Is your sex life as private and personal as you think it is? Or is it shaped by – and constantly shaping, in turn – the society and systems you exist in? 

This week we’re joined by Dr. Angela Jones, who asks these questions and much more in their new book, Sex in Public. Angela is a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. In addition to scholarly works published in many distinguished journals including Porn Studies and The Black Scholar, they’re the author, co-author and/or editor of several books, including Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook and Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Industry which came out in 2020 and advanced and informed a lot of my own understanding of the online adult industry especially.

Their latest book, Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives, just launched. As Angela writes: “Revolutionizing how we talk about sex means thinking not just about what a single solitary person should or shouldn't do in bed.” 

We get into the history of sexology, how sex toys complicate our understanding of what counts as sex, whether sex needs a definition at all, what happened when they bought and used a sex doll, and why the most vulnerable moments in their book are also the ones everyone wants to discuss. 

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives

Cash/Consent by Lorelei Lee

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss mobile podcasting, participating in the meme, and vertigo.

JASON: My last few articles have basically been first person behind the blog vibes about things I’m doing (Cannes, influencer LARPing), or things that annoy me (ChatGPT flyers), so I’m trying to think how much more people want to know about my Process or what’s going on in my brain. As mentioned in those posts, I flew to France for Cannes a few weeks ago, and, because I was in Europe already, have been here for a few weeks now (also as discussed in the LARPing post, having our own company has given me the ability to do some pretty cool things, and to work weird hours from faraway places without it ruining everything). I’m headed back home to the US today, writing this from Heathrow on a layover. When I’m at home, I either work on my patio or at my desktop computer battle station that you probably know from my podcast. A few gear and time-zone related observations from my last few weeks: 

Patreon announced on Thursday that it’s partnering with Cloudflare to block crawlers from stealing creators’ work to train AI models.

“I HAVE A KICKASS PRODUCT UPDATE FOR YOU ALL!” Jack Conte, the founder and CEO of Patreon, wrote in a post on Instagram with the superimposed text, “POV: you're CEO of one of these fucking tech companies, so you do what you want.” 

“Patreon has partnered with an internet infrastructure company called Cloudflare to block Al training crawlers from using the work you publish on your Patreon to train their Al models,” Conte wrote. “This is live and happening at the network level on all posts published on Patreon.”

"As AI agents become increasingly powerful and popular, creators deserve a meaningful say in how their work is used by AI companies. On most of the Internet, creators have to accept AI training on their work just to reach and grow an audience," Drew Rowny, SVP of Product at Patreon, said in a press release published by Cloudflare last week. "Patreon has a different vision: creators should be able to grow their audience and control how their work is used. That's why we're building on our existing work with Cloudflare to block known AI training crawlers at the network level across Patreon, while still allowing the crawlers that help creators get discovered and grow their businesses through search."

Last year, internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, which provides cybersecurity protection and content delivery services to websites, announced that it would start blocking AI crawlers from accessing content without website owners’ permission or compensation by default. And earlier this month, Cloudflare announced new options for website owners to control AI traffic based on whether bots are search, agent, or training crawlers. In September, according to the company’s blog, all new domains onboarding to Cloudflare will have training and agent bots blocked by default on pages that display ads, while search crawlers will remain allowed by default.

A spokesperson for Cloudflare pointed 404 Media to the company's Crawl Control technology and its recent data about AI crawling. "Patreon recently enabled Cloudflare’s Crawl Control technology for its users at the network level. Others, like beehiive, have also recently enabled Crawl Control to allow its users to allow or block specific AI models based on their preference," they said.

“Creators deserve credit, compensation, and consent. If that's not on the table, the crawlers can stay the fuck off Patreon. The free internet is alive and happening. The rebellion has already started,” Conte wrote in his post. 

In May, Conte posted a 43-minute video addressing how the AI industry fails to compensate creators. “Creators deserve consent, credit and compensation,” Conte said in the video. “Consent meaning, ‘Do I get to opt out of my work being used by these models as training data?’ Credit meaning, ‘If my work is used and you just replicate my whole vibe as an artist… do I get credit for that?’ And then compensation, meaning, ‘Do I get paid when that happens?’ Unfortunately, the answer to all three of these questions right now is a big fat ‘No.’”

AI-generated works are permitted on Patreon, as long as they comply with the platform's terms of use. In 2024, 404 Media reported that many creators of nonconsensual sexual images and videos monetized their content on Patreon. Last year, Patreon updated its content guidelines for AI content to state: “AI-generated depictions of people that are illustrated/animated are permitted; AI-generated hyperrealistic depictions of people are permitted only if the people are real and have documented their explicit consent.” 

