Pluralistic: Normie diffusion and technophilia (27 Nov 2025)

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Originally published at: Pluralistic: Normie diffusion and technophilia (27 Nov 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



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A supercomputing data center with a drop ceiling. Hanging upside down from the ceiling is a young girl, tinted acid-green, with a halo of light radiating off her body. Around the data center are several young children, running towards her or pointing at her.

Normie diffusion and technophilia (permalink)

It's an accepted (but wrong) fact that some groups of people are just more technologically adventurous by temperament, and that's why they adopt technologies before the rest of society (think here of pornographers, kids, and terrorists).

As I've written before, these groups aren't more (or less) temperamentally inclined to throw themselves into mastering new technologies. Rather, they have more reason to do so:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/21/early-adopters/#sex-tech

Whenever a new communications technology arrives, it is arriving into a world of existing communications technologies, which are, by definition, easier to use. They're easier to use for two reasons: the obvious reason is that you're more likely to be familiar with an existing technology than you are with a new technology. After all, it's literally impossible to be familiar with a technology that has just been invented!

But the other reason that existing communications technologies are easier to use is that communication is – again, by definition – something you do with other people. That means that if you want to use a new communications tool to talk with someone else, it is not sufficient for you to master that technology's use – you must also convince the other person you're hoping to reach to master that technology, too.

In economic terms, the "opportunity cost" (the amount of time you lose for doing other things) of mastering a new communications tool isn't limited to your own education, but also to the project of convincing someone else to master that tool, and then showing them how to use it.

If the existing communications technology is working for you, mastering the new tool is mostly cost, with very little upside. Perhaps you are a technophile by temperament and derive intrinsic satisfaction from exploring a new tool, and that's why you do it, but even so, you're going to find yourself in the bind of trying to convince the people you'd like to communicate with to follow your lead. And if they're all being well-served by the existing communications tools, and if they're not technophiles, you're asking them to engage in a lot of labor and endure a high opportunity cost for no obvious benefit. It's a hard slog.

But there are many groups of people for whom the existing technology does not work, and one of the biggest ways an existing technology can fail is if the authorities are using it to suppress your communications and/or spy on your usage in order to frustrate your goals.

This brings us back to sex workers, kids and terrorists. All three groups are typically poorly served by the existing communications technology. If you're a pornographer in the age of celluloid film, you either have to convince your customers to visit (and risk being seen entering) an adult movie theater, or you have to convince them to buy an 8mm projector and mail order your reels (and risk being caught having them delivered).

No wonder pornographers and sex workers embraced the VCR! No wonder they embraced the internet! No wonder they embraced cryptocurrency (if your bank accounts are liable to being frozen and/or seized, it's worth figuring out how to use an esoteric payment method and endure the risk of its volatility and technological uncertainty). Today, sex workers and their customers are doubtless mastering VPNs (to evade anonymity-stripping "age verification" systems) and Tor hidden services (to evade "online safety" laws).

The alternative to using these systems isn't the status quo – making use of existing websites, existing payment methods, existing connection tools. The alternative is nothing. So it's worth learning to use these new tools, and to engage in the social labor of convincing others to join you in using them.

Then there's kids. Unlike sex workers, kids' communications aren't broadly at risk of being suppressed so much as they are at risk of being observed by authority figures with whom they have an adversarial relationship.

When you're a kid, you want to talk about things without your parents, teachers, principals, or (some of) your peers or siblings listening in. You want to plan things without these people listening in, because they might try and stop you from doing them, or punish you if you succeed.

So again, it's worth figuring out how to use new technologies, because the existing ones are riddled with censorship and surveillance back-doors ("parental controls") that can be deployed to observe your communications, interdict your actions, and punish you for the things that you manage to pull off.

So of course kids are also "early adopters" – but not because being a kid makes you a technophile. Many kids are technophiles and many are not, but whether or not a kid finds mastering a new technology intrinsically satisfying, they will likely have to do so, if they want to communicate with their peers.

For terrorists, the case for mastering new technologies combines the sex-workers' cases and kids' cases: terrorists' communications are both illegal and societally unacceptable (like sexual content) and terrorists operate in an environment in which entities far more powerful than them seek to observe and interdict their plans, and punish them after the fact for their actions (like kids).

