Annalee Newitz

Free software is software in which the underlying source code to a program is made freely available to the general public. It’s a development methodology that sharply contradicts the way companies like Microsoft or Oracle do business. At first glance, the idea that free love and free software would come together as smoothly as so many sex-party comminglers might seem odd, but the scene really wasn’t that unusual. As my own regular participation in both the party scene and the world of free software frequently demonstrated, free software hackers aren’t all that uncommon in the “sex” community, a group that includes people in open relationships, queers, S/M or kinky fetish fans, and anyone else whose sexual proclivities fall outside the mainstream.

Coders suffer an unfortunate reputation for living disembodied, asexual lives; they are maligned for being passionate only about their computers and often deemed incapable of non-virtual lust. But the stereotype doesn’t hold true — the geeks I know are getting some, and not infrequently with utter disregard for conventional social mores. Most intriguingly, that subset of geeks who are passionate about free software may well be leading the way: Some of the same free software programmers who eagerly experiment with new methods for developing software are also gleefully dallying with alternative ways of developing sexual relationships.

The people at this particular sex party — a private, monthly event that many of us attend regularly — were in search of freedom, or at least a relief from social convention. They saw no need to constrain themselves to a sexual status quo just because the boring majority doesn’t know how to have fun. Likewise, many advocates of free and open-source software describe themselves as nonconformists, rebels or as just generally more open-minded than your average person. In terms of software, that means that they delight in engaging in practices that challenge the staid old proprietary capitalist way of doing software business.

The ideals that underlie free and open-source software are applicable to more than simply coding and business — they get at the very nature of what constitutes human community. Free software is a shared resource that nobody can selfishly hoard; open-source software is an alternative form of production that involves groups of people who work together rather than in competition with each other.

When programmers see that software production is dramatically improved in a shared, non-competitive, free environment, wouldn’t it be natural for them to apply what they’ve learned from coding to what they practice in their everyday lives — including their sex lives? And the logical extension of free and open-source software in the realm of sex would certainly include publicly shared sex at a sex party, for instance, alternative ways of building relationships (such as queer sexuality) and non-monogamy (or, to put it another way, non-proprietary sexual affection).

One need look no further than Richard Stallman, the most prominent advocate of free software, to see how technological and sexual experimentation can merge. Stallman has both awed and frustrated the open-source and free-software communities with his incendiary opinions about why developing free software is not merely pragmatic, but also morally imperative. But his intransigence isn’t limited to code. “I’ve been resistant to the pressure to conform in any circumstance,” he says. And that includes sexual conformity.

Stallman says he has never had a monogamous sexual relationship, and he’s also observed that programmers tend to favor polyamorous or non-monogamous relationships more than people in other jobs. “It’s about being able to question conventional wisdom,” he asserts.

He confesses with a smile that he doesn’t consider himself an expert on sex, but he recognizes that the unconventional choices he has made as a software engineer are analogous to the choices he’s made in his romantic life as well. “I believe in love, but not monogamy,” he says plainly.

Stallman’s specific beliefs are his own, but the nonconformist, experimental nature that guides his work is shared by a not-insignificant portion of the coder community.

Stallman is often dismissed by mainstream software developers as an oddball who is not to be taken seriously — so it wouldn’t be surprising for defenders of the sexual status quo to do the same. But Stallman isn’t unique in his hacker polyamority. Author and programmer Eric Raymond is both a leading evangelist of free software and a expert on geek anthropology whose credentials are second to none. “Hackerdom easily tolerates a much wider range of sexual and lifestyle variation than the mainstream culture,” writes Raymond in “The New Hacker’s Dictionary.” “It includes a relatively large gay and bisexual contingent. Hackers are somewhat more likely to … practice open marriage, or live in communes or group homes.”

Of course, no one’s been counting how many hackers frequent sex parties or calculating the percentage of open-source contributors who also enjoy open relationships, but there does seem to be a crossover. “This [alternative lifestyle] group is a healthy contingent of the hacker culture, and has been even more influential than its size would suggest,” says Raymond.

At the very least, it’s safe to say that not only are many open-minded open-source hackers unafraid of the anything-goes mentality of the experimental sex community, but that they also positively embrace it. There’s even a crop of online open-source pornography, memorialized in J. Stile’s hoard of erotic “Linux slut” images, which you can find on his Webby award-winning Stile Project. The overlap between the languages of programming and kink is a source of humor on a bondage Web site known to fans as the BSD BDSM Site. As an advertisement for the “Cat5 o’ Eight Tails” reads, “Light and fast, perfect for the home or office where multitasking is vital. Eight individual strands to transmit your message interference-free.”

This entire free software/free love scenario would seem to challenge the conventional wisdom that holds that there is something lacking in geek sexuality. According to stereotype, geeks are celibate, disinterested in pleasures of “the meat” or too socially awkward and unattractive to find partners. And sexual pioneers are supposed to be gutter-dwelling crackpots or beautiful porn stars. What reason could they have for mingling with bespectacled programmers who gripe endlessly about such problems as coding a free Perl script that will work flawlessly with a proprietary Oracle database?

