Technically Incorrect

There's something quite sad when people fall out over Internet porn.

However, relationships do not appear to be anywhere closer to a consummated hug at Ireland's Green Isle Foods pizza-making plant.

Should you not have been arrested by this pulsating tale, Green Isle Foods dismissed three workers after accusing them of enjoying Internet porn on the job. Thirty-five pizza-producing people went on strike. This was five weeks ago.

Now, according to the Leinster Leader, the workers are trying to seduce the management into some making up and kissing.

In my mind, this pizza represents the fractious relationships at Green Isle.

(Credit: CC Kevitivity/Flickr)

The Technical, Engineering and Electrical Union, which represents the workers, has offered a visit to the local Irish sex therapist, otherwise termed the Labor Court.

Management is playing rather hard to get. It has already refused to bare the other cheek by communicating with the union through the Irish Labor Relations Commission.

And now, a Green Isle Foods spokesman dismissed union efforts, telling the Leader that this is not an issue for group therapy.

"It (the company] will continue to interact with employees locally and directly to resolve the issue. In the meantime, operations remain as normal," he said.

I cannot possibly imagine who is making the pizzas if the workers and their highly sensitive dough-stroking fingers are outside picketing (and having pizzas delivered to them by sympathetic locals).

I cannot imagine how much fun it is to work at a pizza-making plant.

Indeed, the mere fact that there exist plants to make pizza seems entirely unedifying to me.

So I cannot help but feel a tinge of sympathy for three workers who were allegedly caught casting a furtive eye upon some material of a pornographic nature while pumping out pizza for the man.

According to the Belfast Telegraph, staff at the Green Isle Foods pizza-making plant in Naas, Ireland, will be calling for more strikers to protest the firing of their three frustrated colleagues.

There are those who believe this is food porn.

(Credit: CC Foodies/Flickr)

The Irish Congress of Trades Unions has granted approval for the plant to be picketed by naked women. Well, perhaps I am imagining the "naked women" part.

The Technical, Engineering and Electrical Union, representing the three men, is disputing the very facts surrounding their dismissal.

"One of our members received an e-mail from outside the plant and was essentially dismissed for receiving an e-mail," TEEU general secretary designate, Eamon Devoy told the Telegraph.

I am guessing that the e-mail did not contain pictures of rolling Irish hills. Or perhaps it did.

Although a spokesman for the company told the Leinster Leader that this was "a cut and dried case of dismissal for people who seriously breached IT policy by accessing and e-mailing adult material of a serious nature."

Yet I am touched to hear that locals have come out in support of the workers. The Leader reports that they have delivered doughnuts to the picketing workers.

Oh, and pizza.

I tend to believe that life's pleasures should be experienced with real human beings, relatively sober, and free of excessive chemical content.

However, I understand there are those who make use of search engines to fuel their various needs, including those of pornographic succour.

Which brings me to Bing.

There seems to be some agreement among the cognoscenti that Microsoft's fine search engine offers optimal results for those who are seeking the filmic freshness of the flesh. Blocking such freshness can also be a difficult maneuver.

You see, Bing has excellent video search properties. And you might be astonished to hear that one of the major types of video for which humanity's needy search is video of a pornographic bent.

However, TechCrunch claims to have encountered evidence that Bing has entered an entirely new realm of raunch.

An enterprising TechCrunch employee decided to google the term "pornography" and was perhaps simultaneously astonished and elated to discover a sponsored link from Bing.

No, there is no suggestion that Bing is the better search engine for drug paraphernalia.

(Credit: CC James Wheare/Flickr)

The artful ad was headlined "Free Video." It then extolled Bing's remarkable access to "thousands of videos."

Somehow, I feel there may be more than thousands.

I know those of a technical leaning might suggest that sometimes when you do quite a few searches in succession the ads don't seem to keep up, so the ads that you see for your second search might have been generated by your first search.

I was still dissatisfied. I could not understand why anyone would search "pornography" when the very simple "porn" would have clearly sufficed. Is the suggestion that only those of a elevated snootiness, those who refer to pornography by its full name, get the Bing ad?

