A Little Digital Victorian Age

We won't keep children safe by ushering in digital dystopia

The excavation of Herculaneum began with wonder and ended, decades later, in embarrassment.

A product of the Enlightenment, the 18th century unearthing of the Roman city’s ancient wonders was an act of science and vanity. Mankind believed it was finally ready to learn lessons from the past, even if those lessons had a curious habit of confirming just how great the current ruling dynasties were — first the Spanish, digging the foundations of a summer home for Charles III, then the French, then finally the Italians.

When a particularly remarkable find was dug up, these proto-archeologists had a habit of burying them again until some appropriately revered noble was within eyesight, so they could dig it up again.

There was a going theory that Rome had fallen under the weight of its own moral failures and social degradation. Many of the findings dug out of the soft ash and pumice at Herculaneum — and later, the more famous settlement of Pompeii — seemed to confirm that idea. There were bawdy frescoes, phallus-shaped windchimes, and all manner of smutty statutes.

But things really turned when they came across the statue: A small marble figurine of Pan, a Greek god, fully getting it on with a goat.

You may be familiar with this story. In one telling, King Charles was picnicking near the excavation site with his family when the archeologists unearthed the offending goat, which disturbed the King so acutely that he immediately issued a “strict injunction that no one should be allowed access to it.”¹ Pan and his hoofed friend were tragically locked away, along with a raft of other lurid findings, accessible only for well-to-do gentlemen with an academic purpose. The Europeans believed that this kind of lubricious penis-worship had doomed Rome², and they would not allow it to bring down their enlightened society. This attitude would give way to the Victorian sensibilities around the corner.

But that story, oft told, isn’t quite true. In fact, the goat-god copulation statue was discovered in 1752. Yet the Gabinetto Segreto — the secret museum, where these artworks were hidden away — was not created until 1819. So what happened in those interceding seven decades?

The intelligentsia of the time certainly turned their noses up at these scandalous findings. French philosopher Sylvain Maréchal sniffed in 1780 that “the simplicity and innocence of our ancestors found nothing indecent in objects which today make modesty blush.”³

But European society wasn’t blushing. A guidebook to the museum became so highly sought-after across Europe that national authorities ordered them seized and destroyed. That, in turn, made them only more popular. There was a booming demand for erotic art on the streets of Europe, and the popularization of photography and the stereoscope in the decades to come would only feed the frenzy. The images and cartoons would range from the suggestive to the hardcore, even homosexual. With utopian socialism a hot political ideology, authors began to wonder if traditional gender roles and rigid church-ordained relationships were really necessary — maybe “amorous freedom” was a good alternative to monogamous marriage, posited philosopher Charles Fourier.⁴

It was only in the throes of this sexual liberation that the raunchy Roman artefacts were locked away. Another, probably more accurate, story goes that the Duke of Calabria (later King Francis I of the Two Sicilies) visited the royal museum in Naples with his daughter in 1819, where the goat-boning statue was on full display. His horrified reaction prompted the decision to secret away the offending material to a room where only those of “mature age and proven morals could enter.”⁵

And they would remain locked away there, behind a brick wall, until the year 2000.

But even upon its reopening, at the dawn of the 21st century, the smutty chamber required a reservation, and could only be toured with a museum-appointed guide. A sign at the door forbids anyone under the age of 14 from entering.

Historians Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands note that, perusing through social media and blogs from recent visitors, our penchant to take offence hasn’t changed that much from two centuries prior.

“Didn’t know our tour guide was going to take my 14 year olds into the secret sexy room displaying ancient porn and sex objects,” one schoolteacher remarked on Flickr.
”Huh.”

So this week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, I want to talk about porn. I’m here to argue that, while we seem to have found ourselves right back at the point that our European forbearers found themselves in in 1752. Plans to ban books, age-gate the internet, and shield children from all the harms of the internet have plunged us back into the old story of censorship.

We need to learn from the story of Pan and his friend, who did nearly two centuries in prison on trumped-up charges, victims of a moral panic surrounding the foundations of the modern pornography industry.

Scapegoats, if you will.

