Pussy Capital

The four years I worked as a sex worker in San Francisco were a very practical lesson in the mechanics of modern techno-capitalism, or whatever this is. During my time in the Bay Area in the 2010s, I learned how tech companies treat images of “hot girls” as a natural resource to be mined. Social media platforms exploited images of me and my fellow workers for profit as soon as we began posting them. They used our images to draw attention to the screen, fuel addictive algorithms, and sell advertising. Now, with the advent of neural networks, our images are mined and then exploited to create artificial “hot girls,” eliminating the algorithm’s need for actual humans. The AI business model dissociates the profit-making engine from the people who create the intellectual property that fuels it.

I first began moonlighting as a sex worker during the evenings, after I got home from my job at a start-up based in the rapidly gentrifying Mission District. Tired of the misogyny of the purportedly meritocratic tech industry, where by day I assisted Big Tech in stripping and selling data from the users of our products, I felt the urge to earn my money from more honest labor: selling sex. I posted a profile on Seeking Arrangements, and over the next week I received more than fifty messages from potential “sugar daddies.”

Seeking Arrangements makes its money by charging sugar daddy members for the ability to send messages, essentially selling access to attractive, usually younger, and predominantly female “sugar babies.” The site is an extension of the gig economy; much like Uber and Fiverr, it profits from the manual labor of a vulnerable population. While I was able to make good money during my time on Seeking Arrangements, it bothered me that the site demanded that I masquerade as a naive young woman who wasn’t doing this as a job, who wasn’t a prostitute, but just wanted to be spoiled by a wealthy older gentleman. I wanted to own my erotic labor, not pretend that what I was doing was anything else.

This desire for a clearly delineated transaction, a straightforward exchange of sex for cash, led me to Eros.com, where in 2014 escorts could list their hourly rates directly in their advertisements without having to play at being a broke college coeds. The financial model of Eros suited me better. The sex workers themselves paid to post there, as opposed to sugar daddies paying for membership. This meant the site had an incentive to keep us, the workers, happy, instead of encouraging delusional behavior from our clientele; I was looking forward to avoiding men who insisted they were entitled to condomless sex to see if we were “compatible.”

Eros wasn’t the only place I advertised. In 2015, the idea of a “personal brand” was becoming popular among the advertising agencies my yuppie friends were founding. At the time, most escorts chose to hide their faces and obscure their personalities, but I decided my escort persona should become an internet personality to increase my exposure to potential clients. I created a website where I advertised my services and wrote sexy copy full of double entendres. I had an Instagram and a Twitter where I posted about a fictional day-to-day life filled with macarons, shopping, and plenty of cute selfies.

Eventually these selfies started going viral. One day, my website crashed due to an unexpected surge of traffic. I traced the source back to a Reddit thread where people discussed my selfies and my escort advertising. I catered to my booming audience on Reddit by sharing more risqué selfies and chatting bubbily about my video game and comic book collections. The bookings started rolling in and soon I was making twenty to fifty thousand dollars a month.

There was something strange about the way Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit operated. While they generally ban overt sexual content or advertising oneself as a sex worker, many of the wildly popular accounts belonged to those who were posting content that was decidedly erotic. Social media sites like Instagram, I would later learn, derive much of their profit from these accounts selling their own form of sex: images that elicit sexual responses.

McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto, published in 2004, ten years before I started doing sex work, discussed the then newly emerging mechanisms of extraction that now dominate our economy. Wark reminds the reader that in Marx’s time there were not only capitalist and working classes, but also landlords and peasants. There have always been more than two classes. She then introduces a new dimension to class struggle: the hacker and the vectoralist. The vectoralist makes their money not from exploiting labor with machines, as a capitalist might, but by exploiting data, viewing freely available information as a natural resource to be mined and exploited.

Bodies can be made valuable as commodities, and attractive bodies are valuable in that they can entice. Old-school capitalists exploit the bodies of attractive women in advertising campaigns, adorning the products they sell for profit with a veneer of sex. By associating a beautiful face with cosmetics, apparel, or even food, the company that sells these products can increase its profits dramatically. The vectoralist also excels at exploiting beautiful images of people. Look at Instagram: attractive models post attention-grabbing photos at no cost to the platform, generating $20 billion in profit in 2019—and that’s before the pandemic.1 Those with exceptionally beautiful bodies and faces, by conventional Eurocentric standards, can make a great deal of money off of the use of their image.

Instagram rarely compensates users for the content they generate. Brands do, sending complimentary samples, booking luxury trips, and shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for a few posts on the feed. Instagram, realizing the value of a pretty face, began creating filters that allowed people to algorithmically perfect their appearance, smoothing wrinkles, erasing pores, lightening their skin, plumping lips, and altering their facial features to conform with Eurocentric beauty standards. Users who altered their faces quickly realized these altered photos received significantly higher engagement, giving them a quick dopamine hit and more potential revenue.