Of course, most free-software advocates will tell you that conventional wisdom is no wisdom at all. For some of the select group of techies who have devoted themselves to free software and open-source projects, free love and creative sexuality are part and parcel of their dedication to communities that value openness, sharing and collective pragmatism.

“There’s no causal connection between being into open-source software and being sexually adventurous. Let’s dash the implication that open source causes bisexuality or anything else,” laughs Eli Silverman (not his real name), a longtime programmer who worked extensively with the GNU Emacs text editor at a Silicon Valley company devoted to open-source development. He is also a self-described “pervert” whose collection of gray-market lesbian fisting videos is much admired in the sex community. Adds Ed, a queer Apache developer working in San Francisco: “Just because you know other freaks in open-source doesn’t mean that being into open-source makes you a pervert.”

And yet both admit that the ideals that motivate a person to get into open source or free software might also motivate them to be sexually experimental. Open-source “is not the textbook solution,” Ed explains. “It’s an alternative mode of economic production, and being queer or non-monogamous are alternative modes of having relationships. Perhaps people who can consider alternate modes of production are willing to consider other kinds of alternatives.”

Another Apache developer who preferred to remain anonymous noted that while he isn’t a part of the sex community, he does see how the mindsets of the two overlap. “I suppose the two groups do share a common sense of rebelliousness caused by marginalization by society, a marginalization due to deliberate choices made by the individuals involved.”

Even as the craze for free software saturates the market, spurring stock market public offerings and inciting fear and trembling in industry giants, opting to go the free or open-source route is still difficult. Although lately free software hackers have been more likely than not to get rewarded for their labors with stock options from aspiring Linux companies, the usual result is more intangible, like getting to build communities or creating better code just for the sheer joy of it. Therefore, it is no surprise that mavericks and free thinkers are the lifeblood of open-source and free software development. And thinking outside the box is, of course, exactly what is required of anyone whose sexuality doesn’t fit into cultural norms.

Yet the notoriously debate-prone open source and free software communities are as divided on the question of sexuality as they are on whether Debian or Red Hat is the better distribution of GNU/Linux. While people like Raymond and Ed see the communities as open to alternative lifestyles, others disagree.

Deirdre Saoirse, a former employee of Linuxcare and founder of a Bay Area users group for people who use the Python scripting language, feels strongly that people involved in open source can be just as conservative and closed-minded as any other part of the population. “Some of my female and/or queer and/or transgendered friends have felt very out of place in the Linux community,” she says emphatically. “I’ve seen a lot of sexism and not a lot of openness to alternative lifestyles among the community as a whole, even in the Bay Area.”

Goolie, a programmer who works on open-source community development projects at a San Francisco start-up, warns that an ability to connect open-source sensibilities and open-mindedness about sex “would take a particular type of coder, one who felt that open source gets at some basic, fundamental expression of humanity.”

Richard Stallman, of course, is just this sort of person. Free software is not a business model for Stallman, nor is it a technically superior method for creating software. Stallman has made his point of view very clear — he doesn’t care if the software he uses is actually technically inferior; for him, free software is a moral imperative based on the principle that people who share code are ethically better people. His commitment to an unorthodox romantic life extends even into the realm of family.

He says he distrusts the idea of traditional families and criticizes the idea that having children is necessarily a positive contribution to an already overpopulated civilization. “As a child, I rebelled against parental authority,” he recollects. In his view, traditional family structures are predicated on the opposite of freely-given love. His point of view is shared by many people in the queer community, where “family” often means long-term friends rather than biological relations, and having children isn’t regarded as the logical outcome of marriage.

Like many social renegades, Stallman has had to create a home life out of his work and friendships. He remembers that back in the 1970s he flirted with the idea of joining a commune devoted to creating “families” who practiced polyfidelity (committed, but non-monogamous, relationships). But he was concerned that he wouldn’t fit into any of the families.

Instead, he created his own family of sorts with his Free Software Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to the sharing and creation of free software resources and information. Rather than sharing food and shelter with a biological family, Stallman shares his famous GNU software with an international group of like-minded individuals.

When queer San Francisco network consultant Richard R. Couture created a Linux-based Internet cafe known as CoffeeNet, one of his wishes was “to create the kind of space where socializing and sexuality and an interest in computers could come together.” And yet Couture, who also founded the Linux user group now known as the Linux Mafia, mourns the fact that Linux users seem so, well, straight. “People call me a pervert jokingly in the Linux cabal,” he laughs. “It’s because I’m openly homosexual and I sometimes enjoy freaking everybody out by commenting on sex. I do it to shock everybody. Sometimes, I just can’t keep my mouth shut.”

Couture’s friend Rick Moen, also a network consultant and member of the Linux Mafia user group, contends that the connection between hacking and open sexuality goes back to the 1970s. In a free zine called the Node, published by San Francisco’s now-defunct Kerista commune, he found a “mix [of] articles about computers and technology with pieces on polyamorous/community living and all sorts of other oddities. I read it whenever I could find it,” he says.

