on the proliferation of online porn culture into our everyday
Are you, like me, desperately trying to avoid consuming so much garbage brainrot internet content? Then you’ll know this means, well, spending less time on the internet. Or specifically, the swamp of social media.
This makes it all the more jarring when you do log back on, for whatever reason (research purposes???), only to find new depths of sexualised depravity. And then you realise, this kind of content is now our dominant culture, and it’s not limited to X, Facebook, TikTok or Instagram.
AI made fruit misogynistic
The thing that spurred me to write about this phenomenon was a strange and disturbing video trend that blew up on X, the formerly semi-respectable platform, now a wasteland of Nazis, bots, AI crap and abusive deepfakes of women. Suddenly, AI-generated videos showing Pixar-style anthropomorphic fruit with dramatic and salacious storylines were pushed to the front of the algorithm.
These bizarre video shorts often involve a female fruit doing something controversial. A common trope is one cheating on their male partner, then falling pregnant, and after bearing the other man’s fruit, being ‘appropriately’ punished or chasisted for their wrongdoing.
If you watch one of these AI videos, and I highly recommend you don’t, they all have a creepy quality to them, something uncanny yet trying to emulate real art. Like all artificial intelligence, I guess.
But the misogyny of each one is unavoidable: the female characters are used sexually, shown as negatively promiscuous or otherwise weak, and the men are shown as either irresistible Alpha studs – mimicking porn storylines – or loyal and justifiably angry partners. The female characters get their comeuppance in the form of being abandoned to raise the child alone or even assaulted.
As Kat Tenbarge for Wired writes of these disturbing videos, “one theme sticks out: women fruit characters facing humiliating scenarios and even violence.”
These videos are cynically creating the most scandalous form of slop to draw clicks and attention, but their plots specifically illustrate the pornified misogyny at the heart of modern culture.
deepfake distress
AI videos go even darker than these fruit-based scenarios, when generated deepfakes paint real people in belittling or highly sexualisd positions. Elon Musk’s X is a serial offender. As shado culture editor Ning Chang writes about in her excellent recent piece Deepfakes are dooming us, the technology is inherently misogynistic – women and girls have been the most focal target of the image generation of xAI’s chatbot Grok.
An investigation by The Guardian over a single day found that Grok generated 6,000 images per hour of young women and even children forced into bikinis, and then made to spread their legs, bend over, or contort their bodies into revealing sexual positions.
Around 3 million people, including 23,000 children, had their images deepfaked before X belatedly attempted to scale back abuse of the tool.
Deepfakes are used as a show of power and control: men can claim ownership or domination over the women they disagree with on the internet, putting them in degrading scenarios or otherwise enacting their highly sexualised fantasies.
The notoriety of deepfakes and AI porn shorts on social media platforms, accessed by many children, darkly complements a general increase in actual porn or porn-adjacent content on X and other social media. It’s a troubling development: the addictive elements of socials and porn in itself, and how it’s weaved into popular culture, means it has real staying power.
access is key
Never before have we had such power at our fingertips. We can search for anything, conjure up any scenario. We can make anyone look like they are doing anything. And it’s led to our reality merging with fantasy pornified scenarios.
This ‘hyper-pornification’ even infects our language: people are described in non-sexual contexts as ‘simps’ and ‘cucked’. Whole sub-cultures have basis in misogynstic fantasies and porn scenarios – the ‘trad wife’ movement – or addiction to online porn and masturbating – gooning. The incel movement’s hatred of women is reinforced by violent porn content, which has become a staple of the industry, with a proliferation of women being choked and slapped during hardcore sexual acts.
The naked misogyny of the manosphere thrives on a ‘pornified’ view of the world: women are sex objects who deserve to be degraded and to be abused by men. This has seeped into the mainstream: any of the big social media platforms now seem to have this kind of content – whether AI slop or literally just hardcore porn – in abundance.
what is it all for?
What is the point of the hyper-pornification of our culture? To reinforce patriarchy, male myths about women and justify the othering.
As Ning points out, it should not be lost in the haze that big tech profits from the AI abuse on its platform in the form of deepfakes. It’s the whole systemic issue with the attention economy: quickfire, salacious porn content gets more clicks and engagement, as does seeing a well-known celebrity, online personality or a random woman on the internet turned into an object of sexual ridicule.
This is not a moralistic call to be squeamish about sex between consenting adults, or an anti-sex worker tirade. I 100% support sex workers, and also want to take into account their own critiques of this stigmatised industry, including issues around safeguarding, consent and workers’ rights. There is a place for ethical pornographic content but the type of content which has become accepted – and so, so prolific – in our digital and physical lives has elements of pure exploitation, and is manifesting a more volatile social fabric.
