Has the internet always been sexy?

This episode kicks off a new season, produced in cooperation with Radio Ö1–Austria’s leading cultural voice. Today, radio journalist Hannah Balber from Radio Ö1 talks to American artist and technologist Mindy Seu about sex and its influence on the internet. Mindy’s work combines archival research on cyberfeminism, online communities, and the histories embedded in the web with experimental forms of publishing and lecturing, questioning how digital infrastructures shape power, identity and knowledge. 

Art Is Not a Thing is produced by Ars Electronica and developed in collaboration with Radio Ö1.

Host: Hannah Balber
Producers: Ana-Maria Carabelea, Christopher Sonnleitner, Marlene Grinner 
Editing: Yazdan Zand 
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger 

Ars Electronica:
https://ars.electronica.art/
https://www.instagram.com/arselectronica/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/arselectronica 

Resources:
A Sexual History of the Internet

Transcript

Mindy Seu: We see how a lot of these tools have shaped the development of new sexual desires. When we see these kinks around parental controls or restrictions, when we think about how we can access certain content and how we want to pay people for things that aren't even necessarily sexual, it really makes you question like, what exactly is sex and what exactly is technology? 

[Music] 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Welcome to Art Is Not a Thing, the podcast series about art as a practice of critical inquiry, knowledge production and world-building. My name is Ana Carabelea part-time host and producer of the podcast. Today, we kick off a new season, and we’ve partnered with Radio O1–Austria’s leading cultural voice–to bring you the next six episode.  

Over the next months, my colleague and radio journalist Hannah Balber will discuss with artists and researchers whose work questions and reimagines our practices in and of the world. In today’s episode, Hannah talks to American artist and technologist Mindy Seu about sex and its influence on the internet. Mindy’s practice focuses on technology-driven performance and publication. Her latest project A Sexual History of the Internet is a lecture performance and artist book that retells marginalized histories of technology. During the performance, the audience reads aloud the history of everyday digital tools, along with texts by artists, lawyers, sex workers, and historians, using a shared script on their mobile phones via Instagram Stories. In conversation with Hannah, Mindy discusses how technology, desire, and power have been entangled since the early days of the digital age. Enjoy the conversation! 

Hannah Balber: Welcome to the Art is Not a Thing podcast, Mindy, it's great to have you. 

Mindy: Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here. 

Hannah: Your recent project is called A Sexual History of the Internet. It's a lecture performance and book that gathers anecdotes, artworks, and historical artifacts that reveal the pervasive and perverted origins of our digital tools. So where did you get the idea for this project? 

Mindy: So, my previous publication, Cyberfeminism Index, was like this big encyclopedia, and it gathered three decades of online activism and net art, and it had multiple different themes running through it, like hacktivism and wetware, open-source software movements, things like this. But one of the three key lines that I felt was quite present was that of embodied technology. And I wanted to isolate that thread from the publication to create its own narrative project, which is where A Sexual History of the Internet came from. So Cyberfeminism Index feels like a project of accumulation, hundreds or thousands of entries creating a cohesive narrative, whereas A Sexual History of the Internet feels a bit more pointed to create this singular, essayistic narrative. 

Hannah: But was there a specific moment or a question or maybe even a conversation that triggered that project? 

Mindy: I think it was built through community and anecdotal experience. I have so many peers who are working as technologists, who are performers online, who are performers in life. And it just seems to be like a very socially prescient conversation that would come up over and over again, especially now as we think about these economic downturns and how sex has been a part of that for so many decades. So, it was really based on this kind of research, but also friends and colleagues who were constantly talking about this and wanting to kind of situate that within this longer context of art history, technology history and the history of sexualized labor. 

Hannah: And when did you realize this wasn't just a research topic, but something that actually needed a performative form? 

Mindy: I love the performative form because in my work I often give lectures about various topics, but the performance is really meant to exemplify… kind of provide an alternative perspective on how to get the connotation of the content rather than it being more didactic. So, for example, we use Instagram every day, multiple times a day, and it has these built-in behaviors that we've been conditioned to perpetuate over and over, largely doomscrolling and rapidly clicking and trying to do things for likes and clicks and this kind of engagement. So, when we then use Instagram as a performance vehicle, it kind of retrains how you might be thinking of that tool and also re-situates the tool within this larger context of performance and extraction. So, it really became the way to kind of take advantage of the interface, but use it in an alternative way. 