“Geeks are introverts, we read a lot of science fiction, and we have bizarre socialization,” says Muffy Barkocy, a non-monogamous bisexual working with Apache and Perl at Egreetings.com. She believes that a geek’s stereotypical lack of socialization encourages a more experimental sexual life. “Because of our lack of socialization, we don’t learn about the monogamous imperative. It just doesn’t occur to us.”

Barkocy’s point about science fiction bears examination. Speculative fantasizing has always been a passion for geeks of any kind. For some free-software enthusiasts, there is a clear link between the bold visions common in science fiction and a tendency toward experimentation in both coding and sexual practice. Lile Elam, a member of Linux Chix, a women’s Linux user group, suggests that many proto-free software geeks grew up imagining a world where societies weren’t necessarily driven by the profit motive — or by compulsory heterosexual monogamy. Elam adds that many hackers are also pagans — yet another data point indicating an openness to alternative ways of living.

Adds Stallman: “A lot of programmers are science fiction fans, and there’s a tendency in science fiction fandom to accept non-standard relationships.” Science fiction is a genre sometimes known for its utopian musings on what a more liberated society than our own would look like. And reading about alien or unknown worlds can inspire fans to go beyond the realm of imagination and explore alternative realities and social arrangements in everyday life.

Not all free software geeks are science fiction fans, of course, nor are all open-source software developers likely to be ready to strip down and join a three-way at the drop of a Red Hat. But that’s not the point. Part of the essence of the open-source and free software communities, ideally, is that they are open to experimentation of all kinds, both in terms of practical engineering — the compilation of efficient code — and social engineering — the construction of new ways of being in the world. And these new ways of being are certainly not limited to the sexual variety. Open-source enthusiasts are likely to see applications for open-source strategies in a vast number of arenas, including politics, the creation of literature and even hardware design.

But when you get right down to it, sex is always near the top of the list.

“Computer people talk about two things: code and sex,” says Barkocy. “You discuss alternatives to what your company can do with code, or alternatives to sexual norms.”

“Raytheon canceled their appearance literally at the last minute,” he says. “It’s unclear whether this was connected to the e-mail leak, but it’s certainly atypical of Raytheon not to follow through on a campus appearance.” A spokesperson for Raytheon refused to comment on whether the company had canceled its appearance because of the protest, but did acknowledge that the company skipped the job fair and instead met individually with students who had made appointments.

The idea that university administrators are reading private e-mail might seem distinctly Big Brotherian, but the practice is increasingly commonplace. When students access the Internet via university equipment, everything they do — from sending e-mail and visiting Web sites, to sharing pictures and using certain kinds of software — is being watched.

Historically, computer network administrators have monitored student activity online for purely legitimate, technical reasons. Increasingly, however, pressure from government and industry is forcing university administrators to become digital spies. Fears of terrorism, combined with concerns about copyright violations, are creating a climate of campus surveillance.

At the University of California at Berkeley, the everyday Web-surfing habits of students are regularly watched and recorded. Berkeley’s Systems and Network Security group uses a program called BRO — named after the infamous fascist icon from George Orwell’s “1984″ — that keeps logs of every IP address students visit on the Internet from the campus network.

Cliff Frost, UC-Berkeley’s director of communication and network services, says that “this practice is under review right now,” because the campus community feels it interferes with academic freedom. He expects that the university will continue to keep logs but will discard them after a month or two. “I’d love to keep that data forever,” he adds, “if there weren’t the threats of subpoenas for vile purposes.”

He is referring partly to recent actions by the Recording Industry Association of America, which has subpoenaed universities for the names of students allegedly engaging in music piracy. Techs must comb through saved logs for personal information to fulfill the subpoenas’ demands. Some schools, including MIT, have refused to hand over the information by arguing that it is protected under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. FERPA is designed to stop students’ personal data from being handed over to third parties, and no one has yet challenged the use of FERPA in these copyright cases.

But there is a little-discussed section of the USA-PATRIOT Act that renders FERPA completely useless when federal officials subpoena personal student information for terrorism-related investigations. Not only do these federal subpoenas bypass FERPA, but the people served are not permitted to discuss them with anybody.

“You can’t challenge [these subpoenas] because you can’t tell anyone you’ve received them,” says Lauren Gelman, an attorney with the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford. “At a university, one administrator can’t even tell another administrator about these subpoenas, so there is no way to know how many have gone out.” While university administrators want to comply with federal laws, many are wary of handing over private data in such a secretive manner.

And if the experiences of MIT computer network director Jeff Schiller are any indication, USA-PATRIOT Act subpoenas are being used on a regular basis to gather information about student online activity. “Things have definitely changed around here since 9/11,” Schiller says. “Nobody has come around with a blanket subpoena looking for e-mails sent by Muslims [on campus]. But we’d never seen subpoenas for information related to national security before, and now we do.” He couldn’t reveal how many of these subpoenas he’s received, but he did confirm that there has been a marked escalation in the electronic investigation of people at MIT “on terrorist grounds.”

