Welcome back to Computing Queer Spaces. In Part 1: A People Full of Possibility, we discussed how spatial computing could be used in a variety of arenas to amplify Queer life and foster community. We now must engage the questions and concerns that arise from this technology. To be clear, I do not believe that this technology is itself the problem. I believe surveillance capitalism, the attention economy, social alienation, exploitation, and gatekeeping by Big Tech are the major problems. Let’s use a Meta platform for an example since they’re one of the movers in this market. Instagram used to be a place to share photos with cute little filters and plucky captions. Now it is a highly addictive space with memes, vitriolic public comments, “news” to share, news to share, men creeping on teen girls, gay beach trip photos, AI generated bullsh*t, too many ads, digital stores, and far too many anti-competitive copies of other platforms’ products (reels and stories). Meta, then Facebook, bought Instagram, a reprieve from and a competitor of Facebook, and turned it into an arm of Zuckerberg’s evil digital empire. Possibly illegally, according to the FTC. I like a lot of Instagram, but the motives of ad sales and omnipresence have turned a photo-sharing app into a pseudo-Super App. Meta is so bad for people that the Attorney General of New Mexico is suing Meta and its subsidiaries, Instagram and Facebook, for harms to children including human trafficking and sexual exploitation. Meta could have made safer products, but the need to harvest data, sell ads, and influence their audience to stay on the platforms trumps any interest in human flourishing and safety. In the hands of our “benevolent” masters, these technologies can turn into tools of our own alienation, extraction, and destruction. I would like to not have the same people being forced to apologize to parents for their dead kids to be governing powerful, immersive technology. In a democratic society, the people and their elected officials should govern the direction and deployment of technology, not industrial feudal lords motivated solely by shareholder value.
These are central mantras in modern Queer life, but one in particular represents a regular obstruction to forming digital communities and connections. Gatekeepers in tech, specifically Big Tech, have long kept us restrained and policed. Currently our political and regulatory environment, or lack thereof, has created a duopoly in app marketplaces for mobile devices. You are choosing between Apple’s App Store and Alphabet’s Google Play Store. Their dominance in the mobile app market is such that Epic Games was able to bring lawsuits against both companies for monopolization, with Google having been found by a jury to be guilty of monopolizing Android app markets.
Epic lost on 9 out of the 10 charges in the Apple suit but won on the “anti-steering” charge.
Gonzalez-Rogers did, however, side with Epic in one matter, ruling Apple could not block developers from linking out to alternative payment methods from within their apps - a practice known as "anti-steering" - as that would constitute "anti-competitive conduct" under state law (Matt Wales in Eurogamer).
Unfortunately, Apple then once again circumvented this by throwing up warning screens to folks attempting to pay outside their ecosystem. Epic Games is now appealing to Judge Yovonne Gonzalez Rogers to force Apple to stop avoiding compliance. Also, Apple is in trouble with the judge herself potentially violating injunctions and stymieing the turning over of documents. There’s an interesting dance here where the jury trial clearly found Google simply guilty of monopolization and Epic clearly learned from the Apple trial, but also Apple got too comfortable with Judge Gonzalez Rogers and is now turning her against them even after a successful legal fight. I think the jury trials are the better way to go because citizens have a clearer sense of things that judges and their mess (consumer welfare doctrine indoctrination, conflicts of interest, ego, etc) but watching a judge turn against a monopolist in real time is fascinating.
Part of being a gatekeeper is deciding the standards for entry like a nightclub bouncer enforcing a “no sneakers” rule. In this case, the bouncers, Apple and Google, have censorious rules on what sort of apps are appropriate for their stores. For years Recon, a gay, kink-focused hookup app, was barred from the App and Play stores. Users were required to download the app as a file on Recon’s website and awareness of Recon’s existence was spread by word of mouth, not advertising within the marketplaces. Scruff and Grindr have both gotten in trouble for allowing users to be too slu*tty and have often been forced to censor users for “explicit content” like bulges or underwear in their profile pictures. Far off heterosexuals and their accomplices in Mountainview and Cupertino dictate self-expression on apps that they don’t own, solely because they control the markets. I for one hope the remedy stages of the Epic Games trial require Google to divest their app store and create an economy where a variety of app stores exist and offer a variety of products, privacy protections, standards, and more. I want the bodega, Wegmans, Safeway, and Hana Market of app stores.
You might be thinking “Hey girlboss, what does this have to do with spatial computing?” The simple answer is everything. While information is hard to discern in this emerging market, in 2023 Meta dominated sales of VR headsets with its Oculus Quest 2 amounting to “75% of all VR headsets” shipped according to Kommando Tech. It almost seems like their $2 billion acquisition of Oculus was to give them hardware and a headstart in the spatial computing market. If Apple’s Vision Pro comes down in cost, I expect an explosion in their market share as well. Having another product to integrate into the Apple Ecosystem will be enticing to their most loyal customers. The DOJ would call that ecosystem a “walled garden” and central to the antitrust lawsuit Apple is currently facing. So that’s all the hardware, but what about software? Well here’s a quick search for VR apps.
