Editor’s note: This story is the latest edition of Link Rot, a new column by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that explores the intersections of art, technology, and the internet.
Now that I’ve captured your attention, please buy my book. Or my skin cream. Or my slime.
Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but most experiences on the internet resolve like this: into a sales pitch. Then you scroll to the next video or click to the next post, and it happens again. When designer and digital researcher Mindy Seu finished her performance lecture A Sexual History of the Internet last month at New York’s Performance Space, I felt that I had that experience in public instead of in the private, intimate dynamic I usually have with my social media feed.
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Seu’s lecture is described in the promotional copy as a gathering of “anecdotes, artworks, and historical artifacts that reveal the pervasive and perverted origins of our digital tools.” Like Seu’s last performance lecture tour on the Cyberfeminism Index, this show is quite popular. All events thus far have sold out. It heads to the Kunstverein in Hamburg and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo next.
Here’s how it went down for me: The audience mingled at the bar until we were told to take our seats—I spotted an influencer who parodies overly affected elite cultural actors on what looked like a bad date. Then we shuffled into a large room, dimly lit with about fifty chairs scattered about. My friend and I were scrambling to find seats together when Seu entered holding a microphone and began to give us instructions. We had to take out our phones, turn up the brightness and the sound, turn on the “Do Not Disturb” function, and open Instagram. As neither my friend nor I had the app, I downloaded it quickly, all the while wondering how long it would take me to delete it again. Audience members were encouraged to raise their hands and ask for help if they were experiencing technical difficulties—and several did. Once on Instagram, we were told to find the “finsta” @asexualhistoryoftheinternet.
“I’m going to count down to ten, and when I say click—not ten—click on the first highlighted story,” Seu said to the audience. Like a conductor, she synced the orchestra of her audience to the time of her baton.
For the next forty minutes, the “stories” automatically played. Each one contained a portion of her script. When the story had white text on black backgrounds, she read. Occasionally, a green, red, blue, cyan, or magenta background would appear. That was a cue for members assigned to that color by their birth month to read the text. A scattered chorus of voices rose up in response to their color displaying, in sound, the microsecond differences in when we clicked the first story. Text was interrupted with the occasional vibration, videos of performances, archival materials or interviews, and images.
Seu read from her phone as she wandered around the room. She told us that this Instagram-Stories-as-lecture format is credited to Julio Correa, who taught Seu’s class on Lecture Performance at the Yale School of Art. Story by story we were told how sex has shaped many of the infrastructures and customs of the internet, from the invention of teledildonics—networked electronic sex toys—to the testing of what we now refer to as JPEGs on a Playboy centerfold of Lena Sjööblom in 1972.
Attendees of A Sexual History of the Internet hold out their phones as part of the performance.
Max Lakner
“Alexander Sawchuk and his team at University of Southern California Signal and Image Processing Institute used her image to test their latest compression algorithm. It became the industry standard, reanalyzed billions of times, and this stolen image developed what we now know as the JPEG,” Seu read.
That the JPEG is built on a moment of theft is a crystallization of the general theme. In all sexual relations hovers the specter of money: what does it mean to get it for “free,” what does it mean to pay for it? Similarly, the internet is ruled by questions of what should be free and what we should pay for. On the one hand, the copynorms of the internet have normalized the unobstructed circulation of images and text under the founding dogma that “information wants to be free.” While this has been an obvious boon to society in many ways, the normalization of free circulation has often been abused, most recently by the developers of AI platforms. Many such image or video generator programs were trained on the LAION dataset, a collection of 5.6 billion images scraped primarily from public websites.
On the flip side of this free-stolen circulation is a parallel history of using the internet to sell things. At one point, a video of the sex worker Carol Leigh appeared on the screen and said, “As sex workers, we understood intuitively from the beginning of social media—maybe even from the beginning of the internet—that the reason to be online is to sell something.”
Perhaps it is no surprise that Seu’s performance ended with a sales pitch. She told us that she had just dommed us, that we had been obeying her every instruction, that during the performance photographers had been taking our pictures and they were uploading them to Instagram, and that by the way, the performance could be purchased as a book. Seu explained that if the books sold out, each person cited within the book would receive $850 as compensation for their contribution. Seu also designed, in collaboration with Metalabel, CitationalSplits, a tool which automatically distributes royalties to cited authors in the event of reprints (they don’t share how exactly this tool functions). This narrative of financial experimentation is plastered all over the book: “When you buy this book, profit will be redistributed to every person cited within—a new model of attribution.”
When skimming through the pages of the book, however, one finds other beneficiaries are named: 30 percent of the proceeds go to the cited authors and artists, 10 percent to Metalabel, and 60 percent to Seu and the team that made the work. The typical deal is a 90/10 split, with 90 going to the publishing house and 10 to the author. Considering there are five other people listed on the design team, Seu is still ending up with just a bit more than 10 percent of the profits.
The self-publishing arrangement introduces a unique proposition: in order to get the cited authors paid, Seu has to act like any other influencer trying to make a buck. The selling of the work is no longer removed from the artist and handed off to dealers and publicists used to getting their hands dirty. Seu and her art cannot pretend to being above the transaction. The difference is that instead of capturing attention online, she captures a live audience. It’s an interesting move, conceptually speaking… or maybe it’s just business?
Not long after the performance ended, the specifics of what I’d learned began to fade. What lingered instead was the feeling of being sold to. Perhaps that’s an unfair reaction. In 2021, at the height of the NFT boom, Seu might have sold these Instagram stories as digital assets. With that era now behind us, she has to objectify her work in other ways: as experience (the lecture) or as object (the book), both of which can be sold to many people at a lower price. That process requires exposing more people to the kinds of transactions necessary to keep her practice—and by extension, the art infrastructure—solvent.
It’s in that invitation to transact that art becomes merch. Whether it’s sex or art, we’ve designed systems that help us ignore the financial mechanisms at play. But sidestepping where the money comes from is at central to the ethical complaint concerning capitalism. The decentralized, peer-to-peer model of selling seems to be the best alternative. It’s just sort of unpleasant. But I guess it’s something we should get used to.
