Dan Theft Auto: Vice City

Or, How the Internet Affects Our Hidden Desires

Feb 29, 2024

If I asked what the internet is best at I would expect to receive numerous excellent answers while we all waited for one person to be brave enough to give the right answer: the internet is best at distributing pornography.

Some significant percentage of internet traffic – anywhere from four to thirty percent based on estimates – is dedicated to porn. One of my favorite videos is this one which shows the rise and fall of various websites over time. You should watch it but if you don’t here’s the key: a lot of people are using the internet for porn.

It’s difficult to define what exactly pornography is, so much so that the most famous definition is U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously stating that he could not intelligibly define it, but “I know it when I see it.” But what we can say is that for at least three hundred and fifty centuries, humans have been making depictions designed to be erotic. At a certain point, those become pornography.

One of the things we love to do with new technologies is find a way to use them for pornography. And before the internet, it was the movies.

A fundamental truth of this newsletter is that society moves through a trio of levers: technology, law, and culture. All three of those explain The Golden Age of Pornography, best covered by the criminally underrated The Deuce, and now butchered by me.

As the laws on obscenity and cultural attitudes towards sex changed, pornographic movies began receiving more widespread release. This also led to many of them becoming better, including some actual quality films. Eventually pornographic films became mainstream, leading to the eternally amusing fact that schoolchildren are taught about how Deep Throat brought down a President without being told why that was his codename. Then the Supreme Court changed the laws making it became easier to ban pornography. The wounded Golden Age was hit with the killing blow of the VCR, and the rest is history.

Then came the internet. This was the cover of Time three decades ago:

Has the explosion of porn on the internet been a good thing for society? I’m not going to even begin to address that. Because this article is not about pornography, nor is this about me launching my OnlyFans page (sorry if I got your hopes up!). This article is about one deal the internet made with us, and another one it’s offering us now. But first, a detour.

We discussed technology, let’s discuss law. We typically consider laws to be either malum prohibitum or malum in se. The latter are inherently wrong. Yes, we have a law to punish murder but even without one most would avoid it because it is evil. The former are those that are wrong because they are prohibited, for example, vice. Few people would consider pornography, prostitution, narcotics, or gambling as morally wrong as murder. We prohibit them because they harm society.

Many of you are bristling at me using words like “evil” or “morally” but this is where law comes from. Tension in law comes with determining what we should prohibit that we don’t need to. The obvious example is the decade long marijuana legalization slowly wafting over the country like a bong rip. Although I am no libertarian, I tend to take such a view on issues of criminal law. I respect if you disagree, but think the argument “people should be allowed to make their own choices as long as they don’t hurt others” is a sound one from a jurisprudential standpoint.

We discussed technology and law, let’s discuss culture. In any society, there exists shared values and norms. These are critical to society’s function. Let’s synthesize with the last part and think about this as a spectrum.

This is literally the WORST image ever created in all of human history. I spent so long trying to make something even remotely useful before giving up. I really suck at graphics.

All actions exist on a scale of societal acceptability. Categories 1 & 5 are where the law comes in. Category 1 are those things which are considered so good for society that it is mandatory you do them, such as paying taxes or sending your kids to school. Category 5 are those things considered so bad they are illegal, such as murder. Although these categories always fluctuate across both time and space, nothing moves between these, except perhaps Christianity.

Next is Category 3, the actions society just does not care whether you do or not. For example, my choice to spend my life engaging in self-torture as a Philadelphia Eagles fan. Although perhaps that should have been illegal.

If you can count you realize I left out two categories. These are where societal norms and values fill the gaps. Category 2 are those actions that are so good we praise you for engaging in them, such as charitable donations or giving blood, which get you a deduction and a cookie, respectively.

Most importantly is Category 4: that which we prohibit but not through law. It’s not illegal for you to refuse to tip your waiter1 but society will look down on you for not doing so. Without Categories 2 & 4, society struggles to function outside of totalitarianism.

The fluctuations we see in our lifetime typically fall between just a few categories. Smoking was once seen as if not beneficial, at least neutral. For most of my life it has been resolutely in Category 4. We won’t arrest you for being a smoker – yet – but people will look down on you.

The history of vice is a long back and forth between Categories 4 and 5. And in 2024 America, Category 4 is winning.

Back to technology. Why did the internet make porn consumption so prevalent? Let’s answer that by talking about the big bag of porn I used to have in my closet.