We are becoming a less informed, more addle-brained population. Our limited attention span is now being saturated with porn-y deepfakes and all other kinds of trash, leading more broadly to backsliding on women’s rights, as well as democratic principles.
Enough, stand up to big tech and refuse to feed from the hyper-pornified hand!
~ Tommy
Florida Taco Bell Worker Opens Fire On Customers Over Drink Dispute
If the U.S was a sentence…
This story has all the staples of modern American life: fast food, guns and violence in response to a private property dispute.
Apparently in this Taco Bell in West Palm Beach, a customer did the sneaky trick of asking an employee for a cup for water, but filled it with soda instead. Whom amongst us??
A confrontation about this indiscretion soon escalated into open fire by the employee. Extremely normal behaviour as part of an extremely normal society. Luckily, the victim only sustained minor injuries – it could’ve been so much worse.
This tale serves as a ridiculous reminder of the dangerous cocktail of pettiness and firearms.
Richard Dawkins’ Claude Delusion
For those who missed it, evolutionary biologist, arch-atheist and ‘cultural Christian’ (read as white) Richard Dawkins has come to the conclusion that AI is conscious, after a romantic-sounding few weeks chatting with the LLM bot he calls Claudia (🤮).
“These intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism,” he said. Well, he may be proving his own point here.
It seems the infamous critic of God as an “imaginary friend” has mistaken the mimicry and flattery of an AI bot for genuine consciousness. As this helpful video by Rebecca Watson (Skepchick) explains, Dawkins falls for the AI as it reinforces his own belief structure. In reality, he is talking to a mirror – of course he’s going to be flattered by it!
Kelela – linknb
A bouncy offering by alt-R&B singer Kelela. I like how the vocals are almost lo-fi, and the backing track mixes neo-soul with a guitar riff and 2000s record scratching. It gives it this timeless element. I only wish it was a longer tune, but maybe that’s where it strength lies, in making you want to re-listen!
The video is worth checking out too!
It Could Happen Here – Zohran Mamdani’s First 100 Days
A comprehensive appraisal of Mamdani’s first 100 days as New York mayor by It Could Happen Here podcast host Garrison Davis.
What Zohran has been able to achieve so far in his tenure of reviving municipal socialism – using local government to further socialist aims – is impressive. This is especially true in the area of housing: public investment in social housing, building affordable homes, cracking down on landlord violations, moving towards a rent freeze and further tenant protections. Also, his focus on transport improvements has created more bike lanes and express bus routes, though the larger aim of making buses free for all will require more than a few months.
Mamdani’s approach of fixing the most immediate material issues in people’s lives in NYC is typified by this quote: If you can't solve the smallest task in someone's life, why would they ever trust you to solve the biggest one? How can we promise to transform our city if we can't pave your street?
And he has proven this determination in practice, for instance with his ‘pothole politics’: filling one hundred thousand potholes in just 100 days.
I found this episode does a balanced job of exploring Mamdani’s key wins whilst being realistic about the overwhelming challenges he’s facing at the helm of NY, and not shying away from what he has yet to deliver on. It touches on how this term can serve as an example of progressive politics from within for the rest of the country, but identifies the limitations and critiques of such a model too.
Yi-Ling Liu – The Shared Feeling of Being Harvested by the Future (requires free registration to read)
This NYT piece went viral, and I can see why.
Writer Yi-Ling Liu paints a vivid picture of workers in the new AI economy of both the U.S and China having a lot in common, and being a closer indication of reality than the hyped China-U.S war of competition.
She posits that AI technologies are already disempowering human agency in key economic sectors, and being relied on for labour, and increasingly the emotional support of lonely, isolated individuals. A world accelerating out of humans’ control is a prime setting for a resurgence in different forms of spirituality and nostalgia, including fringe and illiberal ideas, as people cling on to things that make sense of their conditions.
As usual, it is the underclass which suffers from the U.S-China rapid developments in AI. Far from “embracing the future”, as Big Tech bosses want us to believe is happening, workers are sealing their own fate by buying into these unequal forms of technology which are dooming their livelihoods.
Read the piece and see what you think for yourself, would love to hear your opinion on this!
Enjoy the sun ☀️
Keeping it simple this week, and well done for making it this far down my newsletter on a sticky day! The weather has been hot hotting up lately so stay safe, hydrated and remember to touch grass. I hate living on a laptop during days like this, except for writing the shuffle of course:)
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