So once again, terrorists are apt to master new communications technologies, but not because seeking to influence political outcomes by acts of violence against civilian populations is somehow tied to deriving intrinsic satisfaction from mastering new technologies, but rather because the existing technologies are dangerously unsuitable for your needs.

Note that just because being in one of these groups doesn't automatically make you a technophile, it doesn't mean that there are no technophiles among these groups. Some people are into tech and the sex industry. Some kids love mastering new technologies. Doubtless this is true of some terrorists, too.

I haven't seen any evidence that being a kid, or a terrorist, or a sex-worker, makes you any less (or any more) interested in technology than anyone else. Some of us just love this stuff for its own sake. Other people just want a tool that works so they can get on with their lives. That's true of every group of people.

The difference is that if you're a technophile in a group of people who have a damned good reason to endure the opportunity cost of mastering a new technology, you have a much more receptive audience for your overheated exhortations to try this amazing new cool thing you've discovered.

What's more, there are some situational and second-order effects that come into play as a result of these dynamics. For example, kids are famously "cash-poor and time-rich" which means that spending them time to figure out new technologies when they're still in stage one of enshittification (when they deliver a lot of value at their lowest cost, often free) is absolutely worth it.

Likewise, the fact that sex-workers are often the first commercial users of a new communications technology means that there's something especially ugly about the fact that these services jettison sex workers the instant they get leaned on by official prudes. The story of the internet is the story of businesses who owe their commercial existence to sex workers, who have since rejected them and written them out of their official history.

It also means that technophiles who aren't kids, pornographers or terrorists are more likely to find themselves in techno-social spaces that have higher-than-average cohorts of all three groups. This means that bright young technologists can find themselves being treated as peers by accomplished adults (think of Aaron Swartz attending W3C meetings as a pre-teen after being welcomed as a peer in web standardization online forums).

It also means that technophiles are more likely than the average person to have accidentally clicked on a terrorist atrocity video. And it means that pornographers and sex-workers are more likely to be exposed to technologically adventurous people in purely social, non-sexual online interactions, because they're among the first arrivals in new technological spaces, when they are still mostly esoteric, high-tech realms, which means that even among the less technophilic members of that group, there's probably an above-average degree of familiarity with things that are still way ahead of the tech mainstream.

My point is that we should understand that the adoption of technology by disfavored, at risk, or prohibited groups is driven by material factors, not by some hidden ideological link between sex and tech, or youth and tech, or terrorism at tech.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago TSA makes flier remove body jewelry https://web.archive.org/web/20051129025951/https://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/s_397618.html

#20yrsago Microsoft caught subverting UN process, censoring FOSS references https://web.archive.org/web/20051128030303/https://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39238443,00.htm

#15yrsago Zimbabwean law will put legislation, parliamentary gazette, etc, under state copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20101129133649/https://www.theindependent.co.zw/local/28907-general-laws-bill-inimical-to-democracy.html

#10yrsago Steiff Japan’s centaur teddybears http://www.steiff-shop.jp/2007w_ltd/037351_seet.html

#10yrsago Woman adds vaginal yeast to sourdough starter, Internet flips out https://web.archive.org/web/20180808194241/https://anotherangrywoman.com/2015/11/25/baking-and-eating-cuntsourdough/

#10yrsago Party like it’s 1998: UK government bans ripping CDs — again https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/thanks-to-the-music-industry-it-is-illegal-to-make-private-copies-of-music-again/

#10yrsago Devastating technical rebuttal to the Snoopers Charter https://www.me.uk/IPBill-evidence1.pdf

#10yrsago AIDS-drug-gouging hedge-douche reneges on promise to cut prices for Daraprim https://www.techdirt.com/2015/11/25/turing-refuses-to-lower-cost-daraprim-hides-news-ahead-thanksgiving-holiday/

#10yrsago US credit union regulator crushed Internet Archive’s non-predatory, game-changing bank https://blog.archive.org/2015/11/24/difficult-times-at-our-credit-union/

#10yrsago The last quarter-century of climate talks explained, in comics form https://web.archive.org/web/20151126142914/http://www.nature.com/news/the-fragile-framework-1.18861

#10yrsago The Paradox: a secret history of magical London worthy of Tim Powers https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/26/the-paradox-a-secret-history-of-magical-london-worthy-of-tim-powers/

#1yrago Bossware is unfair (in the legal sense, too) https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/26/hawtch-hawtch/#you-treasure-what-you-measure

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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