In "Posthumans Go Hollywood! (Maybe.)," Charlie Jane Anders wonders: "Are we finally going to get a posthuman mass culture?" What's "posthuman"?
Anders:
For the purposes of this post, I'm thinking of posthumans as "vanilla" humans who get upgraded somehow, either by becoming cyborgs, or connecting their minds to cyberspace, or becoming part-alien, or enhancing their bodies with nanotech, biotech or some other improvements.Anders posits posthumans in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and James Cameron's forthcoming "Avatar" offer humans a "a new dose of optimism and escapism." It's like Obama, with a microchip. We're all Obamabots now.
These days, I'm working on an essay on the future of Porn Valley. (In a word? Bleak.) It's gotten me thinking about the future of pornography. I'd like to venture my ideas here, but I should probably save them for my article.
Premise: Porn Valley is dying.
Question: What do you think posthuman pornography would look like?
Email me.
If I get some interesting responses, I'll add them in updates to this post.
Update 1: Paul Blume:
Not so sure it will "look" particularly different in any way -- perhaps a greater emphasis on extremities of size/elasticity/mutability coupled with a freedom to maim/kill one's partner or one's self -- but rather will concentrate on virtually generated physical sensation via the still gestating technology of teledildonics.Update 2: Peter Tupper:
If anything, posthuman porn -- should it actually ever come to be -- will be the first to be almost utterly divorced from the body and wholly concentrated, instead, in the brain.
People with extensive body modification or cosmetic surgery, particularly if it isn't meant to look "natural", like Sabrina Sabrok or the late Lolo Ferrari, could be considered early posthumans. Body modification is already doing what fashion used to do (i.e. the gym sculpted, lipo-suctioned body instead of the corset) and it may be a matter of time until we have designer body mods.Update 3: Cavalor Epthith:
In terms of pornography, you'd need something that made a strong visual impact. For instance, a drug that temporarily shuts off your melanin production, giving you albinism. Such visible forms of body modification could be linked to subcultures that promote sexual freedom. This kind of technology will make it to the streets, like transpeople who use gray-market hormones. The viewer develops a fetish that "blanco girls" are hot, and somebody sets up www.whitehotgirls.com.
Though not post-human, I think in the next few years we'll see porn influenced by the iconography of the War on Terror, with Muslim extremists providing the threatening Other group that will be eroticized/exoticized, just as Nazis were in the late 20th century and the Catholic Church was in the 18th and 19th centuries. Look for veiling and masking, "naked under her burqa", interrogation scenarios, that kind of thing.
Posthumanism, at its most fundamental level, will be the ability to go beyond death since death is the ultimate human act. To do this the petit mort must become the grand mort and the experience must be able to allow the entertained to be able to answer the question, "Is there sex after death?" with a resounding "Yes!"Update 4: Ayzad:
I found the io9.com article most interesting for while it dealt with concepts like the Terminator, it totally ignored characters like Constantine and the burden of knowing Paradise and Hell both existing and waiting on the other side of the divide. In both, there must be sex because it is the ultimate act of succor and or punishment. On a more technical level, posthuman pornography will be at once utterly selfish and mutually gratifying. A posthuman can defy most social conventions regarding sex without committing any crime. One can extrapolate with their own imagination what this would mean for a society that would still have its bulk a mere human substrate of billions of Souls that are nothing more than templates of desire for a few demigods. As time marches forward, however, and the desire to reach that new height of release beckons ever louder all would becomes deities in their own right seeking their own "big bangs."
In the long run, the game will probably be played entirely at direct neural stimulation level. As soon as we have the technology, you can be sure that somebody will develop a gadget to excite the pleasure centers of the brain without the aggravation of "superfluous" elements like fantasy scenarios, foreplay or whatever - plug 'n' come, if you will. I imagine the rise of a iPleazure-junkie subculture with lots of similarities to the heroin plague of the Seventies, with many people choosing to get out of an ever-depressing life and waste away in synthetic happiness - both as a statement and an addiction.
Sometimes along the line (I really don't know if earlier, later or concurrently with the above mentioned period) it is also easy to envision some kind of working virtual reality porn coming up. I think that before-regulations Second Life was a very good example of the diversity of sexual experiences people would be interested in exploring if they were: available, free, good-quality, customizable, interactive. Of course SL is way shitty, but it is only a matter of time until technology catches up with the (admittedly low) expectations of the average porn user. Add up half-good haptic interfaces, and you'll have a world full of otaku-like wankers.
Thinking about it, if the Singularity theory is right you could sum it all up in people living more and more in their custom virtual spaces to have fun (read: sex-type experiences) while their AI avatars go on conducting business for them semi-autonomously.
What I DON'T see is the porn industry surviving very well. Projecting from the current situation of the online minority, porn is going to be more and more free, customized and "user-created" - three lines not viable for any industry. Maybe for a while we'll keep seeing the current strategy of trying to launch zillions of different imaginary fetishes in the hope that one of them sticks (case in point: zombies raping girls didn't work, pedal pumping did; ass milkshakes didn't work, bukkake did...), but sooner or later even that will become economically unviable, and everyone will be back to recycling "old" contents.
