have for the future is that a bunch of people like me are going to make a bunch of money. And a bunch of people are going to lose their jobs. And a bunch of people are going to get new jobs that are crazy and cool. But I don’t know on net how great it’s going to be for society moving forward, though I want to be optimistic about it.

Response: I don’t know if it’s just the tweets that I read in the last election, but the automation of trucking with self-driving cars seems like the most tangible disruptive application of this sort of AI technology. And that impacts such a huge number of people in our economy. It’s the typical thing, where people overrate the effects of technological innovation in the short term, and underrate it in the long term. The automation of trucking is not going to happen overnight. It’s going to take years. But I believe “truck driver” is the single most common occupation in the U.S. Yeah, it’s not going to be next year. Maybe there will be some automation in five years. But in twenty or thirty years that might not even be a job that people do. And what’s going to happen? I don’t know. That’s a great question. It may involve becoming video game designers.


Prompt: That’s the thing I have the hardest problem with. I often have this kind of discussion with people who are algorithmically minded, and they view capitalism as an optimizing function. And all questions about technological change go through this filter of, well, we’re glad we have cars instead of horse and buggies. And everything else will sort itself out. But everything else doesn’t just “sort itself out.” I mean, I try to not fall into the Y Combinator autistic Stanford guy thing, but I actually do think that universal basic income is going to be the endgame. I think that is what society will look like long-term, because I think universal basic income is the welfare that everyone can get behind.

Response: But it’s such a weighty question and technology’s impact on the economy changes so quickly that I don’t know if any of us have ever really had the chance to take a breath. You look at some of the strikes a hundred years ago, like at the Homestead plant, where the workers held out and had fucking gun boats come down the river with Pinkertons and shot the shit out of people a hundred years ago. There’s a Costco there now, and a bunch of smokestacks where the plant used to be. And it’s like, was that whole thing just this ridiculous farce? I don’t even know.


Prompt: I feel like it’s always a question of, what are you optimizing for? There is this fetish of capitalism as supremely rational. And it does optimize for certain things, like technological innovation. But if you think about it from another perspective, it’s also catastrophically irrational, because what could be less rational than wasting the potential of the millions of people whom capitalism exploits, or, worse, excludes by rendering permanently redundant? Capitalism doesn’t optimize for that.

Response: I feel like I encounter this a lot in conversations with people who are in tech—my colleagues—who often have good intentions, but sometimes it’s hard for them to move their frame of mind from the technical to the political, to move from the technical question of how to optimize the process in front of you to the political question of what are you optimizing for.


Prompt: It can also be hard for them to consider solutions to political problems that might be extremely low-tech. And for that reason are probably even more difficult—like the question of what happens in the future—which may not be a hundred years away or 200 years away—when robots or algorithms can do 90% of the jobs. How do you prevent that future from becoming a brutal neo-feudal nightmare? That seems to me like a political question rather than a technical one.

Response: I think the strangest thing about being out here in the Bay Area is that the Aspy worldview has just completely saturated everything to the point that people think that everything is a technical problem that should be solved technologically. It’s a very privileged view of very smart people who just want there to be sink or swim. It’s troubling.


Prompt: On the one hand, there’s no better shepherd for the economy than an engineer; on the other hand, there’s no worse shepherd for an economy than an engineer. Because that kind of machine thinking is very good at producing some things, and very, very bad at producing other things. On the one hand, I don’t view any of the Silicon Valley startup economies as producing any kind of sustainable growth or ways of employing all these people. On the other hand, I do think that the basic income idea eventually will be the future. One of the most interesting things is the amount of leverage that individual people in Silicon Valley are getting—you look at the WhatsApp acquisition or whatever, with so few people being worth so much money.

Response: That may have been a little bit irrational, but longer-term, it’s hard to argue against. And I don’t see another endgame other than pretty high taxes plus basic income as the way of making that okay, because I don’t think that’s going to go away. I’m not even totally sure that we should discourage it from happening.


Prompt: But the leverage is just astounding. To go back to that GPU example, there might be some guy who’s running some quant hedge fund somewhere who’s just sitting on the backs of thousands of these $26-an-hour machines making tons of money off of them. That kind of leverage was just unimaginable even ten years ago, and now there’s presumably one guy—I’m assuming it’s a guy, it’s probably a guy—just making shitloads of money, and that opportunity didn’t even exist ten years ago.

Response: This may be a tangent, but I think the technical mindset is very compatible with the technocratic mindset. In both cases, it’s an evasion of politics, because just as the person who designs the racist algorithm presumably does not think of what they’re doing as political, neither does the technocrat who crafts the free trade agreement because all the mainstream economists in the room told him it would be good for the economy, full stop.


Prompt: I think both approaches are connected to this overwhelming need to see political problems as technical ones, whether from an engineering perspective or from a technocratic governance perspective. To me those feel totally compatible. What you’re describing—the Silicon Valley view of the world—feels to me like a very technocratic view of the world, where if you can just solve certain problems then it will benefit everyone.

Response: In defense of it, it’s also a hopeful view of the world, because you’re at least trying to describe problems that you can solve. It’s a very optimistic way of looking at things, and I’m hesitant to abandon that, because I think ultimately… It’s hard, grappling with this idea of the enormous amount of individual leverage and the crazy rate of change.


Prompt: On the other hand, it’s hard not to be a kind of technical utopian. It’s hard to bet against the innovation that this country has produced, and maybe that’s a function of survivorship bias or looking back and saying we just happened to get lucky. But you know, airplanes, the elevator—we just invented that stuff, and that’s kind of cool. And so it seems sort of melancholy—or maybe this is my own limitation as a technical thinker to see it as melancholy—to be like, “Yeah, there’s some stuff we can’t solve.” I’m not sure I want to live in that world. I always want to live in a world where we’re at least trying. But we’ll see.

Response: Alex Kriss The job of the psychotherapist is, in no small part, to help the patient find middle ground between extremes. This is what Janet Malcolm called “the freedom to be uninteresting.” When the patient can imagine more ordinary ways of being than the Gothic binaries of love/hate, depression/mania, or serenity/suicide, she begins to discard oppressive patterns of behavior in favor of living like herself.


