Technology accelerates. Concerns accumulate. Alexander Monea’s The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight explores the foundations of the internet as a whole to make the case that heteronormativity is a core component of the technology, rather than a glitch or coincidence. Where Monea’s work excels is in documenting different ways in which heteronormativity has served to police the internet and set policy and practice. That said, I find that The Digital Closet fails somewhat in its promise to document “how the internet became straight.” Some of the argumentation needs to be taken on trust, and Monea admits in the conclusion that he has not offered the smoking gun that would close the case.
Usually when we talk about nonfiction, we focus on the ideas in the book while brushing the style aside, unless, of course, it stands out as particularly exemplary (consider A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott or The Skin We’re In by Desmond Cole). I find the style of Monea’s work to be disorienting. At the level of the book, there are some organizational issues. The purported focus of each chapter meanders, which leads to some repetitions—the manosphere gaining significant focus in the first chapter and the fourth, for example, and, as much as Monea professes to avoid an overemphasis on pornography, it certainly pops up quite a bit. At the level of the paragraph, sometimes the paragraph begins with a topic before taking a turn and ending on a different idea, which leads to an unclear focus. The book also reads like a doctoral thesis—not a bad thing, per se, but phrases like “as I shall explore in chapter four” take me out of my own immersion and at times it felt like there was far more prefatory commentary than was necessary: just say the thing!
I’ll do my best to reorganize some of the text’s key topics into a way that I find more comprehensible.
If we’re thinking about the key question of the book, how the internet became straight, one of the core pieces to Monea’s argument is that employees in the tech industry have programmed their homophobic and heteronormative biases into the code itself. What I found most compelling in this particular section was the idea of the culture surrounding tech. Monea talks about the frat-like culture of “mommy’s basement” (65). The reframing of tech companies like Google as “mommy’s basement” really altered my perspective. He talks about how tech campuses are like living in your mother’s basement because there are always fun activities around, you have “free high-end food within fifty yards [...] at all times” and “offer free dinners for employees who stay after 5 p.m.” (65). Monea explains how there are all kinds of services on these tech campuses: gyms, doctors, laundry, pet care, and so on. Notably, very few of them have child services… Additionally, “open floor plans [...] make it notably difficult for employees to avoid coworkers who ight harass them” (65). Monea notes that the entire design of tech companies tends to skew design toward the interests of young and single men at the expense of women. The book also refers to the disproportionate number of men in the field, the high propensity for sexual assaults at conferences and off-sites, and the low rates of reporting. The case for a misogynistic and largely straight is pretty clear.
Further, Moneo outlines the backlash towards “diversity hiring” in the industry and its failure to promote significant change. Monea suggests that “the number of women in technical positions at technology companies has remained rather stagnant despite the past decade of attempts at fairer hiring practices” (69). He notes that there are a number of companies that use unconscious bias training about race and gender. He notes, though, that there is a problem with “how unconscious bias training actually plays out” (69). He writes that unconscious bias training rests on the premise that everyone holds biases. “that there is nothing wrong with having biases, and all one is responsible for is curbing them as much as possible” (69). He explains that studies suggest the practice normalizes bias by removing the stigma around it and that people “accept these biases as unavoidable and make them more likely to exhibit these types of biases in the workplace” (69). That’s a pretty wild revelation in its own right. Even the creator of the Implicit Association Test is concerned about it because “understanding implicit bias does not actually provide you with the tools to do something about it” (69).
I digress.
Monea gives some background into the toxic work culture of tech, though not without sympathy toward programmers, who are an “increasingly precarious class because of their replaceability and are easily controlled by the corporate officers of their companies because of their desire to maintain the perks of their positions” (78). Capitalism, again—actually, in the recommendations Monea gives in the conclusion, ending capitalism is of course a key pillar. Due to the competitive nature of the industry, “those programmers who might develop an interest in the purposes of their work or find themselves critical of the social impacts of their research might have on the world are left with little room to voice these qualms” (78). As we’ve seen before in any number of tech-related books, the “ruling ideology is one in which ‘progress’ [...] is inevitable, and all one can do is try to capitalize on being the first to meet the bleeding edge of the future” (78). Monea then connects the ideology of progress to heteronormativity. I find the rationale here a little less fleshed out.