Hannah: So how does the lecture performance actually work? Can you walk us through it? 

Mindy: Yes. So, when you go to a lecture hall, there's rows of seats, there is a podium with the speaker and there's a big screen behind them. And this setup kind of suggests a sort of expertise or legitimacy. And I was trying to kind of draw attention to these conventions and then turn them on its head. So, you're still in some sort of lecture hall or blackbox theatre, but there's no podium and there's no projection. Rather, all the chairs are randomly askew so everyone's facing a different direction. Everyone is then instructed to pull out their phone, and I get them all onto the same Finsta. And for me, there's no spotlight, there's no central stage, but I weave throughout all of the chairs. So as people are looking at their Instagram, you feel very much alone but together, because you're in a very dark room, you're all facing different directions and yet you're doing this kind of endurance test where everyone is following the same 45-minute autoplay at the same time. It does start to feel kind of like this religious experience. And one of the curators watching it said it felt like a Catholic mass because you have this light reflection, you have this recitation from the audience. And it really does start to feel like this very polyvocal performance. 

Hannah: And why was it important to you to also have this book as an extension of the lecture series? 

Mindy: I have a practice of prototyping in public. I really like testing things out with an audience and being able to iterate quickly. And when we were doing these beta tests all throughout 2024, we found that many of our Instagram accounts kept getting deleted because of Instagram's very opaque community guidelines. So, while we have learned how to censor the images and the language enough, I do want to keep the Internet or the Instagram account up so it's open access. But we also wanted to accompany that with a printed book for posterity. So I worked with Laura Coombs, who's a longtime collaborator, and we were able to create a facsimile of the performance scripts and nod to the performance as much as possible. So you can actually see it behind me. There are these tiny books that are the size of your iPhone, but when it’s extruded to 600 pages, it starts to feel like a little Bible or a little black book. 

Hannah: At the heart of the project is this idea that pretty much every type of modern technology, from the computer mouse to A.I., has been directly or indirectly shaped by desire, power relations and the labor of sex workers. So how exactly has technology been shaped by sexuality? 

Mindy: Yeah, I mean, I can provide a few concrete examples. Some of it is very theoretical. So your reference to the computer mouse is really drawn by the scholar Ali Na. She wrote this great essay called The Fetish of the Click, in which she maps the history of the light gun to the light pen, to the computer mouse, and how it then transitioned from the light gun, which is a very phallic object that was also used as a tool for military testing in these online environments before it then segwayed to the computer mouse with Mother of All Demos by Douglas Engelbart. So here we see the transition of shape. The computer mouse is a very yonic shape with a central scrolling wheel. This is also then referred to by cyber feminist collectives like VNS Matrix, where they describe the clitoris as the direct line to the Matrix, and you might associate that with the central scrolling, click on the mouse. And then even now, with our iPhones or Touch Pads, it no longer has a yonic shape, but it's still very pressure sensitive. It vibrates. It has all of these qualities of teledildonics. There's also things that are more concrete. Alexander Sawchuk and his team at USC were testing compression algorithms and they used an image of Lena Forsén, who was a Playboy model at the time. And they didn't ask for permission. That image was reanalyzed billions of times and ultimately became the foundational image of what we now know as the JPEG. We see how these kind of like childish jokes kind of embed their way into these extractive histories. One of the first computer-generated nudes was a joke that they put up on the wall of their boss's office. One of the first nodes on the computer ARPANET was called Sex OS shorthand for Set X. So, we see all of these anecdotes where sex, embodiment and technologies are very much tied together. 

Hannah: So I think you have both of these aspects of sexuality. The one thing being the pictures, nude images, and the other is the physicality of technology. For example, in your work, you describe the phone as essentially a sex toy. The quote is: “On our phones we sext, we send nudes. Apps scan our environment for erotic encounters. Our phones respond to touch. It's pressure sensitive. It vibrates.” And you already mentioned that, you reference Ali Na's article, The Fetish of the Click, comparing a computer mouse to a vulva. So do you think digital interfaces are already operating on a very intimate level whether we acknowledge it or not? 