Then I stumbled into a blog post by Aaron Goldman, who seems to be quite au fait with the digital marketing world.

Goldman claims that he googled "Google porn searches" and immediately encountered an ad for Bing. Now the minds of those of a suspicious disposition must truly be wandering and wondering.

I would never be the one to suggest that Microsoft deliberately seeks out porn business.

However, business is, indeed, business. So one wonders just how much awareness there is among bingers of this alleged arousing serendipity?

Sometimes, I wonder what the rest of the world is looking at.

And I espied that one of the most popular articles in the Independent newspaper was titled "iSex: How pornography has revolutionized technology."

At first, I assumed this was a piece about how highly committed individuals in Silicon Valley and other places of technological worship had resorted to pornography because they didn't have the time to enjoy relationships with real human beings.

Propelling the world toward enlightened modernity is very time-consuming.

However, this Independent opus, in words and pictures, actually purported to suggest that the needs of pornographic enterprises had thrust the technological world toward many of its finest achievements.

The story begins with the Super 8 projector, whose rise the authors put down to the "large amount of pornographic material that was quickly available for it." It was allegedly a favorite for frat house home movies.

This interesting history moved to the Polaroid camera, which, as I recall really did provide a sort of instant intimacy that no other camera had offered before. You didn't need to take it to the pharmacy for your most personal moments to be developed. They happened before your very eyes.

Then, there's VoIP. The article claims that this was created "to feed the porn market after frustrated internet users bemoaned the lack of 'dirty talk' online."

VHS is alleged to have had a dirty beginning too. Apparently "the rival Betamax tapes were not long enough to record a film, at only 60 minutes, and adult content was not available on Betamax."

And look for voyeurism has done for technology too.

(Credit: CC Stevie-B/Flickr)

The researchers suggested that porn was the reason Blu-Ray defeated HD-DVD. Which, given Blu-Ray's clear superiority, might suggest their view of pornography's technological influence is less than perfect.

Then there was pay-per-view and cable, which gave pornographers the opportunity to pump material into people's homes without having to deliver tapes in plain brown envelopes.

And then there's camcorders, the Web, even interactive TV, inventions that all allow for more personal, more varied, and more immediate communing with images of people communing.

I thought all this somewhat fanciful, so I turned my most alluring gaze toward academia for help.

I found a 1996 essay by a scholarly lawyer called Peter Johnson, published in the Federal Communications Law Journal.

Johnson declared: "Throughout the history of new media, from vernacular speech to movable type, to photography, to paperback books, to videotape, to cable and pay-TV, to '900' phone lines, to the French Minitel, to the Internet, to CD-ROMs and laser discs, pornography has shown technology the way."

Johnson's opus is quite extraordinary.

He writes sentences such as "Both English and Italian can trace their emergence as popular tongues partly to pornography."

Which he swiftly follows with: "The victory of VHS over Betamax, and the triumph of video rental and purchase over time-shifting, is a rare example of pornography specifically adopting a product and a method of retailing that drove its competitor from the market."

And please enjoy this hearty rendition of Johnson's: "When new media offer new markets, porn spies them quickly and rushes to fill them, like an amoeba extruding a new pseudopod where its skin is thinnest."

While the image of a brand-new pseudopod occupied the happy part of my inner matter, I still found the conclusion of his rather interesting study couldn't be be deflowered: "Far from viewing cyberpornographers as pariahs, society would do well to view them as mountain men and women in the mold of Jedediah Smith, who discovered and opened the passes of the Rockies for entire families to follow west."

While you might conjure a picture of the passes opening for yourself, I have a little question.

Currently, the porn industry is whining that its profits are being severely chafed. Does this mean that technological development will shortly grind to a embarrassing crawl?

Some are concerned that porn's salvation may lie in more mobile usage, there is a considerable fear that they will be frustrated by a lack of bandwidth.