Prompt: The same philosophy should be applied to considering the role of technology within the psychotherapy context: it is not pathology or balm, but something in between, and what that something is depends entirely on how it is used. Jamieson Webster Patients know they have your cell phone. Patients will text you. Patients will search you on the internet. Patients will find out what they can. Patients will ask you to Skype or FaceTime them. Patients will use any of this technology, which becomes part of the transference. Why shouldn’t they? And why shouldn’t the technology be absorbed into the treatment? Marcus Coelen In psychoanalysis, the question of technology and media is the question of transference. Strangely enough, the German term for transference—“Übertragung”—is also used for “transmission” in the sense of technical media, as in “live transmission”— “Direktübertragung,” or more commonly, “Live-Übertragung.” “Übertragung”—“transmission,” “transference”—also means “metaphor.” Carlene MacMillan I actually find texting much more efficient than returning voicemails and playing phone tag. Even returning an email takes more effort to do than text. Particularly for teenagers, texting is very familiar with them. I’m happy to meet them where they are at, because they’re not going to call me, and even if I leave them a voicemail they’re probably not going to listen to it.

Response: The one thing I’ve heard people worrying about is: What if you missed a text that was about suicide or some other kind of safety issue? But I think that the same thing can be true of a voicemail, especially if you’re using your work mail in your office. You’re not going to be checking it non-stop. I’m not going to check a voicemail in the middle of a meeting. But if I get a text, chances are I have my phone on me. I very rarely miss a text and so I find that it’s actually safer. I work with a lot of high-risk people who have chronic suicidality, so it actually matters for me.


Prompt: AK: I have few if any inviolable rules regarding technology in my practice. When a patient is out of town we may opt to hold sessions via Skype, acknowledging that while video chat is less sacrosanct than meeting in person, it is a far closer approximation than speaking by phone, and above all preferable to not having a session at all. Patients frequently email me; particularly in handling logistical issues I find it more efficient than volleying voicemails back and forth. Even if an email contains more personal material, this is “allowed”—by what right could I forbid it? If a patient sends a provocative email, checks her phone in the middle of a session, or spends a great deal of time discussing the intricacies of her life on social media or in video games, I regard it, first and foremost, as meaningful. In one way or another, the patient is showing me who she is and how she relates to others.

Response: CM: Different technologies like social media show up as the content of what you are working through with patients. I would say the biggest thing that we get is parents wanting to either monitor or restrict what social media platforms are okay for their kids. I think that when you’re talking about an eight-year-old with an Instagram account, it’s completely appropriate and reasonable that their Mom is going to follow them on it.


Prompt: But once you get up into eleven, twelve, and beyond, I don’t think it’s realistic for parents to monitor them on everything. Kids find ways around it, or they have multiple profiles. They’ll do whatever they need to do to have their own space. I also don’t think it’s appropriate developmentally. I try to talk to parents about the developmental trajectory of using social media, and it shifting from monitoring to being more about trust and conversations. That’s really, really hard for some parents. Some totally get it, but others are still like, “Nope, I’m going to monitor them on everything, I own this phone, I pay for the internet, therefore I get full access.” Usually that doesn’t work out.

Response: Parents will think that social media causes their kids to have X, Y, or Z problem. But usually the kids who are getting into serious problems on the internet with sexting or cyberbullying are having problems in other non-technological realms. And some parents don’t want to accept that. It’s much easier to scapegoat the technology.


Prompt: AK: Understanding how technology intersects with the lives of patients and the broader culture is necessary extracurricular work for the psychotherapist. If I were to treat someone deeply embroiled in the world of Tinder, it would behoove me to at least have some idea of what Tinder is. More important would be the need for me to feel curious about what Tinder is to my patient, and not dismiss anything I don’t understand as corruptive or puerile, for to do so would be to dismiss a part of my patient’s life.

Response: My rule, if you can call it that, is that a patient is free to say whatever they like, however they like, and I am free to respond (or not respond) in whatever way I think will benefit the treatment. For instance, I will rarely respond to an email or text message from a patient other than to acknowledge its receipt, and perhaps suggest that we discuss its contents at the next session. Many things happen in the asymmetric, virtual space that defines modern communication—ranging from the wonderful to the horrific—but not, I think, psychotherapy. The patient has enlisted me to bear witness to her experience, which demands my presence and undivided attention.


Prompt: Technology can help this purpose—by keeping us connected even when physically apart—or present new conundrums. But it can neither destroy nor replace the emergent power of two people sitting in a room together, attempting to chart a course between extremes. MC: There are two extremes: Language, or rather speaking, is the medium of psychoanalysis. Its space is saturated with “speaks.” Everything in it speaks: silence, sounds, furniture, clothes—they all speak. Nothing is not speaking in the setting of psychoanalysis. The patient doesn’t show up—that’s speaking. He says “I hate you”—that’s not what it says alone. She dreams—that’s speaking.

Response: So why not speak, yell, or not be there—on the phone? In a way, there is no difference. The bodies are there, by necessity, and without language. You have to be in a shared room and share the space. The classical setting for psychoanalysis (couch, facing opposite directions, free-floating attention), combined with voice, gaze, and touch, is a felicitous compromise between these two extremes. But it is only a compromise. And since this is only a compromise, there are others. A walk, a phone, a hotel lounge. The setting can be transposed, transferred, transmitted, and metaphorized. Into phone sessions, for instance.


Prompt: 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 Freud, from Civilization and its Discontents: If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear has voice; if travelling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What is the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage, and have probably worked against the beneficial effects of natural selection? And, finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer? It seems certain that we do not feel comfortable in our present-day civilization, but it is very difficult to form an opinion whether and in what degree men of an earlier age felt happier and what part their cultural conditions played in the matter.

Response: 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, make living easier or more fun, help them find the perfect life or the perfect match.


Prompt: 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 track rolls into a dark tunnel. It holds a camera flanked by two flashlights. Lasers help it navigate this cramped space and trace an efficient route. At the other end of its connecting cable is a US Customs and Border Protection agent with a joystick. They are looking for smugglers and drugs.

