Nick Carr thinks technologists have a porn problem. According to him, they wink, nod, and retail porn’s technological innovations — Porn drove VCR adoption! Porn is driving micro-payments! Porn is driving online video! — while ignoring its damaging effects. In so doing they are being too clever, for his taste, about tacitly admiring an immoral industry, one that he calls “bad”, not to mention “very bad”. Ouch.
Nick’s a bright guy, so his argument is convincing, cogent, emotionally-compelling — and, I think, misleading and strained.
I’m not condoning porn nor am I a consumer. What’s more, I’m militantly against many (most?) kinds of pornography, especially ones involving violence, and so on. But left with legal porn, stuff of the Playboy variety — as opposed to the heinous dreck that Nick trots out to make his point in inflammatory fashion — I’m left guessing at Nick’s real argument, let alone its internal consistency. Does he, for example, object to businesses learning anything from all legal but objectionable industries, or is porn the only one? Is it okay to observe and learn from tobacco industries? How about gambling? Are there other legal industries from which it is unnacceptable to learn anything?
I have nothing against a principled stand, but I do have a problem with seductive slippery slope arguments built around extreme cases and ritual invocations of “let’s protect the children”.
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I don’t think the point of Nick’s post was “protecting children” or “pornography is bad”. In my eyes those were parts of the examples he used to underline the real point: being in denial of the “growing amorality” because we cannot afford to acknowledge it. The problem of (peer) pressure that practically prevents any serious talk about something that is viewed as a problem by many.
I’ve always found that people have weird hang ups in regards to the tv content they’ll watch. i’ve noticed that in general people are more comfortable watching violence and humans dying on tv than nudity or people having sex. I guess in the case of pornography the sex is happening for real (which you may or may not think is a bad thing), but people don’t actually die when making movies about the war in Vietnam. In hollywood type productions the actors in sex scenes aren’t actually having intercourse either though. In real life though sex is far more socially acceptable than killing people;-) Something seems weird about that to me.
The argument refutes itself. Nick goes on about how ubiquitous and easily accessible all sorts of horrible “long tail” depravity has become with the Internet. He writes, “I just find it curious how easily we’ve come to accept what just a few years ago would have been unimaginable – both the content and its accessibility.”
And, then?
We have here a major new social phenomenon that started abruptly approximately 10 years ago. That’s more than enough time to demonstrate any statistically significant adverse social consequences (such as are readily evident in the cases of alcohol, tobacco, and gambling).
[Your link on "damaging effects" is thin, on the order of the "damaging effects" of flouridating drinking water.]
If there were a harm to show, there would be an argument to make. Rather, we get vacuous sententia in service of common prudery.
I have nothing against a principled stand, but I do have a problem with seductive slippery slope arguments built around extreme cases and ritual invocations of “let’s protect the childrenâ€.
Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed