Downstream: Porn Addiction Defines Our Political Age. Here’s How w/ Ash Sarkar

Ash Sarkar (0:07)

I bet you didn't think about this during your last wank. Porn is now a commodity that people expect to get for free, and yet it generates more than $90 billion every year.

How on earth does that work as a business model? Well, luckily this week on Downstream, we've got someone here to tell us. I'm joined by investigative journalist and reporter for the Financial Times, Patricia Nilsson. Her new book, Guilty Pleasure, is a forensic examination of the industry, which at peak times, commands a tenth of global internet traffic. And what she finds isn't a shadowy underworld of grubby studios and back alleys. Instead, what she explores is how payment processors and nerdy software engineers displace the likes of Hugh Hefner and Larry Flint as industry power brokers. We train algorithms with our most private desires, and in turn, they train us helping shape our behavior in the bedroom. Anyway, I hope you're ready for some interracial girl on girl action. And I hate myself just for saying that.

So I was expecting a very titillating book, and what I got was something about financing JP Morgan, mergers and takeovers. Where's my porn?

Patricia Nilsson (1:33)

Well, I'm sorry about that.

Yeah, but I think that's the history that a lot of people don't know. I mean, a lot of people think about the porn industry, and we still think about sort of like Boogie Nights and Playboy, and Hugh Hefner, and this type of traditional porn industry. But that doesn't really exist anymore. And I mean, I learned this a couple of years ago. So I first jumped down the rabbit hole. That sort of became guilty pleasure a couple of years ago when I was sat at my desk at the Financial Times here in London. And I just started thinking about porn. And I just started wondering, why is there so much porn on the Internet? Why is the online world saturated with these videos of people paid to have sex? And if they're free to watch, then how is anyone actually making money from this industry? And so that's how I started learning about this crazy story of how basically the porn industry was taken over by these nerds, by techies, by pirates who were stealing content about two decades ago. And a lot of people in the traditional porn industry are still fighting against the business model of free porn and tube sites. So, tube sites like porn hub, where you're just watching free content, and anyone can basically upload anything.

And that's how I learned that it wasn't at all random that it became like this, because this business model was helped by some of the biggest institutional investors on Wall Street, who really worked to cement it as the way that sexual culture is created and disseminated today.

Ash Sarkar (3:29)

I mean, so before we get into the present day, one of the things that you look at is what the porn industry was like. And during the so-called golden age of porn, where you had these kind of blockbuster hits, so Deep Throat, which I think is the most famous, it wasn't just that these were popular films, it was also something that the high and mighty and the legitimate world of celebrity wanted to be associated with. So what was that golden age of porn like? And what was driving it socially?

Patricia Nilsson (4:02)

Well, it came at this moment of the sexual revolution, which was very much driven by US culture and US consumerist culture in many ways. But you had this sexual revolution and the politics changing around that. And that was the creation of Silicon Valley in LA, so the other, not that Silicon Valley, the slightly smaller one, also named after Silicon's other use case.

And you started seeing the production of pornographic film large scale at this moment. But you had, one of the first pornographic films that was shown and became mainstream was a film by Andy Warhol called Blue Movie. So there was definitely this moment when sex and pornography was seen as something transgressive. And it was cool to be seen as sort of, to be sexually liberated in that way. And so then you had the golden era of pornography production, which was very much dominated by US studios, although you had European studios as well, like Japan had its own scene. And then in the 80s, you started seeing one sort of conservative backlash, the Reagan era, but you also saw a very successful backlash from feminists who were increasingly arguing that pornography was inherently misogynist, and we didn't want to have this kind of portrayal, these kind of portrayals of sex and sexualization of women in such a space.