A short, serious history of the co-development of sex and sexuality and the internet, and how the issues at their convergence increasingly define our lives: free speech, privacy, online banking, dating and social media, streaming technology, cultural and sexual appropriation, and mass data collection. From the moment there was an “online,” there was sex online. The famous test image used by software engineers to develop formats like the jpeg was “Lenna,” taken from Playboy’s November 1972 centerfold. Early bulletin boards and multi-user domains quickly came to serve their members sexual musings. Facebook started as a way to rate “hot or not” Harvard co-eds. In fact, virtually every significant development that defines the Internet we know and love (and hate) today―privacy issues, online payments and online banking, dating, social media, streaming technology, mass data collection―came out the meeting of sexuality and technology. And the kicker is, not only did sexuality vastly