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Before we embark on this journey together, I should make clear that there are two core parts to my argument: Banning published material that is not in-and-of-itself illegal, be it literature, pornography, or a marble depiction of a satyr getting busy with a goat, is bad. And efforts to use technology to fundamentally alter the internet — be it ID verification and age-gates or the blocking of entire websites — can often be just as bad and, in some instances, worse.

Faced with a litany of problems caused or worsened by the internet — unhealthy attitudes towards sex, porn addiction, revenge porn, grooming, online child sexual exploitation, bullying, and so on — governments have pursued these two tactics, banning and internet regulation, to solve them.

The Free Speech Coalition, an advocacy group for the adult entertainment industry, is tracking dozens of bills across roughly half the United States which would require online age-verification for porn.

One proposal, in the Oklahoma legislature, would open up online pornography sites to liability, if they expose kids to the ‘harmful’ content. Another, in Tennessee, would allow the attorney general to block adult websites which fail to verify their users’ ages. Proposals in Wyoming would fine porn websites $1,000 per day if they are available to youth. (And it would upgrade some old, antiquated, obscenity laws in the process.)

A bill to mandate age verification for online porn made its way through the Canadian Senate and passed an initial vote in the House of Commons. Similar efforts are either being contemplated or are actively being implemented in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and other European states. One proposal would see this strategy implemented across the EU. In the U.S., these proposals are dovetailing with efforts to ban LGBTQ books — but in some cases, they are receiving bipartisan support.

These plans will enable mass censorship, they won’t work, they are a privacy nightmare, and they risk breaking the internet itself. These are bad ideas.

There is no doubt that the internet is screwing up kids’ psychology in ways we can’t entirely understand, and we need to come up with workable solutions to mitigate those harms. But that doesn’t mean that the most severe solutions are necessarily the right ones. What’s more, we should appreciate that some people pushing these solutions, given their anti-LGTBQ bona fides, should not be leading the conversation.

So nothing in this dispatch should be taken as a criticism of parents with legitimate concerns. I love parents. Some of my best friends are parents. But I’m here to argue that the solutions some parents are supporting, touted by politicians with little appreciation of the plumbing of the internet, will be no more effective than locking Pan and his billy in a secret cabinet.

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Problem 1: Censorship

We like to think of internet censorship as a bad thing done for wrong reasons: Like Russia banning news, China banning social media, and so on.

Germany, however, has been enacting large-scale online censorship for decades. Even when it is done for noble reasons, it can have clearly undesirable effects.

In 1995, four million CompuServe customers around the world were suddenly blocked from accessing their favorite filthy usenet groups, after Munich police launched an investigation into the illegal distribution of pornography. At this point, there were just dozens of groups distributing porn.⁶ And Germany wanted it to stop.

CompuServe, located in Ohio, had no way of doing country-specific filtering. So it simply blocked porn for everybody.

In the years that followed, Germany would continue going after CompuServe for distributing neo-Nazi material and child porn — holding the service accountable for its users. It culminated when a court convicted the company’s German head, issuing him a two-year suspended sentence. Prosecutors eventually backed off, but the damage was done.

Today, German regulators have only grown more aggressive, mandating age-verification for porn. (They also have strict regulations on violent video games.)

Germany’s strict age-verification rules prompted Twitter to pre-emptively block all adult material for users in Germany.

The major porn websites, however, have refused to comply. German regulators have responded by issuing a blocking order for popular site xHamster, while one state is threatening to issue similar orders against Pornhub and other major porn websites.

Oftentimes, this kind of blocking is explained away as being merely porn. Defenders of these measures, especially well-intentioned ones, essentially draw a line — there is good material, and there is pornography. The former should never be banned or restricted, but the latter can be. In practise, though, those lines get very blurry. It is estimated that some 12% of the internet is made up of pornography, while a huge number of sites offer both SFW and NSFW: Will they also be blocked for failing to comply?

Ron DeSantis’ book-banning crusade, for example, is explicitly predicated on rooting out “pornographic and inappropriate materials that have been snuck into our classrooms and libraries to sexualize our students.” By classifying certain images and writing as pornographic, it is easier to remove them from library shelves.

