Everything In Between

This evening over dinner after Poly-NYC‘s “Politics and Passion” meeting, I found myself in an unexpected debate over Internet ID, part of the US government’s plan to centralize Internet identity mechanisms. Although this is actually old news—over a year old at this point!—fears about it seem to be cropping up again this week on places like Reddit, and my Google searches return this 6-day old FauxNews article that links to a 12-month old CNET article cross-posted at CBSNews. (And, as an aside: WTF, Fox‽ You really are a piece of shit “news” network, aren’t you?)

Maybe what gave some people a new injection of Internet ID-induced fear was the fact that the truly horrid SOPA and PIPA Internet censorship laws were in the news this week thanks to the #SOPAStrike Internet blackout (which I enjoyed participating in). Or maybe it was because the latest versions of the Internet ID specifications are nearing their release date, so everyone’s a little on edge.

Whatever it was, though, I think that fear is misplaced. Most of this fear seems to stem from a real misunderstanding of the way Internet identities (not just Internet ID itself) work. Like so many things involving computer network security, something like Internet ID can sound scary when you’re not up on the nitty gritty details—that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Knowledge is power, and lack of knowledge breeds fear.

But Internet ID, or more formally known as National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) is actually not something to be fearful of. In fact, it could be a really good step forward, one that many Internet security, privacy, and free speech experts seem pretty excited about. And, what’s more, they have been for quite some time.

For example, Kaliya Hamlin is founder of the Internet Identity Workshop and an Internet identity expert who’s formally weighed in on NSTIC. She’s also a personal friend and someone I greatly trust to handle these matters with a lot of care, specifically to people who express an alternative sexuality. She’s done so time and again.

But don’t take my word for it! Listen to her thoughtful inclusion of how Facebook’s privacy-degrading actions late in 2009 would affect closeted users on Kink On Tap Episode 21: Welcome to the Privacy Wars. Her fantastic year-old piece, National! Identity! Cyberspace! Why We Shouldn’t Freak Out About NSTIC is still highly relevant today:

Our main conference Internet Identity Workshop held every 6 months since the fall of 2005 has for a logo the identity dog: an allusion to the famous New Yorker cartoon On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog. To me, this symbolizes the two big threads of our work: 1) maintaining the freedom to be who you want to be on the Internet AND 2) having the freedom and ability to share verified information about yourself when you do want to. I believe the intentions of NSTIC align with both of these[…].

As another high-profile example, computer and Internet security expert Steve Gibson also recorded a netcast that dealt directly with NSTIC and explained it in remarkably clear detail. He dissected the way it functions, why it’s useful, where it can be improved, and what the big fears about it were.

Gibson rightfully concluded the fear is largely due to ignorance of the technology and a general mistrust of the government, but that the technical specification as it exists today is so good as to actually prevent the majority of the fears being espoused by people like those I spoke with who have not actually taken the time to grok the specifics. Here’s an excerpt from the transcription of the netcast:

LEO: I know some people, the idea of government doing this makes them nervous. To me it actually seems sensible because you need a centralized third party to certify it.

STEVE: Yes.

LEO: And I know people, a lot of people who listen to this show, don’t trust our government. And we probably shouldn’t trust government. But who better? I mean, you want Microsoft to do this? They have been, by the way, with little success. So I think it needs to be that. And then I think this is a nice – you liken it to certificates, and I think that’s a good – the web certificate system, I think that’s a good analogy. I think it makes sense to have third parties that are certified and that kind of thing. I’m excited. We needed this. I’ve been signing my email for years, to no avail. It’s all been the Web of Trust technique.

STEVE: Yes. And this document establishes the right principles. I mean, and I’ve read the whole thing. Everything about it, as I’m reading – and I’m skeptical of Big Brother, too. I don’t know how we’re going to do it. I mean, as a coder and technologist I think about all of the hurdles and the pitfalls and the challenges we face. But it’s clear that we need that. We need this in order to move forward and to really leverage cyberspace to the full extent possible, I mean, we have the technology.

LEO: Yes, yes. Identity is critical. We’ve learned that lesson. And anonymity, while you – I think this is nicely done because you can have anonymity.

STEVE: Yes.

LEO: But there’s also a way to certify you are who you say you are. And I think you need both. So I think this is good. This sounds – I’m excited.

STEVE: Yeah, me, too.

The nice thing about technology such as that being built by NSTIC is that, unlike the need to rely on flimsy promises of the government’s benevolence, we can actually audit the specifications and open-source implementations of these technologies ourselves. And many people do. Steve Gibson did, and I trust him.

None of this is to say there are not valid concerns—there are. For one, Trusted Identity Providers are still going to be privy to most everything you do with one of your Internet ID identities, but I don’t see how that’s any worse than what we have today: your ISP, your DNS provider, and countless third-party advertising companies can and are tracking everywhere you go on the Web today. NSTIC, on the other hand, could give users like you and me both the technical and legal ability to have more fine-grained control over what such third parties see about us as we use the Web.

Technology that puts users back in charge of their identity? Now that’s an Internet law I can be proud of.

So, as I said in the discussion over dinner earlier tonight, rather than spend our time wringing our hands over this Internet ID stuff, we’ll all be far better off saving our energy to fight foolhardy initiatives like SOPA, PIPA, and other forms of political, social, and technical censorship.

Internet ID/NSTIC is not an enemy. It is going to be an important and useful tool for users like you and me.

Here’s a topic I’ve been meaning to write about ever since I was deeply depressed last Fall and Winter. Back then, I was incredibly lonely, and despite my best efforts I simply found it damn near impossible to do anything to improve my situation. That’s because my “best efforts” consistently lead me to dead-end resources that sounded good but that had no practical or immediately useful information; resources like WikiHow.com’s “How to Deal With Loneliness” article.

In their article, WikiHow contributors write:

Get involved in anything where you will meet people. If you are very shy, find a group for social anxiety, even if it has to be online (obviously it’s better if it’s not). Look on places like Craig’s List, or local news websites for your town for activities in your area. Volunteering can help. But don’t attend functions with the idea of making friends or meeting people. Being too demanding is a sign of loneliness. Try to go with no expectations whatsoever, and to enjoy yourself regardless of what happens. Look for activities that interest you, that also involve groups of people, like intramural sports, book clubs, church groups, political campaigns, concerts, art exhibitions, etc.

While it all “makes sense,” the WikiHow article reads like an elaborate horoscope. It’s incredibly annoying because it contains no meaningful, discrete, actionable items. Where, exactly, can I find “activities in my area”? And once I find them, how do I make sure I know about them when they are happening? And as if that wasn’t hard enough, how do I make the process workable under the extreme energy constraints that being depressed and lonely put me under? (See also: without using up too many “spoons”.)

Ironically, when I finally concocted a solution to this problem, I no longer had the time to write the blog post about solving the problem because I was so busy doing things and being social. I proceeded to pull myself out of my depression, have a pretty good (if still difficult at times) Spring and Summer, and even Fall in 2011. But now that the days are getting shorter and I’m increasingly feeling like my moods are walking on a tightrope of “happy” above a pit of bleakness, I figure it’s about time to document my process. That, and it seems people I know are running into the same problem, so hopefully sharing my own solution can really make a positive impact on others’ lives.

Creating a Cyborg’s Social Calendar

The basic problem was two-fold. First, I needed an easy way to discover local goings-on. Second, I needed a way to remember to actually attend events that I was interested in.

It turns out this is far more difficult to accomplish than one may at first believe since the set of events that I both want to attend and have the capability (energy, time, money, motivation, physical accessibility, etc.) to attend are actually relatively limited. Moreover, I also need to align the set of events that match both of those criteria with the knowledge that said event is occurring when it is occurring. It’s a bit like playing temporal Tetris.

In a nutshell, the solution I implemented was similarly two-fold. First, I cast an incredibly wide but low-cost sensor net, integrated directly into the process I already used for keeping track of my daily appointments. (See also the “no extra time” concept and its wide applicability). Second, I classified the “activities in my area” into two distinct groups: “engagements” (stuff I’ve said “yes” or “maybe” to) and “opportunities” (stuff I haven’t yet said “no” to).

Here’s what my calendar looks like after all the pieces of the system are in place:

As you can see, I have an enormous selection of activities I could participate in at any given time. Better yet, they all show up on my calendar without my ever needing to repeatedly go “look[ing] on places like Craig’s List” to find them, the events on my calendar update themselves, and I can show or hide sets of events on a whim.

The prerequisite tool for doing this is the iCalendar feed, which, in the words of Stanford University, is a popular calendar data exchange format which allows you to subscribe to a calendar and receive updates as calendar data changes. Each of those calendars under the “Subscriptions” heading in the screenshot of my iCal is actually an iCalendar feed from a remote website. iCalendar feeds are to calendars as RSS feeds are to blogs.

The first thing I did was add the event subscription feed from my Facebook. Do this:

1. Log into your Facebook account and go to the “Events” page.
2. Scroll to the very bottom of the page and click on the small “Export” link. This will reveal a personalized web address (URL) listing all upcoming Facebook events you’ve been invited to or have RSVP‘ed either “Yes” or “Maybe” to, in iCalendar feed (.ics) format. Copy that URL.
3. Back in iCal (or your calendaring application of choice), choose “Subscribe…” from the menu and paste in the URL you got from Facebook.
4. Give this calendar subscription a meaningful name. I called it “Facebook Events” (see above screenshot).
5. Set the “Refresh” interval to something that makes sense; I set it to once “every 15 minutes,” since the Facebook feed is one I check often because it changes so frequently. (For feeds from calendars that I check or that update less often, such as those of community groups, or calendars listing events that are far from home, I set the refresh rate much, much slower, such as once “every week.”)

Okay! Now, whenever a friend invites you to an event on Facebook, your calendar will be updated to reflect that event at the appropriate date and time. If you RSVP “No” to the event, it will disappear from your calendar when iCal next checks your Facebook iCalendar feed.

Repeat the same steps for any other event-management website that you use and that offers iCalendar feeds. Some services I use, such as Plancast.com and Meetup.com, actually offer two distinct iCalendar feeds, one for all of the events visible to you on the service, and one for events that you have RSVP‘ed “Yes” to. Subscribe to both; in the screenshot of my iCal window, above, you’ll note the existence of a “‘meitar’ on Plancast” calendar as well as a “Plancast Subscriptions” calendar, and similarly a “My ‘Yes/Maybe’ Meetups” calendar as well as a “My Meetups” calendar.

