This is the full length version of the VIDEO that seems to have caused YouTube to ban delete my channel and ban me from future channels. See https://innovationcafe.us/why-you-cant-find-innovation-cafe-on-youtube for details.
The Full-Length Version of the VIDEO:
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Ault content and intimate images have been enormous drivers of technological advancement throughout history. From an evolutionary biology point of view, anything that involves procreation is going to be top of the list in terms of what’s important to people. Food, shelter, all that stuff is designed to pass our genes on to the next generation. And one of the most concrete expressions of that is sex.
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So of course, sex drives a lot of human behavior, and innovation is no different. A lot of innovation was birthed, pardon the pun, through sex. So let’s start in the early days. Now you’re thinking, what does adult content have to do with technological progress? And the answer is a huge amount. Throughout history, adult has been a silent but powerful catalyst for technological advancement.
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So grab your favorite drink, settle in, and let’s explore this amazing connection. Now, I bet you thought I was going to start with the internet, because that’s of course, what most people associate adult content with, but this goes back a lot further than that. In fact, we go all the way back to the first printing presses. Our journey begins in the 15th century with Gutenberg’s printing press.
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It was a groundbreaking invention. I mean, think about it. Instead of having people sit for their entire lives copying just a handful of books by hand, you can roll out books en mass. Well, it turns out that it wasn’t just for religious texts like the Bible. It also opened the floodgates for the mass production of all kinds of literature, including erotic content.
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The appetite for these materials pushed printers to refine their techniques, and led to higher quality prints and more efficient production methods. In striving to satisfy diverse human interests, and frankly, the thing that evolutionary biology tells us is the driving factor behind a lot of human behavior, the demand for content accelerated the evolution of printing tech. The advancement wasn’t isolated.
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It benefited the dissemination of scientific knowledge, philosophical ideas, educational ideas by supercharging the creation of mass content, making it easier, cheaper, faster, simpler. Adult content brought along with it a lot of content that by itself might not have had the level of interest necessary to drive that level of rapid technological innovation. Jumping ahead to the 1800s, we encountered the birth of photography.
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Almost as soon as cameras were invented, people began to use them to capture intimate images. Now this is echoed in what every parent worries about today, which is you put a cellphone with a camera on it in a teen’s pocket, and they are likely to use it for things that are not very smart to put up on the internet.
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It was no different back then. It’s just that instead of using a tiny handheld camera, it was a huge device with plates of film. But people used these early photographic breakthroughs to capture nude images. This demand drove significant innovations in photographic techniques and equipment, and pushed the boundaries of what cameras could do. Not it wasn’t too long before history repeated itself with motion pictures.
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The adult industry’s interest in film spurred amazing advancements in camera technology, film production, and projection methods. These leaps, again, weren’t confined to any genre. Although a lot of money came into research as a result of demand for adult content, the benefits of the research spread far and wide. They produced a film industry with realms of possibility and really enriched options for entertainment outside of the bedroom, as well as in.
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There is an amazing coincidence? Overlap? between one of history’s greatest inventors, Hedy Lamarr, and adult film. Hers was the first mainstream film with a significant amount of nudity, and that more or less ushered in an era of censorship and the rating system. She also happened to come up with frequency hopping, which she patented and is incorporated into almost every device that we have now that uses any kind of radio transmission.
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So your cell phone, your Bluetooth, all that stuff — you can thank Hattie Lamarr for taking time out from her busy film career to revolutionize telecommunications. If you remember from my video about copyright and fair use, the video recorder played a really key role in an early Supreme Court case deciding that using a video recorder to timeshift shows was a fair use. Close call 5 to 4.
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In addition to pioneering concepts of fair use, video recorders pioneered adult content. Now, do you remember or have you heard? If you’re my age, you remember. If you’re younger, you’ve heard about the videotaped format war between VHS and Betamax. Betamax was considered to be technologically superior, but VHS did one thing that BetaMax didn’t. VHS permitted the creation of adult content and distribution of adult content using the VHS technology.