Let me be perfectly clear: I have never spent a single dollar on pornography in my entire life. But in college I had a friend who bought two pornographic DVDs. Although I was not present for that, this involved going into that “special” area of the video store that everyone my age or older knows of which I speak. An experience almost designed to amplify the shame of the activity. Thus began the bag. Later, his roommate would purchase – through the mail – a copy of a DVD known as Girls Gone Wild. For those unfamiliar, this was a truly shameful part of American history. And in what may be that company’s least disgusting illegality, they automatically enrolled him in a subscription service. A couple years later when my friends moved, they had a big trash bag full of porn and, although no one ever watched these, for reasons only early 20 something men could fathom, they were never thrown out. When my friend moved in with his parents I agreed to be the guardian. And thus, for the better part of a decade, I had a big bag of porn sitting in the back of my closet.

The internet instead delivered a product to you, instantaneously, usually free, and without any need for anyone else to know of your consumption.

Even if prostitution and drugs were legalized nationwide tomorrow, the internet would not supercharge them the way it did with viewing pornography. This is because of the extent of the experience that can be digitized.

There is an element of shame in buying pornography or consuming it in public. There is a shame in soliciting prostitution, but the world’s oldest profession long ago invented brothels and madams to work around that. Can the internet make that part easier? Sure, but that’s it. Which is even more than can be said for drugs. First, shame doesn’t have a big effect on addicts. Second, even recreational drugs do not suffer the same social opprobrium as the other vices. At this point, the only thing more conformist than smoking marijuana is consuming it in edible form. “Oh, you ate a pot cookie? That’s so cool. Please tell me about how I should vote for Nixon you square.” The shame of drug use is related not to procuring them, but to their effects. The internet can’t help with that.

And at the end of the day, the only part of the experience that can be digitized is the procurement. You cannot do drugs through your phone. You cannot bang your laptop.2 You can experience the entire pornography viewing experience through your internet. Although I guarantee there’s endless entrepreneurs with “Uber for Hookers” or “Uber for Coke” plans drawn up just waiting for legalization, all it would ever be is a delivery system. That’s not to knock delivery systems. That’s what Amazon was. But there’s a reason most other big internet success stories were those that could let you have the entire experience digitally. Netflix may have deeply wounded Blockbuster by sending DVDs through the mail, but it was when they started streaming that the killing blow was landed.

But I mentioned four big vices, so let’s discuss the fourth: gambling.3

For most of my life, if I wanted to gamble I had two choices: go to a casino or find some way to do it illegally. Either was an impediment. And although it was less shameful to go an underground card room (an experience I have had) than go to a peep show (an experience I have not had) it was more inconvenient.

Pornography just needed a technical advancement to make consuming it easier and, helpfully, secretive. And after thirty years of that benefit it’s still in Category 4, though less so.

Gambling was trapped in Category 5, but now one part is it is getting free and it has the benefit the same technological advances porn did. It can be done entirely digitally. It’s not a delivery service, it’s a substitute. A better one. You can sit on the toilet and put a few thousand dollars on the Pacers to cover the spread on any one of a dozen sports betting apps that I won’t mention by name because if I launch a podcast I want their advertising cash.

Here's the most important part: sports gambling has entirely skipped Category 4. People didn’t go from illegal to inconvenient to convenient. They went from illegal to “Scan this QR Code.” Sports broadcasts have always referenced gambling, typically subtly. For example, this:

Some of you probably still don’t understand what Al Michaels is referencing. Now, sports coverage is essentially gambling promotion. ESPN, the erstwhile World Wide Leader in Sports, has their own betting app.

Unsurprisingly, the combination of legalization, ease, and encouragement has seen sports gambling explode in popularity in the states where it is legal. How long until it spreads to all states? How long until the success of sports gambling leads to real money Blackjack on your phone? Or a legalization of online poker?

And many of you will say “good.” But this gets to the heart of this piece: the deal the internet made with us.

The internet made us a deal 30 years ago: it would give us all the pornography we could watch for however long and no one needed to know. Do you like how that deal turned out? Should society like how that deal turned out?

The internet is making us a new deal today: it will give us the ability to wager on sports whenever and wherever we like and no one needs to know. And this time we can anticipate how the deal is going to turn out. Do you like it? Should society?

This is one of those unsatisfying conclusions where I just say people need to talk about this more. I’ve made my opinion on the legal part clear in this article, and the opinion on the tech part clear through many. The trend of our society over the last century has been to narrow Categories 2 & 4. If it is not prohibited it is allowed. The fiction that society is just as benefited from someone who spends their evening volunteering at a soup kitchen as they are from someone who spends their evening masturbating to clown porn.4

We can say it should be legal to do something but you also shouldn’t do it. We can make that choice. Or we can choose not to, and we already have a pattern for what will happen. It’s a safe bet which choice we’ll make. Because if there’s one thing I know about gambling it’s the first lesson I was taught: the house always wins.

Technopoptimism

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