Culture Club - Cyberfeminism & The Internet’s Sexual History With Tech Researcher Mindy Seu

00:00:00.000 I do think that having an art or research practice that's very contemporary means that

00:00:07.100 like living in the world feels like a form of research. Actively going to performances,

00:00:11.560 other people's lectures, what your contemporaries are writing.

00:00:14.740 I'm Jasmine.

00:00:15.760 And I'm Maggie.

00:00:16.880 And you're listening to Culture Club Chats.

00:00:19.040 This is our interview episode where we sit down with a guest to chat all things

00:00:22.820 life, culture, and creativity.

00:00:24.640 Today, we are recording on the land of the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people of the Kulin Nations.

00:00:30.000 I pay my respects to Elders past and present and extend that to any Aboriginal or Torres

00:00:35.000 Strait Islander listeners today.

00:00:40.640 Mindy Su is an American designer, researcher, author, and one of the youngest tenured professors

00:00:46.520 at the University of California, Los Angeles. 0.99

00:00:49.860 In 2023, Mindy published the Cyber Feminism Index.

00:00:53.720 What began as a public spreadsheet on the topic of cyber feminism evolved into a book

00:00:59.120 charting three decades of online activism and art.

00:01:03.140 Now, Mindy is touring a new project, A Sexual History of the Internet.

00:01:07.360 Described as part participatory lecture performance, part 700-page artist book,

00:01:13.320 the performance traces the tangled history of our digital tools.

00:01:16.880 Guests gather to explore their intertwined histories of sexuality and technological development,

00:01:23.300 all while becoming active participants by reading historical citations and anecdotes aloud

00:01:28.480 through a shared script delivered via Instagram stories. Mindy's lectured everywhere from MoMA

00:01:34.460 to Pornhub and has been profiled in the Los Angeles Times, Days, Vogue, Vanity Fair and more.

00:01:41.560 Welcome Mindy. Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here. We're so glad to have you in

00:01:46.980 the studio because originally this is going to be a remote record and we actually had some internet

00:01:50.960 issues ironically for this topic and now you're in Australia so we get to chat IRL. My third day

00:01:57.340 in Australia one more to go and then back to Europe but excited to be here what have you found

00:02:03.520 Melbourne to be like this is not your first time you've been here before it's my second time Melbourne

00:02:07.780 is great Melbourne feels like great coffee hub food hub great museums from what I remember I

00:02:14.560 stayed at QT last time so it was right by Acme I believe yeah but it was great it feels very

00:02:20.200 central even though it's so far but in some ways feels very American yeah really in what way maybe

00:02:27.060 this is just because of my very American perspective but when I feel like I'm in this

00:02:32.300 kind of metropole because of the English speaking and because of easy access to everything that

00:02:38.600 inherently like the efficiency feels very American to me interesting if Melbourne was an American

00:02:43.680 city which one would it be do you think people always tell me the analogy of like Melbourne is

00:02:48.140 New York Sydney is LA I see the Sydney LA way more beach town very healthy yeah but Melbourne

00:02:55.640 doesn't quite feel like New York to me,

00:02:57.840 but it definitely feels like a metropole

00:02:59.980 or a cosmopolitan city.

00:03:01.360 I feel like it's a stretch to call us New York,

00:03:03.340 let's be real.

00:03:04.240 But we have had a few movie production shoot here

00:03:07.320 in the last couple of years

00:03:08.940 and they're pretending to be New York,

00:03:10.220 so they'll bring out trash bags

00:03:11.720 and put them on our corners to be like,

00:03:13.940 that's New York?

00:03:14.900 That's kind of hilarious

00:03:15.860 because a big signal of New York is 0.89

00:03:17.880 there's not enough trash infrastructure.

00:03:19.980 Yeah, and we have heaps.

00:03:20.840 So you just have piles.

00:03:22.340 You're also performing tonight.

00:03:24.060 Would you say performing?

00:03:25.080 Lecturing?

00:03:25.460 yeah performing tonight at the state library victoria have you been to that building before

00:03:30.700 i haven't been but the photos look stunning it's my favorite building in the city i'm obsessed with

00:03:36.340 it 170 years old yeah i mean i can i didn't know the age sorry i love it it's incredible too but

00:03:42.700 like even the star pattern or like this vestibule feeling of the column yes i'm excited to i'm

00:03:50.380 excited to see how the performance will work there because typically we can rearrange the

00:03:55.360 format a bit but in this case I believe all the tables are fixed so we're going to really

00:04:01.060 try to make the star pattern work but I think it'll be beautiful we'll get more into that soon

00:04:05.940 as well and we're also going to get more into your books and the work that you do at UCLA but

00:04:11.840 first kind of want to ask you like what is life for you like right now because one day you're on

00:04:19.420 subway takes and the next you're touring the world next you're back at a lecture hall so did you ever

00:04:25.420 imagine that your work would take you to these places it's been a ride because I think that

00:04:32.380 people think academic I mean it's it makes sense why you have a very specific trope of what an

00:04:38.480 academic should be and I think because I'm part of a research university but because I'm in the art

00:04:45.340 department the design department they actually have a very expanded sense of what research is

00:04:50.800 so it could be anything public facing um it doesn't have to be a peer-reviewed academic

00:04:56.140 journal it could be a performance or a curation or what they call like public humanities which

00:05:01.380 is when you write for a more mainstream publication like dazed or something like this

00:05:06.080 so i think that allowed i made the intentional decision to try to be more accessible because

00:05:13.560 this is impacting everyone it's nice to be able to speak about it with a wider audience rather than

00:05:20.040 it feeling very insular but all of the other things surrounding it like the media things

