The Dark Net

by Jamie Bartlett

  Within thirty seconds, the first tip arrives. It’s ten tokens from Danny. Every time someone tips, it appears next to their name in the chat box, and there is a small ‘ding’ noise. Ding! Someone throws in enough to open a Keno prize: fifty-three tokens. ‘Thank you, Bumbler!’ says Vex. It’s the Firm Handshake. The three girls laugh, and earnestly perform their task. I laugh. The 2,000 or so people now in the room laugh too, albeit in text speak.

  This show isn’t all about sex. It’s about entertainment and socialising. The girls seem to be having a lot of fun. They draw on each other’s bodies. Poke fun at each other. Clothes come off, and then go back on again. Vex falls off the bed. Auryn chats with viewers about various news items. There is a Ding! every three or four minutes, and every five minutes or so a prize is won and performed. After the handshake comes the ‘extra-gropey make-out between two girls of your choice’. ‘Oh, that’s a good one!’ says Vex. And for the next two minutes, she and Auryn perform what must be an extra-gropey make-out.

  The chatter is constant. Most conversations are led by a relatively small band of regular fans, who all know Vex and appear to know each other. I identify around two dozen regulars, and begin to contact them individually. They are a fun and welcoming bunch. One, Bob, is a thirty-two-year-old single man from the UK and ‘not a hermit who lives in a virtual world!’ he tells me. He has made a lot of friends in and around Vex’s room: ‘I have come to consider the time spent hanging out in cam rooms as important as spending time with what I would call “real-world” friends,’ he says. There is certainly a social aspect to it. This show lasts for three hours, and the majority of viewers stay from beginning to end.

  I can see why. Vex is extremely friendly, funny and attentive, and a natural performer. She doesn’t try to be perfect. She tries to be normal. Danny tells me that the best camgirls are the ones who can laugh at themselves: ‘Vex does something silly on at least a weekly basis,’ he explains, ‘if not more regularly. So aside from being breathtakingly attractive, it’s always interesting to see what games and incentives she has planned.’ Before meeting Vex, I watched several of her shows from the other side of the screen. It looked effortless. But being so close to the action I get a sense of how hard it must be. Vex – with excellent support from Blath and Auryn – is keeping thousands of people entertained with nothing but herself and a webcam. This takes a lot of imagination, according to Danny – taking your clothes off and touching yourself gets stale and predictable very quickly.

  In a world awash with hard-core pornography, it’s personality and inventiveness that set the best apart. Aella, another of the more popular camgirls on Chaturbate, often puts on entire shows as a mime. She humps chairs, plays with toy gnomes, and sometimes does shows where she doesn’t take any clothes off at all. Even so, there is a lot of time to fill. On WeCamGirls – a community website for cam-models – the most popular forum is for sharing lesson plans, tricks, tips and ideas. ‘You have to be really, really imaginative,’ Vex agrees. ‘It’s not easy.’

  Vex has a strange knack of being able to twist everything into a part of her show. Her cat, Duchamp, keeps wandering in and out of the room, and is often brought on camera.fn1 Last year she started a sticker club, and created an enormous wall chart, with a list of regular viewers’ names. If you see Duchamp – sticker. If you tip a certain amount – sticker. It was wildly popular.

  Although I was well hidden, I worried that I would ruin the show – perhaps I’d put off the girls, or the viewers. That was surprisingly not the case.

  ‘So, we have a writer here today with us, guys,’ says Vex to the camera suddenly. I start shaking my head. Violently. ‘And if you tip one thousand tokens in the next minute, he’s promised he’ll say hello.’ Ding! Ding! Ding! Vex jumps off the bed and drags me over.

  ‘Hello, everyone,’ I say.

  ‘Hello,’ reply a dozen light and dark blue names.

  ‘I’m writing a book too?’ types one.

  ‘I’ll pay you ten thousand tokens to suck his cock,’ adds another.

  ‘Guys! Stop it! What shall his Chaturbate name be?’

  ‘The Pen-is-Mightier!’