Certainly, the programmers have certain kinds of biases—but how those biases are made manifest in technology are less clear. The piece that is perhaps most clear is how programmers have a direct effect on the types of words that get tagged for censorship or search engine optimization. There are certain biases that come up here, including the use of English as the foundation for algorithms. So, when images are tagged in particular ways it may replicate the internal biases of the programmers. Monea outlines a situation wherein multiple people labeled the same images and then only those that the majority agreed on were accepted (87). People are only paid if their labels are consistent with the majority (87). You can see why the outsourcing of ideas and relying on the popular vote might lead to particular kinds of oversights. There is a section in which Monea explains the way information sorting works, but I have to admit it’s a little unclear. I feel like it wasn’t the most accessible explanation for a professed luddite like myself.
In any case, the practices in programming and sorting the internet leads to a great deal of censorship, and Monea makes the case that 2SLGBTQ+ content gets censored at higher rates. There’s some other industry explanations for this. Take Facebook for example. I’ve witnessed their censorship practices first hand. When I reported about 30 comments that encouraged a trans person to kill herself, all of the comments I reported were left up. When I requested that the band Talk Show Host play the song I Hate Men (I Hate All Men), I was automatically flagged for hate speech. How mysterious. In any case, the algorithms automatically report certain types of content. The remaining 10% is outsourced to call centers. Monea’s use of statistics shows the flaws in censorship practice. In particular, in 2012 Facebook had only 50 moderators for the entire platform. The employees are mostly from Asia, Africa, and Central America. They get paid between $1-$4 per hour while Facebook is worth billions and billions (99). While the number of content moderators may have changed, the process remains a challenge. Laborers “receive two weeks of training and a set of prescriptive manuals for assessing content” and they “act like human algorithms” (99). The entire model forces laborers into particular time constraints where they can look at each piece of content for about eight to ten seconds and have to review around a thousand pieces of content per day. There’s a linguistic barrier (all the training manuals that have been released are in English), which means that those not fluent in English have to use Google Translate and also have difficulty moderating content (99). There are a number of challenges in decontextualizing content, as well. Innocuous images may be perceived differently, of course, which leads to overblocking.
For instance, consider how nipples get censored online. There’s the assumption that “female nipples” are linked to female genitalia. However, the correlation between sex and gender is not at all obvious. Monea gives the example of Courtney Demone’s #DoIHaveBoobsNow? Project. Demone is a trans woman and posted her exposed chest during hormone replacement therapy. She was asking a simple question: “At what point in my breast development do I need to start covering my nipples?” (108). Monea says that “platforms cannot answer this question based on their cisnormative community standards” (108). Platforms block nipples without context of the actual sex or gender of those posting them and end up regulating visibility of gender fluid, nonbinary, and trans bodies. Monea gives the solution to overblocking by just having a filter on top of images as is done with violence and sums up the issue as follows: “Heteronormativity on a platform like Facebook is essentially this: to see biased filtering as the default, most practical solution to the problem of content moderation rather than recognizing the ease with which less normative filtering could be achieved across the platform” (108).
What I find really interesting, too, about the content guidelines on Facebook, is the level of depth and contingencies it provides for. Monea identifies what constitutes sexual content: “Implied sexual intercourse, defined as mouth or genitals entering or in contact with another person’s genitals or anus, even when the contact is not directly visible, except in cases of a sexual health context, advertisements, and recognized fictional images or with indicators of fiction” (105). Monea doesn’t comment on this, but I find it fascinating that among the exceptions are “advertisements” (capitalism gets a pass), and “recognized fictional images or with indicators of fiction.” I think there’s a lot to unpack there about what it implies about reality. While I’m working towards Monea’s studies about pornography, I would offer the question of whether pornography is allowed as something recognized as fictional? Beyond simply policing sexuality and gender, it seems content filters give themselves a means for policing reality as a whole.
There is resistance to the censorship, of course, and The Digital Closet includes a few images and stories of resistance. There are projects that consider what computer vision is able to see and what it recognizes as nudity and then manipulates its expectations. Tom White, for instance, uses “a generative adversarial network (GAN) to produce what the tech industry calls ‘adversarial examples’ based on ImageNet classifiers” (120). The program feeds abstract shapes, patterns, or amalgamations of images into the network and then adjusts the image iteratively “until it outputs an image that will trigger a classifier despite looking nothing like what a human would recognize as an example of that particular classification” (120). Monea also outlines artist Tom White’s projects Synthetic Abstractions and Perception Engines. He creates images that will draw the attention of Amazon, Google, and Yahoo for being against policies, but the images look absurd to humans. The abstract forms are designed to be seen as NSFW while to human it’s just form and colour. I find that the “challenge [to] the efficacy of image recognition systems, probing [of] their boundaries to demonstrate the different ways in which they perceive the world” (120) could be a valuable full-length book in its own right, especially because as things have developed, most of Tom White’s artwork would become censored and he would have to appeal each automatic flag so that people would be able to see it (120).