Now that you’ve got a bunch of subscriptions, it behooves you to organize them in a way that makes sense to you. How you can do this will depend a little bit on the tools you have at your disposal. I found Apple iCal the best choice because of its Calendar Group feature, while I found Google Calendar an incredibly frustrating tool to use.

In iCal, I first created two calendar groups. The first one was called “Social Engagements,” into which I placed all the iCalendar feeds that showed me events to which I’ve RSVP‘ed “Yes” to on the remote site. This included the Facebook, “‘meitar’ on Plancast”, and “My ‘Yes/Maybe’ Meetups” feed. The second group was called “Social Opportunities,” into which I placed all the other calendars.

Every time I learned about a new local venue, such as a nightclub, or a café, or a bookstore that had an open mic, I would scour its website to see if it offered an iCalendar feed. If it did, or if it used a tool that did, such as embedding a Google Calendar on their website,¹ I’d add their feed to my “Social Opportunities” calendar group, too. I’d do the same every time I learned of a new event aggregating website, such as the IndyBay.org calendar or the Calagator Portland Tech Community calendar, which both offer feeds.

In very short order, I became one of the go-to people to ask about what was happening ’round town—including some towns I didn’t even live in!

However, as I travelled across the country speaking at conferences, I realized that my “Social Opportunities” group was getting cluttered with events that I could not actually attend because I was literally thousands of miles away from them. To solve that problem, I created distinct “Social Opportunities” calendar groups based on geographic region, and moved the individual subscriptions to the group with which they were geographically associated; the Occupy DC calendar feed is in the “Social Opportunities – DC” calendar group, and so on. I also created an “A-geographic” group to house feeds that listed events from all over the place.²

Some event-management services let you filter by geography, making this even easier. For instance, Yahoo!’s “Upcoming” event listing website shows you events by “place,” and you can subscribe to an iCalendar feed of just those events. For instance, here are the Upcoming events in Seattle, and here is the same information in iCalendar feed format. I added the feed of each Upcoming Place to which I regularly travel to its appropriate regional calendar group.

The benefits of this set up are obvious:

• Visually overlay social opportunities on top of social engagements to ensure few conflicts, and help make the most informed choice about which events I want to go to when there are conflicts, to mitigate my social opportunity cost.
• Toggle calendars on/off to find nearby activities. Ordinarily, I simply leave all the “opportunities” calendars deselected, so I’m just looking at my personal calendars and the “Engagements” group, since this view shows me “stuff I have to do today.” When I’m bored or I’m looking for new things to do in the upcoming week, however, I simply turn on the “opportunities” calendars. Voila! In 1 click, I’m browsing a wealth of stuff to do!³
• Quickly orient oneself within the social space of a new city. If I’m taking a trip to Washington DC for a few days, all I have to do is deselect/uncheck the “Social Opportunities – SF/Bay Area” calendar group to hide all of my calendar subscriptions in that group, then select/check the “Social Opportunities – DC” calendar group and, voila, my calendar view has instantly shifted to showing me events that I can attend in Washington, DC.
• Make RSVP‘s meaningful: if I RSVP “Yes” to an event on Meetup, the event is automatically removed from my “Social Opportunities – A-geographic” calendar group and added to my “Social Engagements” calendar group.
• Easily move event information from a calendar feed to a personal calendar using copy-and-paste without ever leaving the calendaring tool of your choice.

Of course, none of this matters with regards to feeling lonely if I don’t also show up at events in physical space. Admittedly, actually mustering the physical and social energy to get up and go is by far the hardest part of this whole process. Typing on a keyboard is all fine and well (rest assured I do more than enough of it!), but there is no substitute for actually being around other human beings face-to-face. Physically vibrating the air using one’s mouth and having those vibrations move another’s ear drum (or physically moving one’s hands and letting the photons bounce off those movements and onto the retina of another’s eyes, in the case of sign language) is a vital part of the experience of being social.

This system isn’t perfect, but the imperfections are mostly due to the way sites like Facebook handle RSVP information. For my purposes, though, this workflow gets me well over 80% of the way towards my goal, and since I’m actually a human (not a machine), I can deal with a little data pollution here and there. There’s also plenty more I could write about with regards to “being a social cyborg,” such as how I use my calendar in conjunction with my contact management application (my digital rolodex) to maintain “loose” or “weak” interpersonal ties with over 1,000 people spread across the world—again, using “no extra time.” But I’ll save that for another post.

For now, hopefully this gave you a better understanding why my most frequent response to being informed of a party is something along the lines of, “Can you send me a link (to Facebook/Meetup/Google Calendar)?” and also why I’m so, so, so critical of important websites like FetLife that seem to prioritize everything but user security and interoperability.

1. Every public Google Calendar also publishes its information in an iCalendar feed. For example, rather than view the Occupy SF calendar on their website, just subscribe to the iCalendar feed provided by Google. Also, while you can create an aggregate view of multiple Google Calendars to embed on a Web page, it seems to me like this isn’t a feature offered for iCalendar feeds, so if you come across such a calendar, you’ll likely need to add the individual calendars’ feeds one by one. [↩]
2. Currently that’s just Meetup and Plancast, for me, since I’ve joined Meetup groups all over the country and I’ve subscribed to people on Plancast who live in dozens of cities. [↩]
3. Frustratingly, although Facebook also offers you a page listing events that you were not invited to but that your friends were, there seems to be no iCalendar feed of that list, forcing me to periodically check that page for events that would be “Social Opportunities” if I knew of them. Thankfully, to add them to my own calendar, I just RSVP “Yes” or (more likely) “Maybe.” [↩]

She had blue skin.
And so did he.
He kept it hid
And so did she.
They searched for blue
Their whole life through,
Then passed right by –
And never knew.

—“Masks“ by Shel Silverstein

I remember the sunlight on 8^th Avenue and 15^th Street that morning vividly. New York City is beautiful in the morning, but only if the streets aren’t packed with throngs of hurried people. The sunlight streamed into the tangled mess of steel and concrete and glass, bouncing from one reflective surface to another until it finally lay flat on the ground, or on me.

Often, while alone—and only while alone—I’d walk facing the sky. In the Summer, if I woke early enough or stayed up late enough, I’d slow my typically brisk pace to relish the thick, warm air as I walked through it. In the Winter, when too many people woke before the sun, I’d wait for rush hour to end before venturing outside, because that’s when I could feel the sun drape its light on me the way I wanted to feel it.

It was one of those cold, late mornings in the Winter that I remember, except I wasn’t alone. On this particular morning, I was walking with my father and we were talking about school. I’d recently started attending another school after dropping out of the one I had just been in, and, again, I hated it.

But there was a girl, and her name was Bre, and one day she told me in visibly unconcerned confidence that she, like me, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. And so, she was beautiful to me, and I got a crush on her. And on this particular morning, playing hooky for a while with an understanding father, I was explaining all this to him as matter-of-factly as I could, lest I seem too smitten.

As my father is wont to do when he correctly sensed I had shared something that made me feel uneasy, he paused momentarily, looked at me concertedly, and then began to tell me an allegorical tale. This time, he told me of a short story he had once read. It went something like this.

On a day very much like that sunlit day, a man and a woman met at a sidewalk café. They quickly struck up a conversation and, soon thereafter, found themselves spending a good deal of time with one another. As their friendship flourished and their fondness for one another deepened, however, they each became more afraid of revealing their romantic feelings to the other.

The story, my father told me, was written from both of their perspectives. The narrative voice switched from one to the other, so that the reader became a sort of voyeur able to peer into each of the protagonists’ minds. Although the details of his fears were different from hers, the outcome was the same: neither told the other the extent of their true feelings.

Ultimately, it was a very sad story. It ended on a note of mutual resignation rather than happy romance. But the moral is clear, and so was my father’s message.

I remember this story whenever I shy away from revealing something about myself for fear of rejection, ridicule, or even shame. Like the characters in the story, I don’t always muster the courage to lay myself bare. In fact, I never told Bre about my crush on her and before long my opportunity had gone, as she transferred to another school. However, the memory serves to make me that much braver in moments like these.

There are numerous things I’m struggling to work up the courage to offer for public view. I am afraid of being ridiculed and mocked. I am afraid of being ignored; that things important to me are not important to anyone else; of being unimportant, myself. Most of all, though, and contrary to some of my bravado, I am afraid of being disliked.

But I also know I am often ridiculed and mocked precisely because I show courage when others do not. I know I am often ignored precisely because the things important to me are too threatening for others to acknowledge. And I know I am often disliked precisely because of my conviction’s integrity.

Often, all of that makes me conspicuous, and so I’m sometimes thought to be “inspiring” when framed positively or “intimidating” when framed more negatively. I think enfant terribles are important, and I’ve rarely felt happier than when I receive (now weekly, if often private) thanks for sharing myself publicly. But at the same time, I really do not want to be any of those things. I want, instead, to be plain and largely forgotten.

I want to be in love and feel close with people. And I’m afraid the more “inspiring” or “intimidating” I become, the more I’ll stand out as someone hard to feel close to.

I remember when someone who was in love with me sang along to Billy Joel as we crossed the Golden Gate bridge. And I remember when another who was in love with me put her arm around me as I gently shook flowers off the tree we climbed on Atwell’s Avenue. And I remember both of the days when each of them stopped feeling safe enough to be in love with me, days I revealed the extent of my true feelings.

So I think that, these days, I share so much of myself with strangers so publicly because what I really want is to share myself with someone who loves me. And I just hope you’re reading.

Dear readers,

About an hour ago, while walking home from Noisebridge, I was mugged. Two men who seemed to be in their mid-twenties, one dark-skinned gentleman and one lighter-skinned, wearing black hoodies and jeans attacked me at the corner of Fillmore and Waller streets. The dark-skinned man looped his arm around my throat roughly and yanked me to the floor, catching my bag as I fell and pulling it above me.

“Give me everything you’ve got!” he yelled at me.

“Hold on! Hold on!” I said.

I was on the floor in an instant and trying to find the strap of my bag. I couldn’t, he pulled it above my head, and the two men bolted as fast as they could.

