The Dark Net

by Jamie Bartlett

  In April 1996, an American university student named Jennifer Ringley registered a website named ‘JenniCam’. She filmed herself performing a range of activities – from brushing her teeth to stripteases – and streamed it live on the site. Jennifer was the very first cam-model, one whose motivation, she claimed, was to give viewers ‘an insight into a virtual human zoo’. At its peak, four million people were watching the jolting and stuttering frames of a life lived in front of the computer. Ringley quickly realised the financial possibilities her popularity presented. In 1998 she divided her site into free and paying, with a fifteen-dollar annual fee allowing access to new pictures every two minutes (if you didn’t pay, you’d have to wait twenty minutes).

  Within months, thousands of aspiring performers had created copycat sites across the web. The majority were set up by amateurs, and more often than not were pay-to-view. They included several spoof JenniCam sites, and even a ‘Voyeur Dorm’ cam, featuring five college students leading normal lives in front of thirty-one cameras running around the clock. In 2001 Live Jasmin, an erotic internet-based reality-television show, was set up by the Hungarian entrepreneur György Gattyán. The site soon morphed into a place for amateur and aspiring models to go to perform to paying viewers. Camming was becoming a gainful means of employment, albeit still a very niche one. Then a new generation of cam-sites arrived: MyFreeCams in 2004 and Chaturbate in 2011 offered free, professionally produced and regularly maintained websites. Camming experienced a surge in popularity.

  Chaturbate is one of the largest camsites in terms of unique site visits, second only to Live Jasmin. At any one time, there are around 600 models online, from all over the world, sitting at home with their webcams on, and performing live for people who have logged in and joined their Chaturbate ‘room’.

  There are no signing-on fees or subscriptions on Chaturbate, and the performers make their money from ‘tips’ from viewers. Cam-models will often perform once or twice a day, and a typical show might last an hour. During a show, viewers can tip the models in Chaturbate tokens, which can be bought on the site. Shirley, the glamorous thirty-year-old chief technical officer at Chaturbate (who seems to more or less run the site single-handedly), explains to me how it works. Cam-models use Chaturbate a bit like a franchise. They have to pay 60 per cent of any tokens they earn to the company, who offer the server space, web maintenance, payment processes and, as Shirley puts it, ‘the power of the Chaturbate brand’. It is a powerful brand. Chaturbate receives approximately three million unique visitors a day. That’s a lot of potential tippers.

  You don’t need to look like a porn star to become a performer on Chaturbate, and most do not. A 2013 study of 7,000 professional female porn stars from the US revealed that the average actress is 5 foot 5 inches tall with measurements of 34–24–34. There are certainly cam-models that look like that too, but also plenty who don’t. Today there are probably around 50,000 or so cam-models working from bedrooms and studios around the world, mostly from North America and Europe. Although men, transsexuals and couples also perform, typical cam-models are women aged between twenty and thirty. Beyond that it’s hard to be exact. Some do it full-time, like Vex. Others dip in for fun, or to supplement their income. On Chaturbate you will likely find (and I have found): middle-aged couples going at it hammer and tongs, naked men playing the guitar, bored-looking females sitting silently, a transsexual orgy, a penis being vigorously masturbated (of course), as well as countless other performers in various pre- and post-coital states. The most popular models can easily have more than 1,000 viewers any time they perform, but some will only have a few dozen watching. There is something for everybody here.

  According to the New York Times, camming has become an enormous, global industry that generates over a billion dollars a year, which is about 20 per cent of the pornography industry as a whole. There is even a large and growing cam community, with several online forums and support groups where cam-models can meet, talk and exchange ideas. Camming is a vibrant and flourishing world, and one almost entirely made up of ‘ordinaries’ with webcams, just like Vex. But what is it that makes ordinaries so popular?

  Vex hadn’t planned to become a cam-model. She had signed up to pose for a series of nude photographs for an alternative soft-core company called God’s Girls to earn some extra cash while she was at university. One day, she overheard some friends at God’s Girls discussing camming as a good way to make money. After a spot of research, she bought a webcam, and signed up to perform private shows on Skype with a local camming company. ‘I was very nervous the first time I did it. I talked way too much,’ she tells me. ‘I had twenty visitors in my room, and that felt insane! I think I made about thirty pounds.’ She then joined Chaturbate, and almost immediately started making enough money for it to become her sole source of employment.

