THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT: Jon Ronson On... Pornhub

The Butterfly Effect, Jon Ronson’s latest documentary, is about streaming.  More specifically it’s about Pornhub, and looks at the ways that different people’s lives have been affected by it, in often unexpected ways.

The first episode, deals with the growth of the company from one 16 year old (Fabian Thylmann, a pleasant but unashamed interviewee) scamming pornsites to get them for free to him making them redundant by pilfering their work. Ronson follows up all sorts of tangents in the following episodes, in a manner very similar to his Jon Ronson On… Radio 4 series.

So, we meet an old school porn director in the US describing how Pornhub has affected his livlihood; a porn star agent, who sounds every bit is ruthless and sleazy as you might expect; the porn star who was told to stop tweeting about how unhappy she was because it wasn’t sexy.  There’s the really rather sweet company that makes bespoke porn films (including a clothed woman swatting a fly, and someone who wants to see his stamp collection burnt); a man who found a sex doll who looked exactly like his first love, which he bought and now dresses and shares a bed with it (while his incredibly patient wife sleeps in the spare room); and the darker tales of a pastor who committed suicide after the Ashley Madison leaks (Ashley Madison was owned by PornHub), and children as young as 6 being put on the sex offender register.

There’s a lot to take in, and the series being over 3 hours long it never runs out of steam.  Until I listened to the documentary, I had no idea what a porn hub was, and so finding out that there is such a thing as a YouTube for porn was quite enlightening.  Streaming as an issue is something I’ve written about before on this blog and one of the data analysts from PornHub points out that it is technology that is here to stay and people have to adapt.  That’s true to a degree.

But whilst it might seem pretty much the same, streaming music and films is a separate conversation and has to be treated as such.  As I see it there are two main reasons.  Firstly, YouTube was created primarily to enable users to upload and share their own content, the copyright implications of uploading other peoples’ property didn’t come in until later when it had really taken off.  Pornhub was created to enable users to get porn for free instead of paying for it.  Ethically, it is more like torrenting - whereas Spotify was set up with the intention of reducing piracy, Pornhub was set up to make it easier.

Secondly, it’s porn, so Pornhub can get away with it.  Society has no great love for pornographers and because of the moral grey area that porn lives in, it is easier to dismiss their concerns than it is of your favourite musicians.  The very start of the series has Ronson describing meeting a porn actress to interview for a different story, and seeing the look of utter contempt a man gave her when she walked in.  Fabian Thylmann accepts it’s an absurd situation that porn actors often find it hard to open a bank account and the bank manager is statistically likely to be going home to watch porn on Pornhub that evening.  A girl who was at the college where the pastor who killed himself worked admitted to having had a Pornhub addiction, and also admitted she didn’t know the names or really care about the actors she had seen.  It’s a very different situation to other streamed media, where the stars and creators are idolised.  

However, that isn’t really the point.  The documentary uses Pornhub as a jumping off point for Ronson to do what he does best, which is to interview people with quirky, unusual often surprisingly moving stories to tell.

For instance, my favourite part of the documentary was the bespoke porn company mentioned earlier.  They receive requests - nothing is considered too bizarre, and a lot of it is very bizarre.  The couple who run it have more of a personal relationship with their customers even if they never see or speak to them - the deeply specific nature of the fetishes means that someone is really opening up about something that probably embarrasses them to strangers.  A great deal of time is put into trying to contact the “Stamp Man”, and by a coincidental conversation to a porn actor they manage to make contact.  It turns out he gets off on watching his stamp collection being burnt by the girls (and it is his actual collection - he sends it to them to be used in the films) because he was once really into collecting stamps and his therapist mocked him for it and told him to stop.  This obviously left its mark on him and it’s a remarkably sexless and bittersweet story.  

The series revisits the same company towards the end - one of the requests is for a clothed actor to read out sentences he has prepared to dissuade him from suicide.  They tried to get in touch because they were worried, but he never got back to them.  They were disturbed, and made the video for free in the knowledge he might have just been embarrassed or have already done the deed.

