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ENCODED STIGMA
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A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of the
Interactive Telecommunications Program @ New York University
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by Gabriella Garcia

Disclaimer: This paper is under review—do not publish.

Contact the author for more information: hello@higabriella.com
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This paper speculates toward a syllabus for technologists who want to design at the sex+tech

intersection and build technology that is safe for sex workers as informed by sex workers and

their experience in the digital sphere. ​In proposing a syllabus, I am setting the technology school

as the locus for a radical, feminist, design justice movement that recognizes the complicated

co-constitutive relationship between sex, society, and Human-Computer Interaction design. My

motivation comes from a place of accountability as a creative technologist who wishes to design

toward harm reduction, to signal-boost the voices of the Other-Wise, and confront uncomfortable

topics in hopes of expanding the perspective of those creating in the realm of the “recently

possible.” Sex/work stigma is a computer ethics design question in that those who labor in sex

trades (and by proxy sexual minorities in the digital space) have been useful for communications

technology developers only as far as they invest as early adopters or pose as a problem to be

solved ​without consideration of the incredible breadth of knowledge each has to offer—as

observers, laborers, artists, educators, entrepreneurs, targets, activists, partners, and citizens.

When presented with my midterm thesis review, critics kept returning to one question: “what is

your personal connection to this idea?” ​That is, why do I personally care about what sex workers

have to say about technology? I cannot help but wonder if I would have to prove personal stakes

if I were proposing an ethics-based curriculum for technologists that focused on physical

accessibility despite the fact that I am (at least visibly) able-bodied, or that addressed issues of

homelessness despite my status as house-secure. It reminds me of a story that journalist Melissa

Gira Grant shares​, i​ n which she recounts a presentation she gives at Yale University School of

Law about the violence experienced by sex workers at the hands of the police. After the
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presentation, several students approach her, remarking that she should have prefaced the

presentation by stating her stance on prostitution. In turn she responds, “Do you need to know if

I oppose prostitution... before you can evaluate how you feel about police abuse, about a

persistent pattern of denying justice to people labeled ‘prostitutes’?” (7)

A “personal story” does not have to be present before a technologist can evaluate how they feel

about the fact that sex/work stigma has been used to justify research funding for—and

deployment of—surveillance technology that ultimately profiles women and further harms

at-risk communities (Musto & Boyd; Pickering & Ham). A “personal story” is not necessary to

legitimize voices belonging to the driving early adopters of interactive media that have up to this

point been silenced by simply mentioning “sex” and “work” in the same sentence (Barss, 2012).

This is not to diminish what I consider invaluable feedback in my process, but to highlight how

difficult it is to even begin asking these questions in the technology school at all, and further, to

speculate what opportunities could present themselves by making these questions intrinsic to the

interactive technology design process.

DISTINGUISHING CONSENSUAL SEX WORK AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING

When speaking to other technologsists about sex/work stigma on the internet, the topic of

trafficking is inevitable. ​My intention is to create within the speculative realm of Ratna Kapur’s

“erotic justice” project through her “sexual subaltern,” (2001, 856) a theoretical device Kapur

conceives to challenge the dominant “victim subject” narrative that allows for the penalization of

the sex worker as determined by imperialist state ideology. The “sexual subaltern” is especially
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effective in that it embraces political complexity, allowing for agency of pleasure and visibility

of labor while also making room for experiences of violence and exploitation experienced in sex

work without essentializing the subject as “victim.” With great sensitivity, I emphasize that

Kapur’s “sexual subaltern” project is historiographically rooted in South Asian subaltern studies

(2000, 16) and aims to disrupt the oppositional East/West exploitation/liberation binaries that

reinforce “moral surveillance of women’s lives” through western imperialist “rescue”

interventionalism (2001). However, I am struck that the same “victim subject” justification for

First World anti-trafficking legislation that penalizes Third World sex workers has evolved to

justify transnational, digitally-fascilitated surveillance of sexually stigmatized communities,

especially as sex work migrates online—a product of urban gentrification efforts temporally

converging with mainstream adoption of the internet tunneling private encounter into the private

sphere; strange bedfellows, indeed (Grant 44-45). The digitally-mediated sex worker joins

Kapur’s post-colonial politics of desire, igniting Kapur’s call to “bring erotically stigmatized

communities from our respective worlds into mutual conversation” (2000, 22) at the site of

resisting this digital colonialism by way of rejecting this silenceable “victim subject”

classification.

There is an obligation to disambiguate definitions of consensual sex work (and ​by proxy digital

content produced by sexual minorities)​ from sex trafficking as they relate to this paper. For the

purpose of this project, I follow the lead of Amnesty International (2016) and Open Society

Foundations (2014) by using ​The United Nations Trafficking Protocol (2004) to define human

trafficking as ​“the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or receipt of persons by

improper means (such as force, abduction, fraud, or coercion) for an improper purpose
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including forced labor or sexual exploitation,” ​and no doubt a gross violation of human rights.

“Anti-trafficking” is a hotkey term for research funding, nearing an industrial

complex—DARPA contracted seventeen organizations, including private corporations,

universities, and public research agencies, to develop its algorithmic trafficking identification

software, MEMEX (JPL MEMEX). The anti-trafficking industry has targeted sexual exploitation

while more pervasive forms of labor trafficking fail to capture public interest (Musto & Boyd).

Consenting sex workers are often rounded into trafficking statistics because of legal status; by

disambiguating trafficking rhetoric from—and decriminalizing—consensual forms of sexual

expression (commercial or otherwise), resultant action can better benefit anti-trafficking efforts

(Albright & D’Adamo, 2016).