  I ask Vex why she thinks she is so popular. ‘Traditional porn tends to be standardised and unrealistic,’ she replies. ‘I guess I’m a real person in a real room.’ This view is one put forward by Feona Attwood, professor of cultural studies at Middlesex University: ‘It’s a better kind of porn: somehow more real, raw and innovative than the products of the mainstream porn industry.’

  ‘Are you more “real” than mainstream porn?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, the best way to find out,’ Vex says, ‘is to come along to one of my shows.’

  A Rate-me Interlude

  Over the last decade, our lives have been turned inside out. The amount of information we now routinely share about ourselves is staggering. Around the world there are between 1.73 billion and 1.86 billion active social media users across all platforms: posting status updates, uploading videos, describing or sharing photos of where they are, what they like, who they are with. On Facebook alone, users upload somewhere between 20 and 140 billion items of content every month. Some psychologists think that social media is popular because it taps into a hard-wired need to seek affirmation from our peers, ‘a deep evolutionary need for community’, and a very natural desire for enhanced reputation. Sharing our every intimacy is a shortcut to fulfilling innate needs that are present in all of us: needs for affection, relationships, belonging, self-esteem and social recognition.

  Social networking sites have developed clever new ways to encourage you to share increasing amounts of information about yourself. This is because personal data is an extremely valuable commodity. The more you provide, the more of your digital breadcrumbs can be collected and sold on to companies who want to sell you something. There is a multi-billion-dollar industry that does nothing except buy and sell the personal data we share online.

  The MIT professor Sherry Turkle thinks that the fact we’re always logged on, and always being observed, is turning many of us into personal brand managers, who carefully sculpt our online identities and obsess over what others think of us. In her 2011 book Alone Together, Turkle interviews hundreds of children and adults, and documents the new instabilities in how we understand privacy and personal identity online. She records young people spending hours a week carefully selecting their Facebook likes, and photoshopping mildly unflattering photos: ‘What kind of social life should I say I have?’ they ask. She calls this ‘presentation anxiety’.

  Young people today have different views about privacy compared to their parents. Pew Research’s 2013 study of teens, social media and privacy found that young people are sharing more information about themselves than they did in the past. In 2012, 91 per cent posted a photo of themselves, (up from 79 per cent in 2006); 71 per cent post their school name and the city or town where they live; half post their email address. That’s not to say young people don’t care about protecting their privacy online – surveys show they do – but rather that they regard their privacy in terms of retaining control over what they share publicly, rather than limiting what they share.

  This sharing epidemic stretches into the intimate. According to a 2014 YouGov poll, approximately one fifth of British adults under forty have engage
d in sexual activity in front of a camera; 15 per cent have appeared naked in front of a web-cam. Of those who said that they had taken ‘selfies’, 25 per cent also admitted to taking ‘sexy selfies’.

  Sharing images of ourselves or our body parts is not a recent phenomenon. A lengthy history could be written about penises alone, beginning perhaps with the 28,000-year-old image of a phallus in the Hohle Fels cave in Germany. But the instantaneous connect-ivity of life online has certainly enabled us to do so more easily, and to a wider audience.

  The website 4chan’s socialising board /soc/ is a space specifically for cam-models, meet-up groups and extremely popular ‘rate-me’ threads. It’s a sort of ground zero of exhibitionism. A rate-me thread is exactly what it sounds like. Every few minutes on one of the hundreds of threads on 4chan, someone posts a photo (often naked), accompanied by a message inviting feedback. Viewers respond – sometimes positively, sometimes not, and almost always with a score out of ten.

