A while ago, I ran a small (and very anecdotal) experiment. Since 2024, Instagram has enabled users to reset their recommendation algorithm, turning the Explore Page into a blank slate untouched by individual desires. So, curious to see what the app would serve based on my basic profile information – male, late-20s, based in London – I hit refresh. It turns out the average man, as imagined by Mark Zuckerberg, really likes smoothed-out softcore porn and muscular men shouting at each other.

Admittedly, the former was not a very surprising discovery. On social media sites like Instagram, X, and TikTok, it’s no secret that sex sells better than almost anything else, even when it’s technically forbidden or restricted under the platform’s content guidelines. Then, there’s the porn sites themselves. It’s hard to overstate the quantity of porn that flows through these sites on a daily basis, or the extent of its consumption. According to data from Pornhub, almost 650,000 videos were published to its platform in the first six months of 2025 – and that’s just one of many established websites, many of them owned by shady conglomerates. 

Altogether, this explicit and implicit online content caters to a vast percentage of horny adults and their (often hidden) desires around the world. But what if we told you that porn actually shaped the internet itself, not only saturating its platforms, but influencing how they work at a fundamental level? This is the claim made by journalist Patricia Nilsson in her new book Guilty Pleasure: The Pornification of the Internet, the Economy, and Everything Else. In it, she traces the evolution of porn from the advent of X-rated VHS tapes, through the rise of “tube sites” like Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube, to current times where eroticised content is almost inescapable in our social media feeds. But even more importantly, she explores the expansion of porn’s “masturbatory business model” into a foundational logic of the internet at large.

This happened in a couple of ways, Nilsson tells Dazed. Firstly, there’s the pioneering use of technology by early porn websites, including livestreaming, online payments and affiliate marketing (where you’re paid a cut to promote someone else’s content or services – today, this is a key way for people to profit from mainstream behemoths like Amazon). This tech-forward approach also saw the NSFW side of the web land on an embryonic version of the attention economy. “They were really the first ones that started figuring out how to monetise huge amounts of attention,” says Nilsson. And with that came other attention-grabbing mechanisms, like “addictive user interfaces” and the large-scale tracking of user desires.

This might not be the glamorous – or even seedy – image that first pops into your mind when you think of the porn industry, the kind popularised by films like Boogie Nights. But today, it’s the cold, hard truth of how the industry operates. “The look of online porn is far from random,” as Nilsson writes in Guilty Pleasure. “It’s defined by the tube sites’ most valuable asset – namely, databases of unprecedented scale that chart the sexual fantasies and impulses of hundreds of millions of users. What arouses our animal instincts is no longer inferred, but extracted.” Following a pattern typical of addiction, sustaining this arousal often depends on increasingly extreme or niche content, which might explain the explosion of porn categories related to fake incest, or the trend for aggressive acts like choking that has also bled out into IRL sex lives.

“The look of online porn is far from random. It’s defined by [...] databases of unprecedented scale that chart the sexual fantasies and impulses of hundreds of millions of users” – Patricia Nilsson

This model for porn, where our consumption habits are digested and fed back to us in ever more potent forms, mirrors other, SFW online giants who store our information en masse and use it to feed us increasingly addictive – and equally unhealthy – content. It also serves as a different kind of mirror, reflecting humans’ deepest and darkest desires back at us. “There’s a difference between what we want, and what we want to want,” Nilsson says. Unfortunately, the latter isn’t what makes people rich, whether you’re talking about porn, junk food, or algorithmically-engineered slop. 

Our inability to resist our deepest desires is what the “masturbatory business model of the internet” is banking on, she suggests in Guilty Pleasure (the title itself is a giveaway). In short, she explains of this masturbatory model and its expansion into the rest of our online lives: “Watching porn is stimulating a psychosocial need, by staring at content that has been algorithmically engineered to arouse you. That is the perfect metaphor for what we’re doing when we keep scrolling [on social media] and when we get anxious, or bored, or whatever and we pick up our phones to stimulate ourselves, to self-soothe and gratify ourselves.” 

“There’s a difference between what we want, and what we want to want” – Patricia Nilsson

If the first half of Guilty Pleasure is dedicated to tracking the rise of the masturbatory business model, via porn, the second half illustrates one of its more surprising effects: the widespread phenomenon of monetising our own images when we go online. “It’s changed how we present and how we view ourselves, but also how we consume and interact with each other,” says Nilsson. This is best illustrated on OnlyFans, where users pay to maintain parasocial relationships with often-NSFW creators, but extends to performing for likes on platforms like Instagram, as well.

“I mean, it’s sort of second nature that we are slightly different people online and choose what sides of ourselves to present,” Nilsson adds. But it was online sex workers and cam models who first perfected the craft, as she argues in the book, citing Katya Tiuni – a Ukrainian cam girl-turned-founder of a cam school for sex workers – as an example. Namely, Tiuni teaches members of her cam school to capture viewers’ attention, fuel their desire, and tap into the all-important algorithm using archetypes inspired by the psychologist Carl Jung.

“If you don't understand why people want to be OnlyFans models, you don’t understand how very bleak the job market is right now” – Patricia Nilsson

Knowing all that we know at the end of Guilty Pleasure – the vast stores of data, psychological tricks, and technologies used to manufacture our desire – is there a way out of the “masturbatory model” in the near future? Do we have the will to push back against the tech giants and porn platforms that have defined the contours of our online lives? Are we even surprised to learn how much we’re being surveilled, modelled, and targeted in 2026? “I think as a society, we haven’t really decided whether we’re just apathetic about living in a surveillance economy, or whether we just don’t really understand how pervasive it really is,” says Nilsson. “I think it’s just cognitive dissonance.”

A similar kind of fatalism could be used to explain why we’re so comfortable performing for money or clout in the new online landscape. After all, if everything we consume is being tracked and harvested for the ongoing pornification of the internet, why not just offer up the information ourselves and earn something back in the process? If you’re already posting semi-erotic content on Instagram to serve the “latent pornographic nature of the internet”, why not lean in and start an OnlyFans? “If you don't understand why people want to be OnlyFans models, you don’t understand how very bleak the job market is right now,” Nilsson adds, “and how difficult it is to make enough money in order to live. The idea of an ‘honest living’... I mean, that’s out of the window.”

It can be difficult to talk about the negative effects and dynamics of porn without sounding prudish, or even downplaying the autonomy of the performers who take part in the industry. But Guilty Pleasure does a good job of walking the tightrope – partly because, while the book argues that everything follows the logic of porn now, the real problem it illustrates isn’t to do with porn at all. “When we’re talking about issues with porn, we’re actually talking about the internet,” Nilsson clarifies. “It’s not a porn issue; it’s an issue with how the internet is structured.” As such, she adds: “I don’t think that banning sex work or removing these platforms is the solution. ‘(In fact, this can often have adverse effects for sex workers and performers who’ve found relative safety and security in the virtual world.) “The solution is talking about the state of labour today, and the state of the economy. Why is it more attractive to be an OnlyFans performer than, I don’t know, a midwife? That is a relevant conversation to be having.”

Guilty Pleasure is published by Penguin, coming September 29.