As I got up, I pulled out my phone from my pocket and dialed 9-1-1. A few minutes later a police car sped up to me, I waved at it, and the officer inside rolled down his window as he slowed. He asked me a few questions, including asking for a brief description and the direction the perps ran. I told him, he said he’d be right back, and he sped off.

A few minutes later he returned empty handed. I tweeted. I filed a police report.

Inside my beige one-strap bag was a 15” MacBook Pro laptop, (serial number W89410HRB22) one with a specially-ordered matte display. (I hate the glossy ones.) There was also the laptop charger, my Samsung mobile phone charger, and a bunch of other odds-and-ends, including two Rubik’s cubes. All told, it was pretty expensive: upwards of about $2,500. While I’m pretty sure the data on my laptop is (mostly) backed up safely, my pen-and-paper notebook, which I’ve carried with me for more than two years and is full of irreplaceable notes and memories, was also stolen. That’s hard copy, and can’t be backed up digitally. Damn.

I don’t have a budget for replacing this stuff. Some of it can’t be replaced. I’m taking the somewhat uncharacteristic step of asking you to donate whatever amount that you can to me through the donation button below to help me weather the budget crunch I’m going to have to deal with in the next couple of months as I replace my equipment. It’s particularly bad timing; I just bought airfare for the upcoming CSPH conference as well as a conference ticket for the Poly Leadership Summit in Seattle, which I have yet to purchase travel for.

HELP MAYMAY REPLACE STOLEN EQUIPMENT AFTER STREET MUGGING:

If you can’t offer me financial support, then please, please, please simply take the time to tweet about this blog post. Muggings rarely end with stolen goods returned to their owners, but the ones that do all have one thing in common: people are able to identify the goods quickly because word gets around. Here are some 140-character postings you can use to help me out. (Consider it a karmic investment.)

• Help @maymaym recover from getting mugged on the street in #SF. His laptop and bag was stolen. Help him out: http://ur1.ca/1mqz0 Pls RT—thx!
• Activist @maymaym’s laptop stolen in SF street mugging. Chip in to help replace it http://ur1.ca/1mqz0 and/or RT to get item description out
• See 15″ MacBook Pro laptop w/matte screen selling in Bay Area in odd circumstances? Contact @maymaym. Was stolen: http://ur1.ca/1mqz0 Pls RT

Alternatively, of course, write your own tweet or cross-post this entry and include a link back to this blog post.

So, yeah, it’s kind of been a shitty month. Thanks for your help, in whatever form it may take.

This was originally published on my other blog.

This entry was originally published at my other blog. I’m cross-posting it here in order to make sure it gets copied to more servers, as some people have suggested I’ll face a cease and desist order for publishing it in the first place. Please help distribute this important information by freely copying and republishing this post under the conditions of my CC-BY-NC-ND license: provide me with attribution and a (real) back link, and you are free to republish an unaltered version of this post wherever you like. Thanks.

A few nights ago, I received an email from Editor of EdenFantasys’s SexIs Magazine, Judy Cole, asking me to modify this Kink On Tap brief I published that cites Lorna D. Keach’s writing. Judy asked me to “provide attribution and a link back to” SexIs Magazine. An ordinary enough request soon proved extraordinarily unethical when I discovered that EdenFantasys has invested a staggering amount of time and money to develop and implement a technology platform that actively denies others the courtesy of link reciprocity, a courtesy on which the ethical Internet is based.

While what they’re doing may not be illegal, EdenFantasys has proven itself to me to be an unethical and unworthy partner, in business or otherwise. Its actions are blatantly hypocritical, as I intend to show in detail in this post. Taking willful and self-serving advantage of those not technically savvy is a form of inexcusable oppression, and none of us should tolerate it from companies who purport to be well-intentioned resources for a community of sex-positive individuals.

For busy or non-technical readers, see the next section, Executive Summary, to quickly understand what EdenFantasys is doing, why it’s unethical, and how it affects you whether you’re a customer, a contributor, or a syndication partner. For the technical reader, the Technical Details section should provide ample evidence in the form of a walkthrough and sample code describing the unethical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) techniques EdenFantasys, aka. Web Merchants, Inc., is engaged in. For anyone who wants to read further, I provide an Editorial section in which I share some thoughts about what you can do to help combat these practices and bring transparency and trust—not the sabotage of trust EdenFantasys enacts—to the market.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Internet sex toy retailer Web Merchants, Inc., which bills itself as the “sex shop you can trust” and does business under the name EdenFantasys, has implemented technology on their websites that actively interferes with contributors’ content, intercepts outgoing links, and alters republished content so that links in the original work are redirected to themselves. Using techniques widely acknowledged as unethical by Internet professionals and that are arguably in violation of major search engines’ policies, EdenFantasys’s publishing platform has effectively outsourced the task of “link farming” (a questionable Search Engine Marketing [SEM] technique) to sites with which they have “an ongoing relationship,” such as AlterNet.org, other large news hubs, and individual bloggers’ blogs.

Articles published on EdenFantasys websites, such as the “community” website SexIs Magazine, contain HTML crafted to look like links, but aren’t. When visited by a typical human user, a program written in JavaScript and included as part of the web pages is automatically downloaded and intercepts clicks on these “link-like” elements, fetching their intended destination from the server and redirecting users there. Due to the careful and deliberate implementation, the browser’s status bar is made to appear as though the link is legitimate, and that a destination is provided as expected.

For non-human visitors, including automated search engine indexing programs such as Googlebot, the “link” remains non-functional, making the article a search engine’s dead-end or “orphan” page whose only functional links are those whose destination is EdenFantasys’s own web presence. This makes EdenFantasys’ website(s) a self-referential black hole that provides no reciprocity for contributors who author content, nor for any website ostensibly “linked” to from article content. At the same time, EdenFantasys editors actively solicit inbound links from individuals and organizations through “link exchanges” and incentive programs such as “awards” and “free” sex toys, as well as syndicating SexIs Magazine content such that the content is programmatically altered in order to create multiple (real) inbound links to EdenFantasys’s websites after republication on their partner’s media channels.

How EdenFantasys’s unethical practices have an impact on you

Regardless of who you are, EdenFantasys’s unethical practices have a negative impact on you and, indeed, on the Internet as a whole.

• If you’re an EdenFantasys employee, people will demand answers from you regarding the unethical practices of your (hopefully former) employer. While you are working for EdenFantasys, you’re seriously soiling your reputation in the eyes of ethical Internet professionals. Ignorance is no excuse for the lack of ethics on the programmers’ part, and it’s a shoddy one for everyone else; you should be aware of your company’s business practices because you represent them and they, in turn, represent you.
• If you’re a partner or contributor (reviewer, affiliate, blogger), while you’re providing EdenFantasys with inbound links or writing articles for them and thereby propping them up higher in search results, EdenFantasys is not returning the favor to you (when they are supposed to be doing so). Moreover, they’re attaching your handle, pseudonym, or real name directly to all of their link farming (i.e., spamming) efforts. They look like they’re linking to you and they look like their content is syndicated fairly, but they’re actually playing dirty. They’re going the extra mile to ensure search engines like Google do not recognize the links in articles you write. They’re trying remarkably hard to make certain that all roads lead to EdenFantasys, but none lead outside of it; no matter what the “link,” search engines see it as stemming from and leading to EdenFantasys. The technically savvy executives of Web Merchants, Inc. are using you without giving you a fair return on your efforts. Moreover, EdenFantasys is doing this in a way that preys upon people’s lack of technical knowledge—potentially your own as well as your readership’s. Do you want to keep doing business with people like that?
• If you’re a customer, you’re monetarily supporting a company that essentially amounts to a glorified yet subtle spammer. If you hate spam, you should hate the unethical practices that lead to spam’s perpetual reappearance, including the practices of companies like Web Merchants, Inc. EdenFantasys’s unethical practices may not be illegal, but they are unabashedly a hair’s width away from it, just like many spammers’. If you want to keep companies honest and transparent, if you really want a “sex shop you can trust,” this is relevant to you because EdenFantasys is not it. If you want to purchase from a retailer that truly strives to offer a welcoming, trustworthy community for those interested in sex positivity and sexuality, pay close attention and take action. For ideas about what you can do, please see the “What you can do” section, below.
• If you’ve never heard about EdenFantasys before, but you care about a fair and equal-opportunity Internet, this is relevant to you because what EdenFantasys is doing takes advantage of non-tech-savvy people in order to slant the odds of winning the search engine game in their favor. They could have done this fairly, and I personally believe that they would have succeeded. Their sites are user-friendly, well-designed, and solidly implemented. However, they chose to behave maliciously by not providing credit where credit is due, failing to follow through on agreements with their own community members and contributors, and sneakily utilizing other publishers’ web presences to play a very sad zero-sum game that they need not have entered in the first place. In the Internet I want, nobody takes malicious advantage of those less skilled than they are because their own skill should speak for itself. Isn’t that the Internet and, indeed, the future you want, too?

TECHNICAL DETAILS

What follows is a technical exploration of the way the EdenFantasys technology works. It is my best-effort evaluation of the process in as much detail as I can manage within strict self-imposed time constraints. If any of this information is incorrect, I’d welcome any and all clarifications provided by the EdenFantasys CTO and technical team in an appropriately transparent, public, and ethical manner. (You’re welcome—nay, encouraged—to leave a comment.)

Although I’m unconvinced that EdenFantasys understands this, it is the case that honesty is the best policy—especially on the Internet, where everyone has the power of “View source.”

The “EF Framework” for obfuscating links

Article content written by contributors on SexIs Magazine pages is published after all links are replaced with a <span> element bearing the class of linklike and a unique id attribute value. This apparently happens across any and all content published by Web Merchants, Inc.’s content management system, but I’ll be focusing on Lorna D. Keach’s post entitled SexFeed:Anti-Porn Activists Now Targeting Female Porn Addicts for the sake of example.

These fake links look like this in HTML:

And according to Theresa Flynt, vice president of marketing for Hustler video, <span class="linklike" ID="EFLink_68034_fe64d2">female consumers make up 56% of video sales.</span>

This originally published HTML is what visitors without JavaScript enabled (and what search engine indexers) see when they access the page. Note that the <span> is not a real link, even though it is made to look like one. (See Figure 1; click it to enlarge.)

