mwotw

After a long spell of fretting over the mounting legal assaults on porn, I wrote this “Mega Rant” in the hopes it would inspire a new way of thinking among colleagues and friends.

Perhaps the message will resonate outside the pornography industry.

THE GIST: The combination of pornography and the Internet could save our Civilization.

Sermon on the Mount

I am beginning to understand how the Digital Technologies of the last half-century have been transforming Us.

And we’ve been too busy enjoying our digital cameras and “photochopping” to notice.

These two photographs are Pulitzer Prize winners.

They date from a time when a substantial amount (if not all) of their merit came from the rarity of the moment they had captured. We may look at each image and know that the photographer was in location Lx, with camera Cx in his hand precisely when subjects Sx throught Sy had arranged themselves just so — at hour Hx.

But all of that is gone now.

We are not struck by images in the same way anymore — because they are no longer necessarily “captured moments”. What images we see, whether they are on the printed page or on a screen, cannot escape the pervasiveness of the digital, nor detach in our minds from the possibility (the likelihood) that they’re not real.

Though traditionalist photographers may continue to create images the old-fashioned way, with film, it is the EYE that has changed and, I’m afraid, irreversibly. We simply CANNOT TRUST the images we see.