Guilty Pleasure: The Pornification of the Internet, the Economy, and Everything Else

A groundbreaking, provocative, and immersive investigation into the porn industry, from its golden age to its hidden global present—a story of sex, surveillance, deep data, and dirty money in the attention economy.

We live in a world where more people have access to free porn than to clean tap water. Every day, tens of thousands of hours of pornographic content are uploaded to the internet. Pornhub's uploads in a single year outnumber the uploads of the libraries of the major streaming sites—Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon—combined across all time. We search more frequently for sexual terms than for SFW sites—the news, the weather, Reddit, YouTube.

Though porn is everywhere, we do not talk about it. We don’t admit to watching it—even as data shows that we do more and more, and from younger and younger ages, every year. Porn is not on the internet—it is the internet. And yet its history, its present, its sweeping, propulsive, integral influence on our private and public desires, our sexualities and our identities and our expectations, belong to a story that hasn’t been told—until now.

Building on five years of investigative reporting, Patricia Nilsson’s hyperintelligent, wildly ambitious, provocative, and deeply researched Guilty Pleasure takes us on a wild and shocking trip, from the golden age of Silicon Valley’s auteur era—Playboy, Deep Throat—to the second-wave “porn wars” to the fate of OnlyFans; from the dawn of the internet to the algorithmic, dopamine-addicted deluge of the present. Its ensemble cast of misfits and moguls includes everyone from fetish-film stars to anonymous influencers, the eccentric coders and tech bros and mysterious bankers who meet everywhere from châteaus in Prague to the storied boardrooms of our most powerful financial institutions, many of whom now find themselves locked in high-stakes legal combat over their involvement in the industry. We learn how the logic of the internet and the logic of porn form the twinned centers of our attention economy, and how the makers, grifters, consumers, workers, designers, and investors of this taboo industry show us, and conceal from us, what we really want.