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Sony, which had created Betamax, strongly discouraged it. So, unsurprisingly, the technologically superior device, the Betamax recorder, lost the format wars to VHS because of adult demand. The adult industry decided to distribute content on VHS, and it played a significant role in VHS becoming the dominant format. The preference didn’t just tip the scales, though, it influenced consumer adoption on a massive scale.
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Mainstream media quickly followed, and VHS became the household standard, and it is a prime example of how industry choices can sway technological outcomes in ways that resonate for decades. So we’re navigating the digital frontier of the late 20th century. The adult industry was among the first to recognize and capitalize on the potential of the World Wide Web. Adult websites quickly became some of the most visited sites on the internet, and drove a substantial portion of early web traffic.
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They also had an interesting side effect. They wanted to run ads to get people to their sites. So by hiking demand for internet advertising, they created a sustainable model, which is you can provide free content and run ads. And that model lasted for a very long time. In fact, it’s still in place. And people complain when paywalls go up because it’s deviating from that model.
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The immense demand for faster download speeds and better video streaming pushed internet service providers and tech companies to improve infrastructure at an unprecedented pace. Innovations in video compression, streaming technologies and cybersecurity measures were accelerated in part by the needs of this industry. The advancements laid the groundwork for the high speed, content rich internet we enjoyed today. Now, if you are only downloading text based books and web pages and news, you wouldn’t need that fast of a connection.
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But when you’re downloading full color images, you need a fast connection. When you’re downloading moving images, you need a much faster connection. It makes no sense to pay for advertising to drive people to a website where they can’t spend money. So, unsurprisingly, e-commerce and online payment systems were critically supported by the adult industry, and they also critically supported the adult industry.
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It was a very symbiotic relationship. Secure online payment systems are the backbone of today’s e-commerce landscape, and the adult industry’s necessity for discreet, reliable and secure transaction methods led to early advancements in credit card verification, encryption, and e-commerce, things like Secure Sockets Layer SSL technologies. By pioneering these technologies, the industry helped build consumer trust in online transactions. This trust was critical for the emergence and success of e-commerce giants like Amazon, and it’s made online shopping for everything a seamless part of our daily lives.
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But it all started with the question how do I pay for adult content? And that really was a huge financial catalyst behind the development of those systems. Now, in the early days of the internet, adult internet sites mimicked more or less traditional adult film studios. There were a few big companies. People were hired by production companies to perform on camera, and that was the end of it.
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They got paid and they didn’t get any backend or residuals from that. And that model sustained itself for a couple of decades until it was challenged by the creation of tube sites like Pornhub or Red tube, and those sites all of a sudden need adult content more or less free. So once again, adult content drove technology. And how did it drive it?
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Performers realized that they had something special. They could have a connection to their audience and their fans. And this led to the development of a separate way for them to monetize their performances, which is in the form now of OnlyFans. So for a lot of the 21st century, we’ve seen the rise of user generated content platforms. Sites like OnlyFans really revolutionized how content is created, distributed and monetized. The creators,
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the people who work in that content are empowered to create their content, produce their content, sell their content directly to consumers, interact with those consumers. And that drove a resurgence in money flowing into the adult industry. Because while some things you can get for free online, you can’t get the feeling of community and interaction with a particular adult performer that OnlyFans seems to provide for people.
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The technologies developed to support platforms like OnlyFans include livestreaming technologies that were quite advanced, microtransaction processing, robust authentication systems, anti-piracy systems. They have applications well beyond the adult industry. These technologies have influenced how we interact on social media, how we access entertainment, and even how educators and other professionals deliver content online. No, they’re not, for the most part, delivering their educational content on OnlyFans,
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but it’s the same technology, just with different content, in the same way that what you’re watching right now uses the same technology as fails videos, and you know, cats falling off counters and cute dogs. But this is educational, so there are a variety of different types of content that have benefited directly from the rapid development caused by the flow of funds from the adult industry.
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Now, let’s talk about streaming a little bit more. Streaming high quality video content efficiently is a technological marvel, and it requires constant innovation as quality of video goes up. We had originally 480 interlaced, which is regular TV. Then you get 480 progressive scan and 720, then 1080p, which is HDTV, then you have 4K, and now 6k and 8k. And all these things eat up bandwidth.