The only way to defend student privacy against USA-PATRIOT subpoenas, says University of Michigan public policy professor Virginia Rezmierski, is for university IT departments to stop saving their logs. You can’t subpoena information that doesn’t exist. Rezmierski is the lead author of a 2001 National Science Foundation study of network monitoring and logging practices on college campuses.

“I don’t think this study made people very happy when it came out,” she says. “A lot of our findings were very disturbing.” She describes interviewing a college systems administrator for the study who told her that he had singled out one student and periodically logged everything he did on his computer “because [the student] was really competent with network operations and he seemed a suspicious type.”

She and her co-researchers also discovered that many schools routinely kept records of everything people did on campus networks. Worse, they saved this information without stripping personal identifiers out of it. “People don’t realize there are different levels of monitoring and logging,” Rezmierski says. “You can save logs in order to analyze them for technical and security purposes without saving personal information.” When schools must save logs, she emphasizes, it’s crucial that they remove any markers that connect their data to particular individuals.

She adds that if colleges don’t have policies regulating who has access to such logs, students are left vulnerable to censure by politically motivated administrators who deem certain students or student groups “suspicious” enough to monitor.

Perhaps most disturbing to critics and privacy advocates is the fact that schools are responding to subpoenas from the music recording industry with as much alacrity — and as many privacy-invading techniques — as they are to subpoenas related to national security. In their efforts to ferret out pirates, administrators are violating their own campus privacy policies, treating students who use P2P software the same way they would treat potential terrorists.

Earlier this year, administrators at Penn State decided to hunt down and punish students on the campus network who were using Direct Connect, a program that can be used to trade music files. Although Penn State promises students that their computer use won’t be monitored, administrators tracked down over 200 students using Direct Connect in April and shut down their campus network accounts. Contrary to its expressed policy, the school was retaining logs of network activity that could be traced to individual students.

Penn State’s vice provost of information technology, Russell Vaught, refused to say how the students had been identified, explaining only that his office had “acted within the law.” But undergraduate Mike O’Connor, director of technology affairs for Penn State’s undergraduate student government, showed me an e-mail he’d received from Vaught that acknowledged university techs had watched the online activities of students to find out which ones were using Direct Connect. Vaught’s office may not have broken the law, but O’Connor says that he and other students believe that “Penn State violated its own policy in using these methods.”

For a few months last year, the University of Wyoming used a program called AudibleMagic to look at the content of every piece of data traveling over the campus network suspected of containing copyrighted material. Administrators could gain access to any student’s private data if they suspected he or she might be pirating music. Lambasted in the press, administrators stopped using the program in May. Robert Aylward, the vice president of information technology at the university, says that it no longer uses AudibleMagic and has switched to a program called Packeteer, which tracks data flow on the network but doesn’t look at the content of that data.

However, an AudibleMagic rep says that other universities are adopting its technology.

There are countless products and services like AudibleMagic on the market, all enabling network administrators to place students under surveillance in the name of copyright protection, network monitoring and national security. On college campuses today, the question isn’t whether your computer activity is being watched; it’s who might use your private information against you.

The data has been made available for reasons that stretch beyond mere scientific curiosity. When Celera’s former CEO Craig Venter pushed his company to finish mapping the human genome before the government-funded, public Human Genome Project (HGP), the move was widely considered an attempt to demonstrate that science is done more efficiently by the private sector. But Celera ended up filing hundreds of patents on discoveries it made while sequencing the genome, and access to the database itself is exorbitantly expensive.

For the scientists working on the Human Genome Project, the data defining who we are is too important to be left to Celera — or any other company. David Haussler, a team leader at the University of California at Santa Cruz who helped Kent and others put the genome online, expresses the credo of a data liberator succinctly: “Information about the human genome is better in public hands than secretly locked up somewhere.”

But it’s not just the research data itself that is at the center of the tug of war between corporations and scientists. When working with data as complex and vast as the human genome, the software tools necessary to manipulate that data are as important as the genetic code itself. A whole new science of “bioinformatics” — a flowering of software and hardware explicitly designed to analyze genomic information at blisteringly fast speeds — has arisen, operating at the intersection of computers and biology.

Life science researchers — even those who work in academic settings — are finding that corporations are just as eager to patent the tools as they are the data, and in many cases, universities are bending over backward to let the private sector have its way. As a result, a growing number of bioinformatics researchers are beginning to look to the free-software and open-source software movements for inspiration in their quest for bio freedom.

In the world of free and open-source software, the underlying code to a software program is made publicly available for anyone to share, copy or modify. For bioinformatics researchers, the idea of being able to share software code and benefit from each other’s research exerts a strong appeal that is synergistically linked with their belief that information about human genetic code should also be freely available.

Free software has historically been a realm inhabited by geeks who sometimes have difficulty making their concerns comprehensible to the general public. In contrast, the worries of life sciences workers come at a time when public awareness over the new possibilities of biotech is surging. When kittens and sheep are being cloned, how long can it be before we have the ability to clone humans?