Commercial sex work can be most broadly defined as ​“the exchange of sexual services between

consenting adults for some form of remuneration.”​ Ironically, this “broadest” definition is

equally reductionist, almost certainly because marginalization by way of quasi-legal/criminal

status and stigma has kept those who labor in sex trades (Campbell et al. 2019, 1558)​ f​ rom

speaking about their experiences ​except​ for in criminal circumstances (Gant 8-9). The pun is not

lost on me; gender assumptions are very much important to both this broad definition ​and

deafening silence (Rand 2019, 43). In an attempt to document a workable typology for public

health research, Harcourt and Donovan (2005) identified 25 types of “direct” and “indirect” sex

work far beyond the street-based sex worker or exotic dancer that has dominated its public

perception. Weitzer documents how academic literature about sex work is overwhelmed by

diametrical but one-dimensional “oppressive vs. empowerment paradigms,” proposing instead a

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“polymorphous paradigm” that recognizes “a constellation of occupational arrangements, power

relations, and worker experiences” existing along an expansive spectrum of visibility, legality,

​ ardy and
and motivation (2009, 215). As joint editors of ​New Sociologies of Sex Work, H

Kingston (2016) note that “the sex industry is diverse in its nature, organization, presentation,

who takes part, responses to it and how it sits in the broader context of globalization and

regulation,” (1) advocating for sex work research “beyond issues of criminalization, ‘deviance’

or other judgements about the morality of the sex industry” (4). This is all to emphasize the

substantive reality of sex work, regardless of what one may “think” of it. The full complexity of

sex work, why people choose to labor in sex trades, and the socioethical implications of

either/both is not the task of this paper; the sex work debates are both rich in history and

ongoing, and it would be of great disservice to attempt to distill entire cross-disciplinary bodies

of literature here (Gerassi, 2015; Showden, 2016; Sutherland, 2004).

But why should the technology school care? Why is it critical to invite sexually stigmatized

communities into the technological design space at all? Visible to the mainstream or not, the sex

worker has always been a major stakeholder in technoscience. The substantive reality of sex

work is woven deeply into socially-instituted Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in ways that

will be explored as this paper develops, and by querying the array of patterns emerging from this

weave, particular complexities will be specified and intensified.

TECHNOFEMINISM & THE “EROTIC ENGINE”

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In establishing Technofeminism, Judy Wajcman (2004) explores “mutual shaping of gender and

technology” in the 19th century, during which mechanical and civil engineering begin to shape

the modern definition of technology, segregating a history of technical innovation driven by

women into the domain of invisible labor and care as the identity of skilled professional,

accessible only to men, becomes a marker of class. Carefully toeing the line between feminist

techno-pessimism—which viewed late 20th century technological development as simply

continuing a patriarchical project including “the domination and control of women”

(18-20)—and techno-utopian ideas of a gender-free cyberfeminist liberation (56-71), Wajcman

creates the metaphor of the “heterogeneous network” to convey technology and society (and

thusly gendered power relations) as mutually constitutive (38). This, Wajcman argues, allows for

scholars to scrutinize consequences of androcentric ideologies embedded into technological

development while also creating room for the “interpretive flexibility of objects” in which

women “subvert the original inscription of a technology” predominantly designed by men.

Wajcman successfully extends Feminist critique of scientific knowledge (Haraway, 1988;

Harding, 1991) to the realm of socially-situated communications technology, but exposes her

own situatedness by placing the woman as “responding to technologies that are already there”

(117), defined by the league of predominantly white male engineers, in her considerations of

interpretive flexibility. Research that forefronts the sex worker argues otherwise. Yes, sex

workers have demonstrated many instances of interpretive flexibility, and Wajcman pays

homage to this by citing Sandy Stone’s work discussing how “cyberspace” allows “female sex

workers disguise crucial aspects of identity and play at reinventing themselves” (Wajcman, 2000
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459). But in situating her critique of modern technology in the realm of responsiveness,

Wajcman overlooks a historicity that places the sex worker at the head of innovation, as a crucial

driving force supporting technological development from the get-go.

Arguing that “all sexual commerce is technological,” Grant notes that the traveling peep show

was among the first distributed moving image media, hand operated by candlelight

pre-electricity (70). Grant also cites apocryphal narratives, such as of Greek courtesans who

would indicate their status to potential clients by wearing sandals fabricated to print “follow me”

in their footsteps, or the belief that the term “red light district” came from the practice of railmen

leaving their red light signals at the brothel’s doorstep should their foremen need to interrupt

them for off-duty emergencies (70-71). This latter example is a potential white rabbit’s hole of a

project in and of itself, a study relating lateness and dating, weaving commercial companionship,

the standardization of time, social acceleration, industrial revolution, material semiotics of the

“red light” flashing brilliant as the Cheshire Cat’s grin. Hypothetical as these examples may be,

people want to believe that sex work literally ​moves​ people while producing creative media; we

must also consider that sex workers rarely get to write history, even as their persistent presence

influences the way we remember it.

Apocrypha aside, substantial documentation places the distribution of sexual material as a major

driver behind technological progress, and well within Wajcman’s time frame of tech’s

modernized definition. This is what Patchen Barss calls the “erotic engine.” Erotic material

fiscally supported the emergence of photography (“The products of this new technology, these
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images of real naked human beings, unmediated and raw, were like nothing that had ever existed

before. They commanded a kind of fascination that fetched very generous fees'' (62)), home

video (“the porn industry had a huge stock of product that was easily transferred to videotape and

could sell at an astounding price... enough for investors to take the plunge and build the

infrastructure that would be used by pornography and non-pornography consumers alike” (92)),

and cable TV as the sexual revolution of the 1970s collided with more affordable means of film

production and the birth of public-access television. Money made in the erotic market of 1980s

proto-internet bulletein board systems (BBSs) literally paid for the material infrastructure that

paved the path toward the world wide web (122), weaving with video game development to push

demand for better computer graphics, faster processing speeds, and greater data bandwidths

necessary to make internet ubiquity a remote possibility before mainstream consumer adoption

could even be taken into consideration (144-163). From there, a thread spinning at the rate of

Moore’s Law weaves adult content creators into the pattern of innovation toward the popular

internet as we know it today, being the first to invest in designing protocol for commercial search

engines, livestream video, and secure third-party payment processing (184-199).

“Time and again, entrepreneurs who hone their technologies, techniques, skills and business

models in the adult-entertainment world must conceal this past before selling these tools to the

rest of the world,” Barss says, leaving those most pertinent to commercial success to “decry the

hypocritical mainstream for dismissing and marginalizing pornography while reaping the

benefits of their technological contributions” (4). Less kindly analysis would say Big Tech’s

winners are big pimpin’. In either light, the sex worker is as indispensable as they are disposable.
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Wajcman’s interpretive flexibility is not just responding to technology predominantly designed

by certain modern men, it is responding to technology popularized by—and made commonly

accessible through—sex work.