Mindy: Yeah, absolutely. I think this points to a larger question of how we can think of technology as physical. Technology has a lot of naturalistic metaphors built in–our data stored in the cloud, in our programming languages, we talk about trees and rhizomes as nesting structures. But they're more than just metaphors. The Internet has a very strong environmental and physical footprint. Our content is disseminated through fiber optic cables passing through the ocean floor. We try to understand all of these physical experiences that we bring into the browser. When we think about the computer bug–this was actually a physical moss that was found in Grace Hopper's team's computer. So all of this just goes to show that even if we see the Internet as this very ephemeral, elusive, nonphysical thing, it's very much embedded in nature. That can be taken one step further than to talk about all of the physicality of our embodiedness that we bring into the browser, whether that's the conditions of how we move through society, but also the very physicality ourselves. So again, VNS Matrix, when they were creating the term cyberfeminism alongside Sadie Plant, they were trying to suggest a provocation of how women could suggest what this cyberspace might be, because prior to this it was very much shaped by the male gaze of science fiction with fembots and cyberbabes and all of this. Cyberfeminism was trying to make the internet a bit slimier. How we focus on these naturalistic metaphors, but also bring our physical experiences into the space and how the two are inseparable. 

[Music] 

Ana: Mindy Seu is a designer, technologist and Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds a Master’s degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor’s degree in Design Media Arts from the University of California. In her practice, she investigates the social, political and cultural dimensions of networked technologies, with a particular focus on cyberfeminism, online communities and the histories embedded in the web. Her work combines archival research with experimental forms of publishing and lecturing, often questioning how digital infrastructures shape power, identity and knowledge. She is internationally active through performances, exhibitions, writing, and teaching. In 2023, Mindy published Cyberfeminism Index, a pseudo-encyclopedic book that gathers three decades of online activism and net art. In 2025, she began touring her acclaimed project A Sexual History of the Internet at cultural institutions worldwide, including New York City, Tokyo and Berlin. Back to Hanna and Mindy conversation. 

[Music] 

Hannah: So you mentioned that the first JPEG is essentially the story of a stolen image. And you have many other examples of inventions that have some connection to sex or even the labor of sex workers. Could you give some more examples? Like how have sex workers or the work of sex workers influenced the evolution of the Internet as we know it? 

Mindy: I think this is an important strategy because sex workers are always positioned in some ways as some sort of victimhood. But I think it's important to rewrite this as one of a lot of agency and innovation. In the 90s, as a lot of sex workers were moving online, they were really the boon of these personal websites. They were the reason why bandwidth improved, and chatting engines became better, and video streaming became higher. People then attribute this to big porn, which is essentially a tech company. But it's important to understand the labor that is fueling these desire engines. We also see a lot of sex workers being policed on mainstream channels like Instagram, for example. MasterCard doesn't allow their credit cards to be used for payment processors when you're trying to buy this kind of sexualized labor. So then sex workers moved to alternative channels. The anthropologist Esra Padgett describes how sex workers were using some of the first cryptocurrencies as actual mechanics of capital, even at the time when it was purely speculative and it was kind of being shown as an alternative to these standard banking systems. So Allie Eve Knox, who's a sex worker, helped create Spank Chain, which was a very widely used cryptocurrency. And I think all of these kind of show the innovative qualities, the technological ingenuity that a lot of these people are bringing into the space, even if they're not getting the proper attribution. The same could be said for Patreon. Patreon was a content creation subscription platform that was very much fueled by sex work and sexualized labor. But then, as the platform became more ubiquitous and they tried to change the narrative towards more podcasting, a lot of that sexualized labor was erased. And we see this happen over and over again. 

Hannah: Speaking of erased, why do you think these kinds of histories are usually left out, when we talk about technology? 

Mindy: The topic of sexuality in most cultures is quite taboo. But even beyond the social stigmas behind it, it's always very secretive; and ... that social consciousness is then mapped into legislation. So, for example, regardless of the social sentiment around sexuality, in the US it's highly policed. So if you are using adult websites, if you're buying content, you have to basically create alternative ways of paying for this content. That content is moderated differently. It's taxed differently. The performers get different cuts depending on whether it's adult or not adult. So all of this just creates the stigma of fear around the specific economy. And I think we start to see that's another reason why it becomes so hidden away, because there's less protections around the thing. And when legislation does pass, it's not done in conversation with the people in that industry. So the notorious one in the US was SESTA/FOSTA where platforms became liable for all the content hosted on their platform rather than the user, which is what it had been a decade prior. And this caused a wide sweeping erasure because platforms were very scared of litigation of what these content moderators would say and it caused a huge ripple effect that has been extremely dangerous for the people in the space and also the consumers of that space. 