Updated 7/9 at 7:59 p.m. EDT to include Drew Rowny's statement.

Updated 7/10 at 11:32 EDT to include comment from Cloudflare.

The co-founder of adult creator subscription platform MintStars announced she’s leaving the platform and donating her ownership shares in the company to its creators and sex workers. 

In an email to creators using the platform in late June, Jessica Van Meir wrote: "I am donating my shares in the company to create a 20 percent co-ownership pool for our creators." She wrote that her remaining three percent of the shares will be donated to SWOP Behind Bars, a non-profit that supports incarcerated sex workers and sex trafficking survivors in the U.S. 

“With this step, which completes my personal mission to launch a company for and by adult content creators, I will also be officially moving on from my position as a Director at MintStars,” Van Meir wrote in the email. Van Meir is a Harvard PhD candidate studying the sex workers’ rights movement in Latin America, and also co-founded the Boston Sex Workers and Allies Collective three years ago. Van Meir and Daniel Sargent co-founded MintStars in 2021; Sargent will remain at the company as CEO.

A Waymo in California allegedly called the cops on two teenagers for “drinking and shooting from the vehicle,” according to local police.

On Monday, the San Mateo Police Department posted on Facebook: “Parents do you know where your teens are? @waymo does!”

The police department continued in the post: “Two 15 year olds up to trouble in a Waymo this afternoon were detained after Waymo reported they were drinking and shooting from the vehicle. After calling us and stopping the car, we were able to safely remove both subjects and determined they were shooting Orbeez from the car as they sipped on afternoon libations while being chauffeured around town in the driverless vehicle.” 

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss the Supreme Court, the private jet, and AI on the TV.

JOSEPH: I used to cover court cases and judge’s opinions a lot more back at Motherboard. Sometimes it was in cases I broke news in, like that time the FBI secretly ran a dark web child abuse website. Other times it is big decisions that have wider impacts on privacy, surveillance, and government power. 

Here’s big news regarding the latter sort of decision. I first saw news of it on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s blog. As it says at the start: “You have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world, and even short-term surveillance of these movements is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in Chatrie v. United States.”

Meta just released a new ad for its creeper glasses. In the video, Kylie Jenner, the new face of the glasses called Starfire, goes through a day-in-the-life style video from her point of view. Mostly, she’s led around her own house in a haze by various vendors and assistants. Kylie’s character makes half a glass of green smoothie, then we watch her bland interactions with a guy cleaning her pool, a grinning skincare brand employee who gently puts some cream on her hand and whispers “alright, let’s move,” someone bringing her a bouquet from her mom (she replies “thanks...”) and people moving a huge weird sculpture around her cavernous home. 

The most emotion she displays in the ad is when she grabs a Persian cat and hoists it in a way I’d stop a toddler from doing. In a jarring transition away from the cat and the movers, we see her start inexplicably grabbing black spray paint from her massive closet (???) and jumping in an unbranded black SUV, then speeding to a billboard of her own face. In another unsettling transition that would work in an Ari Aster horror movie, the perspective is no longer from her own eyes, but from about 30 yards behind the car. We watch as she gets out, saunters to the blank space on the weirdly low-set billboard, and sprays “XO, KYLIE.” 

Meta has endured years of brand crises with its smart glasses. In the years since Ray-Ban Meta glasses have been available to the public, we’ve almost exclusively seen them associated with cops, various gestapo-type stooges, unemployed creeps, and that guy at happy hour who wants to show you how the light turns on when it’s recording. During that time, 404 Media has documented all of this, and in the course of that reporting, heard time and time again from Meta that the glasses are NOT that creepy and definitely NOT cop-glasses.  

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss talking aloud to computers, Cannes, and “Engineering Creativity: Guac Is Extra."

JASON: This week I was in Cannes, France for the Cannes Lions advertising conference, which is a sentence you probably did not expect to be reading and is definitely not a sentence I expected to be writing. It’s rare that I BTB something before I actually write about it, but in this case I think it’s OK, as this is going to be significantly different from the actual articles I do. There is no sense in being coy about it—Cannes, which at least in the media business stands for both the beach town in the south of France and the advertising conference (but not the film festival), is a ridiculous place and experience filled with excess and extravagant displays of money wasting. Back when we worked at VICE, every year around this time there would be a bunch of whispers around the office about which executives and higher level sales people were going to Cannes and who was not (us journalists definitely were not). Then, during Cannes, there was a barely spoken sentiment that we, the journalists, should try extra hard to not fuck up lest we create some sort of situation that a VICE executive in Cannes would have to deal with from another time zone while drinking rosé on a yacht. 