Ain’t these the same people that said I couldn’t download Recon from the Play Store? Isn’t the Play Store in Youtube’s corporate family under Alphabet? This is the same Youtube that regularly de-monetizes Watts the Safeword for doing sex education. On Alphabet’s existing platforms Queer creators like Pup Amp and Mr Kristopher and businesses like Sniffies are censored or barred. All of those dreams of mixed-reality drag shows or p*rn go out the window when the presence of LGBTQ people is deemed explicit or “adult” in nature. At the most charitable, you have p*rn apps banned from the Google Play Store because it’s p*rn. Could they mandate age-verification or parental approval for downloading 18+ applications? Sure, but, if they don’t want that trouble and choose to just ban mobile apps for p*rn, I detest but understand that decision. At the most heinous are platforms like Tiktok making people say “gäe”, “unalive”, and “seggs” to get around censorship. Under the Big Tech paradigm, I can see my Drag Race Finale livestream idea coming to fruition because it will be through WOW+ or Paramount+, but you can forget about seeing drag shows like Fat slu*t or a Fitness Papi sex show live. Even sex education applications get the chop because that’s too “adult” for a straight general consumer base. Even at our best, we’re too queer to be let into the nightclub, at least by the current bouncers.
The Big Tech paradigm is also concentrating app development. If Meta, Apple, and Microsoft have the hardware, then you must build for their designs and desires. They also have the money to pay developers which means software and hardware are being tied together and kept in-house. They control an oligopolistic market for mixed-reality products but also an oligopsonistic labor-side market as the primary buyers of developers’ labor. Big Tech layoffs have been all the rage since 2021 and spatial computing is no different. Microsoft just layed off 1,000 employees including in its mixed-reality department.
Part of the curse of bigness is that these companies become unwieldy and unproductive. I love that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella thinks extended reality is cool. The problem is that these big players move markets with their galaxy-brained ideas and the money and resources in the global economy shift to their whims, but when they can’t make products that are affordable with clear use cases, they lay off a bunch of people and send market shifting signals again. Nadella, Pichai, Cook, and Zuckerberg should not be dictating whether this technology flourishes or not, partly because their bigness makes them immune from proper market responses. When PCs arrived, imagine they were all $3,000 made by a few companies, didn’t seem to have any use cases, and the software development for them was completely concentrated around those same few companies leading to limited widespread adoption of the technology and everyone still using typewriters. A dynamic, deconcentrated market for spatial computing would ideally require companies, especially startups, to make hardware products that were affordable, and compete on the development of software products. You shouldn’t have to go to Gatekeep Daddy to get access to this technology and then likely get laid off cause Daddy won’t do the work of making something profitable and good.
Along with concerns about gatekeepers, we have the un-safety of the digital world. I think a lot about alienation in the modern age and the role tech plays in that. Senator Chris Murphy is thinking about this too and you should read his Substack; he’ll be coming back up in a future post. I digress.
The kids are so addicted to short-form videos that the potential ban of their digital cigarettes Tiktok sent them into a tizzy. You ask a company governed by an adversarial state to sell off its highly addictive, youth-targeted products and everyone loses their mind.
Remember when TikTok rallied young people to call their Members of Congress, and it completely overwhelmed the staff? Just a bunch of addicts screaming about their right to unregulated digital cigarettes. Seems kind of scary to me. Anyways, it’s bad out there, and mixed-reality could make it worse.
I’m generally very skeptical of terms like hypersexuality (see previous post about it) and “p*rn addiction.” I often find it hard to tell what’s addiction versus a sex-negative culture’s response to someone enjoying p*rn just like watching sports or movies or reading books. Digital addiction, however, is well-documented, even by social media companies, and, to me, supersedes p*rn addiction. Digital addiction is intimately tied with alienation and dehumanization. For all my dreams of mixed-reality p*rn, extending it further into reality may exacerbate someone's digital addiction by creating more immersive experiences. I don’t have a f*ck machine but I can imagine that for some people they can replace human connections in a way that is detrimental to that individual. Adding an immersive component to that may worsen that person’s connection to their fellow human being. Sex toys, like digital products and services, aren’t there to replace a human; they are unique experiences and, at their best, can be an addition to human connections. I could also see the comfort and safety of mixed-reality sex increasing anxiety around the discomfort and potential risks of in-person sexual interactions. Gen Z is apparently not having sex and the prevailing theory is that they’re too phone addicted and anxious by un-curated interactions. Even for me, at the height of my PTSD after being violently sexually assaulted, would I have gone through the Looking Glass if I could have escaped into the safety of virtual sex? Would I have been wrong to do so? So often watching p*rn is an easy replacement for the annoyances and complexities of sex. Hopping on my “hoe Twitter” saves me a lot of trouble. Now imagine those vids extended into my living room via an Apple Vision Pro.