00:05:25.460 that's been very surprising i always thought my world was very niche but it seems like it's really

00:05:31.140 striking a chord because everyone's scared of the internet right now so yeah it's a balance

00:05:36.820 it's it's fun it's very very fun yeah it's super interesting because the wall street journal called

00:05:41.560 you like the the new part of the new wave of like intellectual influences or something they called it

00:05:48.920 like the alternatively influential yeah um so that was coined i believe by leila and jackie

00:05:57.560 started figures agency which i'm part of but even like having an agent that's unusual as an academic

00:06:03.700 yeah i think that what they mean by this is even though i show my work online i'm not producing

00:06:11.500 anything specific for social media like reels or anything like this i post work online or like

00:06:19.120 event promo but i wouldn't like generate something specifically for that so i'm not a content creator

00:06:24.140 which is typically how people think of influencers um but i think this term is just you have a thing

00:06:31.300 you have a very specific audience and maybe that audience is deep and thorough rather than like

00:06:38.340 broad and this is what they call alternatively influential I'm not I'm not sure but if if I'm

00:06:44.820 an example of that then I think it's just nice to be able to do your own work and if there's

00:06:50.060 resonance then amazing can you actually talk about your work that you do it in the design

00:06:54.460 media arts department? Yes. So I teach at the undergrad and graduate levels. Undergrad,

00:07:01.260 it's more design focused. So we have a very expansive view of design. It's a very

00:07:05.360 interdisciplinary program, but very tech forward. So we'll do like a senior capstone or professional

00:07:11.660 practice or something like this, but we're also accepting and encouraging students in the use of

00:07:18.540 AI or new technologies. We have a VR lab. We have a big media department focusing on media

00:07:24.920 histories, things like this. And the graduate program is only for media art. So I'll teach

00:07:31.760 like a lecture of or a seminar about the history of the lecture performance or what experimental

00:07:38.600 publishing might be. Performance art, media art. Yeah, it's quite wide ranging. But I think that

00:07:46.500 this is helpful for me because I hop around a lot I feel like a translator between fields so it

00:07:52.640 allows me to stick to that rather than feeling a bit stifled that's such a cool description a

00:07:58.760 translator of the field yes yeah I like to call also like a medium agnostic just because then you

00:08:04.680 can play with a lot of different things yeah are you ever not working because your work intersects

00:08:10.660 so many different fields like art fashion tech design as you've said how's how's that lifestyle

00:08:17.520 it's so cheesy to be like you're doing what you love so you're not working because you're

00:08:22.100 definitely working like the amount of administrative overload that I now have is wild

00:08:27.080 I feel like I just spend my life on email but that said I do think that having an art or research

00:08:35.300 practice that's very contemporary means that like living in the world feels like a form of research

00:08:42.140 actively going to performances other people's lectures what your contemporaries are writing

00:08:47.220 general things that is happening online like these are all things that I feel like I'm very

00:08:52.140 conscious of and attentive towards so yeah but I do think the hopping around is helpful because

00:08:58.780 every industry is thinking about these things right now um and being able to address it depending

00:09:05.740 on what they're specifically facing is is also like a helpful specificity even though every

00:09:12.600 the feeling might be quite ubiquitous i love that like living is a form of research so i'm like

00:09:18.080 everything's a tax deduction in some ways yeah no that's terrible my my brain's been capitalism

00:09:25.360 pilled um but speaking about all these broad very like esoteric topics um it's very clear that

00:09:32.280 you're a very deep thinking individual were you always like this like as a child as well

00:09:36.960 deep thinking oh how would my parents describe me let me think about my mom for a moment she

00:09:41.780 would probably describe me every time she calls me she's like are you stressed because i was a

00:09:47.500 very stressed child partly because i was a very overachieving child and my sister who's a nurse

00:09:54.880 she's one year older she's very chill she told me once that she's never experienced stress in her

00:09:59.960 life this is like a list sisters as well she's like the stereotype yes but she was also very

00:10:06.700 maternal like even though she was only one year older she was my caretaker like my parents were

00:10:12.940 working all the time she drove me around she like taught me how to cook she even now is like we'll

00:10:19.800 pay for meals even though we're basically the same age she's the one that stayed at home to

00:10:24.720 stay close to parents and take care of them as they're getting older like she's really adopted

00:10:28.860 that role meanwhile I left the second I could and moved across the country I do think I was a very

00:10:36.000 attentive child and very organized like I would color coordinate my closets and like alphabetize

00:10:42.360 my books and was very meticulous in that way and then seeing what I do now I'm like okay I'm

00:10:48.860 basically just a list maker so it makes sense that that led to what i'm doing now it's just

00:10:53.600 more spreadsheet oriented literally like you're in that you're indexing your books as a child

00:10:58.380 yeah that checks out for sure on the topic of your parents as well i was curious how do they

00:11:03.660 respond to your work especially the topics around sex they have no idea what i do yeah even i think

00:11:10.740 because they're not really internet users like they don't have social media they only use cacao

00:11:16.020 which is like Korean WhatsApp and they'll like share things amongst our close family or their

00:11:24.340 close friends but they are not internet people at all if they find out about something I'm doing

00:11:29.440 it's because I had like an auntie lurking on my Instagram and they like spilled it but the cousins

00:11:36.260 have a pact it's like if you see things online that you think parents would be stressed out by

00:11:41.520 you don't share it, whether that's like dating early or whatever it is. But even when I was

00:11:47.500 younger, when I was first in the design studio world, they would tell their friends that I worked

00:11:53.060 at Pixar because for them, it was like an example of applied arts. But I'm like, definitely not an

00:11:59.320 animator, definitely not an illustrator. And I think now they have more comfort in what I'm doing

