Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism And Porn

Socially progressive Internet leftists joke that their dream of future Utopia is “fully automated luxury gay space communism.” This meme (do you know it?) starts with Karl Marx’s claim that automation will eventually emancipate most human labor by making it unnecessary. Universal basic income, full acceptance of progressive ideas about sexuality and gender, artificial intelligence, space travel: it’s all part of the Utopian stew.

I started thinking about porn in the fully automated luxury gay space communist future the other day when Spanking Blog covered that tiny piece of the Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels sex story where Stormy talked on television about what a huge blowhard Trump was. Her cure was very direct. She took down Donald’s pants and spanked him with a magazine he was bragging about, one that had his picture on the cover. She says “from that moment on, he was a completely different person…he quit talking about himself.” Good work, Stormy!

There’s some good science fiction written about our fully automated luxury gay space communism future. One popular series is the Culture novels by Ian M. Banks. These books have very large spaceship/habitats in them, run by artificial intelligences who choose whimsical and agressive names for themselves. So when I heard about Stormy spanking Trump, I joked on Twitter:

“My dream is that some day our AI-led luxury gay space communism future will have a ship in it named Straighten Up And Be Nice Or I Will Spank You On Your Ass With Your Own Face. Nobody who lives in or travels on Straighten Up will have the foggiest idea why the central feature in a prominent public area is a thirty foot animated hologram of a blonde Stormy Daniels doing a pole routine.”

A key part of that dream, for me anyway, is that a thirty foot tall exotic dancer hologram as public art wouldn’t raise any eyebrows. And in a world were sexuality isn’t primarily about shame and repression, what would porn look like? Would there even be porn?

Of course there would, silly! But I think it would be very different.

Most notions of “fully-automated luxury communism” assume some sort of universal basic income. Or, perhaps the daily necessities of life would be distributed more fundamentally in some hard-to-imagine way. But in all such visions, there’s no starvation-driven need to make “a living”. If nobody on a porn set is there by economic necessity, why are they there at all?

The answer? They’ll make porn for the same reason as any other artist makes art. They make it because they have something they want to express with their sexuality and their naked bodies! Porn in this future will be more diverse, more daring, and less formulaic.

On a trivial level, some of the uglier plot lines will go away. “Hi, stranger, I can’t afford a ride home, will you give me a ride if I blow you?” This graphic from Reddit points out that poverty-and-desperation porn plots won’t make sense any more:

But will such porn be sexier? That’s harder to say. My guess is that it will be a lot less monolithic. There may be lots that is just weird (to you) but so much to choose from that you can find things (very specific things) that really hit all your fetish buttons at once. Right now, almost nobody does that for fetish combinations and unusual fetishes. Not enough money in it, not enough potential profit. Instead, we get a few safe and proven genres and plot formulas, repeated over and over and over with different performers.

Costs of making porn have dropped in recent years, and creativity has gone up. I won’t deny that. We see an explosion of small-studio porn experiments, but they often struggle to get traction and survive. The exciting and critically-acclaimed new porn out there explores all kinds of sexualities and fetishes. Sadly, these studios often close in mere months, because they can’t find enough sales to cover costs. In a world where anybody can do that sort of work out of passion — for as long as the passion grips them — with no fear of want, I think we’ll see an amazing diversity of mind-blowing porn. These little creative porn studios will no longer fail and vanish overnight. Instead, they’ll persist for as long as creative passion grips their producers and performers. That’s why the fully automated luxury gay space communist future can’t come soon enough for me.