Hannah: How was it for you? So, was the Internet, in your experience, a place where you could also, like, learn about sex and sexuality? Or did you feel maybe a little, like, overwhelmed or pressured? Like, did you go looking for explicit content? How did the Internet to you as a person shape your knowledge about sexuality? 

Mindy: It's interesting because I grew up in a very conservative setting. There was a lot of parental control. There was a lot of prevention from accessing a lot of these things. Of course, kids are curious and very resourceful. So when I did stumble upon these explicit images, it was kind of my first exposure to a different level of racist stereotyping as well. So there's over sexualization, this Orientalist framing. I think all of that was very surprising. But my early Internet days, I feel, were very much shaped by blogging and these like friends lists and these collection sites like Delicious or bookmarking things or Zynga blogging platform and things of this nature. So in some ways I felt like I had a very like prude youthful engagement with these spaces and then, as I was in undergrad, more active on these platforms, it moved towards actually finding a lot of these net art sites, and I felt like that was more of an awakening than stumbling upon various porn sites. The net art sites was like: Oh, the browser can be anything. It's a canvas. Coding is like an artistic form. It just felt like you were able to find these weird subcultures online in ways that aren't as accessible now. 

Hannah: Coming back to the sexual history of the Internet, when you trace this history from the early days of the Internet to now, what's the biggest shift you've noticed in how sexuality and technology relate to each other? 

Mindy: I think that, as we are very much embedded in a physical-digital blend, we see how a lot of these tools have shaped the development of new sexual desires and kind of reinforced older ones as well. So when we see the rise of like trying to chat with various performers but not ever having a physical meet up, when we see these kinks around parental controls or restrictions, when we think about how we can access certain content and how we want to pay people for things that aren't even necessarily sexual, it really makes you question like, what exactly is sex? And what exactly is technology? The bounds of both are very blurry, and it kind of causes you to reconsider all of this sexual education that we've had, that was very much a penetration to procreation timeline. And I think increasingly people are understanding how expansive that actually is. 

Hannah: And today? How are technology and the sex industry are still influencing each other? 

Mindy: I think that will continue to happen forever. I think it's... What I was really trying to do with this book is that if you want a history of sex work proper, there are a lot of people cited in the book that focus on that particular narrative: Gabriela Garcia, Sam Lee Cole, Noelle Perdue, like, there's all these great scholars. I was trying to situate it within a larger history of Internet history and art history to show that these things actually shouldn't be isolated into their own canon but rather show how all of it is quite entangled because they do feed into each other. Art shapes sex, sex shapes technology. Technology changes both, like all of it is very blurry. And I think showing the complexity of how that's entangled actually builds a more empathetic response to this thing rather than an othering perspective. 

Hannah: I personally feel that with all the new technological developments today, it's becoming a little bit scarier. I think if we thinking about A.I. avatars, deepfake technologies, just some platforms where people might use images where the owners or the people that their body belongs to, their faces have not consented to that use. So how do you feel about that? 

Mindy: I think also this is so, this for me starts to feel very complicated because technology kind of exacerbates these social conditions. So it's not that deepfakes are inherently bad, it's that we are part of a society where men feel ownership over the bodies of others and they are then exacerbating and accelerating that kind of extraction through these new technologies like deepfakes, like machine learning, like whatever it is, because you feel like the other is quite disposable. We see the same thing with A.I. When I think about... if we were in an egalitarian society and AI had been introduced, we might feel a bit of reprieve because now we can use this tool to distribute labor and create more leisure for all of society. But instead, because we're in a very hyper late capitalist society, we understand that this is only going to extract our labor, reduce the financial equity that's distributed and essentially erase a lot of people without any social security net. So I think while it's easy to be scared of specific technologies, it should be more so about the social conditions that perpetuate these frameworks and how we might be able to shift some of those. Of course, the two things go hand in hand. But it does make me think that it's just easy to blame a tool when in fact it's like the makers of the tool, the social context that allows that tool to thrive, things like this. Because of this, I think artists are great to kind of poke holes in these spaces and provide speculations for alternatives. So even Sarah Friend, who is cited in the book, she has this project called Prompt Baby, which is directly in response to deepfakes and revenge porn. And in it, she allows her clients and customers to purchase a prompt rather than just using her image online. So she trains an AI on images of herself. The client can then prompt what they want the image to be, and she could accept, reject or modify that prompt. So it's really built in conversation with the other, and she still has a bit of autonomy over her image. And this kind of relationship kind of suggests what a potential one might be, but on a much smaller scale. 