In addition to scientists, a number of artists and cultural critics — some of whom are now proudly branding themselves as “biopunks” — are also sounding warnings about the importance of giving the public a voice in how their bodies’ genomic information gets used. The Sausalito offices of Genetic Savings and Clone, the company that announced in February the arrival of “Cc” (Carbon Copy), the cloned kitty, even share space with the brand new BioArts Gallery, a space dedicated to biopunk art.

Not every bioinformatics researcher necessarily considers herself to be pursuing the same cause as self-described biopunks, but together, they may represent a movement in the making, one dedicated to the proposition that the information that defines humanity is too precious to be private.

Two years ago, outspoken U.C. San Diego bioinformatics professor Richard Belew told Science, “In an emerging field like computational biology — where it seems likely that we will have the worst of both software and biomedical intellectual property issues — the stakes are enormous. Genomic projects are already generating huge wealth; active academic researchers … will have great influence on how these assets are ultimately distributed.”

For scientists who work with genomes and proteins, possibly the most radical position they can take is that their research is for the public good, and therefore their data should be available in the public domain. The problem is, few members of the general public are well-trained enough to appreciate the value of a software program that, for example, aligns your cDNA sequence to a gene or set of genes. Nor would many care to use their computers to predict the secondary structure of a protein.

Thus, for many scientists, putting data in the public domain means sharing it with other scientists. Doing this might mean placing your newly discovered protein structures in a public database. Or, if you want to publish your findings, it could mean working with Michael Eisen on the Public Library of Science, a free, peer-reviewed scientific publishing project the U.C. Berkeley professor initiated to combat the problem of having to buy hundreds of prohibitively expensive science journals in order to “share” knowledge with his peers. Like many in the life sciences, Eisen dislikes the commercialization — and, for all practical purposes, privatization — that occurs when scientists place their valuable findings in journals that other scientists can’t access because their universities or labs haven’t got a subscription.

It’s this same problem that led European Bioinformatics Institute team leader Ewan Birney to announce emphatically at a recent conference, “I have vowed never to publish in the journal Science.” Birney — whose work is globally renowned — is one of the founders of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates open-source software development in genomics and serves as the umbrella organization for several popular projects.

Open-source development — in which software code is by definition made publicly available to all — has become a thorny issue for many scientists whose contracts stipulate that all their intellectual property belongs to the university or company that employs them.

Chris Dagdigian, a life sciences technology consultant in Boston who builds genome data-crunching clusters of computers running Linux-based operating systems, explains that for many researchers, developing open-source tools is crucial because otherwise each piece of software has to “reinvent the wheel” and may cost the developer several days of valuable work when she could be gathering new data. While it’s common to hear that private companies don’t want their employees to “give away” software by working on open-source projects, what most people don’t realize is that the problem is even more pressing in academia.

The Bayh-Dole Act, passed in 1980, allows universities to claim ownership of patents on academic discoveries made using federal funds. What this means is that the university, as well as the government, stands to profit from what researchers discover. As a result, universities have set up technology transfer departments whose sole purpose is to determine which discoveries the university is going to patent and market to industry. In other words, universities have become minicompanies, wanting to keep all their scientists’ research proprietary in case it might turn out to be lucrative.

Licensing issues for software development have long been a focus of conflict between programmers and software companies. But the immense financial bonanzas that many believe will accrue to biotech companies — which by necessity are heavily involved not just in software development but also in research that could affect human health — is making such license issues all the more pressing.

Cynthia Gibas, a bioinformatics professor at Virginia Tech, is very concerned about the way her university and others are using the Bayh-Dole Act to keep her colleagues from contributing to open-source software projects. Although her department allows her to work on open source, she says, “I’m interested in this because we don’t have a uniform policy about this across the university. The university doesn’t train us in intellectual property issues. Many researchers have to deal with labs where they believe that anything that goes out the door is a potential loss of profitability.”

With so many people going into bioinformatics, she notes, it’s going to be difficult for them to develop decent software if they’re not allowed to participate in already-existing open-source projects. Gibas may be “a commie pinko from way back,” as she puts it, but she’s also a pragmatist. “I think universities should be allowed to get some butter from these patents because they’re so underfunded anyway. But I’m worried when the attitude becomes ‘let’s grab everything.’”

One solution that Gibas and many other academics favor right now is creating an open-source contract, which would allow academics (and possibly people in industry, too) to make a formal agreement with their employers that allows them to contribute to open-source projects. A group called Openinformatics.org is trying to organize academics around this issue, proposing a number of different kinds of open-source contracts.

Perhaps the only academic to negotiate a blanket open-source contract with his university so far is computational biologist Steven Brenner at U.C. Berkeley, who says that it took several months and hundreds of dollars in legal fees to come to an agreement with the U.C. technology transfer office.

“I just wanted them to sign a document saying I could modify the copyright [license] on my work and contribute to open source,” he says. Eventually, after a great deal of explaining, the tech transfer office came around. Now Brenner is free to contribute to a project called “bioperl” — which he helped found — as much as he likes.