  I hastily retreat. Despite my appearance, the show is a success. The tips are coming in rapidly. That’s perhaps because Vex’s real talent – refined over hundreds of shows – is to keep business ticking over. ‘Remember, guys,’ she says after spanking Auryn with a horse crop, ‘there will be a very special password-only show after this, and it’s only two hundred tokens to join.’

  The Tip-bomb, and Other Financial Matters

  About forty minutes into the show, something remarkable happens. One user pays a big tip – 999 tokens – for no apparent reason. Someone else matches him. And then so does another. The girls freeze. For about three minutes there is a tipping frenzy. When it’s over Blath, Vex and Auryn are each about £60 richer, and all of the hard-core Keno goals have been met. This is known in the trade as a ‘tip-bomb’. They now owe the room a Keno board’s worth of seriously heavy petting.

  ‘Holy fuck,’ says Vex to the fans. ‘I have never seen a board go so quickly. We have so much shit to do. Awesome!’

  ‘What the hell are the prizes, again?’ says Auryn.

  ‘Someone needs to go down on me,’ says Blath.

  ‘Shouldn’t we just, like, do everything to each other?’ suggests Vex.

  The tokens continue to flood in but I am beginning to notice that the tipping largely follows its own rhythm, unconnected to what’s happening onscreen. There are lists and leaderboards everywhere on Chaturbate. The top tipper in today’s room will win a prize: custom Polaroids that the girls will make after the show. Every few minutes a tipper leaderboard is displayed in the chat box (titled ‘most valued tippers’, and not ‘highest tippers’). When you first join Chaturbate there’s a leaderboard of popular rooms, and a list of the most popular performers. Vex displays a list of her top all-time tippers on her profile page. On MyFreeCams, cam-models have a ‘camscore’, which is a formula based on average tokens received per minute.

  This is an extremely clever system, applying a soft competitive pressure on everyone to keep spending. Vex’s regular tippers are loyal to her – and on the whole they tip because they appreciate the show she puts on, or simply because they like to see her happy. But some float around different rooms, dispensing enormous tips to several girls, just to be top of their list. (Some take being a model’s highest tipper very seriously indeed, and do not like it if someone dislodges them as The Favourite.) I suspect the tippers here have one eye on each other, too. Tipping big certainly impresses the 5,000 others in the room. If you tip-bomb the Keno board, everyone gets to enjoy the show. Some of Vex’s fans really do tip her very well indeed. One tells me via email that he typically spends £300–400 every month on cam-models. Another viewer tipped £500 in this show alone.

  These fans make Vex one of Chaturbate’s top earners. After a bit of head counting, she estimates her salary to be around £40,000 per year. The most she’s ever earnt in a single show is about £1,000, thanks to enormous, unsolicited tips, often from regulars. But there are other girls who make even more. Vex told me of one girl who’d made $20,000 in a single month. The money from tonight’s show will arrive in a couple of weeks. The tokens she earns will get exchanged into dollars, Chaturbate takes its cut, and transfers the rest on to a prepaid card called a Payoneer. Payoneer, in turn, takes a small percentage every time it is used. Vex, Auryn and Blath all complain about this. ‘There has to be a better way,’ Vex says after the show. ‘Have you heard of this new thing called Bitcoin?’

  Tokens are not the only perk of the job. Vex, like many performers, has a ‘wish-list’ – a personalised page on Amazon filled with things fans can buy her. Chaturbate’s chief technical officer tells me one girl had a fan pay for breast enlargement; another was bought a washing machine. Vex said she was once sent a set of Le Creuset cooking pots. I found one cam-model wish-list that included books of left-wing political and
social criticism, a Black & Decker Dust Buster, and something called a Ruckus motorcycle atv car valve spring compressor tool.

  Partly because of the possible rewards, Vex tells me that cam-modelling sites are becoming increasingly crowded. There are more performers joining every week. More girls means more competition, and this is driving down what each girl can expect to make. WeCamGirls ran an internal poll of its members, and found that while around 7 per cent of them make over $5,000 a month (Vex’s sort of range), half of them earn under $1,000.

  So cam-models are looking for other ways to supplement their income, and find new fans. It turns out that making money from sex online goes far beyond the webcam.