  Penis rate-me threads are especially popular on 4chan, and have several subgenres: small penis threads, large penis threads, skinny penis threads. ‘Rate my dick please,’ wrote a user in one thread, next to a picture of his member, ‘and feel free to share yours.’ Within a minute, he’d received the following comments:

  Thick, long 8/10

  Veiny slightly weird colour 5/10

  Fucking huge! 10/10

  I’m not even gay and I’d suck it. Absolutely jealous. 9/10

  9/10 would swallow

  Others took up his offer and shared theirs, often pictured alongside household objects to provide a handy scale: a television remote control, a roll of toilet paper, a small bottle of orange juice.

  One regular poster is Joe, a twenty-year-old office worker from London. He posts photographs of himself in the ‘skinny guy’ threads, where slim males share pictures of their bodies. ‘I post for the attention, I suppose,’ he tells me. ‘I’m fed up with people always mentioning how thin I am. It’s refreshing to hear that somebody appreciates my body. Whether they’re male or female isn’t a concern. I’m only listening to the compliments: it’s a confidence boost.’ Joe has saved every positive comment he has received – there are hundreds – in a folder on his desktop.

  I click through countless rate-me sites on 4chan and across the web; sites dedicated to babies, puppies, hairstyles, as well as to arms, muscles and poo (believe it or not). Every one contains thousands of images, each with its own list of comments and ratings.

  The rate-me phenomenon spreads much further than specific websites. In 2011, a Facebook group titled ‘hottest and cutest teenagers’ was created. It spawned a number of similar groups or forums on the site, with countless teenagers participating. The pages provoked an outcry from concerned parents and security experts, and some of the sites were quickly shut down. But each time one was closed, another appeared in its place: ‘the Most Beautiful Teen in the world’, for example, in 2012: ‘cutest teens’ in 2013. At the moment of writing, there are at least twenty-five of these groups or events on Facebook. Rate-me videos are also proliferating. Over the last few years thousands of young teenagers have uploaded clips of themselves on to YouTube with the caption: Am I pretty or ugly?

  In whatever form it takes, it is clear that more people are sharing more personal images about themselves than ever before. Vex is not an outlier. She is the visible tip a very large iceberg.

  Lights, Web-camera . . .

  Three weeks later I’m at Vex’s house in the north of England. Vex is hosting a special show today. Like most cam-models, she usually performs alone. But this evening two other cam-models will be performing with her. It’s a ‘girl-on-girl-on-girl’ show. Vex does one of these every few months, she tells me. They are always well publicised and extremely popular. A big audience is expected.

  Vex lives on a polite redbrick road. Her four-storey house is spacious but cluttered with pieces of art and retro furniture. She gives me a quick tour and takes me up to a fairly small, messy bedroom at the top of the house.

  Two girls are sitting on the bed. They’re both in their early twenties, like Vex. Auryn is from Canada. She’s tall, black, slim and heavily tattooed. She’s been camming full-time for about a year, she says. Blath is shorter, white, has striking pixie-features, and hair that’s dyed a greeny-blue colour. She’s studying photography, and cams part-time for a bit of extra cash. The girls all worked together at God’s Girls, and have been friends ever since.

  The show is due to start in an hour, and the girls hurry to get ready: cleaning, arranging furniture, setting up the lighting. One fan has sent Vex a bottle of champagne for the evening, which she produces, pouring glasses for the girls. ‘What shall we wear?’ Blath asks. ‘Neutral colours, I think,’ Auryn replies. ‘Matching?’ ‘Yes.’ They start discussing tax returns while mixing sparkle glitter into a bottle of baby oil. Vex walks over to a small chest of drawers. ‘Right: here are my dildos,’ she explains. ‘The sex toys have been sterilised, of course,’ she adds, handing me one. ‘Ah. And wet-wipes. A camgirl’s staple. We have to put an unusual amount of objects in our vaginas, you know.’

  We are already thirty minutes late, and Vex, Blath and Auryn are just about ready, dressed in skimpy tops, long socks and frilly knickers. Before we go live, Vex explains, Auryn and I need to be ‘age-verified’ by Chaturbate. She emails photographs of our driving licences to the site’s moderators. Chaturbate has a very strict policy regarding age, for obvious reasons, but I’m not entirely sure why I’ve been included. ‘Don’t worry,’ Vex says. ‘It’s just in case you accidentally walk past the screen or something.’

