Written by Zahra Stardust, Kath Albury and Jenny Kennedyresearchers at Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society.
Sex technology includes a wide range of products from sex therapy apps, sex education chatbots, dating apps, sex entertainment platforms, smart vibrators, teledildonics, period tracking apps, virtual partners and artificial intelligence sex robots.
There is a lot of buzz in the media about the potential profits from sextech. However, less attention has been paid to issues of equity, inclusion and public interest related to these household technologies.
In February 2022 we coordinated a three-day event Public Interest Sex Tech Hackathon in collaboration with global software developers Thoughts and SexTech Schoolan online training academy for sex-tech entrepreneurs.
The Hackathon brought together designers, technologists and communities to work on how sexual technologies can be designed and managed in ways that prioritize the benefit of the public interest.
We prompted participants to think about how designer values are embedded in the technologies themselves, and how we might shift from purely market-oriented approaches to the sex trade to technologies that have collective benefits.
While many sextech practitioners collaborate with researchers, to date these collaborations have focused on the more personalized biomedical or sexological aspects of sexuality and technology use.
Our work adopts a feminist socio-technical perspective, which aims to better understand the ways in which both individuals and communities interact with sextech platforms and devices, as well as the organizations and infrastructures that support them (from sextech startups to cloud-enabled servers’).
We approached the hackathon in two stages. First, we sought insights from would-be sextech entrepreneurs about the ways in which they currently understand the politics and economics surrounding personal data.
We then invited hackathon participants to hypothesize how sextech could be reimagined to speak back to power, dismantle structural oppressions, undertake countersurveillance, or put power back into the hands of communities.
Hackathons typically involve a series of intensive design sprints and often involve groups of strangers coming together to prototype a project. Ours followed this model and sought to inspire and energize attendees through educational panel presentations and access to industry mentors over the course of the 3 days. On day three, panelists competed to pitch their idea to a panel of judges with broad expertise in sextech and public interest technologies.
Hackathons are inherently creative and experimental in nature. At the same time, they ask for concrete results – in the form of proposals and prototypes for new technologies. These contradictions put pressure on our participants to be both pragmatic and speculative while collaborating with strangers in a 3-day Zoom meeting.
To lay the groundwork, we called an opening activist panel to present their vision of sextech in the public interest. Panel participants represented marginalized communities disproportionately affected by the collection, regulation, aggregation and commercialization of sexual and/or personal data – including people living with HIV, people with disabilities, First Nations people, workers of sex and LGBTQ+ people.
The panel challenged us to design technologies that break down barriers to access for LGBTQ+ people living in remote or peripheral communities, or for people living in supported accommodation (such as aged care). They also drew attention to the barriers presented by the technologies themselves – such as voice and facial recognition software that does not adequately take into account users who do not conform to the gender binary.
Participants called for technologies that challenge stigma – for example, designing dating apps and sextoys that don’t just depathologize disabilities, but actively celebrate different bodies and different ways of being sexual.
Finally, our panelists challenged anyone interested in designing “better sextech” to learn more about the ways in which existing laws and policies governing online content (and commerce) result in exclusion, deplatforming and the censorship of sex workers – and the trickle-down effect this has on other forms of sexual content.
Our expert judges and mentors – all with experience in sexual technology production or digital equality and design advocacy – challenged us to move beyond simplistic “community consultation” models to consider the potential harms associated with with technological development. Eliza Sorensen, of the sex worker-led technology company Assembly Four, said:
I want participants to consider the current political and regulatory climate… by considering questions such as: What steps could you take to prevent the state from using your idea against your community? What if your idea or community is actively targeted by an anti-sex group?
Throughout the hackathon, panelists (and activist participants) focused on local, collective approaches and/or policy outcomes – such as responses to policing, cultural protocols, counter-surveillance, and building community partnerships.
In contrast, other participants prioritized opportunities for commercialization and
global scalability, through supporting individual (and often medical) experiences of sexual health, sexual pleasure and well-being. Despite the friction between these approaches, all the small groups participating in the event proposed new and innovative technologies. These ranged from a proposal to reduce waste in sextech manufacturing by developing sustainable algal lubricants, to a prototype chat interface to help neurodeviant people create comfortable communication on dating apps.
We observed that the sexual technology design process – and indeed the hackathon process itself – creates contradictions, tensions and rifts between the market demands of start-up cultures and the more collective and community-focused approaches of activists and stakeholders from marginalized communities. .
In the last debriefing session, we received constructive feedback on how a sex-tech hackathon could be run in the future. Some participants requested more support expectations before the event, such as pre-reading around values-based issues such as intersectionality. or resources that informed everyone about industry-related issues such as data privacy.
Others wanted more hands-on facilitation and technology lessons and extra time with mentors so they could get more out of their skills and experience. As a space for skill-sharing and knowledge-sharing, the hackathon facilitated the initiation of a broader conversation about sexual technology of public interest and participatory design.
The full Public Interest Sex Tech Hackathon report can be access here.
Please note that blog posts are not peer-reviewed and do not necessarily reflect the views of SRHM as an organization.
