How the Jews Lost Control of Twitter
/How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex: An Unexpected History, Kindle Edition, by Samantha Cole
Samantha Cole has written an entirely predictable and conventional history of the intersection between sex and technology on the Internet. What purports to be a book could have been reduced to an article for Wired Magazine based on the assertions she makes in her introduction, where we learn that
“the internet was built on sex. ... A demand for sex built the shopping cart, the browser cookie, ad revenue models, payment processors, and the dynamic web page. The desire to explore and share our sexuality constructed the internet, piece by piece, as we know it today.”1
That article, however, would have been based on falsehoods. One Silicon Valley insider who was involved in many of the technological breakthroughs Cole mentioned, described her account as “full of shit.” The cookie got invented “so you could stay logged into a website such as a bank or hospital and not have to re-log-in on every page navigation within such a site.” The invention of the cookie had less to do with nudity than with its opposite, namely, clothing. The mock-demo pitch for the cookie involved buying a polo shirt, where you could pick the color, and the shirt’s color would change without having to submit a form or fetch a new page from the server.” The inventions which Cole mentioned had “nothing to do with sex. Payments were for online goods, books at first in Amazon (founded as Cadabra in 1994, same year as Netscape).”2
So, Cole knows next to nothing about the history of tech development on the internet, but the main handicap Cole brings to her book is her failure to understand human sexuality. When Samantha Cole says sex built the internet, what she really means is that the internet has enabled more and more complicated forms of masturbation, leading to more and more complicated forms of financial exploitation and social control. I once debated a lady who went into great detail about the perverted acts she engaged in as proof that what she called sex had nothing to do with having children, until in an unguarded moment she blurted out that she had studied the reproductive system in college. “And why is it called that?” I asked. I’m still waiting for her answer. Andy Warhol once said that the problem with sex is that you had to get close to someone to engage in it. That means if what you’re calling sex involves activity with someone who is not in the same zip code, much less the same room, you’re probably engaging in masturbation.
Unfortunately, Cole doesn’t understand masturbation either. Before she wrote her book on sex and the internet, she should have consulted Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint or better still, the locus classicus of masturbation theory, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, by Wilhelm Reich. Like Philip Roth, Reich was a Jew who wanted to weaponize masturbation into a form of control. The Mass Psychology of Fascism appeared in print in 1933, the same year in which Philip Roth was born. At that time, Reich was a Freudian and a Communist living in Vienna and at war with the Catholic population of Austria, the truncated rump of the once powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire. Reich noticed that the same crowd whose eyes glazed over when he began lecturing about the fourth thesis of the Third International perked up whenever he talked about sex.
Using sex as his recruiting device, Reich began proselytizing for masturbation. Rather than getting into arguments with seminarians about the existence of God, which he invariably lost, Reich found that if he could get seminarians to engage in masturbation, the idea of God simply evaporated from their minds, thereby removing the main obstacle to the communist takeover of Austria. Reich’s theories led to the sexualization of the Catholic clergy during the 1960s and ’70s, and that led in turn to the clergy abuse crisis, which was used to attack the Catholic Church by Jews like Josh Shapiro, who used that attack to become governor of Pennsylvania. Something similar happened in Ireland, where confidence in the clergy was wrecked by first sexualizing and then demonizing the clergy for doing what the Reichians who controlled the media told them to do.
Reich’s female patients found his advocacy of masturbation repugnant until it was glamorized by what Reich called a “mass situation,” of the sort which became common during the Dionysian rock festivals of the ’60s. Mass media, the Jews in Hollywood had already discovered, could provide a convincing simulacrum of those mass situations, and as the Jews’ control over western culture increased, their ability to change sexual mores through mass situations increased as well. In 1970 Reich ended up on the cover of the New York Times magazine because of the role he played in inspiring the Paris uprising of 1968, when Jewish rioters like Daniel Cohn-Bendit literally pelted French cops with copies of Reich’s book.
From this point on, pornography, technology, and masturbation went hand in hand, so to speak. The Jews in Hollywood broke the production code in 1965 when they released their Holocaust porn flick The Pawnbroker. Within seven years, hard-core films like Deep Throat were being shown at mainstream theaters, to the applause of the New York Times, whose staff decamped en masse to watch it. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the state of the art aids to masturbation were one-handed magazines like Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler, all of which featured high resolution glossy photos of naked women.
