Browser Histories
Gabriella Garcia, Livia Foldes
Browser Histories is a collective memory space stewarded by sex workers in resistance against the erasure of the erotic imagination upon which communication technologies are built. The Browser Histories prototype holds a repository of digital keepsakes created in a series of communal dreaming sessions designed to build a world that platforms and celebrates sex worker genius as the original innovators of tech. Each session was designed to give those gathering a prompt that considers how technology could be used, subverted, or built if our community were in charge. With Browser Histories, we are experimenting with how concepts of co-operative governance as currently being developed by Web3 communities can help us explore the collective practices necessary to steward a digital commons beyond the static concept of archiving.
Interactive prototype to be released in Spring 2023.
Concept
We decided to dig into the theoreticals proposed by Web3 initiatives, focusing especially on the possibilities of helping sex workers navigate away from creator economy platforms. These platforms have historically exploited erotic labor as a way to attract large audiences, only to deplatform those engaging in that erotic labor on their platforms once that audience is achieved. And while these platforms are solely motivated by extracting profit, the act of deplatforming those who are already dangerously stigmatized for their participation in sex work has destroyed mutual aid networks, safety mechanisms, and already-precarious income streams.
Since sex workers are forced to “exit” such platforms, it was natural we explore “exit-to-community” initiatives that are currently being modeled by Web3 collectives. What happens if we hold intentional space for the subculture that is the deplatformed genius sex worker? And how can decentralized technologies help preserve that space as whorephobic tech development continues to target and eliminate sex workers from centralized digital platforms? These are some of the questions that came to mind when considering how an archive can serve as a sort of living commons, activated by community bonding. We are thus experimenting with the idea of social tokens as a way to materialize the innovative efforts put forth by this specific community toward social technologies. We are roadmapping a later release in which tokens will be distributed to participants who choose to join the Browser Histories initiative in the future. This is not just to incentivize participation, but to also create a calculable representation of the invisibilized, feminized labor that has always been necessary to create and cultivate digital memory spaces. Ultimately these tokens will translate into ballots that can be cast to decide what path of innovation this community will pave together, with full expectation that this project will mutate as it grows.
Browser Histories iterates from an eponymous event facilitated by Decoding Stigma in May 2021. This first Browser Histories event was designed to serve as a decompressive gathering for attendees of Hacking/Hustling’s Trains, Text, and Tits panel series, a 4-part class presented in May of 2021 documenting the history of sex work and technology from the 1800s to today. Attendees shared images, messages, playlists, links, writing, and other personal “keepsakes” that reflected personal experiences in which technology played a role in feelings of safety, creativity, and community in their individual experiences as sex workers. By design, no documentation of this event exists; our intention was to cultivate a community space that was defined by its ephemeral nature in order to replicate the interstitial space in which the sex worker feels most at home. Since that first event, we have dreamed of creating a more permanent platform that can recover and preserve evidence of sex worker-led innovation in digital technology. The C/Change open call prompted us to think about what this could look like within the scope of emerging technologies, and how an archive can be used to promote cultural exchange across myriad audiences.
Process
Our initial goal for the C/Change lab was to develop a foundational repository for an interactive archive featuring digital representations of the imaginative uses of technology by sex workers. We loosely designed the prototype as an “interactive editorial” of multimedia submissions in the form of writing, audio, imagery, video, and other creative expressions that would be created during a series of workshops held during the grant period. This foundational repository would eventually evolve into a searchable crowdsourced database of submissions, highlighting the wide breadth of contributions (in both size and variety) we hoped to receive as the project grew beyond our time incubating with C/Change.
We came into the lab with very loose parameters for our project, as we intended to adhere to community co-design principles throughout its development. It has been a long-term goal to create a collaborative, sex worker-led R&D space that is established around imagination and play, and C/Change was the first time we have had the opportunity to design and execute a compensated workshop series with this intention. We used a portion of our grant to create a paid sex worker/accomplice cohort to be part of our research & design process. This cohort provided expertise to help us define project goals, audiences, and implementation strategies. We also supplemented this cohort with a number of alliances we have established with community initiatives that are working on projects with goals aligned with our own, including OnlyBans and Body of Workers. While the interactive Browser Histories platform prototype was our required deliverable for the C/Change Lab, the process of designing this community cohort served our larger goal of exemplifying what it looks like to have sex workers involved and compensated at every level of a digital media project.