Response: 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 millions of dollars and recruit talented architects and engineers from a mining state in northern Mexico to build them.


Prompt: 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 Taiwanese animation studios and Las Vegas museums created artistic renderings of the structure.

Response: 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 illicit substances across its border.” A 2010 PR release from the MITRE Corporation boasts that their work on sensing robots could eventually provide “an effective, low-cost, and reliable solution to long-term border surveillance.” In 2015, a similar write-up from Makeshift magazine calls these robots “unlikely allies” of the US Border Patrol and features a color illustration of a fedora-wearing, anthropomorphized robot walking in the dark and holding a flashlight.


Prompt: 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 would help win wars in the age of the atom bomb. They thought it would prop up the dominoes of capitalism against the winds of communism. They gave teams of researchers vast sums of money. The researchers made the network work.

Response: 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 they shouldn’t feel at all, the computer network offered the perfect emotional prosthesis. It let them be human. Email was invented in 1971—by 1973, email accounted for 75% of traffic on the network.


Prompt: 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 today—or the nice guys of OkCupid querulously saluting dozens of strangers (“hey”) before going ballistic when they get no answer—the researchers of the early internet wanted, first and foremost, to talk.

Response: 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 Charles Baudelaire was complaining that you could find peepshow stereoscopes depicting prostitutes all over Paris. As soon as there were moving pictures, plucky entrepreneurs figured out that it would be lucrative to shoot smut with them. (The rules of narrative editing would take a little longer: an early porn film cuts from long shots of maidens and fawns frolicking in a glen to a close-up of the male member.) Today, the interweaving of physical and virtual life has reached a point that seems to raise new questions.


Prompt: 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 your perversion is research—then the internet is great for that too.

Response: 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?” is also a trickier question than it might seem. The VR headset clearly counts. But how about a condom? How about a technique, a position, a piece of furniture? We don’t just use technology for sex. We use sex to interpret and inspire technology. As centuries of stories about men falling for statues and dolls and robots show, sex is one of the ways we make sense of the things we build, and the desires and the fears we feel for them. No matter how fantastical the powers that they ascribe to AIs, the stories are suspiciously the same: a male AI, even if he seems friendly, is bent on world domination. (See 2001, Transcendence.) A female AI, on the other hand, is a secretary. (See Her, Siri IRL.) Of course, there is no reason that a computer or an algorithm should have a gender at all. However advanced our tools, they are unlikely to be more enlightened than the people who build them. These biases run deep. If we are not careful, we will continue to encode them. If we want to live as more equal subjects of desire, we will need to make better toys.


Prompt: 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 dominatrices to people with disabilities.

Response: 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 sorts you by a set of rules, because all algorithms are sets of rules. Above all, it converts your sex life into a subject of surveillance, and a stream of profit. Each intimate instant is making someone else money, from the first swipe right to the first relationship status to the first post-breakup revenge selfie.


Prompt: 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 and perverted thought persists on a hard drive in a climate-controlled room in Virginia or Dublin or Singapore.

Response: 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.


Prompt: 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 through the ways that technology is rewiring sex.

Response: 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 background.


Prompt: 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 problems seemed hard but turned out to be very easy? That’s a really interesting question. One of the things I’ll say is that at OkCupid, as with many startups, using really advanced algorithms ends up being a second-order optimization. Often, the more effective thing is just to work on getting the user experience right. It’s much easier to do user experience improvements that make larger differences on the dynamics and the site.

Response: 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 questions. That’s unlike any other site, where there’s less of an algorithmic focus, and there is some psychologist that comes up with an opinionated rating system, or there’s no rating system and there’s no attempt to match personality at all.


Prompt: 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 might not answer all questions that way. You might provide answers for how you feel that night, which may not be reflective of your larger perspective.

Response: 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 perspective.


Prompt: 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 that are perfect for narrowing down the pool of people who are good matches for you.

Response: 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, but because they have different interpretations of the question. Knowing this can happen, we use the algorithms to help us understand the statistics behind each question, and we’ll try to identify questions that are the most likely to be mistaken in this way so that we can remove them.


Prompt: 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 as well.

Response: 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 should be added.


Prompt: 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. So users will add a new question that touches on it, and the question will quickly become popular and play a role in matching people.

Response: 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 achieve.


Prompt: 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 product and decision-making strategy at OkCupid—as I think it is at almost every tech company, I would hope.

Response: 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 they’re trying to make as a result of having that information.


Prompt: 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 one to five stars. And we thought, well, it would be a simpler user interface to just use a yes or no answer. That would be more straightforward, but then again we would lose a lot of information resolution, and was that really worth it? We were pretty torn on it, and couldn’t come to a decision through discussion alone, so we resorted to an experiment to understand which would lead to better messaging patterns. That’s an example of the kind of product decision we would try to answer with experiments.

Response: 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 of the experience makes sense because you don’t know actually know that it works. But then as soon as you learn which version of an experience is worse, you can resolve the experiment.


Prompt: 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 standard research routes, likes IRB approval (a FDA process that regulates the treatment of human research subjects) and informed consent.

Response: 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 can think of a hierarchy of different metrics. They range from being very plentiful and not that informative, to being extremely informative but much more rare.


Prompt: 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.

Response: 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 someone, and asked if they were matched with that person. If they say yes, that allows us to get high-quality information on who were really good matches, because they form entire relationships based on it. But that sort of data is more rare.


Prompt: 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 communications that involve three or four messages exchanged back and forth. We felt those were a good sign that two people had a genuine connection, and that’s what we’re trying to focus on for the site.

Response: 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 message that one person. That’s nice for that one person, and great for the three or four messaging metric, but it’s not so great for evenness. So we try to spread out the engagement on the site to other people, even if it meant fewer message exchanges. There was often tension between those two goals.


Prompt: 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 get messages once in awhile, but overall don’t get much attention. That’s something all these kinds of apps struggle with.

Response: 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 tried to do more of a soft sculpting of the messaging experience. So if someone is sending a large number of lower-quality messages, we would tend to show them other users who get fewer messages, and who maybe would appreciate the message they received more than the typical message recipient.