In the confusion, LGBTQ content is the first to be blocked. In the early 2010s, Missouri implemented the Children’s Internet Protection Act. It tried to forbid all online content in state libraries and schools which was deemed “harmful to minors” — a considerably broad definition. When implemented, the internet filtering technology ended up blocking hundreds of perfectly kid-friendly LGBTQ websites: It took a lawsuit from PFLAG and the ACLU to get the state to stop its anti-Queer censorship.

But this kind of internet blocking has continued across the United States. A depressing 2019 survey found:

Approximately a fifth of LGBTQ students (19.6%) had access to information about LGBTQ-related topics in their textbooks or other assigned readings, just under half of LGBTQ students (48.9%) had access to these topics in their school library, and just over half (55.9%) with internet access at school had access to these topics online on school computers.

As the New America Foundation points out, even the website for the anti-suicide organization The Trevor Project has been blocked by this quixotic attempt to forbid pornography and adult material in schools.

Whether it is the intent or not, government-mandated internet regulation will result in censorship.

Problem 2: It Won’t Work

Sometimes these legislative efforts draw obvious comparisons: You have to show ID to buy porno mags at the gas station, why not the internet? But the argument falls apart, because the internet comes with a reasonable expectation of privacy in a way the local gas station does not. Indeed, the NSFW parts of the internet generally come with an even higher expectation of privacy.

Advocates of these measures sometimes insist that the actual age verification will not be onerous, requiring you only to scan a driver’s license. But the government-enforced de-anonymization of a huge swath of the internet is a massive departure from the status quo and, almost certainly, unconstitutional. The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation have endorsed a constitutional challenge filed by the Free Speech Coalition against one such bill in Texas. In an amicus brief, the groups argue: “Courts have consistently invalidated laws that prohibit granting minors access to online content without age verification, due in significant part to the burden such verification imposes on all users.” They’re likely to win that case.

So it’s worth noting that these efforts are likely to be illegal. But, putting that aside: They will also fail, and could even backfire in a spectacular fashion.

A 2020 survey of British youth found that about a quarter of youth were familiar with firewall workarounds — VPNs, torrenting, and the Tor browser, for example. There is no doubt that years of e-learning amid the pandemic pushed that number up far higher. But the best way to push that number towards 100% would be to implement this broad-based internet restriction.

VPN company Surfshark estimates there are roughly 1.6 billion people worldwide who use the technology, which routes your internet traffic through another server in another country — effectively tunnelling through any restrictions in place on your local or national network.

If circumventing Oklahoma’s age verification system is as simple as using a VPN which routes your traffic through California, Canada, or Cambodia, then the problem it is trying to prevent isn’t going anywhere.

There is an even more obvious reason why these plans will never work: The vast, vast, vast majority of websites will not comply, nor will they be forced to.

In conversations about these measures, we often hear about the big purveyors of porn — most owned by the Canadian company Aylo (formerly MindGeek and, before that, ManWin.)

The company has a wildly complicated corporate structure, but it certainly has assets and operations in Canada, the U.S., and Europe: So the courts would have no trouble holding the company accountable for breaking these age verification laws. (Indeed, the company has already been successfully sued for a variety of very good reasons.)

The same cannot be said of the thousands of other fly-by-night smut shacks across the internet. Many are the same genre of streaming platforms which make available copyright material and, in some cases, outright illegal content.

These websites are numerous and easy to find. They are often located in Cyprus, Ukraine, Hong Kong — if we know where they’re really based at all. These websites, by their very nature, flout the law. There is absolutely no reason why they would bother adhering to these laws.

The major sites, like those owned by Aylo, are deeply imperfect. But they are, at least, trying to clean up their act: Removing revenge pornography, for example. That progress will be squandered if governments force them to adopt onerous, unworkable age-verification measures which their shadier competitions will not match.

Problem 3: It’s a Privacy Nightmare

The dirty secret at the heart of these plans is that nobody has a good plan on how to verify users’ age.

Governments don’t want this job, for obvious reasons. So that means states must either mandate that the porn websites conduct the identity-verification themselves, or outsource to some ‘trusted’ third party to do the deed.

