Mindy Seu’s latest lecture, “The Sexual History of the Internet,” is a grand financial experiment

Editor’s note: This story is the latest edition of Link Rot, a new column from Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that explores the intersection of art, technology and the internet.

Now that I have your attention, buy my book. Or my skin cream. Or my slime.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but that’s how most experiences on the internet are resolved: into sales pitches. Then you scroll to the next video or click on the next post and it happens again. As designer and digital researcher Mindy Seu finishes her performance talk The Sexual History of the Internet At a performance space in New York last month, I felt like I was experiencing this in a public setting rather than in the private, intimate dynamics I usually have on social media.

Promotional copy describes Seu’s talk as “a collection of anecdotes, artwork, and historical artifacts that reveal the pervasive and twisted origins of our digital tools.” Like Seu’s last lecture tour Internet Feminism Indexthis program is quite popular. To date, all events have been sold out. Next it will travel to the Kunsthalle Hamburg and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.

My experience was this: the audience mingled at the bar until we were told to be seated – and I caught an influencer imitating an overly affected elite culture actor on a seemingly bad date. Then we shuffled into a large room, dimly lit and about fifty chairs scattered around. My friend and I were busy finding seats when Seu came in with a microphone and started giving us instructions. We have to take out our phones, turn up the brightness and sound, turn on Do Not Disturb, and open Instagram. Since neither I nor my friend had the app, I quickly downloaded it, all the while wondering how long it would take me to delete it again. Viewers were encouraged to raise their hands and ask for help if they encountered technical difficulties—and several did. On Instagram we were told to find the “finsta” @a Sexhistoryoftheinternet.

“I’m going to count down to ten, and when I say click—Not ten— click on the first highlighted story,” Seu tells the audience. Like a conductor, she synchronizes the audience’s orchestra with the timing of her baton.

For the next forty minutes, “Story” plays automatically. Each contains a portion of her script. She read the story when it was white text on a black background. Sometimes, a green, red, blue, cyan, or magenta background appears. This is a prompt for members assigned to that color by birth month to read the text. When we clicked through the first story, the color of the sound showed microsecond differences and a scattered chorus sounded. The text is interrupted by occasional vibrations, videos of performances, archival materials or interviews, and images.

Seu was looking at his phone as he walked around the room. This Instagram Stories-as-lectures format, she tells us, is down to Julio Correa, who teaches Seu’s lecture performance classes at the Yale School of the Arts. Through story after story, we learn how sex shaped much of the Internet’s infrastructure and mores, from the invention of teledildonics (electronic sex toys on the Internet) to the 1972 test of what we now call JPEG on Lena Sjööblom’s Playboy insert.

“Alexander Sawchuk and his team at USC’s Signal and Image Processing Institute used her image to test their latest compression algorithm. It became an industry standard, and reanalyzed billions of times, this stolen image developed what we now know as JPEG,” Seu wrote.

JPEG is built on moments of theft, which is the culmination of the overarching theme. The specter of money hangs over all sexual relationships: What does it mean to get it “for free” and what does it mean to pay for it? Likewise, the Internet is governed by the question of what should be free and what should be paid for. On the one hand, the Internet’s reproduction norms normalize the unhindered circulation of images and texts under the fundamental tenet that “information wants to be free.” While this clearly benefits society in many ways, the normalization of free circulation is often abused, most recently by developers of artificial intelligence platforms. Many of these image or video generator programs are trained on the LAION dataset, which scrapes 5.6 billion images primarily from public websites.

The flip side of this free stolen circulation is the parallel history of using the internet to sell goods. At one point, a video of sex worker Carol Leigh appears on the screen, saying: “As sex workers, we’ve intuitively understood from the beginning of social media (and probably even from the beginning of the internet) that the reason for going online is to sell something.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Seu’s performance ended with a sales pitch. She told us that she had just bullied us and we had been following her every instruction and photographers had been taking pictures of us during the show and they uploaded them to Instagram and by the way the show can be purchased as a book. Seu explained that if the books sell out, everyone named in the books will receive $850 as compensation for their contribution. Seu also collaborated with Metalabel to design, Citation segmentationa tool that automatically assigns royalties to citing authors upon reprinting (they do not share the specific functionality of the tool). Narratives of this financial experiment are sprinkled throughout the book: “When you buy this book, profits will be redistributed to everyone cited in it—a new attribution model.”

However, when browsing the book, one can find the names of other beneficiaries: 30% of the proceeds go to the authors and artists cited, 10% to Metalabel, and 60% to Seu and the team that produced the work. A typical deal is a 90/10 split, with 90 points going to the publisher and 10 points to the author. Considering there were five other members of the design team, Seu still ended up with just over 10% profit.

The self-publishing arrangement introduces a unique proposition: In order for cited authors to get paid, Seu must act like any other influencer trying to make money. The sale of works is no longer independent of the artist, but is left to dealers and publicists who are used to being hands-on. Seu and her art cannot pretend to be above the transaction. The difference is that instead of attracting attention online, she’s engaging a live audience. Conceptually, this is an interesting move…or maybe it’s just business?

Soon after the show, the details I had learned began to fade away. What lingers instead is a feeling of betrayal. Maybe that’s an unfair reaction. In 2021, at the height of the NFT boom, Seu may sell these Instagram stories as digital assets. Now that that time has passed, she must objectify her work in other ways: as experiences (lectures) or as objects (books), both of which can be sold to many people at lower prices. This process entails exposing more people to the transactions necessary to keep her practice, as well as the arts infrastructure, solvent.

It is in this invitation to trade that art becomes a commodity. Whether it’s sex or art, we design systems that help us ignore the financial mechanisms at work. But avoiding the source of money is at the heart of moral complaints about capitalism. A decentralized peer-to-peer sales model seems to be the best option. It’s just a little unpleasant. But I guess it’s something we should get used to.