Prompt: 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 attractiveness and messaging patterns—when someone sends a message, how often is it responded to, and how many messages someone receives and responds to, which is a good measure for how interested they are in additional messages.

Response: 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 a machine learning model somewhere? You know, we stayed away from that as much as possible. We did at some point allow people to put what their salary was, but I think we may have gotten rid of that, since it didn’t serve a purpose. And in fact, for a very long time we resisted allowing people to filter by race—we felt it just wasn’t appropriate.


Prompt: 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 their best selves.

Response: 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 to people’s tastes, but in certain cases that are very important to us, like with different protected classes, we would focus on doing what was right.


Prompt: 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 users—that was well-received, and was in response to this pattern we noticed of dissatisfaction and unwanted attention. That helped people of different orientations feel safer on the site.

Response: 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 we’ve always been proud of.


Prompt: 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 different pairings.

Response: 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 deeply from the start. We really wanted to make that change, so finally we put in the time and effort and added a much better range of gender options. We were really happy we were able to do that, although it took a lot of work and took us a while to prioritize it.


Prompt: 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 how they filter within gender identities. We want people to find other users who are great matches from a personality perspective, possibly in places that they didn’t expect.

Response: 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 looked for when hiring that reflected those values? Often companies have a more structured set of core values that are baked into company events and communications. Honestly, at OkCupid, the people who worked there came from a certain place of idealism and community, so it just kind of sprung up. Everyone who worked there was encouraged to read feedback, so people would see all kinds of different perspectives from users using the site. When someone would read feedback and find an issue that resonated with them, they could bring it up, and we’d discuss it and think about how to best solve it for the people who sent in the feedback, but in a way that was respectful and helpful to the rest of the users on the site as well.


Prompt: 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 too much structure.

Response: 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 the lives of queer teenagers. I wonder if you could start by talking about that a little bit.


Prompt: 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 living in Bulgaria.

Response: 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 outspoken advocate for LGBT rights in the school community. And one day he came to talk to me because one of his friends in the little town he came from had come out to him. He asked if I could talk to him, and that was how I became aware of the role that Skype was playing in these kids’ lives.


Prompt: 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 than they had in their offline lives.

Response: 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 living in isolated places, the internet radically redraws their horizon of possibility by giving them access to a virtual community.


Prompt: 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 conversations I had with my very privileged students in Sofia were dispiriting, because there’s such a sense of impossibility about things that queer people in the West take for granted: about the possibility of having a visible life, about the possibility of coming out to your parents and your friends.

Response: 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.


Prompt: 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 queer-friendly kids were over the moon about Glee. They loved it. They downloaded pirated episodes of it online. As long as somebody knows enough English, shows like that are available anywhere. But it wasn’t subtitled in Bulgarian, so you had to have English.

Response: 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 conversations I had with a queer Bulgarian was actually before I was in Bulgaria. It was with a Bulgarian poet who’s living in America now named Nikolay Atanasov. And he said that one of the difficulties in getting an LGBT rights movement started in Bulgaria—which really kicked into high gear after Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007—was that they didn’t have the linguistic resources for articulating these arguments in Bulgarian. People who were doing that kind of advocacy had to have studied in Western Europe or to have access to those languages.


Prompt: 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 it is not just a matter of word-for-word equivalence—it’s also about finding a way to bring ideas into a language that has no context for them. In countries like Bulgaria, there are very stark class divisions, and one of the largest of those divisions is linguistic.

Response: 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 a much smaller place. It’s a much smaller language. There are about seven million people in Bulgaria. It’s not like China.


Prompt: 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 sexual life, and especially in queer life, and especially in gay male sexual life.

Response: 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, someone else desires that thing. That, to me, is pretty wonderful. I find it very moving.


Prompt: 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 more than anything else to puncture that particular type of solitude, the solitude that comes with a singular experience of stigma.

Response: 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—although not necessarily.


Prompt: 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 together outside the gaze of any kind of civic authority.

Response: 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.


Prompt: 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 populated urban center, Grindr’s also only showing you people who live on your block. Which means, thanks to gentrification, you’re likely only seeing people in your own class bracket.

Response: 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 function of the erotic that’s given especially free rein in places like cruising bathrooms and parks.


Prompt: 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 backgrounds, cruising through these apps can become something that further reinforces racism and gentrification and class stratification.

Response: 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.


Prompt: 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 cruising. That sort of multiplicity feels very fecund and exciting, I think.

Response: 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 especially affectlessness play in contemporary American fiction. And I do think that it’s connected to the tonelessness of internet-based communication.


Prompt: 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 didn’t invent it. But I think the internet does amplify it.

Response: 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—images of bodies are more easily available than they ever have been. And really unavoidable.


Prompt: 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 practices of S&M are taken out of the context of the richness of S&M culture. That’s the way I feel about much of the internet pornography I see, especially the straight pornography. It seems to me that there is a free rein given to misogyny and to the pleasure of making a human being an object.

Response: 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 kind that inundate today’s internet. Those images are showing us bodies, not persons.


Prompt: 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 graphicness I might find in internet pornography.

Response: 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 for long periods. It’s mind-boggling to think about all the ways that these technologies have intersected with our erotic lives.


Prompt: 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 it suggests the possibility of new kinds of intimacy.

Response: 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 everything else. The internet has produced a multiplication of possibilities for pleasure—but also a multiplication of possibilities for the abdication of inwardness and solitude and meditativeness.


Prompt: 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 “mainstream”… it’s complicated. There is certainly huge public interest in polyamory. Online access to poly people and their lives—via media coverage but also through people putting themselves out there on social media—make it possible to satisfy that public demand efficiently.

Response: 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 “scripts” can be changed and challenged.


Prompt: 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 dating sites ten or fifteen years ago, “Single” and “Available” were treated as synonymous by most. On OkCupid, if you said you were in a relationship but also looking for dating, you’d show up as “Available” instead of “In a Relationship.” This lumped together cheating with ethical non-monogamy.

Response: 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 identify as different categories, and to choose different ways of searching for others, challenge mononormativity by allowing people to move beyond tacit, unspoken norms.