  Utherverse

  Jessica is a professional porn star who has worked in the industry for over a decade. She is also an extremely popular cam-model, and does private cam-shows every day, to a small group of high-paying subscribers.

  But the majority of Jessica’s clients are to be found in a virtual world called Utherverse. Utherverse is a sort of sexed-up version of Second Life. It has all the trappings of the real world: you can own your own flat (called a Zaby), bought with ‘Rays’ that can be exchanged for American dollars. If it’s your thing, you’re free to settle down with a virtual family in virtual suburbia. But most people are here to meet other avatars, and for twenty-four-hour parties, nightclubs and strip bars. Around 3,000 people join this parallel universe every day. ‘It’s a strange mix of fantasy and reality, and that makes it the perfect place to sell sex,’ explains Jessica. According to Utherverse’s friendly president, Anna-Lee, there are currently 25,000 avatars selling cyber-, phone- or cam-sex in Utherverse. These avatars are easy to spot – they each have a sign that floats over their head: ‘working guy’ or ‘working girl’. Anna-Lee tells me that a lot of cam-models come to Utherverse to ‘troll’ – a term confusingly used here to refer to soliciting for business.

  Along with her wife Elle, Jessica runs her own real-world multi-purpose pornography company in Massachusetts. Both are veterans of the adult entertainment industry, and both maintain a strong online and offline presence. Neither is happy with the direction that pornography is taking. ‘People’s standards used to be higher,’ says Jessica. ‘And because the technology’s gotten better, every Tom, Dick and Harry now thinks they’re a videographer or cam-model!’ adds Elle. But both have adapted to this new world, and both offer a remarkable array of cam-shows, phone sex and avatar sex, in addition to the more traditional video shoots.

  You don’t need to be a professional porn star to sell sex here. Anyone can become a working girl or boy and offer their services. I met Julia in one of Utherverse’s carefully designed seedy brothels. As I walked in, three scantily clad women were dancing, all ‘working’. Julia was tall, tanned and sultry, wearing some kind of all-in-one string dress.

  ‘Hey!’ I say.

  ‘Hey, sexy.’

  ‘So what do you do, Julia?’

  ‘I dance, strip and fuck, all for money,’ she quickly replies.

  Julia is a ‘verified’ working girl, which means she has a picture of the real her linked to her avatar. The online Julia is a tall, tanned, sultry twenty-five-year-old. The real Julia is a nurse from Kent in her mid-fifties who is happily married with five children. Julia’s main business here is selling cybersex – making your avatars have sex onscreen, while typing explicit commentary into a chat box. Julia tells me she is very good at cybersex. Some days, she has five or six customers who all want thirty minutes or even an hour of cyber-sex with her. That’s three hours of work, for perhaps $20. It’s not enough to provide a real-world income, but it pays for a VIP account here. She does it, she tells me, ‘for the Rays and the buzz’.

  ‘Doesn’t that get a bit tiring, all that endless dirty talk?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah, sometimes,’ says Julia.

  ‘And does cybersex actually turn you on?’ I ask.

  ‘No, not really,’ she replies.

  Occupational Hazards

  Displaying your naked body live onscreen certainly has its downsides. Most cam-models have the occasional slow room, difficult days and strange requests; these are just occupational hazards. ‘Personally, my worst nights are where no one is interacting,’ Blath told me, as she was getting ready for the show. The silent chat box is a cam-model’s nightmare. There’s no feedback mechanism. You don’t even know if anyone is paying attention. ‘It’s unnerving.’ Vex recalls that private shows used to be especially difficult. One fan wanted her to instruct him to take poppers.

  But these are the least of a cam-model’s concerns. According to Shirley, Chaturbate issues several Digital Millennium Copyright Act notices every day, because some viewers record shows and then repost them on other pornography sites, which is illegal without the site’s permission. ‘You’ll probably end up on a free porn site,’ Vex told me, laughing, after my short cameo. And by putting themselves onscreen, cam-models have long been a target for trolls. In August 2012, one camgirl had what appeared to be a live emotional breakdown on cam after being repeatedly trolled by users of 4chan. ‘God forgot I existed,’ she said, in tears. ‘Twelve years, I’ve been waiting for a man to love me. God doesn’t care. I want to die.’