While I initially intended to pursue the honest, direct labor of in-person sex work, the fans who found me on social media were demanding a new form of labor: the production of content. They wanted porn. Around 2016, seeing an opportunity for an income that was less reliant on the whims of my wealthy clientele, I decided to diversify. I launched a new website. I sold access to pornography I shot with my friends. Soon I was making fifteen thousand dollars a month from porn alone.

The porn also served as advertisement for my escorting services, which soon became even more popular. Clients admitted to me that they felt like they were meeting a celebrity. My Instagram blew up. On days when I had acne I relied on filters to give the illusion of clear skin. Soon, the image filters became so good that I didn’t ever need to apply makeup, and eventually, they worked on videos as well. Of course, I couldn’t help but notice that these altered selfies were the ones that performed the best.

As sex workers rose to prominence on social media, sex work became more palatable to the general population. When I told strangers about my porn, the responses began shifting from judgment to excitement: Wow, cool! As stigma decreased, more women went public about their participation in the industry.2 In the US, right-wing Christian fundamentalists, sensing a threat to “family values,” began cracking down, lobbying for bills that would require online platforms to ban anyone advertising sexual services. Because sex workers were already largely prohibited from explicitly advertising their services, this meant that nearly all sexual content was subject to censorship.

These right-wing fundamentalists also explored extrajudicial methods of limiting sexual expression online. The distribution of pornography is currently protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution, thanks to legal precedents set by provocateurs like Grove Press in 1964 and Robert Mapplethorpe in 1990. However, banks are legally permitted to discriminate against their clientele: after a public pressure campaign from an unholy coalition of Christian evangelicals and “radical feminists” who thought porn undermined women’s rights, Visa and Mastercard pulled support from a number of platforms that sex workers used to advertise their services and take payment, including Pornhub, Slixa, and Eros.

In 2018, the “Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act” (nicknamed “FOSTA”), a bill that criminalizes any websites hosting advertisements for sex workers, passed Congress with massive bipartisan support. The bill was ostensibly created to protect victims of child sex trafficking, but instead the language focused on consenting adults. My sex worker friends and I were terrified that we’d be out of work, but the demand for sex work and for erotic content is so strong that platforms can’t get rid of us without decimating their revenue streams. While sex workers were largely shadow banned, we were not banned entirely, just required to obfuscate the exact nature of our work if we still wanted a piece of the attention economy.

The Covid-19 pandemic destroyed the income of workers who plied their trade in person, but it proved a boon for sex workers who operated online. The pandemic occurred only shortly after OnlyFans, launched in 2016, became popular with sex workers in 2019. OnlyFans, unlike many other platforms for sex workers, mimicked the functionality of a social media site, but unlike most social media sites, instead of profiting from the surveillance of its users and sale of their data, OnlyFans’s revenue comes from the sale of monthly subscriptions, which largely provide access to erotic content.

OnlyFans finally made it possible for “hot girls” with large Instagram, Twitter, or Reddit followings to charge these fans directly; some of the top users were reportedly earning upwards of a million dollars a month.3 This did not reflect the reality of many of those who joined the platform, however; at one point, accounts only needed to earn five hundred dollars a month to make it to the top five percent of earners. I joined OnlyFans a few months into the pandemic and was soon making upwards of thirty thousand a month. People worldwide were devoid of human contact, locked inside their apartments, and flush with cash from pandemic stimulus payments. Paying a few hundred dollars to stave off loneliness with a subscription to a hot girl online who was eager to chat and ask about your day felt like a very reasonable proposition.

Some sex workers were earning so much money it became commonplace for top porn stars to hire an assistant, or assistants; all they had to do was take sexy selfies and record erotic videos, and the assistant would handle the labor of chatting with the horny clients. For many, this was a way to both increase the number of people they were able to chat with and preserve their mental health. The direct access that clients had via OnlyFans was in many ways unprecedented, and while most were respectful, many were not. This delegation of erotic labor turned many sex workers into both workers and capitalists themselves, exploiting both their own bodies and the labor of their assistants.

After the pandemic, OnlyFans’s revenue cooled a bit, but it was still possible to earn good money being a hot girl online. As more and more figured out the formula for altering their photos with filters before posting online, the market quickly flooded with hot girls selling photos and videos to horny men. Catfishing was a perennial issue, with certain scammers stealing the photos of Instagram influencers and passing them off as themselves. But by and large, the ease of using Google image search to check if the photos belonged to someone else ensured that it was not too difficult to ascertain whether you were talking to someone who actually existed.

This quickly shifted with the advent of neural nets. As soon as AI models were able to generate images that could pass as attractive humans, people began creating OnlyFans accounts for artificially generated hot girls. OnlyFans creators also realized that they no longer needed to generate new content themselves. All they had to do was attach their face to AI-generated selfies and videos. Suddenly, everyone was pointing fingers at content and calling it fake. Someone posted an old photo of mine on 4chan and accused me of being fake. Debate ensued about whether I was real. I was only exonerated after someone dug up my Instagram and saw that I had old posts which dated from 2016, before it was possible to create such realistic fakes with AI.