Prompt: 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 break the monogamy norm. I’ve been called most of them, as well as receiving plenty of other hateful—sometimes even violent—online abuse that relates to my gender. The way I experience most online hate seems to be distinctively aimed at the intersection of my non-monogamy and my gender.

Response: 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 rape culture. Then some people will yell at me about whatever they can think of—which sometimes includes me being poly. But when I talk about being in an open relationship that doesn’t emphasize those respects that are threatening to the patriarchy, people don’t usually give me much of a hard time.


Prompt: 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 that make for a better or worse experience? Carrie: I am not, on the whole, very plugged into poly “communities.” Not that I have anything against them, they just tend not to be really my style. But the internet facilitates connection and interaction in multiple ways: the creation and maintenance of such communities is one important one.

Response: 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 have been possible without it—maybe both. I am in many senses a writer: I am often able to express things in written forms that I cannot (or would not) using my voice.


Prompt: 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 simplicity and minimalism, this aesthetic comes at the cost of fewer identities and fewer ways to connect to others in non-normative ways. The simplicity is mirrored in the action of the swipe, and the relative non-emphasis on text.

Response: 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 friends’ profiles they want to look at, what qualities in a romantic partner they consider important—are now done under the hood by proprietary algorithms.


Prompt: 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 interested in and why.

Response: 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 shareable calendar app with instant updating would do the same work, but this is the one I use. Other technologies, like messenger apps, don’t so much automate the labor of scheduling as make it possible.


Prompt: 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 awhile since I’ve talked to someone. It’s easy to fall out of touch accidentally. This goes for friends as much as it does for lovers.

Response: 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 these tools enlarge our idea of what love is—and what it could be? Carrie: I am a fan of science. I think we should get all the information we can about what our brains are doing when we are in love—I’m not in the camp that sees this as destroying the “magic.” So far we have had many suggestive glimpses, thanks to the insight of researchers who appreciated the potential value of fMRI scans for illuminating the mechanics of love in the brain.


Prompt: 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 patterns of brain activation between certain kinds of love and certain kinds of chemical addiction.

Response: 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 wielding the tech—the ones designing our studies, and deciding what to look for in the first place—are themselves socially and culturally embedded creatures.


Prompt: 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 who identify as disabled? Well, it’s important to start by stating that I cannot speak for all of those who live with disabilities. I am just a wheelchair-using person who has studied this for over a decade and wandered around talking to many disabled people about sexuality and sexual health.

Response: 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 building through sharing information and connecting those who have disparate identities. She’s one of the many rockstars I consider friends, largely through our internet interactions. She was featured at the White House through a wheeling telepresence robot—she’s just that badass. I also created a project on Facebook called This is What Disability Looks Like, which shows the myriad permutations of disabled people.


Prompt: The spread of knowledge about disability news and affirmations of disability identity via social media have produced profound shifts in my life. I wish I had the mental and physical support as a teenager in the 1990s that I have on the web now. I consider so many people my family that I have never met in person but have known for years. I’ve found intellectual stimulation and resources, as well as validation and camaraderie through social media. My chosen family has swelled in the past decade.

Response: Could you give us some examples from your own life? I would be remiss if i did not tell the story of meeting my wife on Craigslist in 2009. It is so humorous that we met each other on the bathroom wall of the internet. I was seeking intellectual intercourse, and her friend found the ad and made her write me.


Prompt: Online dating has been really useful for me, as it allows people to meet more than just my body right away. In many social settings, I am not read as a sexual being because I use a wheelchair. It’s a weird sedimented idea that people have around those of us with disabilities. Online dating allows for more chat up front, and it certainly weeds out the jerks who cannot handle disability in the first place. That is a kickass benefit of disability: it’s a good vetting tool.

Response: But do the disabilities themselves still create obstacles to internet access? This is tricky, as access is still quite uneven on the web. For many folks with sight, hearing, cognitive, and physical disabilities, the web continues to present barriers. It is particularly troubling when federal or state websites do not conform to the law mandating access to the web, which is the Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Often the most flagrant violators are universities and department sites that provide information on rights for people with disabilities.


Prompt: What tools are available to help people with disabilities explore their sexuality online? Which ones do you like and dislike, and which do you wish existed? Teledildonics is a whole area that I find fascinating. Allowing people to engage with sex toys at a distance from each other is brilliant and creates the ability to have long- distance relationships while remaining sexually satisfied.

Response: There are all sorts of exciting new sex toys. One of my favorites is the Womanizer and all of its knockoffs. Instead of pure vibration, this little number effectively sucks on the clitoris. It is a thriller, one that can lead to a clitoral orgasm in minutes—plus it is virtually hands free (an access bonus). I am always reading up on the best tools.


Prompt: To pull back a bit, what even is sex? How do you define it? To be completely honest and thereby absolutely absurd, I use the Bill Clinton definition of sex in my personal life. But as a sex educator, I teach a much broader, more inclusive version. I am committed to teaching people about the spectrum of genders and sexual expressions that are available for us all to enjoy. One of my favorite pedagogical activities is teaching students what they can learn about their sex lives from disabled people—focusing quite a bit on the importance of communication, negotiation, lubrication, and intentional breathing.

Response: Generally, I teach from Barbara Carrellas’ book Urban Tantra (2007) on specific types of breath, encouraging students to close their eyes and focus on their bodies. Over several years of perverting the minds of youth through sexual health lessons, my favorite experience was when a soon-to-be law graduate said he felt his penis tingling after the exercise. That kind of thing gives me so much joy it could almost go into my teaching definition of sex. It’s so broad, and it touches all aspects of life from the womb to the tomb.


Prompt: In my personal life, I prefer to think about sex as genital contact with some kind of emphasis on connection. That is all blurry, and reminiscent of Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” I recognize that I am ridiculous, and I like it. How do we define which parts of a body are sexual or capable of sex? That depends on who the “we” is. It depends on a person’s sitpoint. In feminist theory there is the notion of standpoint—that one’s experience inevitably shapes their view of the world, and that being honest about identity and subjectivity actually strengthens research rather than biasing it.