A similar narrative occurs in methods of Postcolonial Computing, which includes “the socially

situated and contingent nature” (Philip et al. 8) assemblages from which technological

development arises, proposing that “when we see a technoscientific object, we investigate

agency not only locally but in the infrastructures, assemblages, political economies that are the

conditions of its possibility” (Philip et al. 10). The authors illustrate the “backrounding” of

unexamined labor and manufacturing processes necessary to produce the “heroic actor” stories

promoting technological determinism, using the invisible, feminized Asian labor “taken for

granted” in computer hardware manufacturing as an example. Wajcman cites this same example

by contrasting the “communications revolution… associated with increasing emancipation of

women world-wide” to the consequences experienced by women as part of the social relations of

production necessary to manufacture these same “emancipatory technologies” (Wajcman, 2004

121-122).

I must pause here to stress that sex work is not women’s work; those who labor in the sex

industry are as diverse as those who have sex, often standing at an intersection of margins, an

irreducible noun paradoxically (conveniently?) collapsed—like “terror” or “freedom”—into

nebulous definition through dominant epistemologies. As an irreducible whole, sex work is

perhaps more diverse ​in its work force than most industries could ever claim​ in that it attracts
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those who cannot maintain mainstream ideals of employment due to factors such as disability,

discrimination—“discrimination against LGBTQI+ individuals, particularly transgender women

of color, prevents many from accessing formal employment resources and educational

opportunities” (U.S. Congress S.3165, 2020)​—​or survival (Blunt & Wolf, 2020). However, sex

​ ork is a feminized form of labor, much the same as other care trades like nursing or
as w

housekeeping. This manifests in the delegitimization of sex workers even within political

systems where sex work is legal, as Helen M. Rand illustrates by pointing out that sex work is

excluded from labor statistics and mainstream labor politics in the UK where sex work is a

wholly legal, regulated, and taxed industry (Rand, 2019). Foregrounding the sex worker in

considerations of technological development complicates everything by revealing an exploited

subclass that everyone can reliably dismiss, even unintentionally—as must the case in

Wajcman’s technofeminism, given her care toward revealing exploitation in her Feminist

theories of technology. “Whore stigma,” Grant writes, “makes central the racial and class

hierarchy reinforced in the dividing of women into the pure and unpure…If woman is other,

whore is the other’s other” (77).

While certainly critiquing both androcentric techno-determinism and liberatory cyberfeminism

through these examples, this is not to virtue signal by pointing out hypocrisy underlying the

“triumphalism about digitalization” (Wajcman, 2004 121) that unifies these two seemingly

contrasting perspectives. Instead, by highlighting constructions of cultural difference defined by

in/vinsibility—marginalized sex work vs. celebrated startup, taken-for-granted assembly line

worker vs. heroic engineer—I hope to adhere to Postcolonial Computing’s advocacy toward the
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“productive possibilities of ‘difference’” in which “the seams among differences are not simply a

source of undesirable unevenness and aberration, but also sites of creativity and possibility

(Philip et al. 7).

ENCODED STIGMA AND THE HALTING OF INNOVATION

I originally came to this project cautiously optimistic about how the democratization of

technology held space for a greater diversity of opinion about—and expression of—sexual

sovereignty, creating an opportunity to reevaluate cultural and legal standards pertaining to sex

work and pleasure. In this way I am one of Wajcman’s utopian cyberfeminists, considering the

interpretive flexibility of technology prior to knowing there was an academic term for it. I was

encouraged by examples of emergent tech used to unlock intimate, corporeal interaction that

challenged normative constructs of bodies and their capabilities toward pleasure. I was prepared

to focus on endeavors such as female owned and operated sex tech companies spearheading

institutionally-backed R&D that prioritizes women’s sexual health and pleasure (Beecham &

Unger, 2019), concerns that have been generally pathologized, overlooked or avoided in

conversations and research about sexuality (Wade et al., 2005). I wanted to highlight spaces

designed by trans and queer-identifying individuals, defying marginalization through connected

visibility, thusly creating accessible community support networks and health resources (Shaw &

Sender, 2016) that were previously unheard of. Adult models and actors have become

independent content producers who connect directly with their audiences, diversify depictions of
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the erotic beyond a mainstream “ideal” that assumes a heteronormative male gaze, and can profit

directly from their work (Gallop, 2015).

For a moment it felt as though the internet disrupted history’s editor, allowing those who

questioned the dominant narrative of “proper” versus “improper” bodies to draw networked

routes toward coalescence. But throughout my research I encountered a powerful oppositional

force in the form of algorithmically-determined censorship, shadow banning, and the chilling

effect of invisible curation via Terms and Conditions. As the extensive availability of

mainstream internet pornography demonstrates, sexual content that features the male chauvinist

format (celebrating the degredation and total objectification of female adult actors) seems left

relatively unscathed by censoring or moderation. It’s bodies who subvert normativity and

celebrate sexual sovereignty who are halted from further innovation, education, and visibility.

This is what I call Encoded Stigma, and it is painfully discriminatory. Salty, a sex-positive digital

media platform, reported that a run of advertisements “featuring fully clothed BIPOC, disabled,

plus-sized and trans women were rejected by Instagram for promoting escorting services,”

confirming suspicions that “certain bodies and perspectives are being policed, and how certain

people are targeted for censorship more than others” (Fitzsimmons, 2019). The first-ever vibrator

informed by vaginal physiology studies, designed by Laura Dicarlo in partnership with the

Robotics & Engineering Lab at Oregon State University, was actually banned from the

Consumer Electronics Show on the basis of obscenity, ​despite​ winning the convention’s robotics

innovation award (DiCarlo, 2019). OMGYes, which invested in creating a resource dedicated to
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women’s sexual pleasure research in partnership with Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute, is

banned from using payment processors such as PayPal or Stripe, who consider them “high risk”

customers because their subject is sex (Lyon, 2016).