Behind closed doors and without expert input, the Trump administration issued a major policy change to how census data is released. Data experts are concerned the result will be less reliable public data related to redistricting, natural disasters, the workforce, housing, and more.

On June 4, the Trump administration released an order, Disclosure Avoidance for Statistical Products, that forbids “any use of noise infusion” for statistical products. “Coarsening shall be the preferred category of Disclosure Avoidance methods for all statistical products,” the order states. “Suppression shall be permitted as a last resort, only to be used when coarsening is prohibited by law or would substantially defeat the accuracy or usability of a statistical product.” 

In statistical terms, noise infusion is a common and accepted technique for privacy protection when working with data: it creates “fuzz” or random values within a dataset, making the published statistics slightly different from the actual, sensitive data. Coarsening is the process of grouping and rounding data, or reporting it in ranges instead of potentially identifiable specifics. Suppression is what it sounds like: redacting information, replacing it with asterisks, or not releasing the data entirely. 

NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang first reported on the policy change and its implications. People who work with census data and statistical analysis are worried that limiting the ways the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) can release data will severely limit what information ends up available to the public.

Data coming out of small communities and industries, especially, could be heavily affected by the change. “Because ‘coarsening’ (grouping, rounding, reporting in ranges) and suppression are the only not-prohibited tools named in the order, it means that to keep information safe, the Census Bureau and BEA need to group small things (like small communities or small business types) into larger ones, or they need suppress the data completely,” Beth Jarosz, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Massive Data Institute and vice president of the Association of Public Data Users, told me in an email. “Small industries may get rolled into bigger industry categories. Small counties may get rolled into county groups or not reported at all.”

On June 17, five groups — the Population Association of America, Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, Association of Public Data Users, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, and Association of Population Centers — released a joint statement condemning the order. “This order subverts processes developed over decades to foster transparency and public trust and creates a scenario in which there will either be less privacy for our personal information, or less usable data, or both,” the statement says.

The Director of Science Policy for the American Statistics Association Steve Pierson wrote that the order “handcuffs the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis in terms of the techniques they can use for protecting the privacy of respondents.” 

John Abowd, the former Associate Director for Research and Methodology and Chief Scientist at the Census Bureau, posted a list of data products on Linkedin that this order would affect. These include the OnTheMap for Emergency Management system, a public data tool that provides real-time U.S. population and workforce statistics for areas being affected by natural disasters; Quarterly Workforce Indicators which include data about employment, job creation and destruction, wages, hires, and more; business formation and dynamics statistics; veteran employment statistics; data related to post-secondary educational outcomes, and many more. Many of these use noise infusion, which Trump’s order just banned.

There’s also confusion about how this order will even be enacted in practice. “Regarding the datasets that used noise infusion, it is unclear how this policy will impact public access,” Lynda Kellam, who leads the Research Data and Digital Scholarship team at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and is a founding organizer of the Data Rescue Project, wrote following the order. “The policy is intended to be retroactive, raising concerns that data might be removed, but how that will play out is uncertain.” 

In the immediate fallout, at least, we’re already losing some public information. As Wang from NPR pointed out on Bluesky last week, multiple webpages related to noise infusion and differential privacy on the Census Bureau's website were removed following the order. Most of those pages have since been restored. At the Data Rescue Project, a team led by Lena Bohman has been proactively collecting and archiving Census Bureau working papers and making them available to the public. 

Jaroz said that along with the risk of unreliable or missing data, the abandonment of long-agreed-upon privacy protection methods can damage public trust in Census data. “When the Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis gather data, they promise respondents that they will keep responses confidential. When a person responded to the American Community Survey or a business owner provided information about their employees or sales, they expected that the Census Bureau and BEA would protect that information. By taking away tools that those agencies use to protect privacy and confidentiality, people may question whether or not Census and BEA can live up to that promise,” she said. “Similarly, the Census Bureau and BEA are producing information for public benefit. People respond, for example, to the American Community Survey (at least in part) because it will benefit their community. If the new rule results in cutting back how the data can be published and used, it also weakens trust and it is worth responding.” 