Hannah: You spoke also about other forms of reclaiming the image and reclaiming the body, speaking from the perspective of sex workers. There's also a very interesting concept that you mentioned that is data domination. Can you talk about that? 

Mindy: Yes. So one of the people in the performance and book is Mistress Harley, who was a data dom, formerly an IT professional. And they coined this phrase called techdom, which we might see as a parent or precursor to more popular forms now like findom, financial domination or this kind of thing. So she essentially–this actually goes back to the question of what is sex and what is technology–she is classified as a sex worker but doesn't participate in sex work as we might imagine it. There's no in-person meet ups, there's no camming, there's no nudes. There's none of this. Her submissives essentially grant remote access to their machine, and she is able to control their data, their bank accounts, their online accounts, their hidden folders and files. And when we tried to situate it, she was like: Well, if you think about what are the cases in which this might be fetishized, in a generation that grew up with parental controls and restrictions, if you live in a region where a lot of the Internet is censored or blocked, you kind of learn how to turn these things into spaces of pleasure and play. And I think it just brings these larger questions of how we can kind of situate these things and understand that they are all done consensually in a way that is meant to be a proper relationship between people and understanding how that is able to blossom because of a larger social shift, and in response to these various legacies of technology. 

Hannah: Given all of these tensions, the liberating potential, but also the exploitation, the intimacy, but also the surveillance. How do you personally feel about the Internet today? Or has making that project changed your relationship to digital spaces? 

Mindy: I think when you make projects like these. They are like calling cards. So I already had a lot of friends and peers and colleagues in this world from various avenues, whether that's academia or performance and art or sex work proper. And I think it feels like a... There's this great quote by Michael Werner that says “A publication is the site where a public is formed.” And similarly, there's a quote by André Breton that says “To publish is to find comrades.” And I think it just becomes a way of trying to find your kin and your people. And that's certainly been.... A lot of them are in the book and performance and through it, I've also met a lot of people that are motivated by similar issues and I think that has been a very beautiful response. 

Hannah: So do you still see a potential for the Internet as a utopian space? 

Mindy: I don't think Utopia was ever real. Utopia and dystopia are so generalizing. A utopic space suggests that there is a universalizing vision of what this space, digital or physical, could be. I think that there are certain utopia principles that we can begin to implement within our current space, like universal access to all knowledge, like reducing borders. This kind of thing I think can be implemented. But to think of utopia at large as the goal, I think is a bit misguided because who is actually defining what that utopia looks like? It feels like a dangerous way of universalizing a principle or a theory. 

Hannah: Or let me rephrase that: What would a feminist approach to the relationship also between technology and sexuality to digital intimacy look like? 

Mindy: I mean, I think we're really seeing it online. There is a collectivity behind a feminist voice that I think has been really beautiful. This is why people talk about citation as the greatest feminist technology. It's trying to attribute all of the people who helped these ideas form, and focusing on that polyvocal narrative rather than like an individual hero that we typically see in these mainstream histories. 

Hannah: So is it about also reclaiming systems? Or imagining entirely different new ones? 

Mindy: I think it's a mix of everything. You have to reclaim certain systems. You have to break some down. People are creating new innovations. All of these different strands become like this decentralized way of creating a new possible alternative to what we currently have. So I really... I never think it's about a singular direction or method. Otherwise, we might see it by now. But it's really trying to think about what is the decentralized polyvocal, communal way of responding to these things in relation to those nearby, the place that you live, the time that you're living in, etc. 

Hannah: Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Mindy. It's been a pleasure. 

Mindy: Thanks so much for having me. 

[Music]   

Ana: That’s it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in and hope you enjoyed it! Today’s episode was brought to you by Radio Ö1 and Ars Electronica. Join us next month for a new episode, and in the meantime, follow us or share the show with someone you think might like it.