Masturbation technology changed with the arrival of the VCR during the 1980s, which is when Cole picks up the story. Video cassettes of movies became available for home use in 1972.3 According to Wikipedia, “The industry boomed in the 1980s as more and more customers bought VCRs. By 1982, 10% of households in the United Kingdom owned a VCR. The figure reached 30% in 1985 and by the end of the decade well over half of British homes owned a VCR.”4 The main reason people bought VCRs in the 1980s was to view pornography.
The first web cam was invented in 1991 at Cambridge University to check on the coffee pot at the computer lab.5 Within minutes of becoming commercially available in 1994, webcams became a vehicle for a whole new genre of home-made pornography, which later got labeled “amateur.” By 1996, one of the most widely reported on webcam sites was JenniCam, which “allowed Internet users to observe the life of its namesake constantly.”6 The real draw for JenniCam came from voyeurs who sat around for hours waiting for Jennifer Ringley, dubbed an “exhibitionist pioneer” by The Baltimore Sun,7 to have sex. Imitators soon followed, but the expectations remained the same. The main question remained: “When would Justin [or Jenni] have sex?” This was “the one thing everyone demanded.” It was the main thing “that they were watching and waiting for. ... By the late nineties, people were running thousands of these static-shot ‘homecams’ from their bedrooms, hundreds of which were devoted specifically to sex on camera.”8 Ringley captured this crowd’s attention by addressing the main psychological problem driving masturbation when she held up a sign saying, “I feel so lonely,” in front of her computer’s silent webcam.9 The message resonated so well that:
Around 527,000 people tuned in for each weekly episode of the first season of The Real World. Ringley’s webcam drew that many viewers every day. People tuned in to reality TV for the same reason they logged on to watch grainy webcam footage online: because they hoped to see something sexual, something scandalous.10
When Skype came online in 2003, it was immediately turned into a vehicle for pornography, as “Webmasters set up mirrors of the software that used the program without taxing the CU-SeeMe server load itself, explicitly for adult livestreaming.”11 Cole gets the details right most of the time, but she fails to understand the big picture. Instead, we are treated to breathless prose extolling masturbation as the cutting edge of freedom, as when she writes:
When people first pointed webcams at their sex lives, they invented a new industry—and more than twenty-five years later, a way for more people to take ownership of their erotic labor or talk on Zoom with an isolated friend. Internet forums built for spreading hate and revenge don’t stay online; they reach out into the world to hurt people. When discriminatory laws push sex workers off the platforms they use to survive, they suffer in real life, and their digitally inflicted hardships serve as a bellwether for what’s to come for the rest of us.12
In addition to not understanding sex, Cole also fails to understand how the internet controls people by determining both choice and behavior. This means that she also doesn’t understand how social control works. Cole is a spokesman for the exhibitionists and prostitutes who earn a living by posting pictures of themselves on platforms like OnlyFans. If she had read the chapters on Wilhelm Reich in my book Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control, she would know that masturbation is a form of control. Because she doesn’t understand sex, Cole can’t understand what is going on over the internet. Whenever Cole mentions control, it is invariably in conjunction with things like the Communications Decency Act, which she sees as a right-wing plot to control female sexuality. Fundamental misunderstandings like this create a situation where she fails to understand her own texts, as when she writes, “This is a history of control: how we had it, grappled for it, lost it, and how we can learn from the past to get it back.”13 Yes, this is a history of control, but not as Cole understands the term. Ever clueless, she describes how “The adult industry’s attempts to tell the difference between individual visitors and server requests helped create the data-collection industry as we know it today”14 with no understanding of the fact that pornography paved the way for the surveillance state we all suffer under today. What kind of freedom is this? Even according to her own account of the role masturbation played in the creation of the “data-collection industry,” sex is used to lure those who have been blinded by their lust into a trap. Under the guise of “computer match-making,” unsuspecting couples shared sex data about themselves with online dating services. Cole reports on this phenomenon in detail, but still can’t figure out that sexual liberation has always been a form of control:
There was perhaps no richer or more accurate portrayal of what users thought of themselves, wanted, dreamed of, or lived like than a dating profile: Through answering guided questions that promise to help you find your soulmate, millions of people willingly plugging their most intimate preferences (“Which pubic hair style do you prefer for a partner?”) and most mundane (“How do you feel about cooking with a partner?”) into a database. They’re compared against others—neatly alongside demographics like age, gender, height, body type, and location—to provide a gold mine of data points to advertisers. And most online daters are under thirty, making their data even more valuable.” According to OkCupid founder Sam Yagan, “Yes, we know whether you smoke and how many hours a week you play video games. We know everything.”15 In 2014, Yagan “urged OkCupid customers to boycott Mozilla because its CEO had supported a measure to prevent same-sex marriage in California,” even though Yagan had supported an anti-same sex congressman ten years earlier.
