If online pornography is a circus, its tent has been pitched all around us. And we''re not just spectators - we''re the prancing ponies. Pornography is everywhere. Every day, tens of thousands of hours of sexual content is uploaded to the internet. In a single year, visitors to the world''s most popular adult site will view more than four billion hours of porn-the equivalent of half a million years. This explosion in online pornography is affecting our world in profound and wholly unexpected ways. And yet we know strikingly little about where it comes from, whose pockets it''s lining, or what its lasting effects might be. In Guilty Pleasure , award-winning journalist Patricia Nilsson exposes how, over the past two decades, this vast, shadowy industry has quietly reshaped sexuality, culture, work, and the internet itself. She tracks how the digital age turned the business of erotic art into something else entirely, as Hollywood moguls gave way to anonymous moneymen determined to profit from our desires - at almost any cost. Today, whether we consume porn or not, we are living in the world they made: in an economy, and a society, saturated by the logic of pornography. We are stuck in its addictive, alienating cycles of stimulation, self-soothing, and craving. Drawing on years of investigative reporting, and emerging research about the impacts of porn, Guilty Pleasure uncovers the inner workings of the industry that has revolutionized everything. Nilsson brings to light the secretive owners of the companies that dominate it; the complicated realities of online sex work; and the bizarre role payment companies play in legislating what is, and isn''t, acceptable. Ultimately, she shows, the story of pornography in the online age leads us to the most urgent question of all: what does it mean to live in a world where almost everything about us - our attention, our desires, our anxieties - is monitored and manipulated by unaccountable figures who will stop at nothing to keep us watching? ...

Autorentext
Patricia Nilsson is a reporter with the Financial Times, where she has covered a broad range of industries such as retail, media, tobacco, cannabis and pornography. Her discovery that the world's biggest adult company had a secret owner led to a year-long investigation into the business of porn, which culminated in the FT's first narrative podcast series, Hot Money. Patricia grew up in Sweden but was raised Polish. She has lived and worked in Shanghai, Istanbul and London and now resides in Frankfurt. Guilty Pleasure is her first book

Klappentext

A gripping investigation into how pornography shaped the internet - and then transformed us all

This is the story of one of the most influential - and least examined - industries on earth. Worth billions of dollars, and commanding a tenth of global internet traffic at peak times, it has quietly reshaped our world: it has transformed technology, work, culture, love and relationships, and even our sense of self. Most industries of this scale make daily headlines. This one rarely does.

In Guilty Pleasure, investigative journalist and FT reporter Patricia Nilsson turns her attention to an industry few have dared to confront, and tells the story of pornography in the online age. Drawing on more than five years of reporting, Nilsson reveals how the internet turned the business of erotic art into something else entirely: a vast, secretive industry dominated by obscure owners, platform logic and profit at almost any cost. She traces how porn helped to shape the online world, and then spilled far beyond it - restructuring everyday life and saturating society with its logic of stimulation, self-soothing and craving.

Whether we consume it or not, Nilsson argues, we are living in the world pornography made: one in which our desires and anxieties are relentlessly monitored and manipulated by unaccountable forces. And because this industry has escaped meaningful scrutiny for so long, the power to regulate it has increasingly fallen to political extremists and payment companies. The result is a system that has quietly revolutionized everything, while remaining - until now - hidden from view.