When the Canadian bill was studied at a Senate committee, the senators heard some stern caution from experts who called the legislation foolhardy, unworkable, technologically unwise. The bill’s author, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, insisted there was nothing to worry about. “The technology now allows for reliable, unintrusive verification,” she promised. She pointed to one company in particular: Yoti. They could conduct the verification through an ID card or facial analysis. Recognizing the massive privacy implications, she underlined “all this data must be erased as quickly as possible.”

Her optimism is misplaced.

She is probably right, that Yoti is the gold standard of age-verification companies. They were tapped by Meta to conduct age-verification on Instagram. And, indeed, their privacy policy, broadly speaking, is pretty good — it commits the company to never sell user’s biometric data, and to only transfer it with their consent.

But here’s the ‘but’: Yoti’s technology works by creating a “biometric template” — a digital map of your face. And, under its privacy policy, it can be stored in perpetuity. What’s more, its client-side terms of service, which the porn companies would be using, requires the replica of your face only be destroyed within three years.

Yoti policy also says it will automatically opt-in all users into their internal research and development programs, meaning your face or identifying information may be used by the company to build new products. It also reserves the right to transfer your personal information if they suspect fraud, or if there is a request from law enforcement.

Yoti also freely admits that its age verification tool isn’t quite there yet — and it may never be. “We don’t claim that it is accurate or that it works equally well for all our users,” their terms of service read. “If you are lucky enough to look younger than you are, then our technology may not grant you access to the content you want to access.”

In a lawsuit filed last year, a minor who submitted to Yoti’s age verification process alleged that the company “disclosed and/or disseminated Plaintiff’s biometric data to third parties, including vendors and contractors it uses for data processing and data storage purposes” and did so without her consent. Yoti, in its defense, denied all the allegations, and the two sides eventually settled the case through mediation.

Even if Yoti was the only company approved to do this work, we should be concerned. But even more worrying is that there is no consensus on which companies should do this work. The German regulator lists dozens of companies who can, supposedly, be trusted to do this work — but some of those approvals came in 2003 and have not, seemingly, been reviewed since.

One supposedly trustworthy age verification company, Incode, explicitly says it may share photos and videos you capture in order to verify your identity with “business partners” and that, in some cases, they may sell user data.

We should be angling towards more privacy online, particularly with respect to youth, not less. This system would require a massive, permanent, and continuous transfer of personal and biometric data from users to a raft of third-party companies, such that could never be adequately supervised or audited.

Given that governments cannot even defend their own systems from ransomware attacks and major data breaches, we should be actively hostile to any attempt to expand data collection on users.

Problem 4: A Splinternet

“The promise of a global digital commons has given way to an increasingly fragmented collection of closed internets with their own separate infrastructures, controlled by Big Tech and nation states, many of them autocratic or totalitarian.”

That is the opening statement of the (draft) Splintercon manifesto, the result of a fascinating meeting of minds held this winter in Montreal.

In attendance were geeks, hackers, activists, journalists, and advocates from around the world. They descended on a (frigidly cold) Montreal to make a plan to fight back against the increasingly fractured, controlled, and over-regulated internet.

Many of the targets were, unsurprisingly, the rogues gallery of autocratic states: Russia, China, Iran. But, increasingly, the conversation turned to hybrid regimes, where top-down control of the internet is being pursued in the name of public safety, emergencies, and counter-terrorism: Kyrgyzstan, India, Mexico. Occasionally, over the weekend, participants mentioned the rise of an unlikely threat: Liberal nations, pursuing wrong-headed initiatives, like blocking pornography.

Their concern is around a splinternet, a version of the world wide web where geography determines access. Where a user in Montreal might access a fundamentally different version of the internet as someone in New York City, different still from someone in London, or Warsaw, or Dakar, or Sydney.

This problem can feel somewhat abstract, but it is very serious.

The very premise of the internet is generally incompatible with country-level regulation. While we can, and should, and have regulated bad behavior that manifests online — gambling, copyright infringement, etc — we have, thus far, been very hesitant to try and manage the content available through the web. It’s that concept, bundled in with the broader idea of net neutrality, that has made the internet the wonderful, chaotic, disruptive, transformative, sometimes terrifying force it has become. If we start fucking around with that, the consequences could be quite dire.