Figure 1:

In a typical user’s browser, when this page is loaded, a JavaScript program is executed that mutates these “linklike” elements into <a> elements, retaining the “linklike” class and the unique id attribute values. However, no value is provided in the href (link destination) attribute of the <a> element. See Figure 2.

Figure 2:

The JavaScript program is downloaded in two parts from the endpoint at http://cdn3.edenfantasys.com/Scripts/Handler/jsget.ashx. The first part, retrieved in this example by accessing the URI at http://cdn3.edenfantasys.com/Scripts/Handler/jsget.ashx?i=jq132_cnf_jdm12_cks_cm_ujsn_udm_stt_err_jsdm_stul_ael_lls_ganl_jqac_jtv_smg_assf_agrsh&v_14927484.12.0, loads the popular jQuery JavaScript framework as well as custom code called the “EF Framework”.

The EF Framework contains code called the DBLinkHandler, an object that parses the <span> “linklike” elements (called “pseudolinks” in the EF Framework code) and retrieves the real destination. The entirety of the DBLinkHandler object is shown in code listing 1, below. Note the code contains a function called handle that performs the mutation of the <span> “linklike” elements (seen primarily on lines 8 through 16) and, based on the prefix of each elements’ id attribute value, two key functions (BuildUrlForElement and GetUrlByUrlID, whose signatures are on lines 48 and 68, respectively) interact to set up the browser navigation after responding to clicks on the fake links.

var DBLinkHandler = {
    pseudoLinkPrefix: "EFLink_",
    generatedAHrefPrefix: "ArtLink_",
    targetBlankClass: "target_blank",
    jsLinksCssLinkLikeClass: "linklike",
    handle: function () {
        var pseudolinksSpans = $("span[id^='" + DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix + "']");
        pseudolinksSpans.each(function () {
            var psLink = $(this);
            var cssClass = $.trim(psLink.attr("class"));
            var target = "";
            var id = psLink.attr("id").replace(DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix, DBLinkHandler.generatedAHrefPrefix);
            var href = $("<a></a>").attr({
                id: id,
                href: ""
            }).html(psLink.html());
            if (psLink.hasClass(DBLinkHandler.targetBlankClass)) {
                href.attr({
                    target: "_blank"
                });
                cssClass = $.trim(cssClass.replace(DBLinkHandler.targetBlankClass, ""))
            }
            if (cssClass != "") {
                href.attr({
                    "class": cssClass
                })
            }
            psLink.before(href).remove()
        });
        var pseudolinksAHrefs = $("a[id^='" + DBLinkHandler.generatedAHrefPrefix + "']");
        pseudolinksAHrefs.live("mouseup", function (event) {
            DBLinkHandler.ArtLinkClick(this)
        });
        pseudolinksSpans = $("span[id^='" + DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix + "']");
        pseudolinksSpans.live("click", function (event) {
            if (event.button != 0) {
                return
            }
            var psLink = $(this);
            var url = DBLinkHandler.BuildUrlForElement(psLink, DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix);
            if (!psLink.hasClass(DBLinkHandler.targetBlankClass)) {
                RedirectTo(url)
            } else {
                OpenNewWindow(url)
            }
        })
    },
    BuildUrlForElement: function (psLink, prefix) {
        var psLink = $(psLink);
        var sufix = psLink.attr("id").toString().substring(prefix.length);
        var id = (sufix.indexOf("_") != -1) ? sufix.substring(0, sufix.indexOf("_")) : sufix;
        var url = DBLinkHandler.GetUrlByUrlID(id);
        if (url == "") {
            url = EF.Constants.Links.Url
        }
        var end = sufix.substring(sufix.indexOf("_") + 1);
        var anchor = "";
        if (end.indexOf("_") != -1) {
            anchor = "#" + end.substring(0, end.lastIndexOf("_"))
        }
        url += anchor;
        return url
    },
    ArtLinkClick: function (psLink) {
        var url = DBLinkHandler.BuildUrlForElement(psLink, DBLinkHandler.generatedAHrefPrefix);
        $(psLink).attr("href", url)
    },
    GetUrlByUrlID: function (UrlID) {
        var url = "";
        UrlRequest = $.ajax({
            type: "POST",
            url: "/LinkLanguage/AjaxLinkHandling.aspx",
            dataType: "json",
            async: false,
            data: {
                urlid: UrlID
            },
            cache: false,
            success: function (data) {
                if (data.status == "Success") {
                    url = data.url;
                    return url
                }
            },
            error: function (xhtmlObj, status, error) {}
        });
        return url
    }
};

Once the mutation is performed and all the content “links” are in the state shown in Figure 2, above, an event listener has been bound to the anchors that captures a click event. This is done using prototypal extension, aka. classic prototypal inheritance, in another part of the code, the live function on line 2,280 of the (de-minimized) jsget.ashx program, as shown in code listing 2, here:

        live: function (G, F) {
            var E = o.event.proxy(F);
            E.guid += this.selector + G;
            o(document).bind(i(G, this.selector), this.selector, E);
            return this
        },

At this point, clicking on one of the “pseudolinks” triggers the EF Framework to call code set up by the GetUrlByUrlID function from within the DBLinkHandler object, initiating an XMLHttpRequest (XHR) connection to the AjaxLinkHandling.aspx server-side application. The request is an HTTP POST containing only one parameter, called urlid, and its value matches a substring from within the id value of the “pseudolinks.” In this example, the id attribute contains a value of EFLink_68034_fe64d2, which means that the unique ID POST’ed to the server is 68034. This is shown in Figure 3, below.

Figure 3:

The response from the server, shown in Figure 4, is also simple. If successful, the intended destination is retrieved by the GetUrlByUrlID object’s success function (on line 79 of Code Listing 1, above) and the user is redirected to that web address, as if the link was a real one all along. The real destination, in this case to CNN.com, is thereby only revealed after the XHR request returns a successful reply.

Figure 4:

All of this obfuscation effectively blinds machines such as the Googlebot who are not JavaScript-capable from seeing and following these links. It deliberately provides no increased Pagerank for the link destination (as a real link would normally do) despite being “linked to” from EdenFantasys’s SexIs Magazine article. While the intended destination in this example link was at CNN.com, it could just as easily have been—and is, in other examples—links to the blogs of EdenFantasys community members and, indeed, everyone else linked to from a SexIs Magazine article or potentially any website operated by Web Merchants, Inc. that makes use of this technology.

The EdenFantasys Outsourced Link-Farm

In addition to creating a self-referential black hole with no gracefully degrading outgoing links, EdenFantasys also actively performs link-stuffing through its syndicated content “relationships,” underhandedly creating an outsourced and distributed link-farm, just like a spammer. The difference is that this spammer (Web Merchants, Inc. aka EdenFantasys) is cleverly crowd-sourcing high-value, high-quality content from its own “community.”

Articles published at SexIs Magazine are syndicated in full to other large hub sites, such as AlterNet.org. Continuing with the above example post by Lorna D. Keach, Anti-Porn Activists Now Targeting Female Porn Addicts, we can see that this content was republished on AlterNet.org shortly after original publication through EdenFantasys’ website on May 3^rd at http://www.alternet.org/story/146774/christian_anti-porn_activists_now_targeting_female_. However, a closer look at the HTML code of the republication shows that each and every link contained within the article points to the same destination: the same article published on SexIs Magazine, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5:

Naturally, these syndicated links provided to third-party sites by EdenFantasys are real and function as expected to both human visitors and to search engines indexing the content. The result is “natural,” high-value links to the EdenFantasys website from these third-party sites; EdenFantasys doesn’t merely scrounge pagerank from harvesting the sheer number of incoming links, but as each link’s anchor text is different, they are setting themselves up to match more keywords in search engine results, keywords that the original author likely did not intend to direct to them. Offering search engines the implication that EdenFantasys.com contains the content described in the anchor text, when in fact EdenFantasys merely acts as an intermediary to the information, is very shady, to say the least.

In addition to syndication, EdenFantasys employs human editors to do community outreach. These editors follow up with publishers, including individual bloggers (such as myself), and request that any references to published material provide attribution and a link back to us, to use the words of Judy Cole, Editor of SexIs Magazine in an email she sent to me (see below), and presumably many others. EdenFantasys has also been known to request “link exchanges,” and offer incentive programs that encouraged bloggers to add the EdenFantasys website to their blogroll or sidebar in order to help raise both parties search engine ranking, when in fact EdenFantasys is not actually providing reciprocity.

More information about EdenFantasys’s unethical practices, which are not limited to technical subterfuge, can be obtained via AAGBlog.com.

EDITORIAL

It is unsurprising that the distributed, subtle, and carefully crafted way EdenFantasys has managed to crowd-source links has (presumably) remained unpenalized by search engines like Google. It is similarly unsurprising that nontechnical users such as the contributors to SexIs Magazine would be unaware of these deceptive practices, or that they are complicit in promoting them.

This is no mistake on the part of EdenFantasys, nor is it a one-off occurrence. The amount of work necessary to implement the elaborate system I’ve described is also not even remotely feasible for a rogue programmer to accomplish, far less accomplish covertly. No, this is the result of a calculated and decidedly underhanded strategy that originated from the direction of top executives at Web Merchants, Inc. aka EdenFantasys.

It is unfortunate that technically privileged people would be so willing to take advantage of the technically uneducated, particularly under the guise of providing a trusted place for the community which they claim to serve. These practices are exactly the ones that “the sex shop you can trust” should in no way support, far less be actively engaged in. And yet, here is unmistakable evidence that EdenFantasys is doing literally everything it can not only to bolster its own web presence at the cost of others’, but to hide this fact from its understandably non-tech-savvy contributors.

On a personal note, I am angered that I would be contacted by the Editor of SexIs Magazine, and asked to properly “attribute” and provide a link to them when it is precisely that reciprocity which SexIs Magazine would clearly deny me (and everyone else) in return. It was this request originally received over email from Judy Cole, that sparked my investigation outlined above and enabled me to uncover this hypocrisy. The email I received from Judy Cole is republished, in full, here:

From: Judy Cole <luxuryholmes@gmail.com>
Subject: Repost mis-attributed
Date: May 17, 2010 2:42:00 PM PDT
To: kinkontap+viewermail@gmail.com
Cc: Laurel <laurelb@edenfantasys.com>

Hello Emma and maymay,

I am the Editor of the online adult magazine SexIs (http://www.edenfantasys.com/sexis/). You recently picked up and re-posted a story of ours by Lorna Keach that Alternet had already picked up:

http://kinkontap.com/?s=alternet

We were hoping that you might provide attribution and a link back to us, citing us as the original source (as is done on Alternet, with whom we have an ongoing relationship), should you pick up something of ours to re-post in the future.