As Wang noted, America First Legal, a law group co-founded by Trump's deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, attempted to force the release of new 2020 Census data in a lawsuit last year, by challenging the Census Bureau's differential privacy system. Judges ruled it was too late to sue, but they refiled the case in February.

As NPR also reported last year, Trump and Republicans in Congress have been pushing to exclude people living in the U.S. without legal status in the 2030 Census. “People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in August 2025. This would be a radical change in how the Census has been conducted for more than 200 years. Redistricting and gerrymandering have been a massive fight for the Trump administration for years, and has ramped up ahead of the 2026 midterms, as the Supreme Court recently weakened the Voting Rights Act and allowed for more redistricting that would favor Republican control of the House. 

The data policy change is also happening in light of the Trump administration’s gutting of Census practice test locations in the South. In February, the Associated Press reported that the administration is eliminating four out of the six locations that were slated to test new methods for the 2030 census. “The Census Bureau would be essentially flying blind into communities that need testing most — tribal lands, rural areas with limited connectivity and places with historically low response rates,” Mark Mather, an associate vice president at the Population Reference Bureau, told the AP. “You can’t fix what you don’t test.”

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss questionable analysis, mysterious parcels, and the Knicks (sorta).

SAM: I was in Amsterdam for most of this week and walked by something called a “Mystery Parcel Store.” It was a storefront loaded with mostly Amazon packages of all shapes and sizes, where people could pick out a package to open (and pay for it based on weight) and hope they scored something cool. I didn’t participate on the spot because it seemed like it involved opening the package in front of the lingering street crowd and getting your photo posted to their social media, but now I kind of wish I’d done it anyway. A group doing it while I watched unboxed a bunch of garbagecore plastic trash, which made it less appealing. I think my strategy would be to seek out heavy boxes with lithium battery labels, but that could still mean I got trash or something I wouldn’t want to have to pack home.

This week, I’m thrilled to be joined by Imani Thompson. Imani is a digital security trainer and host of a series of events called Cache Me Outside, where she and partner orgs help people understand their personal security, divest from big tech platforms, and learn how to stay safe online. She recently hosted a “de-Googling” party and a self-doxxing rave.

We get into how platforms have tried to make surveillance cute, why that damn Duolingo owl emotionally manipulates you, and why learning about privacy best practices when surrounded by community works. 

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

Follow Imani on Instagram

A 'Self-Doxing' Rave Helps Trans People Stay Safe Online

Now you can break up with big tech at a bar: ‘cybersecurity disguised as a party’

Fix It With Piggy

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss Trump fucking up the World Cup, some thoughts on ICE coverage, and movies.

JASON: I have been meaning for weeks to write an article with a headline like: Donald Trump and FIFA Have Really Fucked Up the World Cup, but I never really honed in on the exact correct thesis or argument to make, but I’m gonna ramble a bit here in the BTB in hopes it shakes loose something in my head that I can turn into a more coherent article later. It was going to be part of a bigger piece or series of pieces I’ve been meaning to do about live events in general, which make the basic argument that live ticket prices—for sports, concerts, everything—are simply too high, and it’s an entirely artificial problem that is having an actually negative effect on sports, the music industry, and the local communities that venues and stadiums nominally are there to serve. 

Depending on which chatbot you ask, Elias Thorne might be a clockmaker, a lighthouse keeper, or a librarian. But if you ask ChatGPT or any of the other popular large language models to tell you a story, there’s a good chance he’ll appear, unbidden. And Elias’s stories are flooding the self-published AI generated book market, Youtube, and fake news sites.

Software engineer Daniel May first noticed the Elias takeover earlier this year; he found that on Google Trends, people weren’t searching for “Elias Thorne” until late 2025. Searches for the name really spiked in early 2026, while the related query “lighthouse keeper” also started trending upward in the last few years. He tested a few chatbots, including Grok, Deepseek, and Gemini, with the prompt “tell me a story,” and the chatbots frequently started with similar stories about lighthouses, clockmakers, or explorers. 

In late May, researchers Sil Hamilton and David Mimno at Cornell University’s Department of Information Science published their paper, “Elias in the Lighthouse, Again?” on the preprint repository arXiv. They sampled 20,000 total stories from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, and the Allen Institute for AI's chatbot using five prompts, and found that the same 11 words—names like Elias, Mara, and Elara, and occupations like lighthouse keeper, clockmaker, and librarian—appear in more than 88% of generated stories, with little difference between models. Unite.ai covered the study shortly after it was published.