Personally, I prefer Hollywood's notion that America is driven by violence rather than sex and that therefore it is military exigencies that drive technological invention rather physical urges.

However, if it is really true that pornography pushes technology, what invention will it give rise to next? Porn beamed to the inside of your sunglasses, perhaps?

It used to be a long day's journey into night.

Great writers would craft feature-length scripts worthy of the performers who would swallow each word as if it were their own, give it full dramatic meaning, and lift the whole spectacle to sublime levels.

Then the Web came along to debase the art that was pornography.

According to a report in The New York Times, some of the finest pornographic actors are bemoaning and bemoaning and bemoaning the demise of the great 90-minute carnal classic.

Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment, one of the apogees of pornographic production, told the Times: "On the Internet, the average attention span is three to five minutes. We have to cater to that."

The Times' report claims that three years ago almost all of Vivid's productions were full-length movies. Each, no doubt, had deeply nuanced characters whose dramatic arc curved across the 90 minutes like a rainbow over a hilly horizon.

How sad that the scope of their parts has become reduced.

(Credit: Sico Activa/Flickr)

Yet now, the purveyors of porn are resorting to subscription-based business models. Apparently you have to pay a monthly fee and the sites have to boast about the frequency of new, shorter uploads. (Some estimates, the reports says, suggest that sales and rentals of porn DVDs are down by as much as 50 percent.)

Is the Web and the supposed ADD of its users to blame for this? Perhaps, though somehow the sound bite and the visual bite seem to be more the creation of television in its joyous heyday.

However, is it possible that what the Web has done to mess up these delightfully lucrative porn businesses is that it has ushered in the advent of that nasty little disease called free?

Purely in the cause of researching this vexing question, I called those who live and breathe this world and asked them what the equivalent of YouTube might be for those interested in pornographic exploration.

Remarkably, I was told there is something called YouPorn. And several other sites whose veins are entirely similar, in that they offer pornografree.

These sites appear to enjoy films of varying length and depth. Some last a mere 29 seconds. Others go on for as long as an hour.

Some, indeed, are abbreviated versions of movies that the more vivid of porn producers would like you to pay for. Others are merely real people who would like it very much if you could share some of their more blissful moments.

The most viewed movie on YouPorn this week, at the time of writing, lasted 335 seconds and had been espied more than 1.5 million times. However, the third most viewed, with more than 1 million clicks, lasted more than 30 minutes.

Which might suggest that decreased attention span is not the whole story.

Indeed, is there any evidence that the vast majority of viewers, even in the times of the 90-minute porn extravaganza, didn't merely fast forward through the dialog in order to gain immediate access to the, um, action scenes?

Perhaps you could ask your friends for me.

Michelle Owen was convinced that her ex-boyfriend (and father of her child) was not a nice man.

She was going through a custody dispute with him and was worried he was into child pornography. She was even more worried that he had used her laptop to enjoy his alleged perversion.

As a concerned citizen, she asked the police to examine her laptop. The Indiana police, also composed of concerned citizens, was delighted to oblige.

The detectives did, indeed, find some deleterious video, but surprisingly, it appeared to feature Michelle Owen and Toby the beagle.

May I quote the police report, as the words are most evocative: "The video showed Owen completely naked, saying 'it's playing' and then walking away from the camera to a bed with a dog on it and lying down."

I can feel your imagination beginning to race, but I cannot repeat what happened next because I am too keen to tell you what was on the second video.

It again showed "Michelle Owen, fully unclothed and messing with the camera. She walked away from the camera with a cigarette in her hand and got on the bed."

Yes, Toby was involved again. This time, a "jar of something" was not used. (Oh, didn't I mention the "jar of something" from the first video?)

Please be nice to all beagles. Beagles are lovely.

(Credit: CC carrera 911e)

Look, can we just skip to the part in which Michelle Owen, age 24, was charged with two counts of bestiality?

According to the police report, she said she barely remembered the videos because she was so drunk. But she did remember trying to delete them the next day, when sober. (Police found the videos in the recycling bin.)