  Cam-shows need to be carefully orchestrated. Vex predicts the show might last for at least two hours. It’s a lot of time to fill. The girls first agree on what the boundaries will be tonight. It’s decided they will do ‘pussy play’, close-up shots, and use vibrators, but not dildos. Then they need to decide on the room incentives. There are a lot of clever ways to make use of Chaturbate’s tipping system. Most cam-models set staggered targets: an escalating number of tokens for increasingly explicit acts. Some have a set tip menu that doesn’t change. Usually there is a single overall ‘token goal’, which the performer hopes to reach in the course of the show, and which will result in a show’s finale. Vex, Blath and Auryn decide on something a bit more complicated. They set up two ‘Keno’ boards, a tipping system that works a little bit like bingo. Vex creates eighty numbered boxes, each with a token price. You open each box by paying the amount, but only one in four of the boxes contain prizes. The first Keno board contains only ‘soft-core’ rewards; the second, more expensive board, only ‘hard-core’ acts. All three shout out possible prizes, and Vex types them in on her Chaturbate account:

  Blath and Vex making out

  Blath and Auryn making out

  Auryn and Vex making out

  Auryn, Vex and Blath making out

  Boobies

  Oiling up

  Nipple kissing

  Pussy flash

  Extra-gropey make-out between two girls of your choice

  Oral triangle

  Vibrator: one minute

  Vex adds a ‘firm handshake’ for fun. ‘Gosh,’ she says, ‘there are a lot of prizes.’ They decide that the final goal will be a password-protected ‘cum-show’. Only viewers who have paid 200 tokens each – approximately £12 – will be able to watch.

  Finally we are ready to go. The three of them are sitting on the bed in sexy clothes, arms around each other like a school gang. I am sitting just off-camera, two feet away from the bed, a pad of paper and my laptop on my knees, logged into Vex’s virtual room. It all feels a little strange, to say the least.

  One last swig of champagne. ‘Right. Are we ready?’ asks Vex. Loud cries of ‘yes’ all round. ‘OK, let’s go!’ She turns on her camera, and suddenly the three of them appear onscreen in Vex’s digital room.

  . . . and Action

  As soon as Vex’s camera is turned on, Chaturbate automatically sends a
notification to her 60,000 Chaturbate fans, informing them that she is now in her room and ready to perform. We are live. If I expected a dramatic transformation when the cam starts rolling, I was mistaken. The show begins in a quiet and pleasantly haphazard way. The first ten minutes are characterised by minor technical glitches. The frame speed is too slow. The Keno boards seem to be deleting prizes. The computer, which is positioned on a table three feet away from the bed with an expensive clip-on webcam, is still being adjusted by Vex as people start to join her virtual room.

  And a lot of people are joining. The first to arrive is a regular visitor from the US called Danny. ‘Hey, Danny!’ the girls say in unison. ‘You’re the first one in!’ More regulars join and start communicating via the chat box. When you watch a show on Chaturbate, your screen is split in two. On the left side is the live video stream from the webcam. On the right is a constantly updating chat box, which is where the audience communicates to the performers and each other. Vex, it quickly transpires, has a very large fan base who watch nearly all of her shows. As the regulars join, they typically greet the performers by typing in the box, and the girls greet them back by talking into the camera. Oh hey, Night-shadow, how are you? Welcome back, Stroker! Ox! So nice to see you. But far too many people are pouring in to greet each individually. Within five minutes, over 600 have joined us.

  Chaturbate has a handy – if slightly ruthless – trick to help the performers manage these large crowds. Visitors with no tokens in their account appear as grey in the chat box. Everyone calls them ‘greys’. These are the freeloaders. Performers sometimes decide to ‘turn the greys off’, which means they can watch, but not talk in the chat box. Users whose names appear as light blue have tokens but haven’t tipped more than fifty tokens in the last twenty-four hours. They are the cautious, parsimonious tippers. Dark blue means they have plenty of tokens, and they spend them regularly. If a dark blue says something in the chat box, they are more likely to get a response. It’s a board-specific class system.