(Originally published AVNONLINE, 5/2005)

What the Future May Hold

In 1975, the Sci-Fi classic “Logan’s Run” depicted a future society where the problem of human senescence had been dealt with in an interesting way – they killed people as soon as they turned thirty. Among the many other strange inventions and developments of that disturbingly discontinuous Tomorrow was a technology called “The Circuit”.
The Circuit appears early in the film, and makes it very apparent that we are not watching a movie set in the present. Even the institutional, organized murder of people in the “prime” of life seems more recognizable to us than this unusual SEXUAL artifact of that Future Society.
After a long day of killing errant thirty-something’s, back in his posh 300th floor apartment, Logan (Michael York) walks up to what looks like a phone booth made of glass sitting in the middle of his living room. He presses a button on the booth and begins to “browse” PEOPLE. One at a time, both men and women appear in the booth’s chamber. He considers them, rejects them, and so on, until he finally settles on the person of his pleasure for that evening. The girl, looking a bit reluctant, steps out of the booth and into the waiting attentions of her soon-to-be-lover.
While the teleportation technology needed to physically deliver strangers into our living rooms will certainly remain in the realm of science fiction for a long, long time, the essence of The Circuit – instantaneous, anonymous, real-time sexual interaction with real people – is coming to a Web site near you, very soon.
“Peer-to-Peer Pornography”
Today, there is a trend in evidence that is bringing together two different kinds of Web site, two different business models, which have had to, until now, exist separately – the dating site and the content pay site. This convergence is happening because dating and content have been evolving (in line with the pressures of evolving consumer demand) towards each other. Specifically, dating sites begat sex personals, which turned real people into content. And content sites begat Cam sites, which turned content into real people.
Though there are already a number of conventional cam sites around that have attempted to embrace the trend, by re-skinning themselves as “dating/cam” sites, the larger (true) opportunity can only be seized upon by a kind of site that does not yet exist. This will be a kind of site where the paying customer is neither client to the cam feed nor client to a catalog of inert dating profiles, but peer to countless others like him, seeking sexual liaison in the night. Coin: Peer-to-Peer Pornography, or “P2PP”, for short.
History
The gap that today exists between online (sex) personals and porn content owes to the importation into the online realm of two archaic paradigms that had proved incompatible in the offline realm – as incompatible as fucking and jerking-off.
But, all of that is changing.
Let us consider the ways in which porn and personals were used prior to the advent of the Web, since it was these prior patterns of offline usage (“user training”, if you will) that determined the online models that dominate today.
Literary examples notwithstanding, today’s pornography is pretty much pictures and video. Print pornography owned all the market share, until the VCR Revolution of the 1970’s brought adult videos home from the seedy “wrong side of the tracks” theatres and peep-show parlors, into our living rooms and bedrooms.
1. Porn – Although the last decade has seen the Web take over as the primary distribution medium, the ways in which pornography is found, consumed, and even priced on the Web today remains essentially identical to its offline (print and video) forebears. Consumers “browse” among the pop-ups and free galleries, as they once did with magazine covers in brick and mortar stores. They consider the “shrink-wrapped” exteriors, and decide if they want to buy what’s “inside”. A magazine that gratifies the customer is purchased again, next month, and so on.
Today, the ubiquity of broadband has brought the video forms of pornography to our desktops, but, again, with the unnecessary importation of pre-existing usage patterns from the offline realm. That’s why software interfaces that could look like anything, still resemble VCRs and DVD players. One important result of this trained pattern of use is that people don’t think of the people they see in the pictures and videos as real, in the sense that they are not connected to them either by time or access.
2. Personals – The history of Personals also traces back to the printed page, for hundreds of years. People have long placed their self-descriptive ads, usually in the classified sections of newspapers, and hoped for the best. When you found an ad that appealed to you, you composed a letter, dashed it off to the newspaper, then waited (usually weeks) for a response.
When dating arrived online, this was, unfortunately, exactly how it worked. Of course, there were many more “ads” to peruse, and e-mail had replaced snail-mail. But it was, essentially, the same model. We imported this innately limited model, intact, simply because we understood it. We never considered how the exciting New Medium might facilitate the same (or similar) gratifications, in different ways.
AOL, 1994…
What is ironic is that, just as the first dating sites were being launched using the printed personals paradigm, somebody else was doing it perfectly right.
Though they weren’t trying to be a dating site at first (or, more likely, because they weren’t trying to be a dating site) America Online demonstrated an extraordinarily keen understanding of the New Medium’s power to connect people.
Connection Topologies
The Web facilitates two basic types of transaction: peer-to-peer and client/server. If we broaden the idea of "dating site" to include the full spectrum of people-seeking-people models, we can find many examples of both P2P and C/S. These run the gamut from the conventional query-the-database dating site (C/S), to clever, P2P-C/S hybrids, like Friendster, to Instant Messaging, which is the most basic expression of P2P we have and, I would argue, the simplest kind of "dating" application.
But before anyone told them how it should work, AOL had already stumbled upon the model we must emulate today – 10 years later.
What AOL did right and every dating site did wrong is center their interaction model, not on e-mail (store-and-forward), but instead on chat and instant messaging. By functioning, essentially, as just a catalog of profiles, the conventional dating site suppresses live, real-time interaction between users and makes the profile a “surrogate” for the member. This robs the user experience of the immediacy and “spark” of live human encounters.
But the topological underpinnings of the sites and applications that will make P2PP possible (whether actually P2P or C/S) are unimportant. What matters, and what will define P2PP, is giving users a search and interaction framework where they can offer themselves up to others, either as content (as in, "These are my naughty pix and videos.") or as human beings (as in "Talk to me, meet me, I'm a real person.").
What will P2PP Sites be like?
Once the focus of the user experience becomes live, real-time interaction, these sites will be visually dominated by various representations of the people who are “there”. Much like bars, there will be a feeling of excitement when one “enters”. I’m imagining a site design with three primary functional elements – a way to engage with large groups in virtual “places”, a way to engage with individuals or small groups in private places, and a way to search for people you’re not “meeting” in the virtual places – with easy migration from one area to another. The places where groups gather will be much like chat rooms. People will choose to “be” there. These places can have either geographic significance (as in The Chicago Place) or thematic significance (as in the Ayn Rand Lovers Place). But, unlike chat, where the communication is entirely textual, these places will be alive with real-time multimedia “expressions” of the people who are there. Video and audio feeds will merge with text in an environment where people can participate in groups, then divert in any number (couples, threesomes, etc.) to a more private exchange.
As you can see, the basic architectures are all borrowed from chat, IM conferences and person-to-person IM. Except that in P2PP, much more of the human sensorium will be engaged and stimulated – as much as available technology will allow. Yes, use your imaginations!
Some of these ideas are already in evidence on current sites. On our own AdultFriendFinder.com, for example, we have developed a proprietary IM client that offers a much deeper integration with the rest of the site, and of course the provision for parallel video and audio “pipes” as well. We are also taking steps to enlarge the importance of member cams within the overall member interaction experience.
We may never be able to have sexually-willing strangers materialize on-demand in our homes. But, I believe that that the desire to get-off “by yourself” and the desire to “meet a person” to get off are becoming confusable, partly because the technology is finally there, and partly because our customers are ready to blur those lines. It behooves us an industry, and as people interested in new ways to “have sex”, to create the sites to make it happen. Let’s!