All of this is related to the idea of overblocking. The Digital Closet gives an overview of how censorship operates to make the case that censorship goes too far. He gives examples like how something is tagged as being bisexual, for example, it is most often used on the internet in association with pornography. So, when content is being censored, all information and resources related to bisexuality—pornographic or not—would not be available. Monea documents a number of legitimate resources that were taken down as a result of overblocking. For example, The Keep A Breast Foundation is a youth-based organization that promotes breast cancer awareness. It is an educational service that was “banned from using Google AdWords because of their sling, ‘I Love Boobies’” (125). Information about things like birth control, safe sex, and access to abortion were also rendered unavailable or demonetized. Monea cites the director of Bedsider, Lawrence Swiader, as saying, “We need to be able to talk about sex in a real way: that it’s fun, funny, sexy, awkward … all the things that the entertainment industry gets so well. How can we possibly compete with all of the not-so-healthy messages about sex if we have to speak like doctors and show stale pictures of people who look like they’re shopping for insurance?” (125). Essentially, Monea notes how overblocking unfairly renders LGBTQIA+ identities as pornographic and thus disproportionately affects youth and adults looking for legitimate resources.
Monea also explains how the scale of the producer is relevant to accessing information. For instance, the Supreme Court enforced “obscenity doctrine against LGBTQIA+ and sex education materials but not against Playboy magazine; Playboy has been allowed to advertise its content through its Twitter account and has even posted photos of bare breasts” (125). Monea documents the monopoly of the company MindGeek in owning the porn“tube” sites. It owns all of the major ones and has even worked at buying up the major producers of pornography, which is essentially a heteronormative industry. Smaller producers are unable to compete, first of all, and queer producers don’t have the resources to challenge them for online attention, including when the tube sites steal their content and they need to go through a rigorous process for pursuing copyright claims. There’s a great passage about the homogenization of the adult entertainment industry: “the porn industry’s deepest, darkest secret isn’t that porn is exploitative, socially corrosive, or a catalyst for misogynistic violence—though these can all be true. It’s that porn is boring” (8). Monea continues, “the entire logic of the industry is built around combating this fact. The industry’s worst nightmare is that we might all come to this realization when cycling through the thousand or more professional gonzo POV anal videos and amateur incest role-play videos uploaded to porn tube sites every day. Porn is boring because it’s caught in a heteronormative filter bubble” (8).
Of course, there is significant resistance to pornography in all its forms. Monea describes the unlikely alliance between Christian conservatives and antiporn feminists in creating a context that is actually harmful to the LGBTQIA+ community, whether pornographic or not. He describes the impetus of “protecting children, preserving the family, and combating sexual deviance” that intermingles with “more contemporary feminist critiques of pornography” (55). Among their critiques is that pornography “harms children’s brains, renders them more susceptible to addictions of all kinds as adults, weakens their emotional bonds with their parents, makes them more likely to engage in risky sexual behaviours, increases their chances of reporting being victims of physical and sexual violence, makes them more likely to commit crimes, lessens their sexual satisfaction, makes them more likely to have sex with younger adolescents, and increases their sexual uncertainty and casual sexual exploration” (55). What I find interesting about this passage is that it tends to read as intuitive, but there’s a detail that stands out to me as being unlike the rest. Did you catch it? Among this list of negative outcomes, there’s the comment that it “increases their chances of reporting being victims of physical and sexual violence.” Odd that that is couched in there in a list of all the negatives.
In any case, this alliance led to changes in law and policy. The antiporn mentality led to the creation of FOSTA and SESTA (the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act). This seems to be the closest Monea gets to a smoking gun on the straightification of the internet. These laws made it so that the culpability for things like sex trafficking is also placed upon services that host related information. One issue is that the bill makes no distinction between people being sex trafficked, consensual porn creators, cam girls, and so on. The other is that it targets hosts rather than creators. In terms of law enforcement cracking down on trafficking, “the new law incentivizes law enforcement to focus on intermediaries that facilitate prostitution rather than sex traffickers themselves. It thus shifts focus away from real criminals, and in shuttering these intermediaries, it cuts law enforcement off from essential tools that were previously used to locate and rescue victims. It similarly cuts law enforcement off from easily tracked evidence that can be used in criminal cases against sex traffickers” (129-130). Even anti-trafficking groups and sex work organizations opposed the bill almost universally (130). Meanwhile, safe places for exploration stopped hosting legitimate content in order to maintain support from advertisers.
