Sex, Bombs and Burgers (24 page)

T
he way you know if your technology is good and solid is if it’s doing well in the
orn world.
¹

—SUN MICROSYSTEMS SPOKESPERSON SUSAN STRUBLE

You may think a world without porn stars sounds like the distant past, but according to Tera Patrick, one of the biggest names in adult entertainment, it could also be the near future. That’s because in the world of pornography, what the internet giveth the internet can also taketh away.

Born Linda Ann Hopkins to a Thai mother and British father in 1976, the raven-haired, olive-skinned beauty is a veritable legend in the business. This status is achieved through a combination of her exotic look, some entrepreneurship and a lot of hard work. (Believe it or not, being a porn star is not just about having copious amounts of sex and going to wild parties; there are also many long and dreary hours, tiring travel and repetitive publicity to contend with.) Hopkins’s journey began early, when as a teenager she modelled for mainstream clothing catalogues. By the late nineties, she was posing nude for adult magazines such as
Hustler
and
Swank
and in 1999 she took the full dive into porn, changing her name to “Tera” to reflect her earthconsciousness and “Patrick” for her father’s middle name.

Patrick is not the stereotypical sex-crazed bimbo. She earned a bachelor of science degree at Boise State University
and was set to become a nurse, but found the potential riches of porn too hard to resist. Over the next decade, she appeared in nearly a hundred films, and in 2009 was inducted into the
Adult
Video News
Hall of Fame, the industry’s equivalent to the Oscars’lifetime achievement award.

After working for some of the biggest porn producers in the world, including Vivid and Digital Playground, Patrick struck out on her own with Teravision, a production company devoted to putting together what she calls a “beautiful, sexy video library.” The internet gave her all the necessary tools to get a business up and running, and in 2003 she launched ClubTera.com, a website where customers could buy online access to her photos and videos and order DVDs. ClubTera also allowed her to crosslink with other adult sites, promote personal appearances and interact with fans.

Talking to me from her office in Los Angeles, Patrick is upbeat and cheerful when discussing how she wants to be seen as a positive role model for other women in the industry. Her mood darkens, though, when she starts discussing her reasons for going solo. While the producers of her films, who were always male, capitalized on her popularity, the riches she had been promised never came. “The guys take advantage of the girls. The girls work for free or cheap and the guys make all the money. The producers make all the money,” she snarls. “I was one of those girls who was working my ass off and making very little while the company took all my money ... [Now] I’m one of the few women in the industry that does make money.”
²

This empowering equalization, what Thomas Friedman would call a “world flattener,” extends far beyond porn into what is the most dynamic force in the world today.
³
The internet has
given a voice to the disenfranchised and created opportunities where they never existed, from the very macro level right down to the micro. India, for one, has used the internet to become the world’s high-tech support centre, transforming itself into one of the most important global economies after decades of poverty and hopelessness. Companies such as Google, eBay and Amazon, formed in garages and basements, have used the internet to fundamentally change the way we live by literally bringing the world’s information to our fingertips, or by allowing us to acquire all our earthly needs without ever leaving the house. At the lowest level, individuals—whether they are porn stars like Patrick or just simple teenagers—have been empowered to start their own businesses or blogs, or to connect, communicate and share with others through social-networking sites and tools such as Facebook and Twitter. The internet has opened a new horizon of possibilities for people around the world, and its transformative abilities and effects are only beginning to be felt.

The internet is also destroying the old ways of doing things. We’re seeing the effects of this on an almost daily basis: if it’s not a music label complaining about declining sales, it’s Hollywood suing websites for disseminating copyrighted video or a newspaper going out of business. Traditional industries are having to come to grips with the fact that in the new digital world, the old ways of doing business may no longer work.

This is also true in the porn industry, where anyone with a computer, a webcam and a high-speed internet connection can now become a producer. The old production system, which revolved around the creation of big stars like Patrick, is under attack. On the consumer side, meanwhile, the porn industry is facing the same problems as mainstream media: its digitized
content is increasingly being circulated for free. Having ridden the internet porn wave to the top, Patrick understands that the system she came up in is being squeezed on both ends. “I don’t know if there’ll be another big porn star again because the market is too saturated and there’s so many girls that no one really stands out,” she says. “If you can go on the internet and download free porn, why would you go to a girl’s pay website, unless you were a big fan of hers?”

Few internet users know that this global network, on which they now watch YouTube videos, post Twitter messages and share Facebook photos, was actually invented by the U.S. Department of Defense, then perfected by the porn industry. But the porn industry is already starting to rue all the effort it put into helping develop the internet into what it is today.

Bees in the Bonnet

It all started with President Eisenhower’s other secret weapon against the Soviet Union, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Like NASA, ARPA was formed in 1958 as a direct response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik, and also like NASA, it was a civilian-run agency, designed to oversee all advanced military research and to make sure the United States was never again beaten to the technological punch. Roy Johnson, a vicepresident at General Electric, was appointed its first director and given an annual budget of $150 million. His ambitious vision included the creation of global surveillance satellites, space defence interceptor vehicles, strategic orbital weapons systems, stationary communications satellites, manned space stations and even a moon base.
⁴
The agency, which added a “D” for “Defense” to its name in 1972, was organized differently from
a traditional research group in that it was small, decentralized and run by a handful of program managers scattered around the country. Tony Tether, who stepped down as agency director in 2009, was fond of saying, “Program managers do not work at DARPA, they are DARPA.”
⁵
The managers, almost always leading scientists or engineers in their fields, have typically been recruited for four- to six-year periods and worked wherever they were based, travelling around the country as they were needed. Some observers have characterized the agency as “100 geniuses connected by a travel agent.”
⁶