00:12:06.020 because there's institutional backing so they know that okay this is a real thing she teaches

00:12:12.100 at ucla whatever design might be whatever media art is like it's a very weird term for parents

00:12:19.960 so right now they think you're like lecturing in melbourne australia which is true yeah yeah and

00:12:25.480 they know i'm like my work is about and on the internet again they're not very online um they

00:12:32.520 also i'm sure they're they're also not dumb i'm sure they're very conservative so i think part of

00:12:38.160 this is they're choosing not to ask and if they do ask my sister who's like my ally will like

00:12:46.000 describe it as well this is about feminist work and because of clickbait or all of this they try

00:12:52.940 to skew it one way or the other which is in some ways not wrong like i think that so many people

00:13:00.060 have used this quote the phone is a sex toy because it's like so clippy but if you think 0.66

00:13:05.160 about the work itself it's really about labor but it's just not as sexy to talk about so yeah I think 0.87

00:13:12.620 it's just trying to navigate how you're how you're classified like it's always been a very

00:13:18.540 controversial and complicated issue so you left home as soon as you could and where was home which

00:13:25.040 city was home was Orange County I went to school at UCLA in the same department I'm teaching and

00:13:29.720 now and then I went straight to New York you went straight to New York to start I was at New York

00:13:35.280 I was in New York to do this summer program called typography summer school and then I was working

00:13:40.920 at MoMA and then I moved to this global design studio called two by four and we were doing like

00:13:46.920 very interactive installations for cultural institutions fashion like we made like an

00:13:54.760 interface that had all of Marc Jacobs perfumes and when you put one down there was like an RFID

00:13:59.940 chip that would trigger an animation like this kind of world like high fashion advertising pop-up

00:14:05.980 world and I learned a lot but it also felt like well my peers aren't shopping at Prada like maybe

00:14:13.700 we're doing aspirational work but is this actually something that's for me or my peers meanwhile like

00:14:20.960 i would hang out in warehouses in brooklyn and people were doing like build your own computer

00:14:25.760 workshops and i was part of this very weird like hacking creative technology world um what year

00:14:33.440 was this this was 2012 to 2017 or something so when did facebook or when did instagram come out

00:14:44.740 2012 I believe so like I remember first getting Instagram the year after I left undergrad I don't

00:14:52.140 exactly remember when I got an iPhone but even an undergrad like chat roulette and omegle was

00:14:57.040 popular but people were still primarily using Facebook and then it quickly shifted and we saw

00:15:02.800 within that generation like a huge decade shift of how people see social media totally if you think

00:15:09.620 about instagram in 2012 versus 2022 it's crazy the it's shocking development and impact that

00:15:17.760 it's had in just a decade yes yeah and if we think about all of these major corporations like

00:15:23.700 google's changed dramatically airbnb airbnb is like one of the only companies where the ceo was

00:15:30.480 a design student so he always talks about the importance of creative thinking and creative

00:15:35.200 education but all of these things were very pushed forward by how can we keep something cheap

00:15:43.080 and scalable and that kind of led to this hyper late capitalist downfall that we're all really

00:15:50.960 experiencing i wonder if the kids still use omegle i don't think so i don't know if they do

00:15:56.480 but they must be using some randomized chat function i'm not sure what it would be now

00:16:01.060 it's all snapchat but i love having a reawakening too but i wonder with omegle like my dream is

00:16:09.080 that let's say it's there and the user face hasn't changed one bit it's just i loved how i guess in

00:16:16.660 some ways how primitive it was and just it was such a moment in time i can many asleep over to

00:16:22.620 thank for that absolutely and i also heard myspace is coming back really myspace is coming back

00:16:28.580 algorithm free this is what they claim myspace has tried to make a comeback a couple of other

00:16:35.600 times though in the past decade and it hasn't quite worked but it could be an interesting

00:16:40.200 resurgence because we're experiencing such nostalgic tech right now even like this big

00:16:45.460 cyberdeck trend so i think there might be something there at this point i think people

00:16:50.740 want to be in social networks it's kind of the only social experience that feels like it's very

00:16:57.900 much entwined with our lives these days however people are at this point know what an algorithm

00:17:03.300 is know what surveillance tech is and they don't want that so if this is going to emerge through

00:17:09.440 some decentralized network or company that's not trying to track then people will go there i think

00:17:14.880 people will but it has to be an exodus because think about like mastodon or all of these other

00:17:22.520 companies blue sky uh that emerged because we saw this happen over the past couple years

00:17:29.540 few people join and then it just doesn't get a momentum and then it will fall so i i wonder what

00:17:36.000 will happen here yeah what do you think it would take for a mass exodus of these massive tech

00:17:40.800 platforms i think that because myspace had a lot of clout back in the day and a lot of people were

00:17:47.480 actively using it it feels nostalgic i think maybe the problem with these contemporary orgs is

00:17:53.140 they feel like a modification of an existing thing that we're using right like decentralized twitter

00:18:00.780 or whatever um but myspace was very specific the profiles were very specific it feels very

00:18:07.720 nostalgic and if they're saying we will never use ai we will not track any of your content there is

00:18:16.140 no god view i wonder i wonder if they have enough history that there would be a like a migration

00:18:23.580 toward it um but i think the hard part these days is maintenance and longevity because we're just

00:18:31.980 part of this like hashtag activism generation where it's easy to do a quick reshare but staying

00:18:38.460 with something for a durational period what is even durational these days a few months like even

00:18:44.340 that we were talking on the episode this week about just like the trends are getting even faster

00:18:49.600 like the discourse from the everyone doing the kind of chic trend i don't know if you've seen

00:18:53.920 that but the kind of chic trend and then people hating on people doing the trend was like three

00:18:59.200 four days i swear yeah it's getting faster and faster so yeah yeah and it's also sad because

00:19:05.680 then all these trends are being named because we're trying to figure out like how to document

00:19:09.800 these moments and maybe they shouldn't be documented maybe it's just left to be ephemeral

00:19:15.000 but it's a very interesting challenge for people thinking about digital archiving in this moment

00:19:21.300 let's talk about the cyber feminism index so that gathers three decades of online activism and

00:19:27.260 internet art and it started actually as a public and collaborative spreadsheet in 2019

00:19:32.780 yes can you please tell us how the project came about in the first place why you thought it was

00:19:38.440 important to document cyber feminism explicitly and when did you realize that it needed to become

00:19:45.160 a book so it's so funny that that project it feels like it was yesterday but i guess it was

00:19:51.800 seven or eight years ago now um so again in my 20s i was part of this like very diy diwo do it

00:19:59.060 with others, like hardware hacking, software hacking, creative tech group. And when I went

00:20:08.260 to grad school, I was doing this fellowship at the Harvard Law School called the Berkman

00:20:12.560 Klein Center for the Internet and Society. And here I saw that people were thinking about the

00:20:17.420 same things, but approaching them from opposite directions. So my artist friends were making work

00:20:22.760 about it and then the people in this fellowship were very policy legislative people so they were

00:20:29.320 actually focusing on how do you combat surveillance tech and write it into law so it's we're not

00:20:35.740 actually experiencing this whereas maybe my art friends were part of more of a consciousness

00:20:40.380 raising movement um but i was like these thematically are very similar they should be

00:20:46.360 under the same umbrella so i think as i started creating this bibliography it was really a tool

00:20:51.900 for myself to try to understand what this network emerging was. And then I put it on Twitter when I

00:21:00.160 was on it, I'm no longer on it, and asked what's missing, what could be edited, and it kind of went

00:21:06.240 mini-viral. And people started adding a lot of things. So then it was eventually commissioned by

00:21:13.800 Rhizome at the New Museum. They're like this very old internet art organization. I then worked with

00:21:19.320 angeline meitzler to make a database and that database cyberfeminismindex.com we built it in

00:21:25.300 a way that is like future-proofed god willing and will last for as many decades as possible

00:21:30.800 um and will like continue to crowdsource in perpetuity but we also knew that

00:21:35.880 just by nature books last longer than web forbes in like 2015 had this study where the average

00:21:44.900 lifespan of a website is around two years or something in I'm sure now it's way shorter

00:21:50.480 what do you mean by lifespan so how long a website goes up and down how long a domain is in use um

00:21:57.240 so many everything now you're experiencing a lot of link rot like people aren't really

00:22:02.220 incentivized to publish websites because now people are immediately going towards AI

00:22:07.560 and i'm like well those llms are sourcing inputs from these websites so i yeah i wonder how that's

00:22:15.740 going to progress um so then we made the book i made the book with laura combs who's one of my

00:22:22.680 best friends we've collaborated a lot and we just knew that we wanted to have a website or a book

00:22:28.860 that felt like a snapshot of the website's mutation and it felt like it was a way to infiltrate a

00:22:35.100 forever institution like the library of congress because even if the website did die or was hacked

00:22:41.600 or whatever it was we would have at least one record um so that's we printed that within a few

00:22:48.880 years but the website again will still crowdsource for as long as possible and then maybe in 10 20

00:22:55.200 years if we reprint a new one maybe it would be double the amount who knows um but i like this

00:23:00.280 idea that you have a living archive paired with a static one can you um provide some of the examples

00:23:06.340 of things that were indexed in um cyber feminism yeah so the cyber femme index felt quite uh

00:23:15.420 international there was like korean net femis or like latin american hack feministas one of my 0.79

00:23:22.420 favorite groups at the time was called gynepunk they would make like 3d printed gynecological

00:23:28.080 gynecological tools and uh resources for how to use them because at that time i mean even now

00:23:36.240 there's just not necessarily affordable and equitable access to health care in the u.s there

00:23:41.520 was like legacy russell's glitch feminism um there was black afrofuturism some examples of science

00:23:49.200 fiction like it felt very medium agnostic but all dealing with what are ways that marginalized

00:23:56.620 people can think about what cyberspace is because that's really where the term came from. Cyberspace

00:24:04.460 was coined in the 80s in this book called Neuromancer by William Gibson and it was a sci-fi

00:24:11.400 novel that was very popular and it kind of predicted these like sensory networked online

00:24:16.900 landscapes that we're very much living in but like most sci-fi of the time or even now it was also

00:24:23.780 characterized by fembots and cyber babes and women assistants and orientalism and etc so then

00:24:31.840 when cyber feminism was coined in the early 90s by sadie plant a uk theorist vns matrix australian 0.99

00:24:40.960 art collective um iconic foursome it was again a pro like a provocation how could women think about 0.96

00:24:49.660 what cyberspace could be beyond this like very military industrial origins that the internet was

00:24:55.460 based on um and from that we saw this kind of like wild imagination of like a very slimy visceral

00:25:03.660 internet compared to the very cold metallic one that we have in our science fiction imaginary

00:25:12.100 i want to move on to a sexual history of the internet yes it's your new project which you

00:25:17.780 are touring in Brisbane you've already done it in Sydney and Melbourne Maggie and I are attending

00:25:23.440 tonight very excited but people who may not have heard of the performance how do you describe it

00:25:29.300 and how was it created a sexual history of the internet is a lecture performance and it

00:25:36.940 is very poly vocal it feels like a recital of sorts I realized with my editor Meg Miller

00:25:44.640 that recital and citation share the same root, cite.