Response: Sex is so subjective. It has taken me years to stop using the term “asexual” to describe the social stigma around disability and sexuality, in which many of us with visibly apparent disabilities are considered “desexual” or lacking sexual interest. This shift in my understanding has come through knowing and learning from my asexual disabled comrades.


Prompt: But every body part can be the hot spot. When I teach, I enjoy the practice of doing a pleasure blueprint. In essence, this entails going over the body of a lover and learning the topography of pleasure. Using different types of touch, tools (feathers to floggers), and pressure on the entire body yields wonderful results. So often we get caught up in genital-focused sex and do not realize the pleasure capacity of the entire body. After encouraging students to do this, I’ve discovered that people find the back of the knees or elbows particularly sensual. I really enjoy being bitten on my shoulders.

Response: It’s a beautiful process to consider how the genitals do not need to be the focus of sex, particularly as the body ages and changes in sensate capacity. One of the leaders in my thought in this area is Rafe Biggs of the organization Sexability, who has talked about his sex life after a spinal cord injury. He speaks about how he can achieve an orgasm through the sucking of his thumb alone! I am married and monogamous but damn did I want to suck his thumb! The bodymind—the intersecting and connectedness of the body and mind—is truly powerful if we give ourselves the freedom to explore it.


Prompt: Can you speak to that freedom a little bit? How do we find it? What are the forces that constrain it? We are socialized to be sexually silent, yet saturated with sexual expression. There is no real middle ground. There is so much sexual shame in US culture—it’s just sad. It also means that people like me, who dare to speak of sex professionally, are so desperately needed and frequently denigrated for being “perverse”—which truly should be read as a compliment. In my own sexual life, I found that being able to speak to my needs really changed my pleasure intake. Once I had the hutzpah to finally demand what I wanted, I had such better sex.

Response: That is one of the most important lessons I try to teach people: say what you want so you can get it! I encourage folks to talk in the mirror and just start saying whatever they deem “uncomfortable words”—take the shock out of your voice through immersion. Going in deep helps the pleasure be more expansive.


Prompt: Who gets to be sexual in our society? Whose sexuality is seen, and whose is not? It’s similar to the idea of human rights. We can ask, who is human enough for human rights? For the most part, those with disabled bodies or minds tend to be seen as outside the realm of normal or human. We face countless microaggressions, we are subject to violence (including murder) most often from those who “care” for us, and we experience tremendous levels of sexual and other violence. Like on Daria but not a cool way, it’s a sick sad world when it comes to the sexual understanding of disabled people.

Response: Most of us are not seen as socially valuable, fuckable, or lovable. When people partner with us, they are questioned as either being pathological with disability fetishes or as saviors for giving up on their lives to be with us. More common is our lovers being read as caregivers or siblings. It’s a gross process that we have to go through.


Prompt: Every single body is capable of and worthy of sexual expression and activity. Opening our minds about the confines of sex is the tool to understanding how we all can engage in pleasure giving and receiving. Thinking outside the box can help us get past the cultural garbage dumped all over our bodies and minds.

Response: In 2008, an internet porn company called the Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network (AEBN) announced an innovative product that it promised would revolutionize how men masturbated. Dubbed the RealTouch, the device fit over the penis and connected to the user’s computer via USB. As the wearer watched videos specially encoded for use with the RealTouch, belts inside the machine spun and tensed, its heating elements warmed, and it dispensed controlled bursts of lubricant—all synchronized with the actions occurring onscreen.


Prompt: Although the RealTouch initially worked only with pre-encoded videos streamed from the company’s servers, the addition in 2012 of the “JoyStick” controller allowed the user to be remotely manipulated in real time, typically by a female worker who connected through a network called RealTouch Interactive. In spite of several attempts at providing content that would appeal to gay men, AEBN targeted the RealTouch primarily toward heterosexual males.

Response: By the end of 2013, the machine had begun to capture the public’s imagination, and started getting coverage in tech blogs. With the hype gaining steam, the RealTouch appeared poised to fulfill the lofty promises that had been made about cybersex ever since the writer Howard Rheingold popularized the term “teledildonics” in 1990 to envision the possibility of fully embodied computational sex—riffing on computer visionary Ted Nelson’s idea of “dildonics,” offered way back in 1974.


Prompt: The apex—or climax—of the device’s popularity and public visibility came in January 2014, when the machine was featured in the HBO late-night documentary Sex/Now. For only $200—which included free credits for streaming encoded videos over the RealTouch servers, lubrication cartridges, and cleaning fluid—men could buy the device, described on its Amazon product page as a “High-tech Interactive Virtual Sex Simulator.” However, the same month it debuted on HBO, AEBN—mired in an increasingly expensive patent dispute over the product—halted production of both the RealTouch itself and the vital replacement parts required to keep the device functioning properly. Having sold off the remaining units, the company posted a eulogy for the device, beaming with pride at the RealTouch for “cementing its place in the history of adult entertainment.” It might be tempting to dismiss the RealTouch as another failed attempt at realizing the far-fetched and perpetually deferred fantasy of teledildonics, or to giggle at the absurdity of both the device and its users, or to condemn it as a participant in an industry that objectifies women. But indulging such impulses prevents us from understanding what the RealTouch was—and why it matters. As Marshall McLuhan eloquently put it, “resenting a new technology will not halt its progress.” The RealTouch wasn’t just a complex technical system—it was also an economic strategy and a set of social relations among networked subjects performing a new form of digitized sex work. Each of these factors—the machine’s mechanics, its economics, and its affiliated labor practices—were oriented toward the goal of creating the cybersexual real: the promise to replicate the feel of sex by stimulating the senses of seeing, hearing, and—most crucially—touch. AEBN’s engineers worked hard to build a machine that functioned so effectively that it would make the wearer feel as if they were penetrating “the mouth, vagina, or anus of a real human,” and the company frequently boasted of creating “the most lifelike simulation ever.”