These are the sorts of ripples that Ronson examines after the Pornhub boulder has been tossed in the lake in the first episode, and it’s these unexpected and unpredictable stories that are the most rewarding.  He is very good at putting people at ease by seeming to have a conversation with his interviewees rather than, well, interviewing them.  Even if you have no interest in porn, Pornhub or streaming, if you’re interested in people this is an excellent series.

The Butterfly Effect is available now on Audible and will be released everywhere else in November.

BOOKS: So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

Social Media doesn’t have to be a scary place – but it can wreck your life.

That is the main feeling I came away with after reading Jon Ronson’s ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’, a book which illustrates the perils of (amongst other things) having an ‘online presence’.

Here he looks at public shamings, which since the advent of Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook) have become a massive part of society again.  One of the many cases explored in SYBPS is Jonah Lehrer, a writer who turned out to have used invented Bob Dylan quotes in his book.  After the initial controversy died down, he gave an apology speech, accompanied by a live Twitter feed.  That is the modern equivalent of being jeered at in the stocks, and serves as the perfect visual metaphor for what this book is about .  Social Media doesn’t accept apologies, partly because there are too many people out there who love sticking the boot in, and people find it hard to defend themselves against such overwhelming attack.  A judge from the American Deep South is interviewed for the book.  He’s known for using public shame in many of his sentences (drunk drivers have to hold signs by the highway proclaiming their crime - that sort of thing).  But he argues that the people he subjects to shame are at least found guilty first.  Who is in charge of finding people guilty on Twitter?  No one, obviously – or perhaps everyone.  We all just act as part of one big algorithm that surges wildly every now and then over specific incidents.

In the book, it is pointed out that, especially online, our reputation is everything.  And to lose it can be incredibly traumatic.  Justine Sacco is probably the most famous of the recent Twitterstorm victims, and Ronson gives a précis of the affair (and some others mentioned in the book) in this video made for The Guardian.

Justine Sacco probably naively thought the only people who would read her tweets were some of her 170 or so followers.  She thought she was making a point in a satirical way but as she says when interviewed in the book, she is not a comedienne or a character on South Park.  Her joke wasn’t funny, and because it wasn’t just an ill-judged text to a friend you could later apologise to but was a tweet it lingered in cyberspace as a potentially offensive statement waiting for people to take offence at it. 

Sacco lost her job (at a PR company of all places…).  I don’t know for a fact, but I imagine that she wouldn’t have immediately lost her job for saying the exact same sentence at work even in front of her manager.  She definitely would have had a disciplinary, possibly even been suspended, but she probably wouldn’t have been fired on the spot.  The guys at the tech conference who got fired for making a sexual innuendo about a dongle definitely wouldn’t have been fired if Twitter hadn’t been whipped up into a frenzy.  But Twitter was whipped up into such a frenzy on that occasion it meant that the person who originally complained lost her job.  I mean, no one is a winner here, are they?  As it happens I do think that Adria Richards overreacted regarding a conversation she overheard two strangers have at a conference.  I do think it was right to call her out on that.  But obviously before too long Twitter had in turn overreacted to her overreaction and there were calls for her to be raped and liberal uses of the C-word and all the other nonsense that shows Twitter at its worst.  So even Twitter loses in this case, as in similar cases (#GamerGate anyone?) where its users make it seem as if it is exclusively populated by swearing misogynists obsessed with rape.

Did these people really deserve to lose their jobs and effectively have post-traumatic stress syndrome just for making a bad call on Twitter?   I don’t think so.  I think employers will have to develop more sophisticated ways of dealing with internet indiscretions than simply firing people, because these incidents are going to keep on happening.  Ronson points out that we often like to think that when the Twitterstorm dies down, the person at the centre of it all will be fine really, but his book proves that it doesn’t really work like that.  The people he speaks to in his book all show similar signs of post-traumatic shock and depression for at least a few months after it ‘all dies down’.

Jon Ronson is an excellent journalist who is adept at taking a subject and making it accessible, without dumbing down.  He investigates a subject and lets you in on his investigations rather than just feeding back the results, which gives his books a novelistic and compulsive quality.  And at the very least, this book will definitely make you consider a few more seconds before pressing send on a tweet.