00:25:50.100 So this performance is participatory.

00:25:53.320 You both will be reading.

00:25:54.820 Come with your phones charged.

00:25:57.020 It all uses Instagram stories

00:25:59.080 because we wanted to use a ubiquitous tool

00:26:01.000 on a device that we use every day.

00:26:02.920 Because you're reading other people's words,

00:26:05.260 it feels like an embodied citation.

00:26:07.800 And that is really what a recital is.

00:26:10.500 It also, a curator described it as church.

00:26:13.020 because of this mass incantation quality and because of the latency of it's impossible to

00:26:20.280 have everyone start these stories at the exact same time so they're all like a half second off

00:26:24.140 and it just creates this very musical din um it makes me think that this is the closest I will be

00:26:30.700 to being a musician because it feels like a choir or something like this like you're conducting

00:26:37.040 yes right I'm like the omniscient roaming narrator um and everyone's looking at their

00:26:44.500 phone in a dark room yeah so you feel very alone but together how have people from different

00:26:50.240 countries um responded to the piece it feels like a mirror of the city that you're in and most

00:26:56.160 performances are this way because performances are great because they are you create a scaffolding

00:27:03.440 or a structure that feels constant regardless of how many times you perform it but there's also

00:27:09.480 so many components that are variable and they need to be accepting of those things the venue

00:27:14.660 will feel different the audience feels different the sound is very different so in this case because

00:27:21.880 it is participatory the the the tenor of each city really comes through so like when we did

00:27:28.420 in Tokyo or Antwerp very very shy societies and you could feel like the pain the repression of

00:27:37.700 speaking out loud because it's just not it's not as culturally acceptable or encouraged as let's

00:27:42.840 say New York where like those performances feel very rowdy and they're jam-packed people want to

00:27:49.720 be performers people are laughing out loud so it's there's a mirror of the society in that way but

00:27:55.940 also a mirror of the infrastructure so berlin for example notoriously has very bad wi-fi very bad

00:28:03.260 cell service as we learned when we tried to remote call yeah exactly when we were trying to do this

00:28:08.360 zoom immediately it starts chugging because it just cannot handle this bandwidth so then this

00:28:14.300 performance relies on cell service and if you don't have that a half second latency becomes a

00:28:19.960 couple seconds which feels like cacophony but again it's not really about trying to correct

00:28:26.820 these things but just instead trying to like bring light to them because they all feel like

00:28:31.680 different components of why this performance feels quite different depending on how you do it

00:28:36.520 this one I think will be rather large like the Brisbane one was I think 60 or so people I think

00:28:43.460 this one will be several hundred so that also very much changes the tone and temperature of

00:28:48.440 the performance. And what's kind of your message behind this? Because I love the title, A Sexual

00:28:54.620 History of the Internet. But what do you mean by that? So in some ways, it feels like a revisionist

00:29:01.000 history in that when we think about internet history, we think about all the grandfathers

00:29:07.360 who made the architecture and protocol and it emerging from ARPANET and this military industrial

00:29:16.080 complex and things like this but even thinking about the military the military has very close

00:29:23.440 attachments with sexuality embodiment that it's constantly trying to confront or bury like don't

00:29:29.560 ask don't tell for example but if you actually think about what we're trying to enliven here is

00:29:36.820 I'm quoting 45 of my peers or scholars or sex worker friends or artist friends activist friends

00:29:44.320 who have mapped these different stories of how the internet history is so entangled with embodiment

00:29:54.500 and sexuality the first jpeg was a playboy model that this team at usc used just to test their

00:30:02.820 compression algorithm and that play that playmate she was published as lena schlublum i can't

00:30:10.040 pronounce the Swedish name. Her real name is Lena Forsen. She was not asked about this. She did not

00:30:15.820 receive any compensation for it. At this point now, if you use her image, computer science

00:30:21.440 journals will not accept it. But that was her only nude photo shoot. She was very young at the time.

00:30:27.180 She didn't do a single nude shoot after. And this has kind of become an unwarranted legacy.

00:30:33.540 So we have examples of that, which maybe feel a bit more towards extraction. But we also have

00:30:38.160 examples of innovation, like thinking about sex workers who pushed forward the rise of e-com or

00:30:45.600 streaming services, how things like Pornhub are actually tech companies, not adult entertainment

00:30:51.780 companies. They pushed forward Aliyev Nox, sex worker who pushed forward cryptocurrencies and

00:30:56.920 made them shippable before at the time when it was very, very speculative commodity. 0.94

00:31:01.320 um liara ru talks about pussy capital and how platforms often extract labor from women and 1.00

00:31:09.440 then erase it once the platform feels more stabilized like patreon for example so all of

00:31:15.760 these things are kind of woven in in a very narrative citation based way and it also because

00:31:21.320 of my background in art history there's a lot of contemporary examples of art and women who

00:31:27.480 have negotiated these different topics like hannah bear or sarah friend um nodding to works

00:31:36.000 like shauna michael and holloway or arvida bystrom or people like this so it's a mix of a lot of

00:31:43.620 different things but generally like my writing style feels like a tapestry of like other people's

00:31:49.380 works and i kind of weave them together and this feels like a like a verbalized or articulated

00:31:56.580 version of that yeah like a curator yeah role as you said sex workers have always been early

00:32:03.660 adopters of emerging tech like the cryptocurrency that you referenced how are web one and web 3.0

00:32:11.160 which we're living in now and sex work interlinked web 1.0 was very much defined by what they call

00:32:18.780 reading and writing you heard these terms to read to write it sounds obvious but it essentially

00:32:24.560 referred to, if you want to use the internet, you need to know how a website works and how to

