Sex Workers Built the Internet

Lecture recording

a black and white erotic etching featuring two people writhing on a bed, with latin text underneath.

I Modi (The Ways), by Giulio Romano and Marcantonio Raimondi

A sepia toned archival image of a young naked woman draped horizontally on a wingback sofa. She looks away from the camera.

Lily Pettigrew, August 1889. Photographed by Edward Linley Sambourne (1844-1910)

Four antique machines that look like narrow chest of drawers are lined up against the wall, with posters above them showing naked women in different poses. A person is looking into one of them.

Stereoscopic porn and peeps shows from the 1800s.

An advert from a magazine that feature a close up of a woman's fac with eighties hair. The text says 'SeXXy SoftwareTM: SeXXy CD-ROMsTM'

Classified adverts from PC Magazine, approx 1990s

A magazine cover featuring a lady in a tight lace bodysuit and large hat that covers her face. In front of her is a man coming out of an old school computer screen, his head in his arms and slumped on the keyboard.

Računari (A computer magazine from the Netherlands) - April 1988

A black and white gif of a woman wearing an ankle-length, puffed out dress. She is dancing and showing her ankles.

A a gif made from the 1894 film Carmencita, featuring the first woman in front of an Edison motion picture camera.

A screen shot of a simple website page that says 'Danni's Hard Drive'. A prominent nipple features on the screen next to the text 'touch me here to see my Hard Drive!'

Danni’s Hard Drive (1995). Image via Sex Workers Built the Internet / Internet Archive

A screen shot of two women sitting topless in front of an old school computer. One of them is blonde and the other brunette, an they are both wearing blue jeans with black belts.

A screenshot from the 1996 instructional video, 'How to have Cybersex on the Internet'

Lady of the Night School was a two part course that ran for three months between October to December 2021, and again between April to June 2022. Each month we collectively explored a new topic. The focus was less on current legislation and campaigns, and more at how we got where we are today.

This is an archive of each session in the series. Here you will find recordings, reading lists, audio, and summaries of each section, as well as details of our hosts and where you can find them now.

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Sex Workers Built the Internet (April 2022)

It’s time to have “The Talk” with technologists. From Call Girls to Cam Girls, sex workers have been some of the greatest innovators on the possibilities of harnessing technology. But we currently live in a present in which technology is explicitly built to target and eliminate sex work. In other words, to Big Tech the sex worker is as indispensable as they are disposable. This lecture will outline this tradition of innovation-to-elimination, while also exploring how we might code sex worker ethics into future design.

  • Lecture by Gabriella Garcia, hosted by Nim Ralph (Monday April 4th, 7pm – 8.30pm)

  • Seminar by Debs Durojaiye (Monday 11th April, 6.30 – 8.30pm)

Gabriella Garcia (she/her) is the co-founder of Decoding Stigma, a cross-institutional working group that calls for the inclusion of sex worker voices in all spaces that purport to be designing the future. She recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program (ITP), where her research focused on the co-history of commercial sex and media technology. She sits on the Community Advisory Board for Urban Justice Center’s Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP).

Nim Ralph (they/them) is a trans writer, educator and activist. Nim has led campaigns for trans & queer rights, environmental justice and anti-racism in the UK, and works with activists globally. They are the Lead Trainer and designer of multiple activist training programmes. You can follow them on twitter: @NMRLPH.

Debs Durojaiye (she/her) is a designer and community technologist working in the areas of digital inclusion, accessibility, participation and common ownership. She is co-director of Multitudes, a design and technology co-op and a member of the W3C Devrel Council, an initiative to increase participation from excluded communities in web standards. She co-founded Afrotech Fest in 2018, a ‘for us by us’ tech festival in the UK, for Black people of African and Caribbean heritage.

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Further reading:

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This course is made possible with generous support from the Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn Trust and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Sex Workers Built the Internet was the first session in the second series of our popular education course Lady of the Night School.

The topics included:

  • A History of Sex Work Criminalisation in the UK

  • Trans Sex Workers Through History

  • Latin American Sex Worker Struggles

  • Sex Workers Built the Internet

  • Anti Trafficking in the Caribbean

  • Sex Worker Art and Creative Practices

Year: 2022
Type: public lecture
Series: lady of the night school
Subject(s): technology advertising history internet work sesta fosta