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And so they require continual buildout of infrastructure and continual generation of new technologies to handle that level of streaming data. The adult industry’s extensive libraries demanded effective content delivery networks, which are known as CDNs, and advanced buffering solutions, so that users would have a seamless experience. No one wants to be watching something and just wait for it to buffer for half an hour, like in the late 1990s when you tried to download a picture of a cat and it could take an hour.
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Adult content companies were some of the heavy users of these technologies, and the industry played a part in developing the streaming services that now power platforms like YouTube, Netflix and Spotify. Would these things have come to life without adult content? Eventually they would have. I think that they would have taken longer to develop because the amount of money flowing into technology development was pretty significant.
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And we’ll do a little side move here. And just to say that there was a whole industry that grew up around patents and asserting patents against adult streaming content companies. There were a few people who held early patents on video streaming, and I believe they’re expired now, but for a while in the early 2000’s, adult companies would get letters saying, you got to pay us because you’re using our tech.
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And so it didn’t just support technology development and faster internet connections. It also supported patent lawyers and inventors. So how interesting is that? Now there’s yet another area. And this is an up and coming area which is virtual reality. VR essentially puts you in the scene. Typically you wear goggles. I think that those are eventually going to become something close to contact lenses, or at least normal glasses.
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But for now, they’re goggles and you’re completely immersed in a scene. And when you think about it, it seemed like an obvious extension for adult content to move into. And they did rapidly. Some of the earliest VR studios producing content were adult. In fact, mainstream Hollywood still has not fully adopted VR as a format, but there is plenty of VR content on the adult side of the internet.
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So they are out there right now leading the way in developing the technology to the point where it’ll be usable for mainstream in a way that it isn’t today. There’s yet another industry that’s partly driven by adult content, and that is the metaverse industry that started with Second Life, and they officially did not allow adult content, but plenty of adult content made it in there.
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And many metaverse companies have come to life containing adult content. And an interesting thing about that is if a metaverse company intends to create a virtual version of a city, do you want that city to be realistic in that it has everything from supermarkets to strip clubs and avatars that can sensually interact? Or can they only interact in a more pure way?
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I think that the demand has shown people want a fully rounded virtual environment, so what’s the takeaway from this piece today? Innovation often sprouts from places that are important to humans. And again, going back to evolutionary biology, the whole idea is for you to pass your genes on to another generation. And as a result, humans are very invested in everything having to do with reproduction, even when it’s in the form of a fantasy that doesn’t actually contribute to real reproduction.
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So it underscores how interconnected the world really is. The adult industries pursuit of consumer desires has repeatedly pushed the envelope of technology. We have been advancements that permeate every facet of our lives now, as a result of presence of adult content, the history of adult driving technology shows how interconnected the world is. How developments in one area, even an area it’s considered socially quite stigmatized ripple across everything from industry to education to communication.
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They drive progress in ways that we might not have anticipated. Seriously, who would have thought that a erotic literature would supercharge Gutenberg’s printing press? Well, of course it did, because it’s something that’s very interesting to a lot of humans. So progress doesn’t take place in a vacuum. It’s a collective tapestry woven from the diverse threads of human curiosity and experience and enterprise.
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And, I might add, evolutionary biology, because, again, the things that drive us are the things that we’re going to spend money on. And as a result, it is very hard to disentangle adult entertainment from technological development. They are intertwined in a way that’s almost impossible, probably actually impossible to decouple. Thank you for joining me on hopefully, one of the more interesting topics that I’ve done, and certainly one of the ones that’s probably going to get me some hate comments and some positive comments, but it really is true.
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I mean, this is one of the most traveled routes for innovation, which is appealing to human desire, and we have that to thank for a lot of the technologies we enjoy today. Now if you found this discussion as interesting as I do, give the video a thumbs up. Share it with others who love uncovering the unexpected parts of creativity,
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the unexpected drivers. And please don’t forget to subscribe to Innovation Cafe for more deep dives into a world where creativity meets technology meets human needs. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Comment below. Let’s get the discussion going. And remember we are all on this planet together. I may say things that you don’t like. You may say things that I don’t like.
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But ultimately we’re all humans. We’re all trying to get through the day. And let’s use innovation to make the world better for all of us.