The internet is notorious for facilitating access to stolen porn; however, technologists have helped themselves to women’s images and labor long before the web existed. The first known image of a human on a computer screen was a woman’s reclining silhouette, programmed with punch cards by an anonymous military engineer in the mid-1950s from a pin-up illustration.¹ A stolen erotic photograph has been woven into the technologies that allow images to move through computerized networks since 1972, when a team of engineers at USC scanned model Lena Forsén’s Playboy centerfold from the shoulders up. Forsén’s photograph, endlessly reproduced to this day, became the uncredited and uncompensated industry standard for testing JPEG compression algorithms—just as women started getting pushed out of the computing industry.²

Although Forsén bemusedly embraces her legacy,³ women in computer science fields have long described the feelings of discomfort and exclusion her image evokes,⁴ and creatively protested its use. In a 2013 scientific paper, two computer science professors used a photograph of beefcake model Fabio to demonstrate their image processing algorithms (notably, they obtained his consent),⁵ while the promotional website for the 2019 film Losing Lena challenged tech industry viewers to sign a pledge to “remove one image to make millions of women feel welcome in tech.”⁶

Despite decades of protest, Forsén’s experience has been repeated. In a 2019 Wired article, journalist Linda Kinstler placed her in a “sisterhood of muses” that includes pop star Suzanne Vega, whose 1987 hit “Tom’s Diner” was used to develop MP3 audio compression.⁷ Vega’s voice was to MP3s what Forsén’s face was to JPEGs, and where Forsén was eventually dubbed “The First Lady of the Internet,” Vega’s audio (appropriated without her knowledge) earned her the title “Mother of the MP3.” And, although they were compensated for their work, others—including Shirley Page and her “Shirley card” predecessors, whose images were used to calibrate color film, and voice actor Susan Bennett, whose voice was used for Siri’s initial incarnation—attest to the racialized and gendered power imbalances at the core of technology and imaging industries.⁸

Unsurprisingly, then, the legacy of Lena Forsén’s uncompensated erotic labor haunted the internet from its inception. The telephone lines connecting early computer users in the 1970s and ‘80s were far too slow to transmit photographs, but message board contributors created ASCII art—a successor to typewriter art—as a way to share images made from keyboard characters and encoded into fast-loading text files. And many of those images depicted professional models. In Vice, journalist Samantha Cole spoke to an ASCII artist who explained that they “got into converting playboy girls into textmode [like ASCII, PETSCII and teletext].”⁹

By the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Usenet and bulletin board system (BBS) users began hosting and trading photographs in addition to ASCII porn. Once skillful, labor-intensive ASCII translation was no longer necessary, the quantity of stolen porn circulating through BBS groups exploded. Writing in 1993, a journalist attributed this shift (with a healthy dose of aesthetic distaste) to hardware and software advances:¹⁰

Like Forsén’s Playboy centerfold, many of the erotic images moving through BBS groups were scanned from magazines. A 1993 advertisement for Gourmet Gallery BBS in PC Mag attempted to differentiate itself from other boards, boasting that their images are “100% original and never-seen-before.”¹¹ In 1992, journalist Gary Wolf reflected on the culture of rampant theft in Future Sex, a technology and erotica magazine:

Online theft, of course, remains a serious problem for sex workers, with dire consequences that can go far beyond the financial.¹²

In the internet’s earliest days, sex workers were largely not profiting from their labor, even as the promise of their (often stolen) images sold computers, modems, hard drives, scanners, and BBS fees.¹³ But this began to change as workers with some combination of name recognition, investment capital, and technical expertise came up with ways to charge web surfers to access their photographs.

Although established producers like Playboy and Penthouse had the deep pockets to invest in the nascent network (they launched websites in 1994 and 1995, respectively), individual sex workers were also major players from the start. In 1995, Danni Ashe, a nude model and former erotic dancer, created Danni’s Hard Drive in direct response to her stolen images circulating on a BBS-like discussion board. Quoted in a 1999 Guardian article, Ashe explained that “after getting on Usenet and discovering how many of my pictures were being traded around, I made an introductory post to Alt.Sex basically saying hello and that I could be reached through my fanclub address.” She noted the keen irony of the “stern reply” she received from the board’s moderator “saying my ‘commercial postings’ wouldn’t be tolerated.”¹⁴

Ashe’s site, which sold monthly memberships, was so popular that, for the first two years of its existence, it was the busiest site on the internet.¹⁵ Ashe was remarkably resourceful and enterprising; she later boasted that she launched her site with “$8,000 worth of equipment and an HTML how-to book.”¹⁶

While Ashe’s success was widely reported at the time, she was far from alone. The first major woman-owned BBS was launched in 1995 by Catherine La Croix, a sex worker who entered the adult industry as a phone sex operator in the 1980s.¹⁷ By 1998, a Village Voice article took note of a growing trend, interviewing established porn stars Mimi Miyagi, Asia Carrera, and Vanessa del Rio, who were augmenting or replacing their film work with paid subscription sites. The article quoted a performer named Jenteal, who explained that “it’s trendy in the business to have your own Web site.”¹⁸

The women profiled emphasized the independence and flexibility their self-owned platforms afforded them, citing benefits that would come to define the upsides of online work decades before most workers experienced them. Miyagi credited remote work with enabling her to have the child she fiercely wanted. Several women said the rise of AIDS pushed them to the relative safety of remote work—a benefit many white collar workers have been grateful to take advantage of during Covid-19. All relished the opportunity to control their working hours and conditions, self presentation, and, of course, profits.