Open-source contracts may be the most elegant solution for scientists who want to share their work. “I know many people at U.C. Berkeley produce open-source semi-illicitly,” Brenner says. “And I’ve been contacted by many people who want the [open-source contract] arrangement.”

A more radical response to privatization of the genome and bioinformatics software would be to open up the entire scientific process. This is exactly what Jeff Bizzaro, founder of Bioinformatics.org, proposes to do. His site, which has attracted thousands of members from across the globe, hosts several open-source bioinformatics projects. But the site isn’t just about software. It’s also about making the process of scientific discovery public and collaborative. Bizzaro encourages scientists to post their findings on the site so that, for example, two scientists could conduct complementary experiments halfway across the globe from each other.

Bizzaro and his cohorts at Bioinformatics.org believe that the scientific process has become too competitive and proprietary; ultimately we should share data in the same way a political progressive would suggest we share wealth: democratically, openly and with ethical integrity.

But what about the people who care passionately about opening up the scientific process, but who have little access to labs and lack formal scientific educations? For them there is always the way of the biopunk.

The term “biopunk” — an offshoot of “cyberpunk” — originally described a genre of science fiction dealing with biotechnological themes. But as computer and Internet culture took off, the term came also to be associated with the “information-wants-to-be-free” hacker ethos.

Biopunk shares with cyberpunk a spirit of social critique in the sciences, and a commitment to limiting corporate control of data. Like cyberpunk, it’s also a movement that encompasses the work of engineers, scientists, artists and cultural critics. But the biopunk revolution has yet to be codified or legitimized — it’s as ill-defined as the genome itself. While cyberpunk is the familiar stuff of Wired cover stories and desktop computers, biopunk lurks at the corners of bioinformatics conferences and in the late-night lab work of anti-authoritarian university researchers who contribute to open-source software projects on the sly. Cyberpunk finds expression in big-budget Hollywood pictures like “The Matrix”; biopunk animates the bizarre art of people like San Francisco biopunk artist Dale Hoyt, whose cult video “Transgenic Hairshirt” has been passed from hand to hand in the San Francisco art underground.

Biopunk also differs from cyberpunk in that it is associated with the life sciences and medicine, two areas of inquiry that have a long history of ethical debate over the relationship between research and the public good. Biopunks can therefore call on a venerable tradition of philosophical thought when they raise objections to how scientists are gathering and using genomic data. Moreover, biopunks often protest misuses of the human body and its reproductive functions, which makes biopunk a considerably more feminist and queer movement than straight-guy cyberpunk ever was.

But what do biopunks want? It depends on who you ask. Dale Hoyt says it’s all about protesting both “bio-Luddites and apologists for the biotech industry.” He adds that it’s also about questioning current science. “I think the human genome project is a capitalist fable, a fable in which the government works with private industry. The genome race was ridiculous. Celera came up with this shotgun version of the genome, and I think the results are bogus. I think it was just to get more stock options for Celera and more grants for the NIH.” His sentiment, while extreme, is not unfounded: Many scientists have protested the slapdash methods that Celera used to assemble its map of the human genome so quickly. Genomics expert Barry Commoner carefully debunked Celera’s dubious achievement in a widely read article in the February issue of Harper’s.

Hoyt is the founder of the Coalition of Artists and Life Forms (CALF), a think tank that he says operates “with the utopic idea that artists could contribute to the dialogue about biotech and research about biotech.” Hoyt, whose video “Transgenic Hairshirt” is about his relationship with his “ludicrously bred” hairless cat, was excited about the cloned kitty announcement, remarking that “this is as important a step as was the VCR or the first PC since it takes a major technology and brings it into the home in a domesticated version.”

Although Hoyt and his biopunk colleagues in CALF remain committed to art that eschews commercialism, it’s clear that, as Hoyt worries, “Biopunk could become a capitalist tool.” In the meantime, however, he has high hopes for the ways that genomic information, if liberated, could be used. “I want superanimals who turn on their masters and give the world back to the chipmunks who were here first,” he laughs, then adds, “This is with our extinction in mind, of course. I’m all for human extinction.”

While trickster nihilism works fine as art, it’s hardly suitable for scientific inquiry. Perhaps that’s why data liberationists who do science and engineering tend to espouse rather more modest goals than the elimination or modification of our troublesome species.

At a January conference on bioinformatics organized by the computer book publisher O’Reilly & Associates, I chaired a panel called “Open Data Open Source” where data liberationist scientists and code hounds had a chance to debate the value of free software and learn more about their biopunk counterparts in the arts community. Slightly perplexed by stories of biopunk artists who want to wrest control of genomic data from corporations and participate in everything from genetic engineering experiments to protein discovery, Ewan Birney wondered, “Well, we couldn’t have people doing genome gazing in the same way amateurs engage in star gazing, could we?”

Several geeks in the audience were quite taken by his comment about genome gazing. Chris Dagdigian immediately brainstormed an idea for a Web site for amateur genomics enthusiasts called Genome Gazer that would broadcast genetic information in a manner analogous to video or audio streaming.

