*"Internet Porn as a *dead medium"?! You've gotta be kidding, right? Porn was the only commodity on the Internet that ever had a spark of commercial life!"
Well, read it and weep, skeptic:
"Hi there. I'm an old fan of yours from your "long long essays in Wired" days, and occasional buyer of your books, writing in.
"Have been catching up on your dispatches at Beyond The Beyond today, and I must say your crack on April 5 caught me right where I live: "Crowds of people watching information have become inherently nonmonetizable."
I'm a former lawyer who got tired of making money by threatening people with state hostilities stirred up by me and my clients. For about five years now I've been doing pretty well putting on a sex blogging show (mostly remixing other people's artistic/erotic efforts and presenting with minor commentary) and selling other people's porn to the audience that formed.
It's been fun and low effort and a great gig – and for the last year it's been slumping off a cliff on an accelerating curve, as the internet does to paid porn subscriptions what it already did to music on plastic discs. (((You're following the guy's bio here, right? I know, this is kinda amazing.)))
Crowds of people watching information, I've got. Something to sell that they want to buy? Not so much.
Fortunately, I've also got shelter and wheels and a loving companion that none of them demand a continuing revenue stream, plus access to land and a little water and some long-ago experiences with chickens and kitchen gardening. So, I'm not hurting and no more worried than anybody ought to be in an era when smart people are slinging phrases like "long emergency" and "new dark age".
Hell, I'm not even hungry enough to go back to lawyering. I'd rather raise chickens if it comes to that (and I don't like chickens).
Point to this email? Probably not any. Certainly no reply is expected or needed. I just wanted to say thanks for doing what you do, even as the advertising-supported markets that have paid you to do it continue to dry up. (((I'm cool about raising chickens with the former porn guys. As long as I don't have to pay Mark Frauenfelder's sky-high veterinarian bills for chickens savaged by urban coyotes.)))
– signed, Bacchus at Erosblog