00:32:30.700 upload it and how to code it. That's the writing part. And then you can also access it, which is

00:32:36.940 the reading part. But then as we enter like early web 2.0, this is replaced by you only have to know

00:32:46.200 how to access things. And we see the rise of websites that templatize things like Blogspot

00:32:52.960 or tumblr or whatever it is there were sites that suddenly became aggregators like we see

00:33:00.480 early google or yahoo or ask jeeves or these search engine type things um and then web 2.0

00:33:08.120 late web 2.0 is very much characterized by platform oligopoly so that means not only are

00:33:14.360 we using websites that templatize everything we're all using the same five which is very much what

00:33:20.180 we're living in now. So everyone's using Instagram, Google, whatever it is. Web3 is a bit different

00:33:28.080 because this was characterized by decentralized networks, which did exist in Web 1.0, like

00:33:34.840 torrenting, right? This is an early example of web or of decentralized networks. But in these days,

00:33:41.800 Web3 feels like it's kind of taken over by blockchain and crypto. But it could really be

00:33:48.060 anything that's decentralized. Like when this was booming again in like 2018, there was like

00:33:54.120 Beaker Browser and the DAT protocol and IPFS and all of these different attempts to create

00:33:59.360 different types of decentralized networks. But blockchain really came out on top because of

00:34:05.460 crypto and because of this new financial market and acceleration of that rather than like kind

00:34:12.760 of the utopic principles of trying to be anti-capital which is kind of how it was originally

00:34:18.940 framed and then web 4 is meant to be a bit more three-dimensional four-dimensional so thinking

00:34:25.220 about sensory landscapes and sound augmentation and haptic sensations and things like this

00:34:31.940 right so just different types of interfaces are we in web 4.0 now then depending on who you talk

00:34:37.740 to, it's very blurry, right? Because we're in a multi, we're living in a society that's

00:34:43.520 technologically literate across different spectrums. So like, is my mom existing in

00:34:48.820 Web3? Definitely not. Do I have friends who are using a bit of Web4? For sure. But I would say

00:34:55.600 most of us at this point are still pretty much in late Web 2.0, right? Unless you're actively

00:35:01.600 using decentralized networks, which I don't think many people are because we saw the decline of

00:35:06.960 crypto yeah even though there was a big boom in yeah pre-pandemic yeah oh the boom was pre-pandemic

00:35:14.400 because i think of nfts and crypto as like 2021 22 actually you might be right because pandemic

00:35:20.180 it's so interesting thinking about these hype cycles because pandemic was the push towards

00:35:27.620 metaverse right so we the rise of streaming and augmented realities and virtual realities and

00:35:33.720 things like this. And then I guess in 2022, you're right. It was Web3, blockchain, crypto, NFTs,

00:35:41.700 all economies, etc. And then 2024 was this big AI boom. But what's different is AI is so much

00:35:50.120 easier to access and integrate that I do think is here to stay. Whereas metaverse and crypto had

00:35:57.920 such a learning curve it prevented a lot of access unless you were very tech literate but like who

00:36:05.100 wants to create a wallet like it's just such a barrier of entry whereas now ai it's the first

00:36:11.520 thing you see when you google search anything it's embedded in my email like it's just it's

00:36:16.740 become very ubiquitous very quickly even though it's highly unprofitable and basically all these

00:36:21.600 companies are in extreme amounts of debt yeah i mean to that point as well there's this quote that

00:36:26.360 you have said which reads I try to approach emerging technologies with curiosity rather

00:36:32.760 than fear but I don't believe neutrality exists I stay attentive to power labor access and who

00:36:39.100 gets a raise in the process of innovation so can you expand on this with AI in mind you may have

00:36:44.880 heard this quote technology is not neutral right like people think oh it's not about the tool it's

00:36:52.300 how you use it and that is true to a certain degree but the tool itself is designed by people

00:36:58.180 who have very specific biases intentions expectations for the tool and in many ways

00:37:05.340 once that's released people use the tool as designed right so us being addicted to instagram

00:37:12.200 that is by design us using a pencil within a very specific way that's by design so all of

00:37:20.140 these things are considered biases for the tool itself. What's different in this case is we have

00:37:27.700 tools that are suddenly very literate and hallucinate on their own. So if I'm using AI,

00:37:36.400 it's going to basically do this experimentation where it's using a calculus and predicting a

00:37:45.600 word pattern and because it has access to millions of texts it understands what is a common word

00:37:52.820 pattern. AI even more dangerously is at this point part of an arms race for companies to try to make

00:38:01.000 as much profit as possible and within a capitalist capitalist model you have basically doing things

00:38:09.440 for profit with as little labor or low labor as possible. So in this case, laborers and

00:38:19.040 resources themselves need to then be very, very, very affordable, which is why there's zero

00:38:25.200 incentive. This idea that AI will eradicate labor and redistribute leisure for the rest of us

00:38:31.080 can never happen in a capitalist model because it will just create new forms of labor that will be

00:38:38.820 extraordinarily cheaper and now we're just replacing a lot of skilled labor with the like

00:38:44.060 its likeness um uh this great uh italian scholar like silvia federici and tizia terranova will

00:38:54.540 always have talked about this type of labor force so when ai was first being developed in like the

00:39:00.180 1940s 1950s there was this very utopic impulse toward it right it was emerging from a academic

00:39:07.060 framework funded by military but there was no primary tech company that was pushing it forward

00:39:14.880 and even when sam altman was creating open ai one of their top three principles was to be as

00:39:23.020 value aligned as possible but with the arms race that we're seeing and this hyper acceleration

00:39:31.480 now it's like oh we don't actually have time to morally align anything we are going to just try

00:39:36.820 to capitalize this on as quickly as possible, or someone else will do it first. And now the rest of

00:39:42.140 us are then being asked to use this thing, like, if you don't use this, you'll get left behind.