In each instance, discrimination is highlighted by adjacent hypocrisy: responding to Instagram’s

“false flagging,” Salty launched a data-driven survey which revealed that “cis white men appear

to have a free pass to behave and post in any way they please.” A virtual reality porn app

presenting at the same electronics convention from which Laura DiCarlo was banned, faced zero

scrutiny. And up until November of 2019, PayPal had no issue accepting MindGeek, the

male-owned internet porn monopoly, as a customer.

Encountering these roadblocks on the path of discovery felt like navigating a world that

promised an open-source future while stuck in a redacted past. Why are sexual minorities banned

from innovating pleasure technologies while straight, white, androcentric entrepreneurs are

celebrated for their supposed sex tech breakthroughs? Where would I stand as a queer, hispanic,

female technologist wanting to join the league of pleasure tech innovators? How was I accepted

on this premise into a technology school that held no answers for me?

ONLINE RED LIGHT DISTRICT AND DIGITAL VICE RAIDS

I hold myself accountable here by stating that I did not know the depth of the very material,

co-constitutive history of early techno-cultural trailblazing driven by sexual commerce (Barss,

2012) during my first inquiries, which frame digitally-mediated discoveries of sexual autonomy
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as interpreting responsively. Now, it seems obvious that innovations of pleasure would be born

of—and bear—this historicity. It’s from this recursive coalescence that new materialities of

digitally-mediated sex work surfaced, which set the stage for the emergent sex tech innovation to

occur at all. In the 1990s, lines begin to blur; as urban gentrification efforts attempt to sweep vice

under the rug, street-based sex work migrates online to join a territory established by

pornography (Grant 45), colliding with early adoption of the commercial internet through

amateur intrigue pursued by the “digital elite (“l33t”)” or professional necessity with the

emergence of the “paperless office”. These three players—the necessarily enterprising sex

worker, the passionate l33t, the fiscally capable professional—converge here on a field that is to

become the ubiquitous internet as we know it today.

Sex workers swept off the streets and onto the internet found new potential for agency. Whisper

networks formed, creating digital catalogues of abusive clients and experiences of violence at the

hands of law enforcement. The pimp was devalued as workers began to connect directly with

clients through independently-posted online advertisements. Advocates for the decriminalization

of sex work organized digital platforms that offered legal, medical, and harm reduction resources

for sex workers, a visible allyship that legitimized the trade while emboldening workers to defy

reliance on third-party management that previously exploited them through safety dependency

(Cunningham et all., 2018). One study conducted between 2002-2010 correlates the introduction

of Craigslist’s “erotic services” led to a 17.4% decrease in female homicides in the United States,

citing an increased ability for sex workers to screen clients, create relationships with repeat
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customers, and clients recognizing the creation of a “digital fingerprint” when negotiating sex

work online (Cunningham et al., 2019).

Paradoxically, this made sex work a viable option for those who would have never previously

considered the trade when it was physically cordoned off into localized spaces of impropriety, a

contradiction that those trying to clean up the streets could not have imagined. It became

“possible for many people to try out sex work, organized online and conducted in private,” says

Grant, “without risking becoming a known prostitute.” By moving to the private sphere of the

digital, engagement in sex trades could go undetected; thus sex work gentrifies along with the

streets, dismantling "conventional ways we'd distinguish a prostitute from a non-prostitute

woman” (47-48). The proliferation of access to media technology such as webcams exacerbates

this by making it possible to independently produce commercially viable sexual content from the

privacy of one’s home, potentially distributed as either advertisement of service or as

fully-rendered product to be experienced interactively through live performance or sold as

user-generated adult content. Clientele diversifies too; “like chic coffee bars and restaurants

moving into previously working-class neighborhoods, gentrified sex work brings with it

consumers… who might never before have ventured there” (Grant 46).

It’s not actually all that shocking, this convolution of non/professional sex work, if held next to

the convoluting of non/professionalism that occurred simultaneously within the temporally

specific context of mainstreamed digitization: the freelance writer and the veteran journalist, the

amateur photographer and the trained videographer, the self-taught web developer and the
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esteemed computer scientist. Following the same trajectory of any profession popularized by

access to interactive media, the popular explosion of sex work is an entrepreneurial endeavor

well-suited for Silicon Valley, literally embodying disruptive innovation at both ends of

technological development. Apparently, merit-based boundaries in the information age can be

quite shifty; toeing the blurry line, virtue and vice meet halfway.

One would think this digitally-driven mainstreaming of sex work and its disruptive entrepreneurs

could be cause for a tipping point, creating what Kapur (2010) calls a “conscious challenge to the

dominant normative assumptions about the subject on which law is based” (39). Grant notes that

the word "prostitute" only became the noun we now use it as in the 19th century, a practice of

"produc[ing] a person by transforming a behavior (however occasional) into an identity," Grant

writes, from which point the subject is "marked that could be more easily imagined, located,

treated, and controlled by the law" (14-15). But with the peripheral sex worker subject more

visible than ever, “dominant sexual, cultural, and familial arrangements that are imbricated in

law are exposed and disrupted” (Kapur, 2010 39). Instead, vice raids moved online, embedding

along the way the same Encoded Stigma that halted innovations feuled by sexual sovereignty

even when​ t​ hose innovations had nothing to do with commercial sex work.

SOCIAL SANITATION AND THE CHILLING EFFECT OF BROAD DEFINITIONS OF

“HARMFUL CONTENT”

The idea of “inappropriate content” and what it includes was defined within the pervasive form

of internet access by Apple, the first company to “put the internet in everyone’s pocket,” before
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user consensus could even have a say in the matter. With a characteristically Jobs-ian prescience,

Apple understood that the smartphone would democratize speech in a way unforeseen by digital

utopianists who embraced a free speech libertarianism informed by a time where the digital

realm was only occupied by the techno-privileged and progressive early adopters (Barlow,

1996). True democratization would mean that awful voices would have an equal opportunity to

express, with more ears and eyes than ever ready to receive. So embedding content moderation

came from a good intention that understood what our current hindsight—filled with visions of

virally-spread bigotry, graphic depictions of violence, and revenge porn—now sees quite clearly.

