Whore Data: Technology, Design, and Carceral Surveillance

Increasingly, governments and platforms are investing in automation and artificial intelligence to govern sexual content at scale. As sex work environments become more heavily surveilled, this chapter explores the phenomenon of “automated whorephobia”: the coding of sex work stigma into technology design. It explores how machine learning acts in tandem with whorephobic laws to exacerbate both online and offline inequalities. It examines the use of software to flag words, body parts, and activities; to assess what constitutes sex, nudity, porn, and art; and to estimate age, verify identity, and identify exploitation, trained on databases of stolen nudes. In this context, it showcases the ingenuity and creativity of sex workers in designing our own futures in the face of regulatory, economic, and technical environments that are not built for us—hacking, repurposing, and rejigging them to survive and thrive.