Or: “Prøn. Cats and prøn!”
Years ago — back in grad school, I think or shortly thereafter — there was some discussion about what were the “drivers” of the adoption of new technologies and people brought up the battles that video tape faced. Some went even further back and brought up book publishing/moveable type. It was a discussion I followed closely, in part due to my own interests in the history of bookbinding, as well as my interest in digital publishing.
A running joke at the time, yet still applicable today, was that “the Internet is for prøn, prøn and cats”, the deliberate use of the “ø” and misspelling to avoid immediate censorship by the more easily-offended. There is an amusing truth to the joke: adult entertainment drove the development of micro-payments that led to the monetization of anything put online. And erotica1 was among the earliest of Western European book publication. Quite simple, really, entertainment sells and adult entertainment sells very well.
And so, here we are:
We’ve already seen the AI cats, the nudification of celebrities and spiteful ex-partners, the slop that is spreading in all forms of digital entertainment.
- https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18459/18459-h/18459-h.htm
This links to the Project Gutenberg digital version of the classic. More explanation and background on this text, in the following link,
as the “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is the a example of these early “entertainments”. ↩︎