However, Apple also prohibited “explicit” content from third-party app developers, thus

deciding from the very beginning of internet ubiquity that human sexuality was equal to

“objectionable content” threatening the safety of their product’s users (Apple, 2020). This of

course does not stop predators from finding ways to communicate with potential victims, nor

does it curb the use of violent sexual rhetoric as a threat—it turns out that people who wish to do

harm don’t really care about terms and conditions, and their number is greater than the speed of

moderation (Albergotti & Johri). What it did do however was pave the way for the

criminalization and social ostracization of those who express themselves sexually (or are forced

to “find their flock” based on the sexualization of their identity) in consensual, educational, and

creative ways.

This has become especially chilling as growing numbers of people are accessing news and

information via mobile (and thus via app), meaning that all sources of information can be held
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under the Terms of Service microscope and scrutinized for inappropriate content. Thus,

censorship is designed into networked media in order to guarantee an audience—and now that

much of our consumed content is user-generated, that means media platforms are creating

regulatory “safety nets” to catch inappropriate user-generated/broadcast content that might trip

the harm “flag” in order to protect their business. This requires broad, swiftly-shifting definitions

of obscenity and an extraordinary force of labor—Facebook moderators alone review over 10

million posts a week to “protect” its 2.3 billion users (Newton).

Mechanical turks are hired for the task, assisted by—and informing—moderation algorithms that

also require sweeping surveillance of user data (Cobbe 5), a feature already built into social

platforms as a profit model. This gives private companies the power to restrict and shape user

communications however they see fit. As Dr. Jennifer Cobbe observes, “Algorithmic censorship,

particularly where applied to all posts, messages, and uploads, would potentially allow control of

communications to be extended into every corner of society, positioning social platforms as

mediators and moderators of even private (digital) conversations” (10). Moreover, automated

moderation requires a rejection of nuance in order to scale (Cambridge Consultants). After all,

what exactly does a community standard for 2 billion users—spread across the globe,

representing a variety of norms, values, histories, and sensitivities—look like? In terms of

pleasure, it looks like simultaneously conflating sexuality with obscenity resulting in blanket

censorship of the former, while reducing the voices of sexual minorities in conversations about

intimacy expressed in the digital realm.

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This blanket censorship was recently codified into U.S. law with the 2018 passage of FOSTA,

which amended the Communications Decency Act so that online service providers would be held

criminally liable for any use of their platform that “promotes and fascilitates prostitution” (U.S.

Congress H.R.1865). The bill’s supporters cited harrowing accounts of kidnapped minors forced

into prostitution, and accused less-regulated sharing platforms such as online classifieds site

Backpage.com of knowingly promoting sex trafficking by allowing traffickers to post ads

featuring these victims (Chamberlain 2186). On its face FOSTA read like a no-brainer, and the

law passed with a sweeping majority in both the House and State. However, it turns out case for

FOSTA was built on a red herring narrative; not only had the FBI reported that sites such as

Backpage were not only falsely accused of the “knowing facilitation of prostitution,” it was also

actually helping law enforcement in trafficking investigations (Brown, 2019; Chamberlain 2203).

The outcome invariably created the internet’s first U.S. government-sanctioned censoring

instrument, instigating websites to make definitions of obscenity even broader in order to defend

themselves from FOSTA’s sweeping scope. This resulted in the banning of a wide range of

lawful speech, from forum discussions about consensual sex, to sexual health and education

materials, to resources for promoting safety among sex workers (Greene, 2018; Romano, 2018).

It further marginalized adult-related speech that did not adhere to recognizably heteronormative

mating behavior, demolishing online communities that catered to queer, gender-nonconfomring,

and sex-positive people, essentializing them as categorically obscene (Blue, 2019).

TECHNOLOGY AND THE “VICTIM INDUSTRY”

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Further, those who labor in digitally-mediated sex work became silenced “victim subjects” yet

again, bodies exploited for techno-solutionist development to this new wave of prostitution

panic. This, I hope I have made clear by now, is what can be called a “tail as old as time.”

This begins with the “victim industry” (Best, 1997) converging with neoliberalist “progressive

remedial narratives” supporting private-profit incentivized “modality of governance expanding

through diverse portals and agents” developed into the economization of rescue agencies

requiring a “demand for victims” (Bouklis, 2016 237-263). In his research about the rise of

anti-trafficking efforts in Greece, Bouklis finds the “crime narrative entwined with

antitrafficking in women...under which trafficking was constructed as a phantom threat that

required an immediate legislative response” (237), noting that “Industrial drive, innovation,

private profit, and capital accumulation have been at the core of the crime control commercial

expansion” (239). In Ratna Kapur’s (2001) deconstruction of “discourse of women in the Third

World as being in a state of perpetual victimization,” (868) Kapur notes how the “image of the

innocent native woman being lured into the sex trade by evil traffickers” has been used by First

World countries in drafting “neo-colonial” anti-trafficking legislation “strikingly reminiscent of

the British justification for colonization and the establishment of Empire” by way of Western

“rescue” interventionalism, restriction of migration, and the leveraging foreign aid through the

intensification of “the moral surveillance of women.” This Kapur demonstrates in her

introduction of the consenting Third World sex worker as the “sexual subaltern,” dismantling

“the assumption that the struggle for rights and self-determination is a First World phenomenon,”

(868) and the myth that the post-colonial struggle for sex workers rights was uniquely Western
 Garcia 22

(866-870). These “rescue raids,” often leading to the detainment rather than the “rehabilitation”

of sex workers, are glorified by Western media outlets, which as Grant notes, ironically profit

from sex workers bodies in the form of voyeurism published without the consent—let alone

opinion—of the “rescued” (101-110).

The migration of sex work to the digital sphere offered new territory from which victims could

be produced- not because there are actually more victims, but because the internet made sex for

sale easier to see. Online escort ads provided broad, instantaneous “sytematic surveillance” of

sex workers for vice patrol, who could not build databases fast enough (Grant 63). And the now

well-established economized rescue service network was well-primed to capitalize; the internet

being their domain, technologists naturally took the lead, framing the need for anti-trafficking

technological development in terms of socially-driven innovation. In defining the carceral

imaginary, Ruha Benjamin (2019) asks, “what social groups are classified, corralled, coerced,

and capitalized upon so others are free to tinker, experiment, design, and engineer the future?”

Rendered voiceless, who is a sex worker to protest otherwise? In terms of tech development, the

sex worker finds themself indispensable-yet-disposable once again.

