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But that's wrong. While there are lots of sex workers and sex industry participants who have an innate fascination with technology, there's no reason to think that being into sex is a predictor of being into tech. And yet, sex workers are the vanguard of every technological revolution. What gives?

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Well, think about the other groups that make up that vanguard - who else is an habitual early adopter? At least four other groups also take the lead on new tech: political radicals, kids, drug users, and terrorists. There's some overlap among members of these groups, but their most salient shared trait isn't personnel, it's *exclusion*.

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Kids, drug users, political radicals, sex workers and terrorists are all unwelcome in mainstream society. They struggle to use its money, its communications tools, and its media channels. Any attempt to do so comes at a high price: personal risk, plus a high likelihood that some or all of their interactions and transactions will be interdicted - their work seized and destroyed or blocked or deleted.

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Using a new technology comes at a cost. If it's 1979 and you're Walt Disney Pictures, you've got no reason to explore the VCR. The existing system works great for you - and it works great for your audience. You can always find a movie theater willing to show your movies, your audience is happy to be seen entering that cinema, and the bank gladly accepts ticket revenues as deposits.

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But if you're into smutty movies, none of that is true. Just mailing your 8mm films across state lines is risky - maybe it gets seized and incinerated, maybe a postal inspector shows up at your door with a search warrant. Most theaters won't show your movies, and most people don't want to be seen in the ones that will.

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Given all those structural barriers, it makes sense that the technophiles who also happen to be involved in the sex trade will get a hearing from their colleagues - unlike the traditional media execs whose endorsement of the VCR made them persona non grata within their companies. That is, technophilia is a deficit if you're doing something socially acceptable, and an asset if you're doing something that's socially disfavored.

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Which is why technophiles are leading figures among terrorists and kids and sex workers and drug users and political radicals. The kids who left Facebook for Instagram weren't looking for the Next Big Thing; they were looking for a social media service that their parents and teachers didn't use.

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The kids who were technophiles discovered Instagram and the others followed their lead. They endured the hassle of learning a new service and re-establishing social connections, because that hassle was less than the hassle of staying on Facebook, subject to scrutiny by the adult authorities in your life.

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One corollary of this phenomenon is that technophile circles have disproportionate numbers of socially disfavored people. If you're a normie who just likes new tech, the services and systems you seek out will have higher-than-baseline numbers of people into sex, as well as radicals, kids, druggies and terrorists.

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Another corollary of this phenomenon is that the founders of new technologies will always start out by courting these marginal groups - they are the vanguard, after all - and then, eventually, turn on them.

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Sex workers know this story well. Sex workers' content and transactions turned companies from Tumblr to Instagram, Paypal to Twitch into multi-billion-dollar enterprises, whereupon these companies turned on sex workers and kicked them off the platform, seizing their money and destroying their creative work in the process.

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No one knows this story better than Susie Bright, a pioneering sex-positive, high-tech feminist author, critic, educator and performer. Bright helped found the seminal lesbian magazine *On Our Backs*, practically invented serious film criticism for pornographic videos, edited many classic erotic books, and has used the courts to win justice for many sex-positive causes.

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Bright is also a technophile. I met her on The WELL, an early online service, in the early 1990s. She was already a desktop publishing pioneer by then (*On Our Backs* was the first magazine to be laid out in Pagemaker). Since then, Bright has been at the forefront of every technological development and human rights struggle for sex workers.

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Earlier this spring, Bright and colleagues presented a lecture series called "Radical Desire: Making *On Our Backs* Magazine" for Cornell Library:

https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/radicaldesire/events.php

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As it does with other open access educational material, Cornell uploaded these lectures - presented by fully clothed lecturers - to Youtube. In response, Youtube *deleted Cornell Library's entire channel* - all of it: "lectures on higher mathematics and plate tectonics, fashion design and human ecology, Classical Greek and MBA best practices."

https://susiebright.substack.com/p/terminated

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This is par for the course: Facebook banned Bright simply for posting an announcement of the upcoming lecture series.

As Bright notes, "this banning/terminating/deleting troll crap has been going on since I first got my modem in 1986." She says that tech companies are vulnerable to blue-nosed prudes who seek out sex-positive material and mass-report it to hosting companies and other intermediaries.

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Bright doesn't take this lying down (ahem): she's litigated questions of sex-positivity in the public sphere all the way to the Supreme Court.

Despite having been kicked off of "Apple, Amazon, FB, Twitter, Microsoft, AOL," at one time or another, Bright still has a big platform, and she used it to get Cornell Library's Youtube channel reinstated.

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But Bright's story is instructive to consider in this moment. When we allow a small number of companies to dominate our digital lives, their choices about who is allowed to speak takes on outsized importance. Their bad choices affect millions or even billions of users.

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What's more, people who blithely insist that Youtube's lack of pornography is proof that other platforms could remove other sorts of "bad content" - harassment, conspiratorialism, etc - fail to appreciate that sex workers and other margnizalized users are the dolphins in content-moderation's tuna nets.

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The reason Youtube is porn-free is because it's willing to tolerate accidentally removing an Ivy League university's entire public archive of academic materials as acceptable collateral damage in the sex wars.

Now, as Bright's story shows, it's possible for public pressure to change the content moderation policies of big companies, but this is unreliable.

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