00:39:47.980 But who is actually using this, and how is it being incorporated into industry? In the West,

00:39:57.500 when AI was first rolled out in recent times, it was used as a, they kind of used creative

00:40:04.760 generation as a way to demonstrate its capacity so like we're gonna look it can write an essay

00:40:10.320 or it can write this poem whereas in China they were using it as an agentic AI and they were

00:40:17.640 embedding it into different layers of the stack so it wasn't actually that consumer facing and

00:40:22.980 it made industry quite fast but it didn't have the same existential crisis that we're very much

00:40:29.700 seeing because the first thing that it's coming for is all the creative work rather than the

00:40:34.220 administrative work that it promised to. But even like Meredith Whitaker, who's the CEO of Signal,

00:40:41.400 also a great tech critic and et cetera. Agentic AI for the consumer is also quite dangerous because

00:40:47.400 in some ways, yeah, it seems great to have an AI schedule your calendar and like book your flights.

00:40:54.520 But what does it actually need access to in order to do that? It needs access to your bank accounts,

00:40:59.880 It's access to your cloud files, to all of your passwords, to the calendars of all of your peers and contacts. Like it becomes incredibly invasive. And we have to decide as a community, what are the barriers of do we actually value the right to privacy, which is a very important human right, regardless of this idea of I don't have anything to hide.

00:41:24.940 So I think we are seeing a reckoning right now.

00:41:27.780 And I don't even remember what your question was, but I just spiraled into this whole thing about, yeah, a lot of the tech anxieties that I'm very rapidly observing across multiple generations.

00:41:41.480 Yeah, it's just a fascinating time to exist full stop, but to be someone who's researching in this space.

00:41:47.680 Like there's just so much to think about.

00:41:49.800 It's extremely fast, yes.

00:41:51.040 And the wide-reaching nature of it.

00:41:53.740 Like you said, AI being invented in the 1940s and 50s.

00:41:57.960 Yeah, it is a reckoning, I think, at the moment.

00:42:01.140 And it's curious to see where we'll be in the next five years with it.

00:42:05.820 Like many millennials, your sexual awakening happened online.

00:42:09.680 In an interview with the LA Times, you said, 0.94

00:42:12.240 I asked Jeeves how to have an orgasm.

00:42:14.280 I sexted with classmates on AOL Instant Messenger.

00:42:17.780 any curiosities were saved until I could sneak onto my family's shared ice blue iMac G3 in the

00:42:23.680 living room. How does that generational experience of discovering sexuality online

00:42:28.740 compared to how Gen Z or Gen Alpha encounters it now? Oh, I'm sure it's been exacerbated in

00:42:35.280 many ways. So I think what's been interesting is, I don't know how old you two are. Are you

00:42:40.180 millennials technically i'm 90 96 99 okay so you're maybe the late maybe you're not you're not

00:42:47.080 but we might be the the boundaries of this i think so um i'm 91 i think millennial technically

00:42:53.640 starts at 92 but basically it's this very small micro generation that experienced half of their

00:43:00.180 their childhood offline with no internet and half of it very much online that's very unusual because

00:43:07.920 most people now were immediately born digital. I think what's interesting about being born digital

00:43:12.440 is you are accessing so much information about yourself in an online environment,

00:43:20.200 which only prioritizes a few senses. It's very text dominant. It's very visual or visual dominant.

00:43:30.360 So this ocular centric model kind of asks you to not consider all of the other senses that we

00:43:36.800 actively use in physical space, like touch, temperature, sound, smell, taste. That's a lot

00:43:43.960 of senses that we're just not ignoring. So then if we think about sexuality, this is a very embodied

00:43:52.540 practice and will elicit a lot of these physical changes, even though you're being aroused in a

00:43:59.440 very ocular centric way through sexting or porn or whatever it is so what does it actually mean

00:44:07.280 for yourself to then have these original physical sensations through a digital device then try to

00:44:15.780 translate that to another physical thing like this is what i'm really observing as the anxiety

00:44:21.760 in a lot of gen alpha gen z and that also then can be extrapolated to social environments or

00:44:31.780 conversational strategies or things like this that is fascinating i really i really like your

00:44:39.200 perception there and it's so right i think it's very singular the the types of sensory

00:44:44.600 desire that we get and it reminds me of this theory that i heard on a podcast it's from a

00:44:50.480 tech podcaster called Ryan Broderick from podcast Panic World and he's got a newsletter called

00:44:55.000 Garbage Day and he had this theory that all video online is pornographic from mukbangs to ASMR and

00:45:02.340 he doesn't necessarily mean that it's sexual but that it's desirable and it you know shows us what

00:45:07.360 we want without having to actually experience it ourselves one of the quotes was all video on the

00:45:12.260 internet is a form of pornography because algorithmic platforms have reduced it to that

00:45:16.940 do you agree i agree and there's an artist named ann hirsch who says something very similar she

00:45:22.980 says to post an image online is to be in conversation with pornography of course you're

00:45:29.380 performing every image that you see suddenly becomes like a desire network or desire mapping

00:45:34.920 i think similar to this point it also connects back to the military so uh there was this great

00:45:42.680 conversation with the artist Hito Steyral and other artists Trevor Paglin where they talk about

00:45:48.260 especially in a life of AI what you are using as a recommendation engine for like what lipstick to

00:45:54.940 wear is very similar to the recommendation engines that a drone will use for who its next victim will

00:46:00.800 be it's trying to make sense of a pattern and trying to then feed you um an output that you