In response to this call for victim-tracing technology, DARPA created Memex. “Today's web

searches use a centralized, one-size-fits-all approach that searches the Internet with the same set

of tools for all queries. While that model has been wildly successful commercially, it does not

work well for many government use cases,” DARPA announced, “Memex seeks to develop

software that advances online search capabilities far beyond the current state of the art” (JPL
 Garcia 23

MEMEX). In doing so, DARPA funded seventeen software development teams from NGOs, to

private entities, to universities (including NYU) to “solve this challenge.” Data was scraped from

over 30 million advertisements for sex work to create searchable datasets which could be queried

by geoinformatics, facial recognition, or court citation (Stanford InfoLab).

These datasets would then be used to inform machine learning models with the goal of creating

AI that could identify sex trafficking victims—how these initial data scrapes discerned

consenting sex workers from actual victims of exploitation in the formation of this searchable

taxonomy is not explained. Even as software developers insist that they are capable of building

nuance into their AI algorithms, bias becomes apparent. Claiming that “Any self-respecting

woman, ​even if she is a prostitute [emphasis added],​ she’s going to sell herself as a hot

commodity,” said Kara Smith of DeliverFund, a trafficking detection startup that says it relies on

markers such as bruises or body positioning (“hunched over a bed, rear end facing the camera”)

in images to discern exploitation from consent (Captain, 2019). Nevermind that some

“self-respecting women” enjoy subversive sex that may leave marks, nevermind that some

consenting sex workers understand the market viability of roleplay that may lead to the rear

exposed while “hunched” over a bed, nevermind that many images used in escort advertisements

may not even depict the sex worker on the other side of the screen (Grant 62). Not to mention the

alarming fallibility of datasets used to train object and facial recognition AI systems; in

Excavating AI, AI Now Institute Founder and Director Kate Crawford and artist-activist Trevor

Paglen demonstrate how ImageNet, one of the most widely used databases for image recognition

training, used human mechanical turks to categorize images, creating a taxonomy of categorized
 Garcia 24

clearly-biased labels such as “rapist,” “call girl,” “yellow person,” and “hermaphrodite”

(Crawford & Paglen, 2019).

This is not to dismiss the very real presence of human trafficking. As long as sex work remains

criminalized and the victim industry targets sexual exploitation over more pervasive forms of

labor trafficking, then surveillance and carceral technologies built on the premise of stopping sex

trafficking will convolute consent and exploitation, assume evidence of subversive sex is

evidence of victimization, and perpetuate neo-colonial legislation to catastrophic effect on

women, people of color, migrants, and sexual minorities. Should this not be enough to intervene

with the Encoded Stigma question?

THE SEX WORK STIGMA SYLLABUS

Despite the significance of sex work to the history—and continuance—of technological

development, the ethics of this relationship was never brought up in the two years I attended

NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Department. I don’t blame the school; after all, the

terminus is a degree in professional studies, which doesn’t foreground critical theory or

humanities by definition. But Red Burns founded the school on the basis of promoting social
 Garcia 25

uses of technology. Now, understanding the heterogeneous relationship between social structure

and technological development, there is a responsibility for the technology school to include

questions of computer ethics in the curriculum. Technology is not “used,” it is performed in a

choreography of sociotechnical co-constitution.

Citing the artificial binarism defining “old” and “new” media as divided by the “electronic,”

Johanna Drucker (2013) writes, “I​n a misfire of analysis, the capacity of electrical charge to

create code through positive and negative values, the foundation of ​digital​ technology, had been

described as ​immaterial”​ (3) In her call to shift discussions about interface design toward

“performative materiality,” Drucker demands that “we need to recover the lineage of critical

theory that transformed the humanities from structuralism onward to understand digital objects

and to design them,” otherwise, technologists are doomed toward “thinking about digital

matters...as if the last century had not existed, and we were merely late 19th century naturalists

on the trail of a new species of inscriptional and medial artifacts” (17). An empirical legacy in an

industry that celebrates invisibility as a marketable quality (Moore’s Law and the microchip, the

impenetrable glass slab of the smartphone, the “cloud”), it’s no wonder that the feminized labor

crucial to socially-situated HCI can be so easily veiled, hidden behind the screen.

The technology school is a binary-worshipping temple; it is a one, or it is a zero. It is on, or it is

off. It is “if,” or it is “else.” This “misfire of analysis” that affords the technologist to assume the

immateria of the digital also affords the technologist a false God’s value-neutrality (Haraway,

1988) from whence responsibility can be neglected—one certainly cannot cypher with a
 Garcia 26

qualitative such as “stigma”—so approaching technology development as a material-semiotic

practice threatens to break the code. There is obviously space held for responsibility;

problem-solving is one of the most valued, fundamental tenets of technological innovation,

especially at the instructional level. It’s more a matter of ​which p​ roblems and, more importantly,

who gets to define what needs solving. ​By focusing on the messy, invisibilized weaving of sex

work, consumer-ready social technology, definitions of “harmful content,” and trafficking

policy, this project follows principles of Feminist Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in

commitment toward revealing “unspoken values within HCI’s dominant research and design

paradigms and underpin the development of new approaches, methods and design variations”

(Bardzell, 2010).

“Knowledge claims are always socially situated, and the failure by dominant groups to critically

and systematically interrogate their advantaged social situation and the effect of advantages on

their beliefs leaves their social situation a scientifically and epistimologically disadvantaged one

for generating,” writes Sandra Harding, “Moreover, these accounts end up legitimating

exploitative "practical politics" even when those who produce them have good intentions” (1992

442) ​Thusly, the sex worker certainly apparates at the technology school, but as a nebulous

“victim,” ghost confined within a shell of counter-trafficking hackathons; at one such hackathon

hosted at MIT, “​counter-trafficking experts from across a number of nonprofits, law

enforcement, and industry groups” were platformed as mentors (Park, 2018). There was no

apparent representation by any industry professional from the commercial sex trade; why would
 Garcia 27

such valuable insight be overlooked? How does this event highlight the unspoken values of

HCI’s dominant research paradigms?

Here sex work, like care, is “a devalued doing, often taken for granted, if not rendered invisible.”

