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Subject: <nettime> Trouble In Pornutopia
From: Gerard Van der Leun <gerard.vanderleun@generalmedia.com>
Date: 30 Apr 1998 21:53:13 +0200

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Trouble in Pornutopia


If you wanted even more proof that nothing makes a
situation worse than Congress' meddling, you don't have
to look much further than the boomtown of Pornutopia on
the World Wide Web.

Pornutopia is everywhere on the Web these days.
Pornutopia erupts in the Usenet newsgroups built
with endless promises and links and "free" image
files of everything from Kate Moss' left nipple to
"Goldicocks and the Three Bares."

Pornutopia surges in tsunamis of bandwidth and
rolls over huge amounts of paid corporate "research" time
from coast to coast. Stock market analysts browsing for
"Barely Legal Teens" may well miss the essential data that
tells them a stock-market crash is about to happen.

Pornutopia erupts into email in the form of poorly
Photoshopped attached images of genuine movie stars
involved in various sexual acts. (I don't know about you
but I wouldn't want an image of Meg Ryan in the shadow
of a penis just popping up on my home email viewer.)

Since the defeat of the ill-conceived Computer
Decency Act before the Supreme Court last summer,
Pornutopia has developed faster than a scalded goat. Yup,
the gold rush is on in Pornutopia as every wannabe
pornographer in the world slaps up a Web site fed with
streams of Asian and Swedish and San Fernando Valley
porn. Graphic, organized into categories, and the one
burning reason for middle managers locked in their offices
around the globe to badger the company coffers for faster
and faster Internet connections. ("Dammit, tell those trolls
in accounting that I need to seeing streaming videos of
Debby Doing Dallas and Suburbs right now! I don't care
how much it costs, just get it done!")

But like every boomtown, Pornutopia is now
heading for a bust, and not one that is surgically enhanced,
but one whose title is Chapter 11. You see, the great thing
about sex on the Net is that it sells (Big surprise, right?).
In any new medium, one of the first successful areas of
calls. But the bad thing is that sex in a new medium
initially sells so well that it sucks in the amateurs as well as
the pros in large numbers. And, like anything else, the
market for sex on the Web is only so big. If you have a
million customers and a hundred sites, you've got a
thriving retail industry. But if you have a million
customers and a hundred thousand sites, many sites are
slated for going out of business sales.

For thousands of mom -and-pop pornographers
throughout cyberspace, going out of business is now just a
matter of time. What once looked like springtime for porn
on the Net has become, through the very nature of the Net,
a boneyard of boners. Any casual consumer of porn these
days can see the signs. One site promises free pictures and
suddenly, to compete, all the sites offer free pictures. Then
the middlemen climb aboard and offer pages of hot links
that advertise the benefits of hundreds of sites all with free
pictures of week, the day, the hour and, currently, the
moment. This of course is not enough for the rather finite,
jaded and easily bored pornhounds of cyberspace. Soon
there has to be the promise of more e and more bizarre
images and film clips -- snakes, horses, amputees, the
same 24 inch silicon penis that had 200,000 miles on it the
time Marilyn Chambers retired -- anything to entice and
excite, yet again, those for whom a day without a dildo
shot is a day without sunshine.

The result is that Pornutopia is less and less like an
elegant bordello where all desires are catered to and all
obsessions satisfied, and more and more like a cheap
carnival freak show or a small town dirty book store in the
strip mall right down by the bus station just across from
the trailer park. Not that there's anything wrong with this,
but when you get a whole cybercity made of this stuff,
virtual real estate values tumble.

And so they have. The endless proliferation of
small time porn palaces has resulted in a price war. What
started six months ago as a standard price of around $15-
$20 a month for "membership" has now tumbled to $3.95
for "multiple memberships." In addition, the endless
networking of banners and blinking images and animated
gifs of above-average blow jobs by the well-endowed of
both sexes has gotten so out of hand that, in search of just
one free image, the hapless porn hound can watch window
beget window beget window in a seemingly endless circle
-jerk of titillation until one forgets not only where one is
but where one came from and watches helplessly as the
computer wheezes to a halt and crashes into the ground yet
again. This is an utter and excruciating bore at
InfoHighway cruising speeds of T1, and must make the
hapless browser using his or her new 56K modem from a
home connection want to empty a full clip into the
computer.

The Net result of all these desperate efforts to corral
and manipulate those in quest of sex on the Net will be a
vast die-off of the less well-funded and focused of the sites
as, at last, even the most optimistic among the amateur
pornveyors discover that although sex does sell, too much
cheap sex is just another way of enriching companies like
Netscape, Cisco, Intel and Microsoft while beggaring
themselves. Once the die-off is well underway, the current
rosy predictions for the Web as the way-new medium for
making money will suffer yet another setback as august
journals such as the New York Times and the Wall Street
Journal emit baffled articles about how not even sex sells
on the World Wide Web. They'll be wrong, of course, and
will miss the fact that sex, well done and with a flair for
what is erotic rather than merely base, will always sell.

The death of sex on the Net will occur not because of sex
itself, but because too many monkeys at too many
keyboards uploaded too many images that were, in the
final analysis, always the same. If the pornhounds of
cyberspace wanted a Pornutopia that was always the same,
they'd just logoff and go sleep with their wives and
girlfriends. Which maybe isn't such a bad idea in the first
place.
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