If you would be interested in having us send you updates on stories that might be of interest, I would be happy to arrange for a member of our editorial staff to do so. (Like your site, by the way. TBK is one of our regular contributors.)

Thanks and Best Regards,

Judy Cole
Editor, SexIs

Judy’s email probably intended to reference the new Kink On Tap briefs that my co-host Emma and I publish, not a search result page on the Kink On Tap website. Specifically, she was talking about this brief: http://KinkOnTap.com/?p=676. I said as much in my reply to Judy:

Hi Judy,

The URL in your email doesn’t actually link to a post. We pick up many stories from AlterNet, as well as a number from SexIs, because we follow both those sources, among others. So, did you mean this following entry?

http://KinkOnTap.com/?p=676

If so, you should know that we write briefs as we find them and provide links to where we found them. We purposefully do not republish or re-post significant portions of stories and we limit our briefs to short summaries in deference to the source. In regards to the brief in question, we do provide attribution to Lorna Keach, and our publication process provides links automatically to, again, the source where we found the article. :) As I’m sure you understand, this is the nature of the Internet. Its distribution capability is remarkable, isn’t it?

Also, while we’d absolutely be thrilled to have you send us updates on stories that might be of interest, we would prefer that you do so in the same way the rest of our community does: by contributing to the community links feed. You can find detailed instructions for the many ways you can do that on our wiki:

http://wiki.kinkontap.com/wiki/Community_links_feed

Congratulations on the continued success of SexIs.

Cheers,
-maymay

At the time when I wrote the email replying to Judy, I was perturbed but could not put my finger on why. Her email upset me because she seemed to be suggesting that our briefs are wholesale “re-posts,” when in fact Emma and I have thoroughly discussed attribution policies and, as mentioned in my reply, settled on a number of practices including a length limit, automated back linking (yes, with real links, go see some Kink On Tap briefs for yourself), and clearly demarcating quotes from the source article in our editorializing to ensure we play fair. Clearly, my somewhat snarky reply betrays my annoyance.

In any event, this exchange prompted me to take a closer look at the Kink On Tap brief I wrote, at the original article, and at the cross-post on AlterNet.org. I never would have imagined that EdenFantasys’s technical subterfuge would be as pervasive as it has proven to be. It’s so deeply embedded in the EdenFantasys publishing platform that I’m willing to give Judy the benefit of the doubt regarding this hypocrisy because she doesn’t seem to understand the difference between a search query and a permalink (something any laymen blogger would grok). This is apparent from her reply to my response:

From: Judy Cole <luxuryholmes@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Repost mis-attributed
Date: May 18, 2010 4:57:59 AM PDT
[…redundant email headers clipped…]

Funny, the URL in my email opens the same link as the one you sent me when I click on it.

Maybe if you pick up one of our stories in future, you could just say something like “so and so wrote for SexIs.” ?

As it stands, it looks as if Lorna wrote the piece for Alternet. Thanks.

Judy

That is the end of our email exchange, and will be for good, unless and until EdenFantasys changes its ways. I will from this point forward endeavor never to publish links to any web property that I know to be owned by Web Merchants, Inc., including EdenFantasys.com. I will also do my best to avoid citing any and all SexIs Magazine articles from here on out, and I encourage everyone who has an interest in seeing honesty on the Internet to follow my lead here.

As some of my friends are currently contributors to SexIs Magazine, I would like all of you to know that I sincerely hope you immediately sever all ties with any and all Web Merchants, Inc. properties, suppliers, and business partners, especially because you are friends and I think your work is too important to be sullied by such a disreputable company. Similarly, I hope you encourage your friends to do the same. I understand that the economy is rough and that some of you may have business contracts bearing legal penalties for breaking them, but I urge you to nevertheless consider looking at this as a cost-benefit analysis: the sooner you break up with EdenFantasys, the happier everyone on the Internet, including you, will be (and besides, you can loose just as much of your reputation, money, and pagerank while being happy as you can being sad).

What you can do

• If you are an EdenFantasys reviewer, a SexIs Magazine contributor, or have any other arrangement with Web Merchants, Inc., write to Judy Cole and demand that content you produce for SexIs Magazine adheres to ethical Internet publication standards. Sever business ties with this company immediately upon receipt of any non-response, or any response that does not adequately address every concern raised in this blog post. (Feel free to leave comments on this post with technical questions, and I’ll do my best to help you sort out any l33t answers.)
• EdenFantasys wants to stack the deck in Google. They do this by misusing your content and harvesting your links. To combat this effort, immediately remove any and all links to EdenFantasys websites and web presences from your websites. Furthermore, do not—I repeat—do not publish new links to EdenFantasys websites, not even in direct reference to this post. Instead, provide enough information, as I have done, so visitors to your blog posts can find their website themselves. In lieu of links to EdenFantasys, link to other bloggers’ posts about this issue. (Such posts will probably be mentioned in the comments section of this post.)
• Boycott EdenFantasys: the technical prowess their website displays does provide a useful shopping experience for some people. However, that in no way obligates you to purchase from their website. If you enjoy using their interface, use it to get information about products you’re interested in, but then go buy those products elsewhere, perhaps from the manufacturers directly.
  • On the recommendation of my friend Dr. Charlie Glickman, I suggest Good Vibrations.

  • On the recommendation of my friend Shanna Katz, I also recommend Fascinations.
• Watch for “improved” technical subterfuge from Web Merchants, Inc. As a professional web developer, I can identify several things EdenFantasys could do to make their unethical practices even harder to spot, and harder to stop. If you have any technical knowledge at all, even if you’re “just” a savvy blogger, you can keep a close watch on EdenFantasys and, if you notice anything that doesn’t sit well with you, speak up about it like I did. Get a professional programmer to look into things for you if you need help; yes, you can make a difference just by remaining vigilant as long as you share what you know and act honestly, and transparently.

If you have additional ideas or recommendations regarding how more people can help keep sex toy retailers honest, please suggest them in the comments.

Update: To report website spamming or any kind of fraud to Google, use the authenticated Spam Report tool.

Update: Google provides much more information about why the kinds of practices EdenFantasys is engaged in degrade the overall web experience for you and me. Read Cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects, and doorway pages at the Google Webmaster Tools help site for additional SEO information. Using Google’s terminology, EdenFantasys’s unethical technology is a very skilled mix of social engineering and “sneaky JavaScript redirects.”

Of the Ten Commandments, only 3 are phrased in the affirmative. The other 7 are phrased as negatives. Why? Doesn’t that seem kind of oppressive to anyone else?

Here’s the Ten Commandments as listed on Wikipedia:

1. I am the Lord your God
2. You shall not make for yourself an idol
3. You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God
4. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy
5. Honor your father and mother
6. You shall not murder
7. You shall not commit adultery
8. You shall not steal
9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor
10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife

Well, it certainly sounds like Insert-Your-Favorite-Deity is having a bit of a power trip. Let’s take a closer look at these commandments, but this time let’s phrase them all in the affirmative.

1. I am the Lord your God
2. You shall identify falsehoods and treat them as such
3. You shall respect the power of words, names, and language
4. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy
5. Honor your father and mother
6. You shall let other living beings live
7. You shall honor the relationship contracts that you enter and those of others
8. You shall honor the property of others
9. You shall uphold truth as you have seen it
10. You shall strive for your own happiness

Doesn’t that sound infinitely better already? Interestingly, I feel that this rephrasing not only covers more ground (e.g., “You shall honor the property of others” turns “You shall not steal” into protections against stealing and vandalism), but it’s also a lot more inclusive of diversity.

Now let’s take this one step further and rephrase even the ones that were originally affirmative so that they not only reflect positive ideals, but also engender self-empowerment in the reader. Now my ten commandments read as follows:

1. I am lord over my own body and mind
2. I identify falsehoods and treat them as such
3. My power comes from words, names, and language
4. I honor my memories and choose my traditions
5. I honor my chosen family
6. I protect and create free life
7. I demand respect for the relationship contracts I enter and grant respect to those of others
8. I gift wealth to others
9. I uphold my own convictions
10. I spread joy

I wonder what kind of world we would live in today if this list had been the Ten Commandments so fervently adhered to. Since nothing in life is unchangeable, I’m going to start believing that these self-empowering words are the Ten Commandments for me.

I’m very excited to announce a new initiative that I’ve begun working on in collaboration with Emma, co-unorganizer of KinkForAll Providence and my co-host on Kink On Tap. The new project, called SexEdEverywhere, is going to be our biggest and most challenging project to date. It also has enormous potential.

(This announcement was originally made on another blog of mine, but I’m cross-posting it here to spread the word rapidly.)

The core of the project is a sexual health education and empowerment video campaign highlighting the reality that we learn about sex from disparate sources in many locations. I believe that the time has come for people to realize that “sex education” is not, has never been, and never should be confined to health class. I believe that young people, sexuality minorities, and certain other disenfranchised groups (still including, sadly, women) have an enormously important role to play in reforming the empty-vessel, top-down model of education and turning it into a peer-to-peer meritocracy where accurate information wins out over misinformation because it saves lives rather than being politically expedient.

And I believe that this change is only possible when it comes from the very people who need such change most: young men, women, and other people like you and me.

That’s why Emma and I have put together a proposal for the project and submitted it to the International Women’s Health Coalition Young Visionaries contest, a contest that, if we win, would seed our project with $1000 USD of necessary funding to get it off the ground. Part of the criteria for winning the contest is based on popular vote, which means I need your votes to win.

If this sounds like a project worth supporting, please go to the Sex Ed Everywhere IWHC voting page and click on “Vote” right next to our picture. And then come back and vote again the next day, and every day until voting ends on March 25, which I understand is totally fair for the competition!