There has been a fight taking place at international fora in recent years, between liberal countries and autocratic ones. The autocrats have pushed for greater country-level control, giving nation-states more authority to censor, block, and monitor their citizens’ online behavior.

There is a clear disconnect between what liberal nations argued at those negotiations and what they are contemplating now, in terms of this porn-regulation. (For more on this, see my reporting in WIRED.)

Either we believe that internet governance is a shared responsibility of the whole world — but led by liberal principles of accessibility, openness, and neutrality — or we believe countries should be given more latitude to determine what their citizens can view on the world wide web. That’s the choice ahead of us, and these porn regulation bills are aligning countries for the latter option. That will make it incredibly difficult for us to continue resisting Chinese and Russian attempts to weaken global internet governance.

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Just because these solutions are bad does not mean the problem is unsolvable.

For starters, governments need to get serious about going after illegal material online. While there has been some great progress in rooting out the scourge of revenge porn and child sexual abuse material, much more needs to be done. These harms are not hypothetical or vague, they are very acute. (Canada has recently unveiled legislation which lays out a very thoughtful plan on how to do that.)

When it comes to legal adult content: We still don’t fully understand the substantive and long-term impacts of widely-available online pornography on adolescents. That makes it harder to regulate. But some data we do have offers some insight into how we might address the possible harms in a less obtrusive way. In a survey published in 2020, the British Board of Film Classification reported “45% of those who watched pornography intentionally had done so, at least in part, to ‘learn’ about sex.” Meanwhile, “nearly all” of the LGBTQ youth surveyed “said they had learnt about their sexuality through watching pornography, and several had come to realise their sexuality through watching pornography.” Some research has underlined a possible link between poor sexual education in schools and teenage pornography habits.

Interestingly, the British survey found a pretty pervasive concern about violent and degrading pornography from the youth themselves. In fact, a majority of pre-teens supported age-verification requirements for porn websites. The youth are not as relentlessly, destructively curious, exploratory, and impressionable as we sometimes believe.

Writers once fretted that the stuffed animals made in honor of the 26th president of the United States — the teddy bear — would provoke such obsession in young girls that they would decline to have babies later on. We were warned, too, that pinball machines had been sent “from the devil,” as a sledgehammer-wielding New York City mayor once warned. Porn has always been at the center of this worry: From illustrated guides to the Gabinetto Segreto to dollar porno cinemas, the VCR, usenet groups, e-mail, and so on.

Through all this, the much greater harms have always come from adults meddling in school curriculums, banning books, or shutting down the pinball bars.

Just because there’s a possible solution on the table does not mean it is the right one.

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That’s it for this week!

It’s been long-promised, but paying subscribers will be listening to Bug-eyed and Shameless Radio in the coming weeks. While it will, initially, just be a few special episodes, I continue to plan for a day when regular podcast episodes will be coming through the newsletter.

I penned a elegy for VICE News in the Globe & Mail this week, and joined Jesse Brown on Canadaland to send up the dead new-media golden boy. (And we chatted about Ottawa’s online harms bill, too.)

For my subscribers in Toronto: On Friday, I’ll be hosting a fascinating conversation with Simon Shuster, author of a fantastic new book about Volodmyr Zelensky, at the Reference Library. (One of my favorite places.) Tickets are free, and still available.

Also a particular thanks to

Erwin Dreessen

, who did some (much appreciated, much needed) copyediting on this weeks dispatch. You can find his Substack newsletter here. Thanks Erwin!

Until next week.

1. The Secret Museum, Walter M. Kendrick

2. This ignores, of course, that Pompeii had been buried at the height of Rome’s splendor, three centuries before its ‘fall.‘

3. The Destruction and Resurrection of Pompeii and Herculaneum, Egon Caesar, Conte Corte

4. The Theory of the Four Movements, Charles Fourier

5. The Censorship Myth and the Secret Museum, Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands

6. Some were allegedly distributing child exploitation material, but that was not the primary focus of the German cops.