Our primary archive idea shifted substantially over the course of the lab, as will be further discussed below. However, the core of the project — that being a community-building initiative dedicated to celebrating sex worker innovations in tech — stayed true. Incredible conversations are possible when space is afforded to those who are categorically silenced, and C/Change gave us the opportunity to demonstrate that. Please visit our Substack for more detail about this part of our project.
As it stands today, Browser Histories acts as a calling card. At surface level, we have created the archive as initially conceived; underneath this is the distributed community we are cultivating around a collaborative commons. The future is uncertain, because the prototype is quite literally a conversation piece that will drive the development forward. One of our community partners has been developing the next iteration of an aligned initiative, and we are in talks with them about co-launching our respective projects in March. But there is a lot to do between now and then; having this alpha prototype is crucial for figuring out the necessary infrastructure to make that launch possible.
Between now and then we are going to offer regular programming to demystify the Web3 space beyond the “hype” that dominates the current narrative in hopes of inspiring the creative participation of sex workers in an emerging technological landscape. We hope that this programming will spark community-led conversations about potential uses of Web3 for censorship resistance, responses to financial tech discrimination, radical methods of distributing knowledge, blockchain-enabled organizational transparency, decentralized archiving and more. Ideally, this will be the way we start navigating how this community activates toward collective governance, as discussed in our conceptual explorations above!
Our primary idea shifted from something static/receptive, to something active/emergent. Archiving is essentially an act of storytelling through preservation, and while we expected our database to shift and grow over time, it would essentially act as something that holds ideas and information in a way that could be reliably accessed by future audiences. When we shifted into exploring concepts of Web3, it demanded that we look at our primary idea as something with the potential to be more alive, where participation creates the possibility of evolving the project organically, or according to the needs/desires of the community gathering around the collection.
We honestly did not expect to make this shift, and it was quite a dramatic pivot from where we initially stood. At our first lab check-in, we were told that our artifactual data would have to be interpreted in some way that showcased novel use of an emerging technology, and the searchable multimedia archive we had initially conceived was not enough of a use. It was suggested that we make a data-driven visualization out of the responses collected for the archive, beyond the visual aspect of the artifacts themselves. We felt that this solution would be in conflict with our core value of not replicating harm experienced by our community by promoting disembodied presentations of data.
In our earliest conversations with C/Change, it was suggested that we consider implementing a Web3 element to our project, but had shied away from the suggestion not only because Web3 was beyond our expertise as technologists, but also because hyped Web3 discussions reek of techno-solutionism that does nothing to address the real world harms caused by the criminalization of sex work. However, in facing this project roadblock we saw an opportunity to reconsider this decision. Making this pivot was incredibly challenging, especially as we were already four weeks into the lab. We were already beholden to a number of established stakeholders (including community consultants, cohort members, and project partners), and had to backtrack in order to propose taking this radically different direction than they had initially signed up for. It required an intensive crash course in a technology we had no prior understanding of; one of our project partners literally crashed a crypto hackathon happening on the other side of the country in order to rapidly download information by osmosis.
Initially we considered establishing a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) with our community cohort, but upon sharing this idea with crypto professionals, we decided that legal ambiguity around cryptocurrencies used to support DAOs are too high risk to explore with a community that holds quasi-legal status. But this lit the path for us to think about how DAO concepts actually reflect our intention of enabling sex working communities to reap the benefits of their historically-extracted labor by Big Tech. Ultimately we used the opportunity to explore how Web3 is being used for collective platform governance and participatory media projects. This aligned with our commitment to participatory design, while also affording us the ability to think about how we could encourage community participation in a new technology. After all, our goal was to highlight how sex workers have always been on the bleeding edge of innovation; so why should we only talk about this as an historical occurrence rather than an emergent possibility?