Response: Over the centuries, technological innovation has made it possible to automate the production of an ever-growing number of goods, from clothes to chemicals to cars. With the RealTouch, AEBN aspired to automate the production of male orgasms. You Can’t Pirate a Rollercoaster When AEBN first hatched the project, they had over 100,000 pornographic videos in their stable, spanning an impressively wide range of genres. Like others in the adult video industry, however, AEBN faced the threat of declining revenues due to unauthorized copying and downloading. The company had compounded the problem in 2006 when it launched the streaming site PornoTube, intended to be “the YouTube of porn.” PornoTube was supposed to encourage users to pay for online porn. Instead, it sparked a number of imitator sites, where people reposted paid content from AEBN. CEO Scott Coffman would later call the decision to start PornoTube “the worst thing I’ve done since I was in the adult business.” So when inventor Ramon Alarcon approached AEBN with a wooden prototype of what would eventually become the RealTouch, the company saw it as a potential salve for a wound that had been, to some extent, self-inflicted. Alarcon held a Masters in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford. He had spent eight months interning at NASA all the way back in 1993 and five years working for the Immersion Corporation, a company based in San Jose that had cemented its status as a leader in “haptics”—the use of computer-controlled mechanical cues to provide the illusion of touch.


Prompt: Executed successfully, Alarcon’s idea could provide a way for the company to differentiate and defend its intellectual property: by layering touch sensations onto pre-existing audiovisual content, the RealTouch would add value to AEBN’s vast library of videos. As Coffman explained in a 2010 press release, by “delivering the sensory dimension of touch,” the touch-encoded videos streamed from the company’s servers would prove more resistant to piracy. “You can pirate the movie,” as Coffman put it, “but you can’t pirate the experience. It would be like trying to steal a roller coaster.” For the copy-protection scheme to succeed, however, AEBN had to entice potential customers to boldly take that first step onto the rollercoaster. At the Adult Entertainment Expo in 2009—the porn industry’s annual convention, piggybacked onto the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas each January—the company blitzed the showroom floor, with models pitching the machine as the next generation of online porn. AEBN touted the scientific sophistication of the design process, referencing Alarcon’s thin NASA credentials frequently, and featuring the machine’s use of haptic technology (defined as “the science of touch”) prominently in their marketing materials.

Response: An interactive graphic on the RealTouch’s product site offered a peek inside the device, showing the separate mechanisms used to produce sensations of heat, lubrication, tightness, and friction. The core components were two spinning belts that simulated a human orifice. These were surrounded by “highly-specialized, custom-made material” that provided a “realistic texture,” making it “the closest thing to actual skin.” The exterior had a white-and-grey color scheme that echoed the visual aesthetics of the then-popular WiiMote videogame controller, positioning the RealTouch at the bleeding edge of technological advancement. In another promotional graphic, AEBN depicted the RealTouch at the end of an evolutionary chain of online porn. The implication was that adding the tactile dimension would make everything else seem primitive by comparison.


Prompt: But the biggest selling point of the RealTouch had nothing to do with its physical properties. AEBN wasn’t just promising a pleasurable sexual experience, but an emotionless one. The company claimed that the sex provided by the RealTouch came without the perceived baggage, messiness, and uncertainty of interacting with a real flesh-and-blood woman. According to AEBN, men could order orgasms on-demand—without hazarding the complexities of intimacy, or the risk of rejection. In a promotional video, product manager Scott Rinaldo contrasted the perpetual willingness of the machine with the fickleness of a human romantic partner. “It never gives you an attitude,” he told his audience, “and it always says yes.” The Labor of Haptification The RealTouch’s financial success hinged on the willingness of users to shell out fifty cents a minute to stream touch-encoded videos. But haptifying AEBN’s vast library of videos was no small undertaking.  The company assigned the task to a handful of male coders, who moved scene-by-scene through each video. They imagined what each sexual act would feel like on their own genitals, and then translated those sensations into code using the Real Touch’s proprietary effects-editing software. The highly complex process required the coders to assign numerical values to each of the device’s mechanisms—the heating elements, the belts, and the lubricant dispenser—to create a tactile experience appropriate to the onscreen image. By manipulating the different components, the programmers emulated the sensation of a mouth, a vagina, or an anus.

Response: According to “EJ,” a product manager for the RealTouch, the coders kept the machine on their desk when working. “By having a RealTouch available during the encoding of the movie, they could, in real time, adjust what command seemed to replicate the action on the screen,” EJ told me. They often left the guts of the device exposed, so that they could see the motion of the belts change as they manipulated the coding for a given scene. Blending effects drawn from a bank of over 200 different haptic “events”—pre-programmed combinations of values that produced specific actions—allowed the programmers to ensure that each scene provided the end user with a unique experience.


Prompt: Enterprising coders “came up with ways to move the belts that weren’t even originally envisioned, just by tweaking the velocity and duration of the belt movements,” says EJ. Working in a sterile corporate cubicle farm, however, meant that the coders never tested scenes directly on themselves. Instead, they inserted their fingers into the machine to serve as a surrogate for their genitals.

Response: Adding touch data to a sufficiently large body of content presented an immense challenge for the small team, as they embarked on an ambitious project with few precedents in the history of computing. But despite the device’s exoticism, coding for the RealTouch wasn’t all that different from working with normal video editing software. It could be routinized and mastered with enough training, allowing a skilled programmer to encode a five-minute video in roughly thirty minutes. By 2012, AEBN’s streaming library included over 1500 touch-encoded videos, organized both by category (“Big Tits,” “Teen,” “Blonde,” “M.I.L.F.”) and by sex act (“Blowjob,” “Doggy Style,” “Cowgirl,” and, of course, “Reverse Cowgirl”). Although the videos varied widely in content, they shared a first-person camera angle that provided a unifying visual aesthetic, aligning image, sound, and touch with the male actor’s perspective.