The change in law also makes for some surprising turns of events and unintended consequences. For example, PayPal changed its policy so that online sex workers could not use their service. Patreon had said sex workers could continue to use their service as normal and then froze funds and shut out producers without warning. Monea documents a number of queer producers who were impacted, though I would not say this is exclusively a heteronormative pattern.
Where all of this gets really scary is its connection to the Manosphere. While of course homophobic, the online manosphere is especially misogynistic. Roosh V., for example, encouraged his followers to mass-report online sex workers to the IRS to try to expose them for tax fraud under the belief that they would get a cut. Given that this was too difficult and too much paperwork for an arguably illiterate group, they then changed their tactic to just doxxing women. They would make phone calls to their workplaces and families, telling everyone and showing them what the women were doing online. While this outline comes closer towards the end of the book, Monea also documents the origins and beliefs of Manosphere groups early in the text and demonstrates their power at the political level (like Trump shouting out the proud boys, for example). Monea’s analysis of the NoFap movement is pretty interesting, also. Citing Jesse Signal, Monea writes that it’s “a version of anti-masturbation worries that has been tailored for an age in which productivity is the sort of buzzword that piety and purity were back when this panic first emerged” (43). I find that a fruitful avenue to explore, looking at the biopolitics Foucault outlined decades ago in a modern context where capital is production and sex is non-productive sex is anti-capital. Meanwhile, Sarah Sharma “has critiqued the manosphere’s emphasis on using technology for a sexodus in which feminist critiques and demands can be ignored because sex robots, toys, and pornography now prevent women from withholding sexual gratification from frustrated men—which to many in the manosphere is the only reason feminist demands might otherwise be negotiable” (43-44). It leads to “sexual conservativism” and “the maintenance of traditional gender roles, as well as technocapitalism” (44). It’s a way of avoiding investing “time and energy into addressing feminist concerns” (44).
I think I’ve given a pretty thorough outline here of the central pillars of Monea’s argumentation. While the details are all interesting on their own, I don’t think Monea quite tells the story enough to solidify the case that 2SLGBTQIA+ people are systematically removed from the internet. There are a number of factors that are there, for sure. A lot of the issue is that 2SLGBTQIA+ are already subordinate in our culture and that the internet exacerbates this problem with its other focus on puritanism. I think the connection between the different threads of the argument could be presented more clearly and directly, rather than hopping around.
Ultimately, though, the effect is pretty well-stated. Monea describes “the closet” as a “mechanism through which a space—a silent or invisible space, and thus a partial or nonspace—is produced at the myriad sites of [...] contradictions in heteronormativity that can capture, contain, alleviate, and thus nullify the threat of deviance and abberation” (18). Monea cites Eve Sedgwick: “‘Closetedness’ itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence—not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularly by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it” (18). Monea describes how these “silent and invisible spaces are just as essential to the structure of heteronormativity as are its more vocal and visible portions” (18). This framework is established in the introductory chapter and Monea effectively follows it up in the conclusion of the book. The argument is structured fairly logically: Premise 1: 2SLGBTQIA+ identities have been rendered pornographic and obscene. Premise 2: Pornographic and obscene material is scrubbed from the internet. Conclusion: 2SLGBTQIA+ identities are scrubbed from the internet. Monea outlines how the internet is structured to increasingly render sexuality a private phenomenon. He describes it as a bedroom and that, because of the way the internet is structured, 2SLGBTQIA+ sexuality becomes the closet in that bedroom.
Overall, I would say the book was okay. Some of the research was particularly interesting, as I’ve tried to outline above. The ‘storytelling’ of the book leaves something to be desired and my hope is that I’ve put it into more comprehensible terms to help see the connections between ideas a little further. Monea’s conclusion offers a list of action-items we can take to resist the hetereonormativity of the internet, though the action items seem a little larger than any one person is able to complete.
Ultimately, The Digital Closet is part of a network of texts that work together to let us challenge the filter bubbles of the internet and to try to see the broad picture. On its own, its interesting enough, but its real force will likely only emerge in connection with the broader network of internet-deconstructing books.
Happy reading!
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