In Indie Porn, Zahra Stardust examines the motivations and interventions of independent porn producers as they navigate criminal laws, risk-averse platforms, discriminatory algorithms, and rampant piracy. Herself a porn performer and participant, Stardust takes readers behind the scenes, offering intimate insights into this sociopolitical movement. She finds politicians who watch porn in parliament, protesters leading face-sitting demonstrations, sex workers making COVID-safe pornography, and artists reverse-engineering porn detection software. Against the backdrop of a global gig economy, Stardust documents the promises of indie porn to democratize content, revolutionize production, and redistribute wealth while outlining the fantasies of regulators, whose illusions of what porn is and does foreclose possibilities for transformation. Inevitably, as these paradigms collide, porn producers engage in creative tactics to hustle for survival and visibility, from ethical certification to law reform, sometimes reproducing hierarchies of stigma themselves. By highlighting how porn stigma is bound up with intersecting oppressions, Stardust identifies these junctions as coalitional opportunities for changing social relationships to sex, work, and capitalism.

The business of pornography is a surprisingly elusive subject, and debates on the subject can cause emotions to run high. Tarrant answers the most-asked questions about the performers, the viewers, the dangers and the economic impact of the porn industry. She sorts myths from reality, and the result allows readers to explore these provocative issues and make their own decisions.

Netporn delves into the aesthetics and politics of sexuality in the era of do-it-yourself (DIY) Internet pornography. Katrien Jacobs, drawing on digital media theory and interviews with Web porn producers and consumers, offers an unprecedented critical analysis of Web culture as digital artistry and of the corresponding heightened government surveillance and censorship of the Internet. Netporn features Web users who question the goals of global commercial porn industries-whether they are engaged in Usenet fringes, video blogging, peer-to-peer distribution, porn art collectives, or decadent amateurism. Emphasizing gender and cultural differences, Jacobs shows how the creative uses of netporn images and services are important ways of exploring or redefining the 'network body' and indispensable ingredients of a maturing network society.

xxxxx proposes a radical, new space for artistic exploration, with essential contributions from a diverse range of artists, theorists, and scientists. Combining intense background material, code listings, screenshots, new translation, [the] xxxxx [reader] functions as both guide and manifesto for a thought movement which is radically opposed to entropic contemporary economies. xxxxx traces a clear line across eccentric and wide ranging texts under the rubric of life coding which can well be contrasted with the death drive of cynical economy with roots in rationalism and enlightenment thought. Such philosophy, world as machine, informs its own deadly flipside embedded within language and technology. xxxxx totally unpicks this hiroshimic engraving, offering an dandyish alternative by way of deep examination of software and substance. Life coding is primarily active, subsuming deprecated psychogeography in favour of acute wonderland technology, wary of any assumed transparency. Texts such as Endonomadology, a text from celebrated biochemist and chaos theory pioneer Otto E. Roessler, who features heavily throughout this intense volume, make plain the sadistic nature and active legacy of rationalist thought. At the same time, through the science of endophysics, a physics from the inside elaborated here, a delicate theory of the world as interface is proposed. xxxxx is very much concerned with the joyful elaboration of a new real; software-led propositions which are active and constructive in eviscerating contemporary economic culture. xxxxx embeds Perl Routines to Manipulate London, by way of software artist and Mongrel Graham Harwood, a Universal Dovetailer in the Lisp language from AI researcher Bruno Marchal rewriting the universe as code, and self explanatory Pornographic Coding from plagiarist and author Stewart Home and code art guru Florian Cramer. Software is treated as magical, electromystical, contrasting with the tedious GUI desktop applications and user-led drudgery expressed within a vast ghost-authored literature which merely serves to rehearse again and again the demands of industry and economy. Key texts, which well explain the magic and sheer art of programming for the absolute beginner are published here. Software subjugation is made plain within the very title of media theorist Friedrich Kittler's essay Protected Mode, published in this volume. Media, technology and destruction are further elaborated across this work in texts such as War.pl, Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second World War, again from Kittler, and Simon Ford's elegant take on J.G Ballard's crashed cars exhibition of 1970, A Psychopathic Hymn. Software and its expansion stand in obvious relation to language. Attacking transparency means examining the prison cell or virus of language; life coding as William Burrough's cutup. And perhaps the most substantial and thorough-going examination is put forward by daring Vienna actionist Oswald Wiener in his Notes on the Concept of the Bio-adapter which has been thankfully unearthed here. Equally, Olga Goriunova's extensive examination of a new Russian literary trend, the online male literature of udaff.com provides both a reexamination of culture and language, and an example of the diversity of xxxxx; a diversity well reflected in background texts ranging across subjects such as Leibniz' monadology, the ur-crash of supreme flaneur Thomas de Quincey and several rewritings of the forensic model of Jack the Ripper thanks to Stewart Home and Martin Howse. xxxxx liberates software from the machinic, and questions the transparency of language, proposing a new world view, a sheer electromysticism which is well explained with reference to the works of Thomas Pynchon in Friedrich Kittler's essay, translated for the first time into English, which closes xxxxx. Further contributors include Hal Abelson, Leif Elggren, Jonathan Kemp, Aymeric Mansoux, and socialfiction.org.

After the “digital turn,” expansion of sexual representations has taken shape quantitatively(thanks to the multiplication of production and distribution channels) and qualitatively (giving riseto a plurality of new representational forms). In this context, several social groups – including women and non-normative sexual subcultures – have obtained full citizenship rights within the “pornosphere,” moving beyond their traditional marginalization or, indeed, exclusion. These “nonconventional” pornographies exist in a dialectical relationship with mainstream production in so far as they are at the same time a development and a repudiation of the latter (on an aesthetic, economic and political level).This volume investigates the emergences of alternative pornographies, highlighting theirdiscursive heterogeneity, their cultural status and connections to identities and non-normativepractices, and their role in redefining the very idea of pornography.The publication maps the main areas relating to alternative pornographies, such as alt porn,queer pornography, indie porn, post porn, feminist pornography, and amateur porn.With a foreword by Feona Attwood

“Lynsey G. is an intrepid explorer, boldly going where few reporters have gone with such a critical eye: deep inside the real world of commercial sex.” —Tina Horn, host of the Why Are People Into That?! podcast Lynsey G. never imagined that she would ever work in porn, but at twenty-four years old, with a degree in English literature and an empty bank account, she found herself reviewing the film East Coast ASSault for an adult magazine in New York City. One interview later and it was official: she was a porn journalist. The job was supposed to be temporary—just a paycheck until she could spark her legitimate writing career—but she loved it and spent nearly a decade describing the nuances of money shots and the effectiveness of sex toys. As both a porn consumer and a porn critic, she was not quite an insider, not quite an outsider, but came to know the industry intimately. She found it so fascinating that she co-founded WHACK! Magazine. Finally, she had a platform to voice her thoughts and observations of the adult film world, as well as educate the rest of us about what really goes on behind the scenes. Eventually, Lynsey was thrust back into the “real” world, but not before realizing that one of the most diverse and nebulous—and profitable—industries on the planet isn’t so quite as different from the rest of the world as she thought. Tantalizing, eye-opening, and witty, Watching Porn is a provocative book about an average girl’s foray into the porn industry and the people who make it what it is, both in front of and behind the camera. “Marvelous.” —The New York Times Book Review

Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Porn Work takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and antiwork theorizing, Porn Work details entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from straight work, it reveals porn workers' creative strategies as prophetic of a working landscape in crisis. In the end, it looks to what porn has to tell us about what's wrong with work, and what it might look like to build something better.