PORN FREE?

Dick Pountain/ Idealog297/ 4th April 2019 10:42:59

Amid all the hoohah over our attempted Brexit you might be forgiven for not having noticed that, in addition to taking on the EU our valiant government has also decided to fight the internet. To be exact they’ve decided to regulate the consumption of pornography, which as everyone knows is what keeps that internet going. To be even more exact they’ve decided to announce a date for announcing a date for the introduction of a porn pass, without which porn sites nationwide will become inaccessible to you. This pass, which you’ll either buy online or else from your local newsagent for a fiver, proves that you’re over 18 years of age. It also presumably adds you to a database of dirty dogs who in some future post-Brexit theocracy may be summoned to a clinic for chemical castration.

Now I don’t intend to pursue here the obvious problems of implementing such a scheme - if the Chinese Communist Party can’t effectively censor the internet what chance does this clueless shower stand? Nor am I particularly worried for myself because the government’s definition of porn is far, far narrower than my own. They’re only attempting to ban sex porn, and I’m not much bothered with that as I get quite enough at home. The various porns that I do consume will not require such a pass: for example guitar porn (and its harder core variants guitar-pedal porn and guitar-build-and-repair porn), Japanese-street-food porn, chemical-engineering-animated-safety-video porn, restoring-rusty-old-tools porn, damascus-steel-blacksmithing porn, and a few like Czech-semi-automatic-weapon or dangerous-chemical porn of which I am slightly ashamed. You’ll gather that I’ve updated the definition of pornography for the age of consumerism, to mean any representation of some activity, in whatever medium, that makes a person want to perform that activity themselves. And of course the internet has revolutionised the production, distribution and consumption of this sort of porn.

All varieties of porn share certain aesthetic traits. Works are fairly short (5 to 20 minutes) to match attention spans. They have no plot beyond the preparation, beginning and completion of the activity they depict. Most lack dialogue and have irritating tinkly computer-generated music instead, but where there’s any talking it tends to be clipped, inane or purely functional. Mis-en-scene is often an interior, shot in a single continuous take on video with simple direct lighting. Occasionally there are ill-advised attempts to insert illustration or animation.

For me a perfect example of the form is ‘Japanese Street Food - RED BEAKFISH Sushi Fried Seafood Soup Okinawa Japan’ (1,704,738 views), one of a seemingly endless and hypnotically fascinating series. In all of them an unseen, anonymous fish-artist skillfully dissects an exotic and unfamiliar fish using a gorgeous-but-weatherbeaten Japanese chef knife. The various bits and pieces are then cooked (or not) in several different ways and presented to an equally anonymous and unseen diner who appears only as a hand and a pair of chopsticks, which grasp a piece and hold it close to the lens, slowly rotating it so the light catches its glistening fibres, and I’m unable to avoid some involuntary salivation. I won’t recommend them as I don’t want to corrupt you.

This is, of course, the freedom that the internet has always promised isn’t it? Freedom from the greasy clutches of the music business and Hollywood studios, in short from Big Entertainment, so that any weirdo can, for very little expense, share weird pleasures, unfettered and celebrated by fellow weirdos wherever we may be in the world.

Well, er, actually no. The hold of large monopolistic corporations on our entertainment has in fact increased, only the corporations are different. The various porns I consume are presented to me by YouTube, owned by Google, and just about everything else comes via Amazon, Facebook/Instagram or Netflix. In an important book called ‘The Internet Trap’, US media professor Martin Hindman explains how the internet doesn’t encourage competition but inexorably leads toward monopoly. Using experiments on data sets almost as huge as Cambridge Analytica’s, Hindman demonstrates how we crave variety but won’t search too long for it, which makes ‘stickiness’ the dominant factor driving internet traffic. And stickiness grants exponentially increasing advantages to size. All the advertising - which is what pays for all this free porn - will rapidly gravitate to the handful of huge corporations who host it. The always-charming Peter Thiel has summed it up pithily thus: ‘Competition Is For Losers’.

I do hope the government’s Porn Czar will read Hindman, and would venture to suggest a far more radical reform. Why not introduce an ID card that doubles as a Porn Pass and also confers entitlement to a Universal Basic Income? That covers all the bases and should render our streets empty and safe again in short order.

[Dick Pountain is working on a script where a young, bored housewife rings for a moustachioed Python programmer to help her with list comprehensions]