CHAPTER 4. TOWARD A NUANCED DEFINITION OF SAFETY
The architecture of the internet, big data, and algorithms is something that is currently incomprehensible to most people; for many users, the internet simply works or it does not. In a data-driven world, it is a powerful tool of control that data is largely inaccessible, and often when information about what a particular data set is comprised of and capable of is requested by women, or generally people outside of the tech industry, there is often a sense of dismissal with responses like “you wouldn’t get it” (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020; O'Neil, 2018). Data has become a god-like authority that has lacked critical interrogation on a mass scale. As people who are often the first to feel the impact of new internet policies, sex workers are among the first to discuss critical flaws and encoded biases present in software and policies designed in the interest of capitalistic progress rather than with the desire of maintaining users’ privacy and creating opportunities for community and love to flourish in the digital world (Blunt and Stardust, 2021; Garcia, 2021). Data Feminism calls for a disruption of the authoritative power big tech holds by seeking who does and does not have access to power and how that dynamic can be transformed through data by remaking a data-driven world. Some of the ways that this looks in action are through algorithmic accountability research and audits of existing algorithms. While interventions like these are sometimes criticized as being a retroactive measure that still allows the flawed systems to exist in the public sphere rather than a movement to design algorithms that seek co-liberation from the get-go. Auditing algorithms and addressing racism, sexism, ableism, classism, queer/transphobia, and whorephobia embedded in tech is but a band-aid solution.
Encoded biases get blamed on what Data Feminism refers to as types of “Privilege Hazards.” A privilege hazard refers to how people with more privilege are able to easily ignore and neglect issues that may seem obvious to marginalized people but do not have to be considered by people with privilege. Many of the people working in tech design are and have historically been cisgender, heterosexual, white men whose ease with which they traverse the world is invisible to them. They may assume that everyone experiences the world in the same way regardless of positionality. “They lack the lived experience –the undeniable data of lived experience – that reminds them every day that their bodies, their sexuality, and/or their race depart from a desired norm” (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2019). This privilege hazard is a good way to understand what leads to encoded bias, but it is also a cop-out that does not hold privileged programmers accountable for the impact of their work. It is an excuse that erases the role of capitalism, colonialism, and racism in informing the development of the tech industry and that has led to tech being an industry dominated by people with the most access privilege.
It consistently falls on people most negatively impacted by the privilege hazard to call it out and take action to disrupt its effects on society. When it comes to addressing algorithmic violence and other digital forms of violence perpetrated online, unsurprisingly sex workers, sex worker organizers, and scholars are among folks at the forefront of the movement for a liberated digital future. Sex Worker organizers have long pointed out the flaws of the tech industry and its current trajectory likening encoded whorephobia and digital violence to gentrification. The gentrification of the internet is a common point of discussion in online sex work history and ongoing organizing. In “The Cybernetic Sex Worker,” Gabriella Garcia, founder of the coalition “Decoding Stigma,” highlights how the elimination of sex workers from the internet is pitched to the public as “‘cleaning up’ the internet for the safety of its users.” She goes on to explain, “Gentrification is often sold to the public as making the streets ‘safe’ but the question is, for whom? Schulman duly notes that neighborhood ‘safety’ comes at the expense of its original inhabitants, for whom the neighborhood is now dangerous” (Garcia, 2021). Garcia here is referring to Sara Schulman's work The Gentrification of the Mind (2013), which explores New York City’s response to ‘White flight’ and how the city worked to re-attract those who fled out of fear and hatred of difference. The internet was once a safe place for pornography and for sex workers. In the panel “Sexual Gentrification: an Internet Sex Workers Built,” hosted by Hacking//Hustling, Sinnamon Love, Daisy Ducati, and Melissa Gira Grant discuss previous sites that allowed for anonymity and autonomy for sex workers such as Craigslist and Backpage that is no longer possible. Craigslist previously had a webpage called “erotic services” which was changed to “adult services” in 2010 before being completely removed in 2018 due to the enactment of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), the same year that the U.S. Department of Justice seized Backpage after the passing of the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA) (Kennedy, 2018). It was in response to both of these actions, and the signing into law of FOSTA-SESTA that the sex worker collective Hacking//Hustling was formed as “an autonomous, peer-led, community-run, collective with on-the-ground, embodied knowledge of the social impacts of poor policy design” (Blunt and Stardust, 2021).