Here is an excerpt of our proposal for the IWHC Young Visionaries contest:

With the $1000 grant from the IWHC Young Visionaries contest we will fund a sexual health education and empowerment video campaign that highlights the reality that we learn about sex from disparate sources in many locations. The heart of this campaign, which we call SexEdEverywhere (“SEE”), will begin with a competition calling for submissions of 30 to 90 second videos that will be reviewed and featured on a network of 5 (or more) microsites over time. The campaign will be based at SexEdEverywhere.com, a website that will actively engage the people to whom it will speak: women and youth across the globe.

[…]

Our vision of lasting change is to create a world in which accurate information about sexual health and freedoms reaches more students and young people than suffer from misinformation or a knowledge deficit. By engaging young people in the creation and distribution of knowledge, we hope to help them recognize their power to enact social justice in their local communities. This would be a world in which women and young people are aware of their sexual and reproductive rights from an early age, and are empowered to make informed decisions for themselves and educate those around them.

Please vote for SexEdEverywhere and help us SEE a world where everyone is aware of their sexual and reproductive rights! Thank you for your daily voting support!

I quit my job today. I’d been working there for less than 4 months, and it’s one of (if not the) best normative corporate gigs I’ve ever had. And yet I handed in my 2 weeks’ notice today, without anything “lined up” and no concrete idea about how I’m going to make a living. And in this blog post, I’m going to tell you why I think quitting was the only sensical thing for me to do.

Economy of opportunity

I recall that when I first came to San Francisco and started looking for work, the first interview I had began with a very telling exchange.

“May I ask you a personal question?” the interviewer asked me.

“Of course,” I said, bracing for a question about my sex life, which I’m very open about online, or about my views on education, which are radical if not heretical. My beliefs clash so dramatically with so much of traditional Western society, and yet I’d never been asked a directly personal question at a job interview before. I was almost looking forward to it. But the question I got wasn’t anything I could have expected.

I was asked: “Are you crazy coming to San Francisco without a job in this economy?”

“I’m sorry?” I said, surprised.

“You said you got an apartment before you had a job lined up.”

“Yes, that’s right,” I confirmed.

“That’s very brave,” the interviewer said.

I smiled silently to myself, mentally noting that my interview of this company, the one I conduct simultaneously as any company’s hiring managers were interviewing me, was showing results. I reasoned that I probably wouldn’t want to work there.

“I don’t think of it as being brave,” I said after a moment’s pause. “I choose to believe that, with my skills, I can find a way to do whatever I want. I believe everyone can, if they only believed it, too. So I don’t need to be brave, I just need to be resourceful.”

I didn’t end up in that job but, obviously, I did find a job quickly because otherwise I wouldn’t be quitting that job now. :)

I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a strange breed. A careful look at my résumé will reveal two somewhat odd things. First, that I’ve almost never kept a single “9-5″ (job) for more than a year. Second, the entire education section, often mistakenly believed to be “required” in résumés, is—and always has been—completely missing.

It’s therefore unsurprising that a very common question I get asked during interviews (and parties, and when I’m out at bars, and basically all the time with everyone, always) is, “where did you get your degree?” It’s a funny question because I don’t have a degree. I don’t have a high school diploma. I don’t even have a GED. In fact, I never actually graduated from middle school.

“Why don’t you go to college? You’d love university!” I’m frequently told. Although I love learning, and although I believe that education is one of if not the most important thing in the entirety of human experience, of life, our society, species, and even existence, I vehemently fought to free myself of the poisonous, debilitating reach of schools and institutionalized education way back in 2^nd grade.

The fight was painful and unnecessary, damaging me like almost nothing else possibly could. I feel less capable, less skilled, less intelligent, and a less happy person today because of that miserable fight to leave school. However, I believe I would have been even worse off succumbing to the incessant dulling of my creativity had I relented to “the educational system.”

When they learn some of my history, people are often quick to credit my current abilities to this dreadful experience, or else they dismiss my insistence that I deserved better by saying, “No pain, no gain.” But I reject the cruel idea that misery is necessary to build character or strength, as well as the misguided compliment that I am somehow better, stronger, or more abled than “normal” people for having experienced a largely unhappy life. Although I certainly learned a lot during my fight to leave the school system, that was a result of my human nature, not an inherent characteristic of the painful struggle.

My traditional successes, such as having little problem finding well-paying work, for instance, coupled with my lack of formal education makes me exceptional only in the literal sense: I do not meet most people’s expectations in many ways. But my unique experiences also exposed me to a profound truth that many others aren’t as fortunate to be routinely confronted with: we live in an economy of opportunity. We always have, and we always will. As Tim Robbins is fond of saying, the problem is never resources, it’s resourcefulness.

You might be familiar with Warren Buffet’s well-known advice, “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” But the whole of his sentence was, if [investors] insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. In other words, it is always the right time to do the right thing, regardless of the market’s current circumstance.

The value of appropriate valuation

Conventional wisdom says I shouldn’t quit a good job in a rough time. But it’s a matter of valuing appropriate valuation: even though they provide negligible or no monetary income, I value my “personal” projects, the Kink On Tap sexuality netcast, the free (as in free and as in freedom) KinkForAll unconferences, the “not safe for work” and subversive exploration of sexually submissive masculinity, the various digital outreach and educational efforts for queer people that I help with, and many other projects of mine, far, far higher than the salary I was getting working in my day job. And besides, I have been defying conventional wisdom my whole life.

When I was a pre-teen, I was diagnosed with early-onset bipolar disorder and handed medications. After 6 years being told it was impossible, I had completely stopped taking the pills my doctors were still prescribing. I’ve remained clinically “stable” (doctor-speak for “just fine, thank you very much”) for the 7 years since.

Throughout my school and early teen years, I was told lies about reality by caring but fearful and brainwashed adults. Lies like “you’ll never get a job if you don’t graduate” are, depressingly, still repeated to children today. Of course, a quick look through the histories of some of the most successful and influential people on the planet—people like Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Rosa Parks, and Mae West—show that this fearmongering is complete rubbish.

Just as I love learning but hated schooling, I love doing good work but hate working at jobs. I’m quitting my day job because I feel similarly about it to the way I felt about school. The idea that people have to sacrifice what they want to do by segregating it into whatever crevices of their lives are left after they forfeit 8 hours a day (and often much more than that) to their job is a reprehensible illusion that the school system conditions many to accept and which corporatism, consumerism, and classism perpetuate every day.

The institutionalized indoctrination laughably dubbed education that’s widely deployed today is a travesty, a prison for the young. Similarly, the rigid, outdated understanding of “having a job,” especially as the only valid form of “contributing to society,” is an economic jail for the working class.

To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. Now I will also no longer let my job interfere with my work.

Pricelessness and survival

Many of our current societal systems are unsustainable. We all know it. We’ve all felt the effects.

Global financial crisis. Depreciation of college degrees. Ecological disasters. Massive civil unrest resulting in groups of unhappy, violent people (“terrorists”). If we as the human race are going to survive the century, we simply have to change the rules of this game. And that starts with normal people like you and me committing to doing what we want to do, not what we were told we have to do. I wasn’t comfortable playing by the rules of the so-called well-schooled majority, and I’m no longer comfortable playing by the rules of this economy. I now aim to change it.

And I’m not willing to merely survive, because I demand excellence and happiness. I demand it of myself, and so I demand it of you. Watching the clock while thinking about doing other, “non-job” things is not a valuable investment to me.

Unlike school, however, at work I also have a responsibility to others, not just myself. Whereas poor performance at school largely hinders only oneself, poor performance—and, by extension, lack of interest—at work directly impacts co-workers. And y’know what, I have more than enough respect for my co-workers to believe that they should be working with someone who really wants to be there, because that person exists.

I believe that everyone should be thusly respected. Was it a mistake to take this job and quit only 4 months down the line? Maybe. But mistakes we learn from are good things. It is right of me, upon realizing that I no longer want to be where I was, to leave, to change my status-quo. It would be wrong to pull up a facade of either indifference or resignation because neither of those can inspire excellence.

On a personal note, it’s worth saying that I’ve quit jobs before but, this time, I didn’t quit because I no longer like the job. If I were a different person, or the same person 2 years ago, the job I had would’ve been great. This time I quit because I’ve finally gotten to the point where my skills are well-developed enough and my desires well-formed enough that I know enough about what I want to do, and I believe that I can do it.

I believe there is more value in doing, being, and getting what I want than in sacrificing it. I believe that there is more richness in the world than can be measured with all the world’s riches.

Doing good work is priceless not because its execution is necessarily of superb quality, but because its value can only be determined by the people who find it useful to them. But I can’t magically transport us out of the economic jail of living paycheck-to-paycheck that so many of us are in. It’s going to take many intermediate steps to get us from here to a place where the value that people create by doing what they love is also what sustains us.

And I have only the vaguest of idealistic dreams for how I’m going to help get us there. But I do have those dreams, and I can’t ignore them.

They say that when there’s a will, there’s a way. Well, I have more will, more skill, more knowledge, and thus more opportunity today than ever before. Now, imagine what kind of world we would inhabit if you, your friends, and all the people who look up to you understood that their opportunities today, like mine, are greater than they’ve ever been before.

That, dear fellows, is the value of passion. And no matter what your schoolteachers or bosses might tell you about “the way things are,” passion—excellence, not resigned acceptance—is the key to survival.

This post was originally published on my other blog, a much more Not Safe For Work site, at maybemaimed.com. However, it turns out that blog is censored in various countries, such as Dubai. Gotta love Internet censorship. Sigh. Anyways, since I think the material there is interesting and technology-relevant, and in order to help people avoid Internet censorship, I’m cross-posting the contents here. Enjoy.

Social media. Internet publishing. Privacy. Three phrases that have seemed to be at tenacious odds with each other in a multitude of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For people like me, who have progressive views about sexuality, these three things are constantly on our minds. How do we participate in the online revolution without being forced to “come out” about every sex act we enjoy, some of which are still illegal thanks to draconian restrictions on sexual freedom, even (and especially?) in America.

This month, a new social network called Blackbox Republic (BBR) is attempting to tackle this head-on and aims to create a place for, as Marshall Kirkpatrick put it, this particular large and unserved group of people. Although BBR is clearly a business, it’s a business whose creators have laudable intentions for positive social and cultural change. In that respect, and in many others, Blackbox Republic is worth a close look.