I consider it therefore a “matter of care” (Bellacasa, 2010) to intervene at the scholastic level by

inviting the voice of the sex worker into the design space at the technology school. Maria de la

Bellacasa writes that “care connotes attention and worry for those who can be harmed by an

assemblage but whose voices are less valued as their concerns and need for care” (92). In

January of 2020, ITP hosted its first-ever Tech for Social Good Day, a day-long unconference

motivated by the need to facilitate critical discussion among technologists and "create motivation

and energy around using technological skills to make our society a better place" (T4SGD, 2020)

I organized a panel called "Networked Bodies of Resistance" which focused on how sexuality

was translated into "harmful content" when coded into digital communications systems by way

of culturally-embedded stigma (Garcia et al. 2020).

The prompt proposed a discussion about opportunities for sex/tech innovation with three industry

professionals—all sex work advocates by default—while also addressing the dangerous chilling

effect of digital discrimination based on sexual expression. Starting with a quote penned by

panelist Danielle Blunt: “The misogyny of the creator is mirrored in the platform.” This

statement, that online platform creators are inherently misogynist, might seem like reactionary

stereotyping, but when listening to the experiences of sexual minorities deplatformed or banned

from digital spaces simply for their presence as a sexual minority, it’s difficult to argue
 Garcia 28

otherwise. This, panelist and sex educator Sx Noir attributed to the “echo chambering” caused by

a lack of diversity in the technological design space, leaving culture-wide assumptions

unchecked, and damage experienced by marginalized individuals as a result of those assumptions

unrecognized. Jobs had “good intentions” when he created definitions of objectionable content in

order to protect users, but at great material cost to lives of the already-oppressed by doing so in

the ethno-androcentric “echo chamber” of Silicon Valley’s elite. Jobs could not foresee this

paradox, that his definitions of “harmful content” would, for some, ultimately do more harm.

Noir recounted being banned from multiple platforms, including AirBnB, Venmo, and Tinder

despite​ her very legal profession as a sex educator. For all intents and purposes, Noir is

startup-darling material; she is a young, black, Midwestern-bred, New York City-based

entrepreneur and upward mobility advocate who founded her own podcast to much media

fanfare. But because her subject is sex, Noir simply does not get to participate in the

techno-solutionist’s efficiency model of neoliberal capitalism. Panelist Ariel Martinez, the

community manager for Cindy Gallop’s MakeLoveNotPorn.com (MLNP), discusses the

mundanity of the obstacles her company faces trying to gain traction—being forced to build their

server from scratch after denied service from established web hosting providers due to morality

clauses—that sideline MLNP’s mission of promoting “good sexual values” such as consent and

inclusivity.

For those who depend on sex work for income, the consequences are much more insideous;

Blunt, public health researcher and co-founder (alongside Melissa Gira Grant) of
 Garcia 29

Hacking//Hustling—a "collective of sex workers and allies working at the intersection of

technology and social justice issues"—explained how access to income is the number one harm

reduction factor across the board. When sex workers get deplatformed from digital spaces such

as PayPal, their exposure to violence increases exponentially. Blunt also noted that many

individuals partake in sex trades because of barriers to other forms of employment (over 60%

according to a survey conducted by Hacking//Hustling) such as chronic illness, lack of education

discrimination against gender presentation, or criminal record, so when banned from promoting

their services online, they lose complete access to income and are forced to pursue potentially

violent economic dependency relationships in an environment where they no longer have agency

over screening and selecting clients (Blunt & Wolf, 2020).

As a result of this panel, I became even more deeply invested in the sex worker rights movement

and its intersectional pursuit of the protection of human rights, labor visibility, and digital

privacy, as well as the movement’s efforts toward the destigmatization of alternative sex

(NSWP, 2013). This discussion served as a midpoint to the project presented here; resultant by

the halting of innovation I encountered in my preliminary research, resulting in my pursuit of

designing a curriculum that foregrounds the sex worker’s situated knowledge. The syllabus acts

as a mediating object, a knowledge interface that holds space for “‘starting off thought’ from the

lives of marginalized peoples” with the hope of generating illuminating critical questions that do

not arise in thought that begins from dominant group lives” (Harding, 1992 445) My goal was to

design a number of workshops that invite the voices of sexually stigmatized communities into

the technology space as collaborators. However, the world had other plans in the spring of 2020,
 Garcia 30

just as I was rounding toward this action. Instead, I focused my efforts toward ​speculating on

potential symbiotic learning opportunities at the intersection of stigma and technoscience. ​I

began connecting deeper with local advocacy groups other sex-tech industry thinkers to ask what

I as a technologist could do, and speculate how destigmatizing sex and sex work in technology

development can create opportunities for innovation, research, and accountability. I also

connected with educators who teach at the junction of technology, design, and ethics, to figure

out how these questions can be introduced to the academic institution.

Following is a number of starting points, presented as hypothetical interventions, resulting from

these conversations as they relate to my research.

Feminist Data Collaborations

Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein define data feminism as “a way of thinking about

data, both their uses and their limits, that is informed by direct experience, by a

commitment to action, and by intersectional feminist thought” (2020 3). D’Ignazio and

Klein build off of Haraway’s critique of the empiricist assumption that quantifiable data

is value neutral (“statistical analysis is simply observation-plus-math, therefore it ​must​ be

objective” or “the numbers speak for themselves”). This “god trick,” further emphasized

by the object rhetoric of visual minimalism that deceptively persuades unbiased

objectivity, obscures the stakeholders and dominant assumptions embedded within any

data research project (Haraway 1988). D’Ignazio and Klein propose instead a “messy”

data science that synthesizes multiple perspectives “with priority given to local,
 Garcia 31

Indigenous, and experiential ways of knowing” (125) while challenging unequal power

structures.

As I’ve illustrated earlier, sex workers are often counted, classified, and taxonomized in

technology-driven data projects, but rarely if ever get to participate in the collection of

data themselves despite often embodying some of the most peripheral perspectives. In a

survey shared with me by Hacking//Hustling that focused on digital oppression

experienced by sex workers, one respondent, ​an advocate working with First Nations sex

work communities in Canada relayed frustration that law enforcement can find and

incarcerate Indigenous sex workers, but have no answer for the epidemic of missing

Indigenous women and girls​. “The irony is that...Indigenous women/girls over-policed in

Canada but also under-protected,” they wrote, “How might tech/surveillance be flipped

on its head to demand better protection for Indigenous women/girls? If the state can

surveil us, why can't they find us when we go missing and murdered?”