As many of us today — from platform gig workers with algorithmic bosses to white collar workers with spyware-enabled company laptops — know too well, this autonomy would not necessarily last. In a revealing detail, the piece mentioned that industry heavyweight Vivid Entertainment had begun offering website services to their contracted stars —presumably, in exchange for some amount of creative and financial control.

Before Google and Amazon, Ashe, La Croix, Miyagi, Carrera, del Rio and other adult industry early adopters invented or popularized technologies that would form the foundations of the commercial web. Real-time video was, unsurprisingly, of particular interest. Years before the 1999 debut of streaming video in Windows Media Player, Danni’s Hard Drive developed a proprietary version called DanniVision.¹⁹ In a 1997 AP News profile of Madeleine Altmann, the porn model, entrepreneur, and artist behind the adult site Babes4U, the word “streaming” is placed in quotes and defined for readers as “compressed, high-resolution images that appear to move naturally.”²⁰

Employing creativity, business savvy, and technical expertise, Ashe, Altmann, and their contemporaries dreamed up a host of new ways to make money online, including pay-per-click banner ads and real-time credit card processing;²¹ monthly site fees;²² affiliate marketing, where retailers pay partner sites for referrals; site traffic analysis, which allows sites to sell ads based on visitors and analyze search terms and traffic sources; and cookies, the code snippets that let sites track their users’ browsing activity.

Contemporary readers are, of course, well aware of the downsides to these developments. But surveillance capitalism aside, it’s clear that our prevailing narrative of internet history, which begins with Tim Berners-Lee and the US military and jumps to Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and the rest of the tech oligarchs, erases the labor and innovation of gendered, racialized, and stigmatized adult industry workers.

Prominent adult film stars and a few tech-savvy workers proved there was money to be made, but the internet was still niche (in 1995, just 14% of U.S. adults were able to go online¹). Access was limited to those with the time, skill, and capital to navigate considerable technical and financial hurdles — in 1997, Madeleine Altmann’s site ran on “$100,000 in phone lines and equipment.”² The internet hadn’t yet begun to affect the day-to-day lives of most sex workers. Writing in 2000, the author of a book on porn entrepreneurs extolled the “quantum leap in the number of women who are controlling the use of their own images and reaping the economic benefits,” but estimated that perhaps “only 200 or 300 women and/or couples are running their own Web sites.”³

But that would soon change, as individuals and companies with money and technical expertise recognized financial opportunity. Although not unique to internet technologies — as Sinnamon Love notes, “where there are sex workers, there’s always going to be new investors,”⁴ — a web-specific industry emerged to bridge the access gap. Aspiring “webmasters” began marketing all-in-one packages that made it much easier for average workers to build and maintain an online presence.

In parallel to the burgeoning webmaster industry, a constellation of services emerged to facilitate the complex, costly process of getting erotic images online. Companies offering image scanning, web design, web hosting and billing marketed their services directly to adult industries, while established industry players like Adult Video News built their own web teams.

By the mid-’90s, the online adult industry was growing exponentially (its size was estimated at $2 billion by 1998⁵), even as mainstream tech companies struggled to find profitable business models.⁶ However, in a now-familiar pattern, the tech industry took pains to erase its sex-tinged origins as it bid for wider acceptance and investment.

In 1994, the giant computer industry trade show Comdex expelled its adult industry exhibitors, who had already been relegated to the show’s basement “with no-name companies that [sold] wiring, connectors and other mundane fare”⁷ and banned from displaying nudity or sexually explicit materials. When several exhibitors flouted these rules, Comdex’s organizers kicked them out, and, when they refused to leave, the conference literally pulled the plug, shutting off electricity to the entire floor.

The next year, software distributor Fay Sharp organized a new conference to host the excluded adult companies. In 1995, AdultDex debuted in a Las Vegas hotel steps away from Comdex, and with slightly later hours. Trading barbs in the press, Sharp accused Comdex’s chief executive Jason Chudnofsky of censorship, while Chudnofsky appealed to the industry’s mainstream aspirations, stating that “Comdex is a place where people show creative new products for the betterment of the industry. This is not appropriate.”⁸ Chudnofsky also noted that Comdex was giving up almost $500,000 in revenue by severing its relationship with adult companies.

As the adult industry fought for recognition, workers encountered familiar power dynamics in a new medium. Companies that profited from erotic labor enabled more workers to take advantage of the considerable benefits of working online. However, as Gabriella Garcia notes, technological barriers to entry meant that workers were still being exploited, often along axes intersecting with race and gender.

Over the next decade, webmasters and other intermediaries would become obsolete. And as new tools radically democratized internet access, workers quickly and creatively employed them to share information, find community, and demand their own recognition.

The internet provided a place for marginalized workers, who often feel isolated from one another because their work is stigmatized and criminalized, to connect.

Much of this innovation came in the form of harm reduction technologies. As low cost or free self-publishing tools opened up access and eliminated the need for gatekeepers like webmasters or production companies, workers moved existing safety tools, like bad date lists and customer screening techniques, online, and created new ones.