I was informed about the venture via Clarisse Thorn many months ago. I got in touch with BBR and signed up for a limited-offer “founder” account—basically a private beta. The founder account gave me free access to the features of the BlackboxRepublic.com website for what would normally be a $25 monthly subscription fee.

So, without further ado, here are my impressions about Blackbox Republic, and how its launch may be just what the Internet needs to get us moving in the right direction with regards to personal privacy, and mainstream awareness of the different needs of different people on the Internet.

Mainstream sex-positivity or a VIP room in cyberspace? Or both?

Over the past few months, Blackbox Republic has been building a marketing arsenal of anticipation and intrigue. Its creators are successful in non-sexuality-focused spheres of influence: Sam Lawrence is the respected former Chief Marketing Officer of Jive Software, Inc., and April Donato, has experience in community management. They also both jive (pun!) well with the sex-positive movement, discussing it at length in the early stages of their marketing efforts after de-cloaking the new company.

In an interview for Social Networking Watch, Sam Lawrence said,

[Sam Lawrence:] The co-founder [April Donato] and myself are part of [the sex-positive] community. Sex positive means that your sexuality is not an issue. You don’t have an issue with other people’s sexuality. You’re open to what other people are interested in and what their boundaries are, and you’re open with your own.

[…]

[Interviewer:] To what extent do you practice a sex-positive lifestyle?

[Sam Lawrence:] From the perspective of sex not being an issue, I think that love is generated by people being open enough about who they are as people to put all of themselves out on the table. As far as putting all of myself on the table, it’s something that I do every single day.

I have an enormous amount of respect for anyone able to so capably present themselves as authentically as Sam does. On the eve of KinkForAll New York City 2, I met Sam and April at one of their “founder meetups” and had the chance to talk to them face-to-face. Our conversation revolved around the importance of steadfastly holding true to one’s own desires and having appropriate places to express those things with appropriate communication tools. I really liked their emphasis on self-identification over labeling throughout our discussion.

I also really appreciated the way that Sam and April spoke about their target audience. Blackbox Republic will welcome everyone, but it’s not designed for everyone, and I think that’s a good thing. David Evans writing at Online Dating Post says,

BBR has room for everyone, but is not for everyone. Definitely catering to non-mainstream folks, it will soon feature a constellation of micro-communities, or groups, called Camps. BBR doesn’t tell people how to organize their camps; we’ll do it ourselves, thankyouverymuch.

So is Blackbox Republic a dating site, or a social network? Well, both, kind of. Part of BBR’s slogan includes, “Dates will happen. Sex will happen. It matters how you get there.” The implication, of course, being that the current suite of tools for finding love or play online—sites like Alt.com, OkCupid, and countless personals boards—focus too strongly on the end result, turning matchmaking into a meat market instead of the natural process of getting to know one another. The focus BBR is placing on each person’s “journey” is an extremely welcome paradigm shift in the online dating world.

Along with the welcome and (IMHO, painfully obviously better) new approach to online dating, however, Blackbox Republic faces some real challenges. For new users, the service costs a minimum of $5 a month to use (and $9 per month for new sign-ups starting in 2010), which gives access to basic features like a personal profile. For $25 a month, members get added features like the ability to list real-world meet-ups, send private messages, and partake in a virtual “gifting” economy (think LiveJournal’s “virtual gifts“).

For that reason, BBR has been called a “members-only club.” There are some legitimate differences of opinion as to whether this is a positive or a negative thing. In a press release over the summer, Blackbox Republic is reported as stating:

Blackbox Republic will be a members-only experience that will unite the sex-positive community and give them a personal, private and secure way to connect online and in person.

Writing for ZDNet, Oliver Marks likens Blackbox Republic’s approach to online dating to the fashionability of owning an Apple computer:

Think of Blackbox Republic as a fashionable online ‘members-only’ club where you might expect to meet people with similar interests to your own, and ideally the person of your dreams. […] Blackbox Republic is arguably an Apple product to Facebook’s Windows look & feel: a much more intimately crafted, fuller featured personal user interface which should appeal to Apple generation sensibilities.

Many pages on Blackbox Republic's website showcase fashionably dressed women.

Indeed, almost everything about Blackbox Republic’s marketing and design seems to me as though it’s positioning itself as the equivalent of the hip, new, and exclusive nightclub down the street. There are images of super-chic women in short skirts and tight pants all over the Blackbox Republic promotional pages—way more than there are pictures of men. I was (yet again) put-off by this over-prevalence of women in all advertising material.

This isn’t really a criticism of the site, but rather a statement of disappointment that the marketing gurus behind the effort seemed to me to have succumbed to overwhelming cultural pressure to sell their site with old-school sex appeal: women’s sex appeal, of course. How…traditional.

Not only is the Blackbox Republic intro video markedly gender-skewed, but somewhere along the line Sam and April decided to drop the “sex-positive” phraseology from their marketing:

[L]ike most startups, Blackbox decided it needed to change up. Observers were confused by the sex-positive label.

Oh well. I think this just goes to further showcase how much more social change we really need in our culture.

However, while the clubby, cliquey feel is totally my own subjective perception, there are other issues at play here, too. Most notably, as Clarisse Thorn and many others rightfully remind us very often, the sex-positive movement is overwhelmingly white, middle- to upper-class, college-educated, and privileged in a huge number of ways that many people often take for granted. Even without a for-pay social network, not everyone who wants to can participate in the great-sex-for-everyone party atmosphere of many sex-positive niches.

Will creating a “members-only club” of sex-positivity on the Internet really be a positive thing for “the movement”? Well, maybe. Although it has the potential to exclude lower-income people from the experience, who are sadly also often the people with the most pressing need for the kinds of privacy-related tools BBR offers (school teachers spring to mind!), one upside is that Blacbox Republic promises to pledge a portion of membership dues to a charity of the user’s choice.

It’s $25 a month and $5 of those community dues go to charity. One way to think about it is if you’re sex-positive, you can either spend money on expensive coffee every month or upgrade your social life and meet other sex-positive people like you.

Inescapably, the major selling point of any social network is, of course, the network! If your friends aren’t on Twitter, then you’re probably not going to find it useful. The same truth holds for Blackbox Republic: if the users you want to interact with aren’t there, I doubt you’re going to find the experience fruitful. Due to the membership fees and the socioeconomic realities of the sex-positive community, I’m concerned that BBR’s current business model is too exclusive, and as a result it will have a lot of trouble attracting the kind of diverse community its creators seem to be hoping for.

Yet, some others think differently (pun!). For instance, Dennis Howlett welcomes the for-pay model for a social network:

anyone can join provided they’re willing to pay the $25 a month (I like that he has a pay model from the get go. That sorts out the weirdos and hangers on from day one)

I wonder if adopting a free-mium approach might work better. Still, there are real-world limits to business. Everyone needs to make money, and I don’t think Blackbox Republic’s business model is inherently more exclusive than, say, purchasing access to porn. If anything, BBR’s got some real promise to inject much-needed financial awareness to the sexually insensitive corporate infrastructure of our society. Nevertheless, convincing people to join “the Republic” is going to be a hard sell.

Show me the features!

Let’s say you do decide to join. What do you get? Other than the sex-positive mindset, what’s the benefit?

Well, the bulk of the experience is what you’d expect. Profiles (called “personas”), messaging, user search capabilities (called “explore”), and so forth. A Twitter-like “activity stream” dominates the main page where you can post text, picture, or video status updates. Event listings fill the sidebar. (I’m not going to provide internal screenshots in deference to BBR’s strict confidentiality rules.)

While that’s fun, it’s nothing special. What makes Blackbox Republic different is flexibility, and privacy.

Goodbye drop-downs, hello sliders!

An innovative new interface acknowledges (most of) the diversity in human sexual experience and desire.

Blackbox Republic’s most visible feature is the way its interface allows you to flexibly self-identify various facets of yourself. Rather than give you static drop-down menus or radio buttons for things like your sexual orientation and relationship status, you’re presented with sliders you can change at will. Perhaps you’re feeling particularly same-sex attracted one day. Just move the “Orientation” slider towards the “Gay” end and away from the “Hetero” end. If that changes tomorrow, just move the slider back. Sho-weet!

BBR offers you 5 different sliders for your profile. In addition to the one for sexual orientation, you also get one for relationship “status” (ranging from attached to unattached, with Facebook’s famous “it’s complicated” neatly in the middle), whether you’re available for more partners or not, how comfortable you are with casual sexual activity, and how eagerly you’re looking to par-tay. I’m instantly reminded of FetLife‘s innovative, if dull-looking, mechanism for specifying multiple relationships. Blackbox Republic gives you similar flexibility as FetLife does but presented in a superb and far more intuitive interface.

All that said, one slider is conspicuously missing: the one for gender. The sliders are a very interesting idea and might just be the most innovative feature of the entire site. It speaks volumes about the sensitive and thoughtful mindset of the developers, and that’s why I’m so disappointed that the interface for self-identifying gender is relegated to the Sex 1.0 days of a single, binary option of “male” or “female.”

What gives? Are polyamorous people more welcome here than those who don’t fit the gender binary? I hope this is simply an omission that will be fixed as the service matures, since I couldn’t find any other reason why gender was absent from the sliders. For extra credit, I hope to see different profile options for “Sex” and “Gender,” two distinct concepts that frequently and incorrectly get used interchangeably. This would make it possible to represent complex gender presentations like additive gender on a social networking interface for the first time ever, and that’d totally be something to write home about!

Privacy and security

The other major selling point of Blackbox Republic is its careful attention to privacy. The entire offering, including its name, is predicated on letting users very carefully segment their information based on their privacy boundaries. I love some of the things BBR has done to enable this, and I can only imagine it’s going to get better from here.

Blackbox Republic’s Web of Trust

There are three levels of privacy, which (as far as I can figure out) map directly to the level of trust other members have gained within the Republic’s community. It works like a web of trust. New users are “un-vouched.” As they begin to interact with others on the site and, hopefully, make some friends, they should receive “vouches”—or votes of trust—from previously-vouched members. As a member, you get to control whether something you do, such as posting a status update, gets sent to the “public,” (i.e., the entire public-facing Internet), to all Blackbox Republic members (i.e, to both vouched and un-vouched members) or only to vouched members.

