Covert Culture
a column by Richard Kadrey
The Cybersex Midway
Technology
is all about desire. Technology is about the body. Our technologies extend
our bodies to place we can't or won't go. McLuhan understood this when
he noted that our world-absorbing mediascape was really an extension of
our collective central nervous system. Even the geekiest Silicon Valley
geek understands this when he boots up Doom and grabs his joystick
(though some of the understanding might be unconscious, in this case).
Our technologies are our desires made concrete.
At the beginning of the '90s, Virtual Reality was a technology that was going to Change Everything. When we donned our VR headgear and slipped on our data gloves, we were going to be able to fly, change to other entities—animals or aliens—and, like every new bright and shiny overhyped techno bauble, like every carny barker and strip show tout, VR promised us sex. Mindblowing sex. Science fiction sex. Sex to rattle the walls and shake our molecules into new frequencies of lust and satisfaction. VR sex was called "teledildonics" and "cyberdildonics," the awkward names conjuring images of sticky-floored peep show booths merging with Cray supercomputers in some mutant Clean Room done up like the Playboy Mansion's infamous sex grotto. And like every sideshow come-on in history, guess what?
It didn't work.
Until now. Sort of. With some special hardware, some very old school sex toys and a fast modem, SafeSexPlus.com lets you to turn your computer into one big VibroLove machine. Understand—this isn't the kind of VR sex you've seen in movies. It isn't flesh morphing Lawnmower Man special effects sex or even Woody Allen's goofy Orgasmatron.
SafeSexPlus.com's VR sex works like this: Let's say you want to want to be on the receiving end of some hot web love. First, you need to select your sex toy. We'll use a vibrator for this example—they're simple and most people know what they look like. You need to jack the vibrator into a SafeSexPlus "SSP Converter Box." This contraption, a kind of tarted-up light sensor rig, suction-cups to your computer screen, above a small window that's always open during your cybersex sessions. This small window gets lighter and darker as the person on the other end of the cybersex session moves his/her mouse. As the light in the window pulses, the SSP Converter Box drives your vibrator. (Interestingly, experimental musician Qubais Reed Ghazala uses a similar light-sensor-on-a-screen idea to drive his experimental musical instrument, the Video Octavox. It might be another kind of thrill to combine these two devices)
If you want to up the techno-fetishism of the scene, you can combine the session with a webcam for face-to-face encounters. And, of course, vibrators aren't the only toys allowed here. SafeSexPlus lets you jack in a wide variety of toys, from inexpensive vibrators to more male-oriented gizmos, such as the Robo-Suck (a sort of cyberpunk Accu-Jack). You can also wire-in high-end sex toys, like the Sybian, a $1200 mechanical saddle with a built-in vibrator.
Conveniently (and not surprisingly), SafeSexPlus sells all these items. Conveniently, they also provide you with a network of people to use them with. And this is where you're back on the midway and the carny hustle swings into gear. Because the real point of all this tech isn't just about letting you fuck and be fucked in hot, new millennial ways. It's about separating you from your money. This is where the Friends Network comes in.
Sold as a kind of cyberspace Plato's Retreat where randy technoids lurk just waiting to reach out and virtually touch somebody, the place is more of an open-air flea market where exhibitionists with their own webcams set up shop to sell you virtual sex. Imagine a phone sex operation with streaming low-res images. Now, toss in the SafeSexPlus virtual sex toys. In terms of value-added telesex, the Friends Network isn't a bad deal. You can have a live video chat and cybersex session with someone for around $2 a minute, a price comparable to conventional phone sex (which is the original virtual reality sex, unless you count mash notes).