“Basically, you could make a Web site that just streams human genetic code at you,” he says. “You can get your hands on all sorts of genomes now — they’re just giant text files of alphabet characters. You could pick your favorite chromosome, download it from the government and get one of those stock ticker programs to stream the genome instead of business information.”

Ann Loraine, a staff scientist who studies the human genome at biotech company Affymetrix in Emeryville, Calif., loves the concept. “In 20 years, every high school kid will be surfing the human genome online,” she enthuses. “Now that the genome’s sequenced, and you can get computing power for not much money, you too can investigate genes and this could help you learn how to do it.”

Bring the genome to the people — that’s the biopunk way.

We are somewhere in the bowels of the science fiction convention DragonCon. We are attending the Open Filk — an open mike gathering at which people perform science fiction-themed songs, often set to familiar tunes.

It’s so cheesy that at first my friends and I giggle uncontrollably, covering our mouths and wheezing to hide our too-obvious rudeness. But then the deeper meaning of the song starts to sink in: It’s mournful and sincere, a tale sung by an outcast aching for acceptance. The land where the giants walk is a place where geeks can hold their heads high, a place where difference is respected rather than punished. This filker is singing the deep geek blues.

After listening to several more filkers, I get up to leave, thanking the guy who sang about giants on my way out. His irony-free self-expression might be alien to my more cynical universe, where sentimentality has become a form of mockery. But I’m beginning to wonder if he’s what I’m seeking — the core of truth beneath DragonCon’s veneer of commercial science fiction hype.

Often called the biggest science fiction convention in the United States, DragonCon attracts more than 20,000 people to the Hyatt Regency and Marriott in downtown Atlanta every year for a three-day orgy of SF fandom. Giant exhibition halls are packed with people selling everything from rare 1960s Lois Lane comic books and pirated Japanese anime, to the latest role-playing games (RPGs) from White Wolf. Attendees spend their days at hundreds of panels learning about the finer points of fandom: how to speak Elvish, dress like a Klingon, rediscover old comic book favorites or identify the specialness of each Doctor in Doctor Who.

The main competition for DragonCon on Labor Day weekend is WorldCon, a literary SF convention featuring appearances by “respected editors” and postmodern writer-brainiacs like Samuel Delany and Cecilia Tan. DragonCon, on the other hand, is lowbrow by comparison. The keynote speaker is bad boy Harlan Ellison. The scene? A bunch of “tracks” devoted to “Star Wars,” “Star Trek,” “Xena” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” A special midnight session is dedicated to Internet porn. Gore special effects wizard Tom Savini promises to sign pictures of himself wearing his signature “cock and balls” pistol, featured in the splatterfest movie “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn.”

Of course, I had to go to DragonCon.

Only there, hidden under the slag heap of pop cultural debris, could I find the savage, romantic heart of fannish geekdom: the people who wail out the blues, not the ones who hawk trinkets for cash.

In the oh so science-fictiony year 2001, it’s almost a clichi to point out that SF, despite its progressive, utopian impulses, has for the most part sold out. Heroes are action figures; the quest for social justice is a high-concept Hollywood pitch; loving the alien is a pop song from the 1980s. Looked at from this perspective, DragonCon represents the commodification of every fan’s dreams. Here, speculative worlds are equivalent to the dollars you pay for your fannish T-shirts, comics, swords, buttons, videos, DVDs, CDs, whatever.

All weekend long, I hear people griping about where their money is going. If, like many, you register for the con on-site, the cost is $75 per person for the whole weekend (pre-registration and one-day passes are cheaper). Rumors swirl that some of that money is lining the wrong pockets. “All that money should go to staff!” a con-goer points out to me stridently as we wait in an interminable line to register. Looking at the tired, overworked staff, I have to agree. Are there no unions in Middle Earth?

Each “track” at the conference seems organized around some kind of franchise, complete with a new sales pitch for its latest trinkets. The “Star Trek” track whets con-goer appetites for the new “Enterprise” series; a “Lord of the Rings” track features a panel with scenes from Peter Jackson’s upcoming big-budget flick; the “Star Wars” track has a LucasFilms spokesperson explaining why everything in the series has led up to the inauspiciously titled summer 2002 offering “Attack of the Clones”; a local Atlanta UPN affiliate has a big sign advertising “Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s” resurrection in October; even the gentle Pernies from the Weyrfest are selling books and T-shirts from Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragonriders of Pern” series.

People aren’t here just to swap tales of great RPG campaigns and talk in hushed voices about why they adore Willow from “Buffy.” The hungriest among them are trying to “make connections” and get that elusive book deal with top-level SF publishing house Tor, or write a fantastic new world for White Wolf. Sure, they love SF. But more than that, they love money and fame. They’re here to buy and sell.

But why would SF fans rejoice in the corporate control of fantasies they’ve nursed from childhood? The answer, like so many things at DragonCon, comes to me in the form of a story that unfolds right before my eyes.

When my companion Charles and I arrive Thursday night before the con is in full swing, we settle into the Hyatt bar and spend a few bored minutes watching TV.