Prompt: The repeated use of this first-person perspective required the coder to engage in an odd process of haptic identification. He had to imagine not just what the action onscreen felt like for the male actor, but also how the programmed scene would feel for the device’s wearer when the hardware enacted it. Sometimes, fidelity to the former frightened the latter. As one reviewer noted, “the ultra-faithful coding makes one thing abundantly clear—male pornstars’ penises do not receive gentle treatment from their female colleagues[…] It’s a full throttle sensory onslaught that’s almost a little scary.” At its core, the RealTouch aimed to automate the manual labor of male self-pleasure. For all its cutting-edge qualities, it belonged to a long tradition of devices that tried to mechanize masturbation, dating back to at least the nineteenth century, when doctors developed steam- and electricity-powered vibrators to treat “hysteria” by bringing female patients to orgasm. But the rhetoric of automation—frequently mobilized in the RealTouch’s promotional materials—concealed the immense amount of labor required to materialize the cybersexual real. The machine might have saved a lot of labor for its user, but it created a new, complex form of work behind the scenes. Or, as one commentator put it: with the RealTouch, “it takes a village to get you off.” Stroking From a Distance After several years in development, AEBN debuted the JoyStick controller for the RealTouch at a sex tech party thrown by the porn company Pink Visual near the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show. The controller allowed its operator to remotely manipulate the RealTouch, so that their movements would be felt in real-time by the device’s wearer. As the (typically female) operator stroked the JoyStick, sensors relayed the operator’s movements to the RealTouch, causing its belts to spin and its orifice to tighten in response.

Response: The JoyStick was nothing short of a technological marvel. While the RealTouch represented an impressive first step, some people at AEBN felt that it should’ve been further refined before being released. The JoyStick, by contrast, embodied a half-decade of research and millions of dollars invested in development. The controller featured seven sensors distributed around a phallic computer-connected device, along with buttons that could be used to adjust the RealTouch’s temperature and lubrication.


Prompt: The team that built the JoyStick consisted of five male engineers with training from a range of elite institutions, including Stanford and MIT. During the extensive design process, they experimented with over fifteen sensor placement configurations before arriving at a distribution pattern that allowed for precise, high-resolution control over the remote unit. Along the way, they overcame the monumental design challenge of building electro-capacitive sensors that would be capable of functioning in what EJ described as “wet environments”—the heavily lubricated orifice of the RealTouch—while still providing seven bits of resolution and refreshing forty times per second. The product’s success hinged on achieving a degree of fidelity that would convince the RealTouch wearer that the distance between him and the remote body manipulating the JoyStick had disappeared.

Response: At launch, Rinaldo laid out a bold long-term vision for the system, claiming that the RealTouch/JoyStick pairing could allow couples in long-distance relationships to have more meaningful intimate encounters during their time apart. In a claim that quickly circulated on tech blogs, he promised “a thousand dildos for the military wives,” boasting that AEBN would eventually donate the product to US servicemen stationed abroad and their partners. Such a move, Rinaldo acknowledged, would’ve entailed a massive rebranding of the system: the RealTouch’s promotional materials would have to be “de-pornified,” and reoriented towards romantic, couple-centered imagery. It was a smart marketing ploy, but AEBN never put the resources into making it a reality.


Prompt: While an extraordinary piece of technology, the JoyStick wasn’t just a device. It was also a business model. Immediately upon releasing the product, AEBN launched the RealTouch Interactive (RTI) Network to provide a system for monetizing it. The RTI Network consisted of hundreds of “cam girls”—women who perform paid live sex acts via webcam—willing to add touch feedback to their video streams with the JoyStick. To entice women to join the network, AEBN claimed that using the JoyStick would help them differentiate their video streams in a competitive marketplace. They would be able to form stronger affective bonds with their customers, and thus charge higher rates for their labor.

Response: Dubbed “the world’s first digital brothel” by the tech blog Engadget, the RTI Network lured workers by promising to empower them. They could set their own rates and rules, and reap the benefits of a machine that fostered client satisfaction and loyalty. RealTouch’s official Twitter feed promoted members of the RTI Network, imploring customers to “pop” the “RealTouch cherry” of workers who were new to the network. AEBN ran the RTI servers, and provided the JoySticks for free to the cam workers—although the company took a cut of whatever revenue the women’s streams generated. Rates for oral sex ranged from $30 to $60, while a 30-minute session that featured full penetration cost as much as $219.


Prompt: While Rinaldo had tried to pitch the JoyStick as a system that could provide pleasure for both participants, decisions made in the design process reflected AEBN’s strategy for commercializing the device. When asked why the initial version of the JoyStick lacked any sort of vibration feedback to stimulate the women who would be operating it, Rinaldo admitted that the device was built to be a gendered labor machine. He crudely explained that, for the cam girls, “their job is not to get off. Their job is to service guys all day.” A Girl in Romania Like its predecessor the RealTouch, the RTI Network commercialized the robotic production of male orgasms. But unlike the video-on-demand system, with its pre-encoded streams of haptic data, the RTI Network required touch sensations to be created dynamically in real time. Cam workers, then, were effectively doing the work that had formerly been executed by a small team of male coders—performing a mode of effects editing, configured by the material specifications of a machine interface that expressed a set of patriarchal power relations.

Response: Authoring multimedia content always involves the fusion of authors with authoring tools, as creators work within the platform’s enabling constraints. The RealTouch was no exception: male coders, drawing from a bank of presets, drew upon their existing knowledge of effects-editing suites to develop new combinations of sensations. Female cam workers, building on their experience with previous forms of technologically-mediated sex work, could experiment with the device to see which actions resulted in the most positive responses from their male customers.


Prompt: In the case of the male coders, however, their labor was defined by its invisibility and anonymity: neither the design team who worked on building the RealTouch nor the coders who haptified content for it were identified by name in the videos that featured their work. The LinkedIn page for Alarcon, the RealTouch’s inventor, contains no reference to his work on the RealTouch—except for a link to the patent “System and method for transmitting haptic data in conjunction with media data.” The female workers, by contrast, were defined by their spectacular visibility. They had to make themselves as seen as possible: not only by advertising themselves on the RTI Network, but by showing their naked bodies on camera. Moreover, the technology that configured the cam sessions enforced a unidirectional visibility: the woman operating the JoyStick could be seen by the remote male who donned the RealTouch, but the platform did not allow her to see him back.

Response: She even lacked the capacity to sense the man’s level of arousal through the interface, so the user had to indicate it either through text-based chat, or by clicking one of five icons that showed the male sex organ at different stages of stiffness. To help the worker understand the relationship between her movements and the undulations of the remote RealTouch, an onscreen display represented the position and force of her body as it moved across the JoyStick, providing an oddly disembodied visualization of her interiority.