Guilty Pleasure

A gripping investigation into how pornography shaped the internet – and then transformed us all This is the story of one of the most influential – and least examined – industries on earth. Worth billions of dollars, and commanding a tenth of global internet traffic at peak times, it has quietly reshaped our world: it has transformed technology, work, culture, love and relationships, and even our sense of self. Most industries of this scale make daily headlines. This one rarely does. In Guilty Pleasure, investigative journalist and FT reporter Patricia Nilsson turns her attention to an industry few have dared to confront, and tells the story of pornography in the online age. Drawing on more than five years of reporting, Nilsson reveals how the internet turned the business of erotic art into something else entirely: a vast, secretive industry dominated by obscure owners, platform logic and profit at almost any cost. She traces how porn helped to shape the online world, and then spilled far beyond it – restructuring everyday life and saturating society with its logic of stimulation, self-soothing and craving. Whether we consume it or not, Nilsson argues, we are living in the world pornography made: one in which our desires and anxieties are relentlessly monitored and manipulated by unaccountable forces. And because this industry has escaped meaningful scrutiny for so long, the power to regulate it has increasingly fallen to political extremists and payment companies. The result is a system that has quietly revolutionized everything, while remaining – until now – hidden from view. Ultimately, she shows, the story of pornography in the online age leads us to the most urgent question of all: what does it mean to live in a world where almost everything about us – our attention, our desires, our anxieties – is monitored and manipulated by unaccountable figures who will stop at nothing to keep us watching?