This might lead some to conclude that there isn't all that much difference between her two states. However, you can't accuse Ms. Owen of a lack of persistence. Even though, once charged, she could have withdrawn her consent for the police to continue searching her laptop, she demurred.

She appears still convinced that her ex is a bad, bad guy.

Perhaps you are a fan of the gay porn movie Army F*****s. Perhaps you are not.

But surely everyone can sympathize with the English couple, aged a little more than 60, who received a nasty letter from a law firm demanding that they pay around $750 for "copyright infringement."

According to this law firm, the deeply sensitive Davenport Lyons, this couple downloaded all 115 minutes of the aforementioned seminal German gay porn flick.

There is only one potential drawback to this hammer blow for justice. The couple in question don't even know how to download. As in get something onto their desktop from somewhere else.

They told the Guardian newspaper: "We were offended by the title of the film. We don't do porn - straight or gay - and we can't do downloads. We have to ask our son even to do an iTunes purchase."

"Aha", you of a more cynical bent might be thinking. "It must be the son, then." There again, what if I told you that more than 25,000 of these letters have been sent out?

There were several other images I could have put here.

(Credit: CC Umjanedoan)

And, if everyone paid up, this would net the pornographers (with, presumably, a nice little dribble of percentage for their law firm) a sum that cuddles very close to $8 million.

I am unaware of the budget of Army F*****s, but I feel confident in projecting that such a sum would represent a healthy uplift in the pornographers' balance sheet.

Michael Coyle, who is defending some of the folks who are being strong-armed by Davenport Lyons on behalf of the pornography rights holder, told the Guardian: "We've had straight pensioners complain, and a mother who had the shock of having to question her 14-year-old son about gay porn because he was the only apparent user of the internet connection that was registered to her."

It appears that the copyright holders -- who aren't just protecting porn but also games -- are using potentially slippery methods of web identification.

"All they do is find the internet connection, demand the service provider reveal the name and address (not all do) and then send out a letter demanding cash. But the technology is flawed. It is easy to hijack a wireless router especially in a built-up area or a block of flats, so it is never clear who used what," said Mr. Coyle.

You might, at this point, be wondering whether the firm of Davenport Lyons is one that gets some entertainment from chasing trucks full of paramedics.

But no, it appears that the firm enjoys a rather exalted clientele. Including, according to its website, iTunes s.a.r.l. This is the Apple-owned company that runs Apple stores in Europe. Which might make some wonder just what methods the firm might concoct to defend iTunes.

It might also make you wonder whether Apple, in some way, condones this heartily aggressive and, some might consider, less than discriminating style of lawyering.

Naturally, the deeply sensitive chaps at Davenport Lyons are claiming that those who have done not downloaded their clients' artistic endeavors illegally have nothing to be worried about.

But how many elderly or just plain scared people are getting these demands and simply paying up to avoid embarrassment or legal costs they fear they can't afford?

There are already several discussion threads on this subject, including slyck.com .

I would hate to think that there are hordes of miscreants out there who have enjoyed the exalted stolen pleasures of Army F*****s for free.

However, when it comes to seeking justice, one would have thought that, as in the finest of pornography (so I'm told), seduction works rather better than, um, ham-fistedness.

These days it's hard for a porn producer to find new ways to go where no man (or woman or beast) has gone before.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that Virgin Galactic, the company that plans to fly passengers into orbit from late 2009, announced that it has received a $1 million offer to allow a porn movie to be shot on one of its spacecraft, an offer the company has declined.

As I understand it, the producers thought they would be able to find a completely different kind of action if the participants were under the influence of zero gravity.

It is, however, difficult to understand how they thought they might be able to shoot such a movie.

Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson acknowledges the pleasures of the service.

(Credit: CC Tanya Ryno)

Virgin Galactic's proposed flights offer, for a return ticket of $200,000, only a five-minute period of weightlessness.

However, those who involve themselves in the pleasures of pornography explain to me that the copulatory scenes tend to last a little longer than your average real-life five minutes. And sometimes they involve multiple physically demanding entanglements.