Additionally, privacy settings allow you to specify whether you want to allow un-vouched members to send you private messages, to follow your updates, to comment on your posts, or to see you in search results.

Unlike Facebook, which has very good privacy controls that almost nobody on Earth is aware of (thus negating the control’s usefulness), Blackbox Republic makes it a point to highlight their privacy controls at just about every sensical turn. Each of the settings I found defaults to the most private setting, not the most public, which is exactly the right move. I gotta say, I found turning off privacy settings instead of having to turn (or leave) them on to be a really empowering feeling.

You’re not a “friend,” you’re an acquaintance!

Moreover, the Blackbox Republic platform makes a native distinction between “friends” (again, like Facebook, or FetLife) and “followers” (like Twitter). When I friend someone, I’m connected to them in a way that I’m not if I just follow someone. I’m not yet certain what the practical distinction between “friending” and “following” are, other than the fact that your view of the people you’re connected with is segmented based on which button you clicked, but I think the distinction is a very appropriate and natural one to embed in the software.

This separation is probably the single most important innovation in the space of social networks as a medium of communication and collaboration that I can point at. I love that I can indicate without ambiguity which people I want to remain in constant communication with and which I simply want to watch from a distance. After all, aren’t at least some of your “friends” on Facebook really just “acquaintances” in reality? I think that for the first time ever in a social network, Blackbox Republic gets this feature right. Now, if only I could figure out what it actually does. :)

What? No on-the-wire encryption?!

With all that being said, there’s still at least one really frightening problem with Blacbox Republic’s careful attention to privacy: as far as I could tell, no part of my session is SSL/TLS encrypted!

Stunningly, for a site that sells privacy, not even Blackbox Republic's login form is on a secure page.

The entire BlackboxRepublic.com website is served over HTTP, including the login form and—again, as far as I could tell—every page on the inside of the site. This means that it’s trivial for malicious people who don’t even have a Blackbox Republic subscription to intercept, eavesdrop, and modify my interaction with the site. They could watch—and save—private messages between me and one of my friends (or lovers!), for instance.

In Blackbox’s defense, I don’t know of any social network that protects you from this. FetLife is another example of a website that should seriously consider HTTPS-only pages, but as of this writing hasn’t implemented it. Therein lies one of the most frightening oversights in the entire social networking space: regardless of so-called privacy settings, everything you do on the vast majority of social networks, blogs, and other sites on the Internet are the equivalent of passing notes between friends in a classroom. Better hope that big bully who likes to steal your lunch money doesn’t open the note and read it himself while he’s passing along your login details!

The thing is, few other social networking sites place so strong a spotlight on user privacy and security. Since Blackbox Republic seems to be nobly and rightfully holding itself up to a new standard of privacy, I feel justified in pointing out this glaring omission in their service offering. Given everything else they’ve done so well, and how well-aligned the majority of their technical implementation seems to be with their philosophy, this omission came as a big surprise to me.

Until Blackbox Republic only serves HTTPS traffic for all private areas of their site, I can’t make a recommendation in good conscious that it’s the place to be for privacy-conscious people. But again, despite public opinion to the contrary, I’ve never been able to make that claim for FetLife either.

Conclusion

Blackbox Republic is one of the most interesting websites on the Internet today. Its privacy-conscious and sexually open approach to social networking and online dating deserves huge praise. Its technical implementation—although plagued with some glaring oversights for now—is to be seriously respected.

From a social change perspective, I think the site is a mixed bag. Its exclusivity arguably makes the insularity of the sexuality communities an even bigger problem than it already is. On the other hand, the market-value of that very same exclusivity, if steered toward a benevolent purpose, can end up benefiting philanthropic, non-profit, and other sex-positive endeavors that often struggle to find necessary financial support.

Moreover, Blackbox Republic’s internal gifting economy does seem to encourage a sort of altruistic nature among members. How that may or may not translate into increased support for non-commercial activists has yet to be seen. Nay-sayers should remember that this kind of thing simply hasn’t been done before and the net effect could be quite positive.

Having just launched, however, I don’t think Blackbox Republic should be touted as the go-to site for sex-positive people quite yet. Like other social networks, it needs to grow to become truly useful, and its subscription fee business model poses a serious obstacle to many people. I was fortunate to get in with a free “founder” account, but I have mixed feelings about encouraging my friends to join me knowing they—or someone nice enough to “gift” a limited-time subscription to them—will have to pay for the service.

Additionally, its focus on being, well, a black box and its commitment to not allow Google or other search engines to index its internal content simply doesn’t resonate that strongly with me.

Lawrence emphasizes that what members say in Blackbox Republic will stay private. There’s no danger of what they post inside becoming part of their “Google resume,” as he puts it. He says he would resist efforts from search engines to index content the way Facebook and Twitter allow. “The value proposition is this is the first private, large social network out there,” Lawrence says.

Put simply, and noting that I’m probably not the majority case here, I rely on my “Google résumé,” to use Sam’s words, to live the life I want. My lukewarm reaction to this isn’t a criticism of the goal, simply an observation that it turns out I’m not in the ideal target market for Blackbox Republic’s value proposition.

In other words, I think I’m “too out” for this site to be immediately useful to me. The fact that FetLife is not readily available to the public Internet is the single biggest reason why I don’t sign on to that site very often, and so I have the same reason not to spend all that much time behind the curtains of Blackbox Republic.

Nevertheless, many other people do. If you’re among the cross-section of the populace who’d like a sociosexual experience online and would also like to effectively outsource your social reputation management, if you will, but you feel that sites like Facebook just aren’t cutting it, then Blackbox Republic is definitely worth checking out.

If you do check it out, or even if you don’t, I’d love to know what you think in the comments. And if you’re definitely sold, consider signing up via my partner link. Full disclosure: signing up that way earns me a small commission. If you’d rather sign up but not give me a commission for the referral, just register from the front page.

Over the past month or so, several people with whom I am close—either because we were once close and reconnected, or because we are newly close—have remarked on the jewelry I wear. I have five thin chain bracelets; one around each wrist and ankle, and a fifth closely fitted at my neck. I remember the nights Sara put them there.

“You’re still wearing these,” each of these friends said to me as they slipped a finger underneath one of them.

“I know,” I reply each time. “I’m still figuring out how much of them are me, and how much of them are Sara.” Who am I today, without the life I thought I’d have?

New York City has been a difficult place to be in. Instead, I have spent much of my time North, shuffling between Boston and Providence. The “organized” Boston communities are vastly divergent from The Scene that I am used to. I like the differences—I like that they exist, and that one place is different from another—even if I don’t like all the specifics.

In Boston, I attended the second NEPups.org puppy munch. I went with a friend and met a few gay pups and a kitty girl, and I spoke about queer masculinities and how uncomfortable I feel in the gay communities I’ve tentatively explored. I have never been gay, and I still feel a twinge of discomfort “admitting” to bisexuality in such spaces.

I have a growing connection to Providence. In large part, this is due to the people I’m coming to think of as the sun girl and the metal boy. They are young (younger than I am), which for the first time in my life is a notable thing. They live in slow time and enjoy the physical world in ways that are not entirely new yet not entirely familiar to me. There is much of Sara—a goodness and comfort—in each of them.

The metal boy in particular has been a quiet revelation for me. I find myself more unsure around him than I would have thought, as though I am younger, less experienced, more hesitant. I’ve been sexual with other men before but only now, after being with him, can I wholly and without silent reservation answer “Yes” to the still often asked question, “Are you really bi?” The sun girl, for her part, is in many ways a pure blessing. She is magic and warmth and a grounding force that has helped me move forward.

My trip to San Francisco these past five days proved useful but disappointing. It’s now obvious to me that the plan I had conceived before I left Sydney and which I so steadfastly tried to make happen despite the financial and emotional burdens of losing my relationship with Sara will not actually work. I’m thankful that I met with several other friends who have each generously offered support and crash space for my planned arrival time in late June. It may have perhaps been destined for me to be alone (but not isolated) when I arrive in San Francisco; it’s been almost a decade in the making for me by now.

I’ve been to San Francisco twice before this trip, but I’ve never been so happy to leave it before. I am still determined to move there, but as I write this in my airplane seat somewhere over the landlocked middle of the continent, I find myself eagerly awaiting a return to Providence. I can’t stay on the East coast, but I can’t leave. Not yet, not when there is still so much for me to do here.

My thoughts are consistently drawn to productive pursuits; my second CSS book, my sexuality projects (KinkForAll.org and MaleSubmissionArt.com). I feel strong in ways I’ve never felt before: I bend the world. I change reality. I can.

But I’m still so, so sad, and so, so pained. I don’t cry every day anymore, but I do feel overwhelmed by it. I suspect that, in part, Sara left me because I am so driven by the things I need to change rather than the things that work. Some parts of me want to reach a point where I’m no longer fueled by things that way, but other parts of me doesn’t. As one Bostonian friend fondly reminds me, “All progress is the work of unreasonable men.”

I speak about KinkForAll so often everywhere I go that I’m uncertain whether I’ve latched onto it or if it has latched onto me. I fear for it like a father fears for a child growing too fast and yet I keep pushing it out from underneath my own auspice because I know it can’t ever be what I want it to be without experience in the world. The weekend after I was in Boston, KinkForAll Boston was set into motion by the people I spoke with there and now I am determined to be a part of it.

In the mean time, I am also thinking and becoming increasingly excited about the Sex 2.0 presentations I will give on May 9^th. In particular, I’ll get to meet the likes of Sarah Dopp, one of the inspirations for the Gender and Technology presentation that was accepted (and seems to be in increasingly high demand) at the Sex 2.0 conference. I’m just learning to speak with the people I admire to that degree, and in a week and a half I’m going to stand up and present my own version of the very things they inspire me to be. I will feel like I am standing in front of the very giants whose shoulders I stood on when I was across the planet.

So again, I ask myself, who am I? What is my sexual submissiveness without the dominant presence that revived it when I had given it up those four long years ago? What is my career when I have achieved, for me, an unprecedented level of recognition after 8 long years of being in the workforce? What is my contribution to my own future, and to people like me who are still young children today?

What kind of man am I if so much of the world I live in refuses to see manliness in what I am? Because today, having considered the possibility that I was perhaps a woman at earlier stages of my life, it turns out I am a man. And I am going to make the world know it is good to be the kind of man I am.