Anna Uddenberg, Journey of Self Discovery, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler.

AI can replicate conversation as well as images. During the pandemic, I began getting ads for Replika, an app that promised a convincing performance of a girlfriend. When you feel like you have no one to talk to—meet your new AI girlfriend. I was intrigued. While Replika was still a relatively rudimentary chat bot, it had integrated some of the more sophisticated elements of contemporary Large Language Models. It could remember your stories, your preferences. Most importantly, it could sext. Like OnlyFans, Replika charged a monthly fee for chatting.

Even in-person sex work has been affected by the advent of new forms of AI. I stopped escorting to focus on my writing, but sometime last year I noticed a strange uptick in emails from old clients wondering if I was available for a booking. Curious, I reached out to a few former colleagues and heard that Eros and other escorting websites were being flooded with advertisements for AI-generated hot girls. For better or for worse, my identity is concretely established as real, something that is now worth a premium in the sex work economy.

The debate online quickly centered on whether anyone would still want to hire a real sex worker when they could just chat with an algorithmically perfected, artificially generated sex bot tweaked to their preferences. Much like the demand for organic food, I believe there will always be a desire for authenticity in sex work. What struck me as more insidious was the way in which the images of real sex workers were being exploited by these AI companies for profit.

The vectoralist class views freely available data as a natural resource to be mined and exploited. This is exemplified by the aggressive “move fast, break things” approach of AI companies, which scrape the net for every bit of content they can get their hands on to feed into the minds of these increasingly complex neural nets. Selfies, pornographic videos, confessional blog posts, Nazi propaganda, Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto, conspiracy-theory YouTube videos, dissertations, whole books, the entire discography of Ke$ha—all muddled, merged, stewed, percolating on a server somewhere. On the one hand, it’s easy to see the appeal of this, to want to know what something fed a nearly complete knowledge of human output on the web will spit back out at us. But it’s also a massive violation of intellectual property and privacy rights.

My own selfies are a part of the vast stores of data these neural nets are trained on, which I learned after a friend working on an early AI generator plugged my name in as a prompt and a ghostly version of my face surfaced. I’ve worked hard to retain the rights to my image, by, for instance, refusing to work with certain famous photographers (most notably Richard Prince) after being pressured to sign my rights away. Knowing now that my image is being exploited to generate profit for a tech corporation backed by billions in VC funding is infuriating.

Sex work is often at the avant-garde of new technologies, from VHS to the internet, and the present moment appears to be no exception. By mining these images of what they consider to be attractive people and using them as fuel for social media algorithms, vectoralists have fully severed the connection between the human laborers who grease the wheels of commerce and the value they produce. There are already hundreds of AI-generated influencers on Instagram alone.

Some of these influencers are created by Instagram, who reportedly paid five million dollars to license the faces and “personalities” of certain celebrities.4 Billie, a chatbot who takes the appearance of Kendall Jenner, posts inane AI-generated images of coffee, cats, flowers, and music festivals. Users were once able to chat directly with Billie, but that functionality is currently turned off.

Young Boy Dancing Group. 2019. BOFFO Fire Island Performance Festival. Photo: Nir Arieli.

Other AI-generated influencers are made independently. Ruben Cruz runs the Instagram account “Aitana Lopez,” which features an AI-generated woman who is supposedly twenty-five and a Scorpio. Aitana has almost twice as many followers as Billie; unlike Billie, Aitana’s photos are all sexy selfies. A few AI-generated influencers advertise brands like Nike and Starbucks, although whether these posts were paid remains unclear. Cruz complained to Euronews that he was tired of working with human influencers “who have egos, who have manias, or who just want to make a lot of money by posing.”5 Heaven forbid workers aspire to earn money doing their job. AI influencers, being inanimate, have the benefit of lacking an ego altogether, thus serving as pliable clay that corporations can mold into any form they desire.

Indeed, humanity is an undesirable trait in workers. Constant productivity and consistency are held in the highest esteem, qualities that are often associated with automated mechanical systems. With systems of surveillance that grow more effective year over year, capitalists are more aware than ever of the shortcomings of their human employees. AI is seemingly a perfect solution: Why rely on an inherently flawed human when you can press a button and receive instantaneous results, no messy human emotions or demands involved?

Despite the capitalist’s plastic fantasy of an egoless, servile, robotic, corporate drone, consumers chafe at the unreality of these systems. The comment sections of AI-generated art accounts on Instagram are flooded with complaints. On 4chan and Reddit, users compare notes about which e-girls are real. My inbox is full of emails from former clients asking if I’m available, although I’ve been retired for years. It’s hard to tell which ads are fake these days, they complain. When are you back in New York? Much like the desire for pasture-raised chicken, demand for a more realistic fantasy of sex has yet to die.