ARPA’s early priorities centred around ballistic missiles, developing technologies for space and detecting nuclear tests by other countries. By the late sixties, much of the work in those areas, including the Apollo program’s Saturn rocket and the Corona satellite, had matured and was shuffled off to NASA and the relevant military and intelligence branches. ARPA’s priorities shifted to investing in what its directors like to call “the Far Side,” technologies that were still unknown or risky. Vint Cerf, whom many today revere as the “father of the internet,” was brought on board in 1976 as project manager for an ambitious new concept the agency was working on. The young engineer was an assistant professor at Stanford University, but he was enthused about building a worldwide telecommunications network, an idea that was only a dream at the time. He was a perfect match for the agency. “DARPA hires people who have bees in their bonnets and who want to make things happen,” he says.
⁷

Cerf is one of my favourite people to interview. He has a straightforward manner of speaking, and although he works for Google as its “chief internet evangelist,” he rarely sounds like he’s preaching company spin.
⁸
Moreover, I love his wry sense of
humour. During a speech to computer science students at the University of Waterloo in Canada in 2007, he flashed a slide of himself wearing a T-shirt that read, “IP on everything.” To the nerds in attendance, it was comedic gold.

Nowadays, Cerf spends most of his time in Washington lobbying government officials to keep the internet open and free. Google’s digs in the capital are more serious-looking than its other locations, with fewer primary colours and less of the kindergarten feel the company’s offices are known for. Cerf, the company’s elder statesman, fits in well, with his trademark three-piece suit and impeccable manners. As usual, during our interview he was modest about his role in the creation of the internet. The ARPAnet, its precursor, came about through the confluence of the ideas of three people, he explains. Paul Baran, an engineer working for the RAND Corporation military advisory group in the early sixties, was charged with “thinking the unthinkable”—designing a communications network that could withstand a nuclear attack. Baran came up with the concept of a “command-and-control” system based on the idea of hot-potato routing. Rather than just directing a phone call from point A to point B, his system called for redundancy, so the call would be distributed to a number of nodes in different locations—from point A to B and C and D and E, for example—and stored there. That way, if some of the nodes were disabled, say, by a nuclear attack, others would survive and communications could continue. Phone companies such as AT&T, seeing that such a network would be expensive to build, scoffed at the idea and told Baran he didn’t know how communications worked.

The second prong came from J.C.R. Licklider, an MIT computer scientist who was appointed head of ARPA’s
Information Processing Techniques Office in 1962. Licklider, or “Lick” to his friends, was interested in the psychology of using computers and in harnessing the power of many. Throughout the sixties, he developed his concept of an “Intergalactic Computer Network” in a series of memos that predicted just about everything the internet has now become. If one mainframe computer was powerful, Lick argued, two computers working together were even more powerful, and the power only increased as more computing capability was added. He had trouble convincing MIT officials, though, who preferred to spend money on buying computers rather than connecting them.

The third prong was Welsh computer scientist Donald Davies, who came up with the term “packet switching” while working for the U.K.’s National Physical Laboratory. His ideas were virtually the same as Baran’s, except they involved transmitting non-voice data in “packets” over a decentralized network. Davies built a small network in his lab but couldn’t get funding to take the idea further either.

The prongs converged at a systems engineering convention in Tennessee in 1967 attended by all three parties. Notes were compared, common beliefs were discovered and before anyone knew it, Licklider’s fellow MIT professor, Larry Roberts, was contracted by ARPA to head up development of a new packetswitching voice and data network. A plan was drawn up, the agency approved a budget of a few million dollars and the Massachusetts-based technology company Bolt, Beranek and Newman was hired to build it. UCLA and Stanford, where Cerf was working, were selected as the first two nodes for the network, and on November 21, 1969, the first permanent link in the ARPAnet was established. The first communication,
however, didn’t go very well—UCLA sent the word “login” to Stanford, but after receiving the letters “l” and the “o,” the system crashed. Nevertheless, in a moment akin to the brief firing of the first nuclear reactor in Chicago in 1944, history had been made. For many of the computer scientists working on the project, establishing a network for defence purposes came second to creating new efficiencies in computing ability. “It had a command-and-control flavour to it,” Cerf says, “but it had everything to do with sharing computing resources, because they couldn’t keep buying new computers for everybody.”

Selling Out

As more nodes were added to the ARPAnet and more data, like pictures of
Playboy
playmates, was sent across the network, a new problem emerged: the mainframe computers being used across the country in the early seventies were all built by different companies and ran on different software. IBM machines, for example, could only talk to IBM machines. It would be a full decade before personal computers started to take off and standard operating systems made by the likes of Apple and Microsoft started to gain traction. If there was any hope of expanding the ARPAnet into a truly universal network, which is what many of its creators hoped, it needed a common language to run on. That’s where Cerf came in. After his appointment to DARPA in 1976, he came up with the Internet Protocol Suite, a common set of rules that determined how transmissions across the network worked. In order to get commercial computer manufacturers and network equipment makers to accept their protocol, Cerf and DARPA did the only thing they could do: they made it available for free. “We knew we couldn’t possibly make this an
international standard if we in any way constrained access to the technology, so even in the middle of the Cold War, DARPA flew under the radar,” he says. “We kind of hoped the Russians would pick it up and it would occupy them for the next twenty years.”

The network soon started paying dividends. DARPA found that using networked computers meant fewer machines were needed, so its mainframe costs shrank by 30 percent.
⁹
The rule of unintended consequences, so common when dealing with technological inventions, also reared its head. Scientists found the network was also good for sending electronic text messages. The “killer application,” a term often used for the first practical application of a new technology, was discovered: email.