In 1996 Congress passed the Communications Decency Act (CDA), making it illegal, as Cole puts it:
to use a telecommunications device to make indecent material available to children, punishable with a fine of $ 250,000 or up to two years in prison and make it a crime for webmasters and internet users to knowingly display anything that might be deemed “patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards,” especially sexual activity, to minors.16
Since Cole described the CDA as the result of “zany proselytizing” on the part of religious fanatics, it comes as no surprise that she applauds the gutting of that act which the ACLU accomplished by adding the now infamous Section 230, which allowed what the CDA purported to prevent by stating, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”17 Cole claims that Section 230 “means that internet service providers, as well as platforms, are protected from what users did on their services, and won’t be held responsible for the things people say or do on their sites.”18 But that is clearly not how it has been used. Instead, it turned the internet into a shell game, in which platforms like Twitter were immune from prosecution for disseminating pornography, by claiming that they were a neutral utility like the phone company, but at the same time pressured to de-platform people for “hate speech” as if they were a publisher and liable for prosecution because of the content on their sites. The creator of this double standard was the ADL, which has imposed increasingly draconian and irrational forms of Jewish thought control on the United States for over a century now. Ever clueless, Cole fails to understand how Section 230 has been rigged to impose pornography and simultaneously abolish rights guaranteed under the First Amendment. Section 230, according to Cole:
makes the billions of conversations happening on Facebook and Twitter possible; without Section 230, these companies probably wouldn’t exist, let alone at the scale they do now. The same laws that shield platforms from repercussions from misinformation, hate speech, and sexual abuse material also protect what makes the internet thrive: free expression, without legal consequences for the platforms that host it. A law that set out to banish sex ended up making the whole internet flourish, instead.19
By crippling any prosecution of pornography, Section 230 set in motion what became an avalanche of child pornography and online sex trafficking. Twenty years after the passage of the CDA, legislators woke up to that fact and passed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act in 2016. The threat of lawsuits which followed from these acts forced formerly “horny” platforms like Tumblr to dump its porn in spite of the fact that “As of 2016, 22 percent of Tumblr users were consuming porn on the platform. In 2017, researchers found that more than a quarter of users were there mainly to see porn.”20 Faced with the reality of child pornography and human trafficking, all the ever-clueless Cole can complain about is “serious self-esteem issues, isolation, and in some cases, suicidal thoughts for people who are pushed off platforms or labeled ‘sexually explicit’ because of their body shape or skin color.”21 The threat of lawsuits and the tacit admission that its site was rife with illegal material caused even porn colossus PornHub to dump over a million videos.
Pornhub became the cutting edge of pornography distribution on the internet after its founder “landed a nine-figure loan from a secretive Wall Street funder in mid-2011.”22 German “tech nerd” and Pornhub founder Fabian Thylmann then used that money to buy up “every porn website and studio that would sell to him”23 and to steal those that wouldn’t. Over the course of the next ten years, Pornhub became “an oligopoly” until its demise at the hands of FOSTA and SESTA in 2020.24 During that period of time, porn also became a numbers game: “When you have forty million people visiting your website every day, if one in five thousand, or even one in ten thousand buys something, the numbers are astronomical. So even though the click-through rates are lower, the amount of money that you’re generating is batshit crazy.”25 According to Cole, revenue during the Pornhub era derived from “a mix of premium subscription access and scads of free videos.”26 At some point, the valuation of the company became a function of the sheer traffic the site generated:
Before Pornhub banned unverified uploaders in December 2020, it hosted 13.5 million videos; XVideos hosted more than 9.7 million in June 2021; YouPorn breaks their numbers down by category, with 180,000 in Amateur, 60,000 in Anal, 82,000 in Big Butt, and so on.27
