Porn Drives New Tech

Porn seems to be a main driver for new technologies, at least in terms of pushing up the volume to achieve economy-of-scale and sales cash to spawn further investment. It was involved in the success of home 8mm movies, VCR's, screen graphics, CD-roms, etc. Realistic virtual-reality for human forms may be the next benefiter.

A few days ago my beau said, whenever a new medium of disseminating information to the masses is invented, the pornographers are the EarlyAdopters and there's a huge rash of pornography. For example, loads of Medieval print matter were porn. History classes teach of Gutenberg and his Bibles, but porn sold much better. As for photographs on card stock, can you say "French postcards"?

A species of ape learned to walk upright so that they could carry their porn carvings back to the cave to stash away :-)

This isn't about porn, but it does have to do with driving. There was no "youth culture" per se--nor was there unchaperoned dating--until young people in the early 20th Century discovered cars for making out. Not that cars entirely caused and created youth culture; I'm sure child labor laws and many other factors were part of it. But young people have been some sort of driving (no pun) force in the automobile industry for a long time, as have older fellows in mid-life crises.

And so it seems that what drives new tech is people who are hot to trot. As JamieZawinski says, "Your 'use case' should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?" (http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html)

I've always found it interesting how software developers often view the porn aspect as irrelevant or unclean. However it's not an issue we can simply ignore, particularly with graphics approaching the photorealistic. The design of parental controls, clothes(or lack of) in games particularly MMORPG's, animations (if your character can kneel, your software can be used for porn), and emoting are all practical concerns.

Admit it, you've seen computer generated porn that was better than filmed porn.

Weapons used to fill a similar role in driving technology. Metallurgy was especially weapons-driven, and without it things like steam engines and electric wire would be much later coming. Many mechanical inventions were influenced by the likes of catapults. Early computers were used for shell trajectory, nuclear weapon, and decryption computations.

Thus, we have sex and violence driving tech. What about drugs and rock-and-roll?

"What about drugs?" The drug trade drives spam. Spam drives computer security setups and Bayesian filter algos. LatherRinseRepeat. "[What about] rock-and-roll?" Popular music drives recording and reproduction technology, from piano rolls to vinyl to digital downloads. Digital downloads drive AppleIpods and their crappy batteries. LatherRinseRepeat.

Drugs seem to increase traffic, but not influence *new* technology very often.

EditHint: move content to PornAndWarDrivesNewTech and fix backlinks.

CategoryFuture