00:46:08.900 you'd intended right like I'm looking for this to yield this result and these are all forms of

00:46:16.780 like generative patterns that we access every single day and which is why the algorithm is

00:46:24.360 incredibly dangerous because we are very complicated multi-sensorial multi-directional

00:46:30.820 people and just because I wanted this thing from this brand doesn't mean I want all the other

00:46:36.440 things from it like you can like this very niche thing and this very mainstream thing and algorithms

00:46:43.600 don't really allow for that kind of complexity which is why we see these hyper trendscapes

00:46:49.680 happening um and why everyone kind of starts to look the same so that's why gen alpha is very

00:46:55.500 interesting like gen z right now has the craziest style and it's kind of like this rise of or

00:47:02.400 revisiting of dadaism and absurdism because they're just trying to like break away from this

00:47:08.140 very monotonous uh monoculture that a lot of millennials started to adopt what are some

00:47:16.320 examples of that like people just pairing weird things like i feel like in many ways millennials

00:47:24.240 what millennial black right they started painting their homes black they were all part of like the

00:47:30.980 kinfolk era everything was beige like kim kardashian kanye west monastic living but in a 0.80

00:47:37.560 very luxurious setting uh your expensive coffee like there there's these tropes of millennialism

00:47:43.760 but gen z these people are wild i i love gen z i feel like it gives me a lot of hope for the future

00:47:52.840 people really hate on gen z for but i'm like there is like a very nihilistic but like subcultural

00:48:00.160 quality that this generation has that I think millennials kind of mourn because we are the

00:48:05.920 anxiety generation and they're like the all right let's just it feels almost like hyper present or

00:48:12.240 something so even though they're called like a loneliness generation or the sexless generation

00:48:18.860 I'm like I feel like I'm witnessing way much more pleasure and discourse and this kind of thing and

00:48:24.440 that group because they're living in like a doomsday generation yeah right like they're not

00:48:30.000 they don't really have a future they don't have the illusion of a future to look towards which is

00:48:34.560 what we were promised right so this i think is is fascinating yeah and is this everything you've

00:48:41.660 been saying is that your theory behind one of your most famous quotes which is our phones are sex

00:48:46.220 toys so that quote is by my friend melanie hoff sorry who's an artist um i used that quote

00:48:52.560 and cited her in a sexual history of the internet but no i think that quote when she told me that

00:48:58.580 quote when you were just like having a drink at a bar and it was felt so spot on that i used it as

00:49:03.540 the hook and opening for this performance because what does it actually mean it's like that question

00:49:09.340 or that comment is making you question what is sex and what is a sex toy like when we think of 0.79

00:49:16.420 sex toys we think of dildos but like if you really think about what sex is then it makes you

00:49:23.340 reconsider what like arousal or desire is and then it makes you reconsider how to activate that

00:49:31.080 using a quote-unquote toy so for that i'm like okay your iphone is visual you're seeing all of

00:49:41.560 these things that you desire on it whether it's sexual or in a commoditized way it's how we

00:49:47.680 communicate with other people and access a huge set of media so yes it's absolutely a sex it

00:49:53.960 vibrates it gets hot it's like pressure sensitive like all of these different elements that we see 0.72

00:49:59.440 in classical sex toys i think also to gen z's to point back to that judith butler has this great

00:50:07.120 great quote that describes queering as an action not as an identity it's like something you have

00:50:12.840 to constantly do um and I think that's important because queer communities have known from day one

00:50:20.100 that because they don't really fit into these heteronormative structures you can't have sex 0.75

00:50:26.740 in a heteronormative way so then what does sex look like you have to talk about it and reinvent

00:50:33.180 what sex could be. And I think that's a very important concept because there's all forms of

00:50:41.160 sex that are not penetrative, that don't even require touch. They're like psychosomatic and

00:50:47.160 psychosexual. There's different types of arousal, like financial domination or someone being a

00:50:56.680 demisexual only wanting to have sex when they're in a romantic relationship sapiosexual asexual 0.84

00:51:03.420 like these are all things that i think are important to articulate but hopefully not

00:51:09.040 classify too much because i think an over classification as we kind of alluded to

00:51:14.000 just very makes things very very rigid and there's like a blurriness between all of these things that

00:51:19.460 increasingly people are accepting more mindy we could keep going i feel like i need to like

00:51:25.300 journal after this you know what I mean but we will kind of end on the question that we

00:51:30.940 Jaz and I ask each other at the end of every episode which is we just share a recommendation

00:51:36.040 from our week something that we have either loved watching reading or listening to so we were

00:51:41.000 wondering if you could share something with us from the past week also you can do longer oh well

00:51:47.160 my friend Ezra Padgett who's also cited in A Sexual History of the Internet she's a linguistic

00:51:51.900 anthropologist she has this great substat called love buzz which i think is really nice it kind of

00:51:57.740 feels like a return to like dan savage advice columns you might not even know who dan savage

00:52:02.160 is he's like a sex columnist from the 90s but she has like a very fun contemporary take on it

00:52:08.880 thank you so much for joining us and if audiences would like to find more of your work where can

00:52:14.100 they do so i am very online i guess i'm only really on instagram but my inbox is always open

00:52:22.080 i'm a very active emailer and arena user for any of the arena heads out there but yeah thank you

00:52:29.360 so much for your time this was fun thanks for coming in and you did so well despite the jet

00:52:34.500 lag great i feel very awake right now that worked out buzzing for the performance tonight so we

00:52:40.920 hope you enjoy the rest of your time in melbourne and thanks for joining culture club today thank

00:52:45.200 you so much see ya

Culture Club - September 07, 2026

Cyberfeminism & The Internet’s Sexual History With Tech Researcher Mindy Seu

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