In 2018, Instagram “stopped showing search results for all stripper-related hashtags,”28 a move which “made it especially hard for sex workers to survive online.” Cole has nothing but positive things to say about prostitutes, pimps and sex traffickers because she sees them as the guarantors of free speech on the internet, when in fact the exact opposite is the case. Cole bemoans the fact that porn sites masquerading as chat rooms got taken down with no understanding of how they were used to entrap the unsuspecting:
Craigslist’s Adult Services section was one of the first and biggest dominoes to fall for escorts doing business online. Hugely popular sites for finding and reviewing providers such as The Review Board, Redbook, Rentboy, and Backpage went down in the years to follow, each seized by the FBI after lengthy surveillance operations and undercover police stings.29
By the time Elon Musk expressed an interest in buying Twitter for the astronomical sum of $44 billion dollars in early 2022, the valuation of the company was based on traffic and most of the traffic was based on pornography. The fear that bots were driving most of that traffic caused Musk to pull back for a while, but eventually the sale went through. The rise of Twitter was based on the fall of Pornhub, which was forced to ban over a million videos out of fear of FOSTA and SESTA lawsuits. Blinded by her ideological commitment to tech-enhanced masturbation and social control, Cole misread the hidden grammar of the Twitter takeover. The only light in the gloom surrounding the eclipse of “freedom” caused by FOSTA and SESTA was Twitter, which Cole described as “one of the last bastions of sexual freedom on the mainstream internet. Users in the US are, as of this writing in 2022, allowed to post full nudity, close-up genitalia, and all the hard-core pornography they want. As long as no one dies in front of the camera and no minors are involved, you can tweet pretty much whatever you want, sex-wise.”30
Cole’s claim that “no minors are involved” in Twitter’s porn feeds is shockingly and obviously false. Even a cursory internet search shows that Twitter had been notorious for years as a promoter of child pornography, and was still promoting it on November 15, 2022 when Cole’s book got published. According to Pastor Marty, “If you express a political view which Twitter doesn’t like, that can get you banned, but if you want to spread Kiddie Porn, go for it.”31 Pastor Marty cited an article in the New York Post, which claimed that Twitter refused to ban child pornography because it failed to violate company policies. That revelation became public after a lawsuit got filed by someone whose video had been posted on Twitter while engaging in sexual activity as a 13-year-old.
Minors were not only featured performers in Twitter porn, they were avid consumers too, and especially fond of recommending Twitter as a way of accessing pornography:…
[…] This is just an excerpt from the February 2023 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!
ENDNOTES FOR COMPLETE ARTICLE
1 Cole, p. vii.
2 Personal correspondence
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videocassette_recorder
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videocassette_recorder
5 https://petapixel.com/2013/04/03/the-first-webcam-was-invented-to-check-coffee-levels-without-getting-up/
6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcam
7 Cole, p. 98.
8 Cole, p. 99.
9 Cole, p. 91.
10 Cole, p. 91.
11 Cole, p. 95.
12 Cole, p. x.
13 Cole, p. x
14 Cole, p. 63.
15 Cole, pp. 84-5.
16 Cole, p. 114.
17 Cole, p. 115.
18 Cole, p. 115.
19 Cole, p. 115.
20 Cole, p. 120.
21 Cole, p. 120.
22 Cole, p. 165.
23 Cole, p. 165.
24 Cole, p. 165.
25 Cole, p, 166.
26 Cole, p. 165.
27 Cole, p. 169.
28 Cole, p. 123.
29 Cole, p. 127.
30 Cole, p. 121.
31 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isV6WzH-UeA
32 https://www.bark.us/blog/twitter-porn/0
33 https://www.bark.us/blog/twitter-porn/
34 https://mashable.com/article/twitter-porn-ban
35 https://mashable.com/article/twitter-porn-ban
36 https://mashable.com/article/twitter-porn-ban
37 https://mashable.com/article/twitter-porn-ban
38 https://mashable.com/article/twitter-porn-ban
39
40 https://www.networkworld.com/article/3190954/twitter-s-porn-problem-is-trending.html
41 https://www.networkworld.com/article/3190954/twitter-s-porn-problem-is-trending.html
42 10
43 https://www.unz.com/runz/elon-musk-kanye-west-and-much-riskier-targets/?highlight=Musk+Twitter
44 https://www.walikali.com/yoel-roth/
45 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omSpO0EOxGU
46 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/technology/musk-twitter-antisemitism.html
47 https://twitter.com/sexyblackporn
48 https://www.teslarati.com/twitter-taking-child-exploitation-seriously/
49 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ushome/index.html