Hacking//Hustling came to be through a conversation between Danielle Blunt and Melissa Gira Grant after an emergency community organizing meeting in response to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seizing Backpage through the passing of FOSTA-SESTA after a number of other websites pre-emptively closed their doors to sex work out of fear of punishment. Despite being the most impacted by attacks on digital rights, sex workers are consistently left out of conversations within tech. Due to the lack of knowledge and care about the impacts of SESTA and FOSTA in the tech community, and more specifically the digital rights community, Blunt and Grant organized the eponymous sex worker led tech conference “Hacking and Hustling.” The event hosted panels of sex workers and allies about sex workers’ digital rights, privacy, and safety, as well as digital hygiene and tech related hard reduction workshops led by t4tech (Sage, 2018).
The collective’s core organizers are prison abolitionists and disabled sex workers who seek community safety through the end of structural whore stigma (whorephobia), policing, prisons, and surveillance capitalism, and the creation of a safer, more liberated world. Blunt emphasizes,
The main vision of Hacking//Hustling is to abolish carceral technologies and build the capacity for sex workers and survivors to create new technologies, relationships, and community to increase safety. Our work explodes the definition of technology to include harm reduction models, such as: community-based research; mutual aid; organizing; art; and any/all tools sex workers and survivors develop to mitigate state, workplace, and interpersonal violence and thrive (Blunt and Stardust, 2021).
Hacking//Hustling continues to model its vision of safety through its community research reports, harm-reduction tool kits, and events that are all accessible for free online.
The movement for decriminalization and destigmatization of sex work is a part of a larger movement for the full abolition of the prison industrial complex. In their book, Revolting Prostitutes, Molly Smith and Juno Mac declare that for sex workers the “solution” to sex work “includes dismantling immigration enforcement and the militarized border regimes that push undocumented people into the shadows and shut off their access to safety or justice – in other words, taking power away from the police and giving it to migrants and to workers” (Smith & Mac, 2020). Sex workers and their allies continue to call for full decriminalization of sex work, including sex work being de-exceptionalized: treating sex work as being as dangerous and exploitative as any other profession and no different.
Not only are sex workers criminalized and stigmatized, but the label of ‘sex worker’ (or other, more derogatory, terms) in itself is wielded as a criminal marker bestowed frequently on transgender women and women of color, who have not participated in sex work (Ritchie, 2017; Vanwesenbeeck, 2017; Smith & Mac, 2021). Through sex work criminalization, something as simple as walking home can result in police harassment and vagrancy charges for those assumed to be sex workers. “Associations between gender nonconformity and involvement in the sex trade are so prevalent that pervasive profiling of trans women has been dubbed ‘walking while trans’” (Ritchie, 2017). Profiling based on the assumption that those being targeted have intent to engage in sex work reveals how sex-trade-related charges can be selectively implemented to criminalize folks based on transphobic and/or racist biases held by police, who have been given the power to wield the law.
One of the ways sex work has been associated with moral deviance and crime is through the construction of criminal bodies by targetting those who disrupt white cis-heteropatriarchal expectations of gender, including people of color, queer people, trans people, and disabled people. This amplifies the need for a broader coalitional liberation project that opposes carceral logics and embodies the urgency of full abolition. “Slaves, captives, or prisoners, and those fighting for their freedom, cannot wait for a new world order to be free of incarceration or bondage. They cannot wait until the right conditions emerge and the desired future begins” (Ben-Moshe, 2020). Liat Ben-Moshe describes how a white liberal version of feminism that called for an end of patriarchal violence against the ‘universal woman’ has contributed to the construction of the ‘prison nation’ of the United States. Liberation for the ‘universal woman’ meant only the liberation for the upper/middle class, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, white woman (Ben-Moshe, 2020). This excludes any woman who deviates from these categories, including sex workers, who are perceived as morally compromised in addition to other biases experienced from their multi-faceted identities.
As Andrea Ritchie reminds us, “The policing of prostitution is also a primary site of extortion of sex and sexual violence by police officers,” with studies demonstrating, “that police represent the largest slice of the pie chart depicting sources of violence reported by young women in the sex trades, while violence by individuals (clients, “pimps,” and others) make up much smaller slivers” (Ritchie, 2017). These claims are supported by many other accounts of sex workers sharing their experiences of being threatened by officers and offered special treatment or freedom in exchange for sexual favors. Despite this reality, carceral feminists and sex work neo-abolitionists believe that the way to abolish the commercial sex trade and in turn, sex trafficking, is through criminal law which puts more power in the hands of the police (Mac & Juno 2020, Ritchie, 2017, and Vanwesenbeeck, 2017). Vanwesenbeeck characterizes the sex work neo-abolitionism movement as the recent revival of the aforementioned sex wars. The neo-abolitionist stance on the sex trade equates sex trafficking and sex work, which reifies the assumption that all sex workers are victims and all sex work is violent (Vanwesenbeeck, 2017).
