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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What an erotic, and terrifying, vision: our desires all crammed together, sharing the same strips of disk, indefinitely. My dick pic next to your love letter, your Google search for tentacle porn next to my flirtatious Facebook message. One soup of sexuality, expanding at the speed of human thought.

It will make an odd monument for future archaeologists. What if you knew, in excruciating detail, the wildest fantasies of a third-century Chinese farmer? We will be extremely well-known to future generations. Will they find us as fascinating as we find ourselves? 4. We owe it to ourselves and our lovers to think through the ways that technology is rewiring sex.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One bit of data that is plentiful is who you view on the site. If you have a matching algorithm that displays options on a page, and someone clicks one of those options to view the profile, that’s a weak positive signal. There’s a whole lot of that happening, and it tells us a little bit about the user, but not much.

A stronger positive signal is sending a message. Then even stronger than that is having a multi-directional exchange, which implies that both parties most likely were happy about that exchange. The strongest signal of all is when someone deletes or pauses their account. We ask them if they did it because they met 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As for the kid in the village, he went to university in the West. So it’s nice to think of that story having a much happier trajectory now. When I first spoke to him he was probably fifteen, but he did find a way out. He did find a way to a place where there will be much more possibility for him to live openly.

I know you’ve also spoken about the power of discovering queer erotica online. I’d imagine that in addition to helping queer teenagers find people to talk to, the internet can also help them find their desires represented. And not just erotica. I remember when I first arrived in Bulgaria in 2009, all of the queer and 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I think about the kind of people I met cruising in Cherokee Park in Louisville, Kentucky—these were people that everything in my life was organized to keep me from meeting. I think a lot of the radical potential of queerness inheres in its tendency to scramble the usual lines of identification.

But a location-based app like Grindr is still about putting your body in a space where there are other bodies. Unlike OkCupid, where you don’t need to have any physical proximity to other people. You can just do it from your apartment. Well, people also use Grindr in their apartments. And if you’re in a densely 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.

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.

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.

And that’s something to be lamented. Even though a case can be made that apps like Grindr make cruising safer, that discourse of safety is part and parcel of the same discourse of safety that often accompanies gentrification and that is really code for the hatred of people of color and the hatred of poor people.

So I do think there are disturbing implications if apps like Grindr purely supplant older types of cruising. But what’s interesting is the way these multiple models of cruising can co-exist. If you go to a cruising place today in New York City, everyone’s cruising in real life and everyone’s also on their phone cruising. That sort of multiplicity feels very fecund and exciting, I think.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.