I am, therefore, unclear as to whether the producers (who remain strangely unnamed) wanted to rent the spacecraft solely for their own purposes or whether they were merely looking to book seats for the performers and a single member camera crew.

If it were the former, then surely the $1million offer has something of a derisory nature.

If it were the latter, might Virgin Galactic have charged the other passengers a little extra, given that they would be in the presence of an entirely otherworldly transport that would truly make the trip a once-in-a-lifetime experience?

One's mind is also somewhat disturbed by whether sex in space really is such an easy pleasure. Would there not be a problem with synchronization?

Still, Virgin's extraordinary and surprising intransigence on this alluring space sexperiment means that those who have had to tolerate suboptimal sex for so many years will also have to do without suborbital sex for a while longer.

We really are living in very difficult times.

So the strangely pungent, limp-haired person sitting next to you on that astonishingly clean American Airlines plane might soon avail himself (oh, come on, you know it's more likely to be a "him") of the airline's Wi-Fi service and watch Good Will Humping.

I will leave it to those far wiser in the ways of matters legal to debate the potential lawsuits that might arise if airline passengers are allowed to watch pornography while clenching their behinds in seat 13B. However, a slightly different matter whips me about the crevices in this regard: what sort of person wants to watch porn on a plane?

Please forgive me, but I am told by those who avail themselves of Hefneresque materials that it is a singularly private pursuit. I am told such behavior sometimes occurs when one's spouse has an important business engagement, necessitating a (thankfully) late arrival back at Domestic Bliss Avenue.

So, what's he watching, huh?

(Credit: CC Moriza)

I understand that perhaps a certain imbalance in sexual enthusiasm in longer-term relationships might lead individuals within the relationship to find succor in pornography--or even that couples might indulge in a little combined spectatorship to add a little paprika to their relationship. Of course, for some people, porn is just a way to get from one period of four minutes to the next.

But if you're packed into coach, having to perform certain movements from the Kama Sutra just to get your sweater off, how can you possibly be in the mood to huddle over your laptop and be swept away by the finely scripted acting of John Curtis Holmes or Jenna Jameson?

Flying is, in general, about as pleasurable as manually removing your nasal hair, and there are surely very few people who view pornography without being in a certain mood. Pornography of the "two thumbs up" variety may, I am told, also bring with it a certain change in the the viewer's demeanor and physical position--changes that a seat in coach manifestly does not allow.

Are there truly specimens in our vast and temporary world who would feel neither discomfort nor embarrassment nor even just a little tinge of other-directedness and would simply boot up a little jiggling booty as they float from Detroit to Dallas?

I know you will tell me there are. But I will continue in the mental bondage that prevents me from grasping how they might enjoy it.

Still, you might say, there are the folks in business class. They pay all that money for extra space, extra wine and, I suppose, other extras too. Surely even they, though, despite the additional width of their flying fiefdom, would be pushed hard to feign sanguinity watching the lithe writhing and the overendowed overacting.

I know there will be readers out there who will have already dared to join this Mile Sigh Club on their portable DVD players. There will be those who say live and let live, love and let love, the Internet is freedom and it's my freedom that matters most. Others might say block out this filth, Beijing Olympics-style.

But I find myself far more focused on these peculiar high-flying perps themselves. I don't want anyone disturbing me on a plane. Isn't a porn peep-show merely another way a fellow passenger can make your flying life just a little more unbearable?

This is porn in a public place, which might strike the innocent bysitter as being not entirely dissimilar to their first encounter with a flasher.

So perhaps there might be a rule that you can watch whatever you like, but if anyone is disturbed--and I'm talking sound or vision here--you would have to agree to a suitable forfeit as decided by the airline in question.

What if an airline decided that anyone caught disturbing others by displaying a penchant for stimulation in the skies would be asked to, say, don a large inflated condom on their head for the rest of the flight?

This might seem a little Napoleon Dynamite. But can you think of a quicker way to get teenage boys to forsake their less than endearing habits?