Digital addiction is primarily driven by corporations building technologies designed to addict us and profit off the attention economy. So many of us are deeply plugged into The Matrix but, worse, many don’t even realize it. A headset that actually pulls you into a new reality seems potentially quite scary. Framing digital teleportation as “connection” when it’s actually addictive and a ruse to sell our data is terrifying. We’re all so connected on Facebook that your cousin can blast you with misinformation and propaganda with ease. Take that conspiracy or propaganda video, play it in the personal theater of a VR headset, hit autoplay and see what happens to your formerly normal friend. Wait until they start sending you all the “eye-opening” videos they watched for so long that when they took the Oculus off and opened their eyes, it hurt.
Much like I dream of expanding the audience of drag performance to Queers all over, my nightmare is the further Drag Racification of the art form. Don’t get me wrong, I love Drag Race, but I also am aware of the many people who only know drag through the Race.
They’ve never gone and supported local drag artists or even tried drag themselves. They critique queens online like a dad watching the NY Giants but worse because they know nothing of the skills required to do drag or Drag Race, which are not the same thing. At least dad goes to see a game every once in a while. Even if he didn’t, those players are paid in ways drag artists could only dream of. Without structures around payment and tipping, spatial computing’s merging with performance may just entrench the Instagram and Tiktok-ification of drag, enslaving performers to algorithms and orienting the art form around the platform, not the community or art itself. They begin performing for a sort of ShESPN where some random teen in his mama’s house will stitch the video and offer critiques they don’t have the range for. Many Drag Race contestants talk about online harassment and overly demanding viewers because of the ability to access drag without community wisdom or care. They view the artists as commodities not people who came up honing their craft long before that overly online mama’s boy was born. Without community guardrails and communal education, we will lose the plot. Expanding access to Queer art, drag performance, kink performance, etc. is not an inherent good; the good comes from what we do with it. We must expand access to Queerness to further bolster Queer community, not further commodify our family.
Commodification is deeply tied up with exploitation, so I asked Leo Herrera about sexual violence and exploitation on this new frontier. I’m always sensitive to sexual violence in p*rn, especially p*rn that masquerades as kink. Leo’s piece, The Rape of Henry Cavil, really had me thinking about propagation of rape fantasies with AI and the potential to accelerate the distribution of that material within livestreamed, immersive experiences. Leo was less worried than me and “[didn’t] think [mixed-reality] will be any more different than what we’ve seen on other platforms'' and that we are likely to “see an explosion of violent and semi-legal content followed by a crackdown until we find a ‘middle ground’ in the way we do, with say S&M and extreme fisting p*rn.” That was comforting. As someone who watches quite a bit of fisting p*rn, I’m glad that I’m in the era where the community has really taken the reins on what is sexy and appropriate. I don’t think I’d like what I like if I lived through the sorting period. I would note that Leo didn’t say there’s nothing to worry about, but that we must earnestly face the mess of fetishizing violence and non-consensual acts. Along with those guardrails, we need to utilize our community antibodies against sex-negative crackdowns. Onlyfans is known for being highly censorious of kink content and framing it as dangerous and “violent.” Justforfans stepped up as a platform run by sex workers and has been far more friendly to Queer and kinky creators. That coupled with the owner of Onlyfans being a Zionist has led a lot of Queer creators to revolt against the platform. That’s the energy we will need in the sorting period. Being that straight people won’t even admit that they like kinky sex, I think it’s going to be on Queer people to, once again, imagine healthy guardrails and openly toil over our sexual complexities. That’s not easy but that’s what we’ve been doing forever.
Once again, despite some very serious concerns, there is hope. We can still be the masters of our own destinies, and that’s exactly what I will be discussing in the third and final installment of this series. I will close out on where we go from here and how to navigate the gulf of power between some of the antagonistic forces we face. The task is daunting but what isn’t? And won’t it be worth it when you can freely watch p*rn with your VR headset while your good Judy down the road is having an immersive date night with their long distance partner and your local community center is hosting Drag Queen Story Hour for local and distant kids? That’s the reward for sorting through these Queeries and Concerns and pushing through to a better future.
Once again, Doctor Who. This series (British version of season) is all about technology, alienation, and human connection. I recently watched the “Dot and Bubble” episode, and it is the nightmare version of the extended-reality and attention economy. I might write a full piece about this episode or the entire season when it’s done. Dot and Bubble really capture the way these technologies could make us anti-social and our lives artificial. It’s similar to the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive” but with an even more cynical conclusion
Please go listen to BRAT by Charli XCX, HEAT by Tove Lo and SG Lewis, and HEATWAVE by BRONZE AVERY. The music of the summer will be very gay, and you all need to be plugged in.
I’ve recently fallen in love with Cosmo Lombino, the Queen of Melrose, and you need to get into her interviews. Her recent appearances on Matt Cullen’s channel and Delta Work’s show are absolute musts. It’s Pride Month, and we should be learning about these unseen legends and icons.
Lastly, go watch the Chaka Khan Tiny Desk Concert. Just do it.
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