Kink, Connections, and Communities

There's always more than one underground. This bit of enlightenment occurred to me in passing at a gaming industry party held in a speakeasy with entertainment provided by Goth strippers several years ago. While the statement is true, it's clearly more complex than that, and time for a new formulation:

There is always more than one intersecting underground.

If you've been active in one or more of the kinky communities for a while, you understand that. You understand that that face you see at a play party may also appear at a Ren faire, on Playa, at a gallery opening, or in another context entirely. You don't acknowledge that. You don't risk questions about "how do you know that person?" You don't disturb the public mask. Being different threatens the way you're seen in the non-kinky group—whether you're really "one of them" or not. While you yourself may be transparent, not everyone is or wants to be.

At the same time, among ourselves we notice. We notice that some subcultural groups seem to strong representation in our own undergrounds, enough that we can explore the nature of these intersections. That's what I'll be doing in these articles.

Kink and Tech

Way back in the day, pagers were the hot communications tech. Naturally (unnaturally?) some folks decided to hack a pager, and wire it up to a fully insertable battery-powered vibrator. And lo, teledildonics was born. At that time, the gleeful discussions about making your sub wear this contraption in public were limited to a very small group, and research questions focused on whether or not forced stimulation could lead to an appreciation of football. Think sitting in a stadium, and paging for touchdowns. (Results were inconclusive, unless "you bastard...oh my god" can be considered a research result.)

For her 2006 ethnography "Working at Play: BDSM Sexuality in the San Francisco Bay Area," Margot Weiss interviewed 51 people. 26% worked in the computer or tech industry, more than any other category of employment, including "other." That's big. Are techies more inclined to BDSM than other fields? Hard to say, given the number of bay area folks who work in tech. The overlap suggests the odds are good that kinksters are tech-friendly and tech-oriented.

I'd speculate that BDSM is a natural application domain for control systems and feedback loops, and people who think about them apply them in interesting ways. Vanilla-culture technofetishism is different, but perhaps it provides cover—and an entry point—for those seeking or living in the undergrounds. The obsessive-compulsive aspect of fetishes might cross over with the obsessive focus of many coders; there might be an intersection of conditioned/programmable response. Depending on whom you ask, the intersection might be entirely different.