  And it’s not only cam-models who are at risk. The growing volume of sexually explicit material that we share online or with each other has spurred a remarkable growth in what is called ‘revenge porn’: the posting or sharing of explicit photos or videos of a person without their permission. In late 2013, Kevin Bollaert, a twenty-seven-year-old from San Diego, was arrested in relation to a revenge site he operated. It was found that he had amassed over 10,000 explicit images, all without the knowledge or permission of the subjects. Myex.com is a similar site, which was still functioning at the time of writing. Users post pictures of their ex-partners (often naked, occasionally fully clothed), accompanied by a short caption explaining why they’ve chosen to post: ‘While I was in Iraq this hoe cheated on me,’ wrote one. ‘This girl will lie to you . . . I would suggest staying away from her,’ wrote another. The only way to remove the pictures from myex.com was through an ‘independent arbitration company’, who myex.com advised you to contact ‘if you feel you have been submitted to this site wrongfully’. Removal of images would cost you $499.99. A recent civil rights report found that half of all victims of revenge porn reported that their naked photos appeared next to their full name and social network handle; 20 per cent said that their emails and telephone numbers also appeared. Similar things are happening in schools, too, as cam or sexting pictures end up being shared around the class or school or friendship group. The effect is, of course, devastating. Jessica Logan from Ohio committed suicide after a nude photograph she had sent to an ex-boyfriend was shared around her school. In another American high school, a group of boys were found collecting ‘sexy selfies’ of their fellow students, which they were using to demand ever more explicit photos from the subjects.

  Vulnerable teenagers, willingly or unwillingly, can also be sucked into the world of webcams. There is a good reason why Chaturbate is so strict about verifying the age of its performers. In 2000, thirteen-year-old Justin Berry set up a webcam. Initially, he was offered $50 to take off his shirt and sit bare-chested onscreen for three minutes. He was soon being asked to pose in his underwear for a little over $100. It was the beginning of a cycle of online abuse. For over five years Berry earnt thousands of dollars doing various sexual shows for hundreds of paying subscribers before the site was shut down. It was an early warning of the dangers of the webcam world.

  The Climax

  Vex has never met her viewers, and doesn’t plan to. Her relationship with her regulars exists strictly online, a boundary she is determined to keep. But part of Vex’s appeal is that she is obviously real. Her shows are unashamedly home-made – a mixture of porn and, as one regular viewer describes it, a Skype chat with your girlfriend. Shirley tells me that camming is so popular because people want ‘the real girlfriend’ experience, warts an
d all. If people are going to use the internet for sexual satisfaction – and they will – camming is a more realistic and meaningful experience. Things go wrong, there are mistakes, there’s chat, cats wander in and out. Vex might emphasise her ums and ahs, but she doesn’t make them up. Everything is real. That’s healthy. For all the social panic about the ubiquity of hard-core porn on the net, there is something quite comforting about this. The net has always been accompanied by utopian dreams of sex without limits, of fantasies without boundaries. In his famous 1990 article about the future of sex in the magazine Mondo 2000, Howard Rheingold argued that ‘the definition of Eros’ would ‘soon be up for grabs’, because everyone will be as beautiful as they want and will be able to have virtual sex with anyone, anywhere. But most people don’t want fantastical sex with robots or supermodels. They want ordinary sex with real people.

  Yet something about the phrase ‘real girlfriend experience’ bothers me. I like Vex a lot. I understand why her fans keep coming back. You really do get an excellent ‘girlfriend experience’ with her. And that’s the problem. The men in her room aren’t her boyfriend. Vex’s boyfriend – who is a very cordial and friendly man – is currently downstairs, listening to the football on the radio.

  When it’s stripped down to its bare essence, camming is a transaction. This is Vex’s job. Danny – a loyal Vex fan – explains the downside to me of ‘the girlfriend experience’: ‘You have to keep reminding yourself that you will never meet these women in person, and they do not want to fuck you. Once I came to that conclusion, I found myself a much happier member of the cam-rooms I frequent.’