I imagine a collaboration at the instructional level with advocates such as the one

presented above; working with Indigenous sex workers to develop feminist data

collection toolkits can create more visibility for what​ ​has been described as a Canadian

genocide, while also challenging unequal power structures that criminalize bodies rather

than protect them. In turn, how can such collaborations encourage a more just, humanistic

data science?
 Garcia 32

Anti-Oppressive Design Study

In April 2020, the New York Times published an article called ‘Sex Work Comes Home’

by Gabrielle Drolet, which documented how people turned to online sex work while

forced into Covid-related joblessness while in isolation. The article reported that adult

content platforms experienced a surge of new performer signups (CamSoda reported a

37% increase, ManyVids reported a 69% increase) seeking income performing in

sexually explicit live broadcasts. According to the article, some were sex workers pushed

online as lock-downs closed adult venues and social distancing measures kept them from

meeting clients, forfeiting the identity protection (or more insidiously, having their

identity scraped into carceral surveillance algorithms) that digitally-mediated in-person

sex work provided. Others had never previously participated in commercial sex, leaving

them potentially unaware of risks involved in online sex work including “privacy

breaches, potentially dangerous interactions with clients, and laws that are not designed

to protect them.”

One risk left unconsidered by the article was the potential that these new users (or veteran

sex workers who have heretofore avoided a digital fingerprint) could experience future

financial discrimination once identified and classified as sex workers by algorithmic

metadata collection—even if “interloping” in the commercial sex trade with a plan to

return to “legitimate” work once the pandemic passes. When a women’s sexual health

resource such as OMGYes can be banned as “high risk” customers from payment

processors such as PayPal, despite its connection to a distinguished research academy, it

 Garcia 33

seems inevitable that these performers will experience a similar fate. This is exacerbated

as, once flagged and banned by one digital payment processor, sex workers often

experience rapid succession cross-platform shutdowns of any accounts (Blunden, 2020)

that can be traced back to the original flagged account (this is how Sx Noir found herself

ousted by AirBnB and Tinder after being banned from using PayPal, no participation in

commercial sex work necessary).

When sex work is contextualized within the right to survive, new questions arise for

technologists. How can thinking through questions like these in the classroom prime

technologists for anti-oppressive design? How does destigmatization create opportunities

in financial tech? Can highlighting such divergent events in the context of historical harm

experienced due to algorithmic bias encourage more ethical, empathetic machine learning

development? Can it encourage seeing the digital sex worker as human, rather than as a

“fair-game” commodity for nonconsensual image scraping and data collection for

technology that will further harm them in the future?

Coding School Allyship

As noted during the panel by Danielle Blunt, sex work is often an only option for those

barred from other forms of employment, which intersects critically with access to income

as the most effective mechanism for harm reduction and protection from exposure to

violence (Blunt & Wolf, 2020). The criminalization of sex work has created a carceral
 Garcia 34

feedback loop for many swept up in vice-related stings (Robinson & Shin, 2020), which

often target the most vulnerable bodies involved in commercial sex trades—including

transgender women of color, migrants, and those escaping abusive households—due to

their surveillable presence in public (Open Society Foundations, 2014). “Prostitution

diversion programs,” designed as interventionist alternatives to punitive measures, coerce

sex workers to plead guilty to solicitation in order to receive rehabilitation services that

will scrub their criminal records, a Catch-22 that further criminalizes those caught

by—and often experiencing violence at the hands of—law enforcement (Grant 5-8).

Many caught in this carceral feedback loop entered it due to their placement on the

“wrong side” of a digital divide that affords agency to those entering sex trades from

more privileged backgrounds (as previously described). By offering allyship to

formerly-incarcertated sex workers through stipended education, coding schools can

directly support a liberatory imaginatory that bridges this fateful digital divide.

Technologists are well-aware of the advantages that come with possessing developer

know-how: opportunity for flexible, autonomous freelance income, lucrative employment

viability that does not rely on access to meritocratic education systems, and blind

behind-the-screen hireability based on skill rather than identity. ​All ​of these qualities can

benefit those rendered unemployable due to prior involvement to sex work, especially

when sex work was their only option for independent financial security in the first place.

At the same time, sex workers can offer perspectives on privacy, security, and

surveillance that simply would not occur to privileged technologists. Perhaps this is what
 Garcia 35

reparative justice looks like for an industry that has systematically profitted from labor

performed by sex workers, only up until the point that they can afford to dispose of them.

CONCLUSION & DISCUSSION

These final speculations barely touch the tip of the iceberg, in that I chose to limit what I would

present here to what I could support with research while constricted by a number of un/foreseen

factors. I don’t want nor need any ownership here: I’m putting these ideas out there for

consideration and execution by anyone with the resources to do so. In that way, my next step is

never-ending; amplifying the voice of the Other-Wise requires radical imagination, reflexivity,

vulnerability, and community.

With that in mind, this project prompts an endless deluge of related standpoint questions such as:

Can consent-focused sexual expertise inspire interface design that adopts informed consent and

privacy-aware frameworks, rather than coerces adherence to illegible terms of service

agreements? What does street-based harm reduction look like when sex workers are actively

included in public health research? What does sexual or mental health and education look like

when those who labor in sex industries are asked about their experienced observations from the

frontlines of intimate encounter? When sex workers are seen for their labors of care and

collective organizing strengths, how can they influence labor practices?

Many of these prompts are far outside the scope of this paper, and even further beyond my own
 Garcia 36

purview as a justice-driven creative technologist. I hope however that this paper makes the case

for pursuing collaborations with sex workers and their allies in all venues of technoscience,

especially in challenging the carceral imaginary so pervasive in technological development.

There is an abundance of opportunity—in robotics, medical research, cybersecurity, artificial

intelligence, accessibility design—currently limited due to the resounding effects of Encoded

Stigma; an erotic justice movement stemming from the technology school affords access to such

opportunities, while prioritizing an intersectional pursuit of the protection of human rights, labor

visibility, and digital privacy.

 Garcia 37

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