Just then, our extremely drunk friend Kelly arrives. She’s wearing a giant Nascar T-shirt on her diminutive frame, and has brought a “Mundane” — a nongeek, nonfan — along with her. He looks shaken.

“Hey, guys,” Mundane says to us in a sweet Georgia twang, “I just met her in a bar and we’ve been having a really weird conversation.” Kelly ignores him and looks me over. Hands on hips, she declares, “I want to kiss you. I want to stick my tongue all the way down your throat.” Mundane starts to get pale, then he manages to stammer out, “I’d pay to see that!”

Some goths behind us grin and light a clove cigarette. When Kelly and I start making out, Mundane hands us each a $20 bill and speeds out of the bar. Settling into some new seats along with a handful of Trek junkies, we exchange perplexed glances. We thought he was just kidding about the money. It’s so hard to understand the strange ways of Mundanes.

“Maybe he thought we were about to do a strip show or something?” Kelly wonders. The Trekkers have seen the whole exchange, and join our conversation.

“People used to say I had the best ass in fandom. I could wear a standard Star Fleet uniform when I was younger,” says Joe, one of the Trekkers. “But now I have to wear the Riker uniform — you know, big shoulder pads to hide my belly.” Joe has been attending SF cons for 30 years.

I stare up at the vaulted ceiling of the Hyatt and wonder how much money Joe has spent on Star Fleet uniforms in his 30 years on the USS Enterprise of the imagination. What’s more tragic? Paying two women to kiss (a recognized Mundane ritual in strip clubs), or paying to live in a fantasy world where spaceships can take you far, far away and women kiss because they want to? Both are equally tragic, I think, but a fan’s willingness to exchange money for fantasies is an understandable method of self-defense against a culture that doesn’t understand her. Money, after all, is power. Science-fiction and fantasy commodification allows (middle-class) fans to escape from the horrors of Mundane life on a regular basis.

Selling out becomes a form of protection. If people will pay to live in your fantasy, that fantasy will survive a little longer.

Behind me at the Hyatt bar, a group of gamers are meeting for the first time.

“This is Jim, who invented the Krathgar universe,” one of them says.

“And this is Kathy, who invented the Swiftriver universe,” replies another. There is general murmuring, and several handshakes.

I decide to devote the next two days to getting the equivalent of a graduate education in fandom. Then, I’ll work on getting laid. I start by looking over my program in the Hyatt bar, where I also have a good vantage point from which to study my DragonConian cohorts.

Klingons abound, and a veritable fleet of storm troopers are following Darth Vader. I spot a Cylon (gearing up, no doubt, for the new “Battlestar Galactica” series), a vampire, various fairies and goths, and a knight in full chain mail sharing a table with Daphne from Scooby Doo and Trinity from “The Matrix.” Strangely, there is even a Hunter Thompson look-alike smoking from a cigarette holder and chatting with somebody wearing an Atlanta Comicon T-shirt. I always knew Thompson was a geek.

There are also massive numbers of my fellow female nerds. Unlike at DefCon,, another geekfest I attended recently, these women are not arm candy. People of all genders, races, sizes and ages are mingling on the Hyatt main floor, wandering from panel to panel, stopping occasionally to hug or talk to old friends. Everyone at DragonCon hugs. It’s one of the few environments where I’ve met strangers who ask me for a hug without a trace of sleaziness or New Age hippie smarm. Already, it’s clear to me that DragonCon is more than a marketplace. It’s a social testing ground, a place where people experiment with new kinds of relationships.

I inaugurate my course of study by attending an afternoon panel about how to bring horror into your favorite RPG. Run by three representatives from Hex Games, the company known for inventing the “quick ass game system” (QAGS), the panel quickly turns into a spirited debate about group gaming psychology.

“Personally, my ideal player is naked and on fire in a strange world!” enthuses Hex president Kevin Butler. He urges us to be imaginative, to become “partners” with our players and to remember that they need small triumphs even if they’re eventually going to be eaten by aliens. A guy with a Cthulhu doll strapped to his chest in a baby carrier raises his hand and intones ponderously, “What players fear more than death is not knowing the rules.”

The discussion turns to live action role playing, or LARPing, where people don’t just sit around and narrate what their character is doing, but act it out. We wonder if sometimes people take their gaming too seriously when they LARP. “I keep hearing about this Scandinavian Web site about sex during LARPing,” laughs Butler, “and there’s this big problem with staying in character while having an orgasm. Worrying about shit like that is going TOO FAR!”

It turns out that dozens of LARPs are going on at DragonCon, and I didn’t even realize it. After the Hex panel is over, I chat with a player in the “Lord of the Rings” LARP, who is trying to entice new players to join in. She has a box full of envelopes with character names on them — you pick one, and can play the character for as long as you want. “There are more popular LARPs here, though,” admits the “Lord of the Rings” rep, “and we have a lot of competition, especially at night.” Now, when I walk around, I stare more carefully at people who are in costume or who look like they’re acting. Are they LARPing? I decide that if anyone creepy approaches me, I have the perfect excuse not to talk to them. I’ll just flash a talk-to-the-hand sign and say disdainfully, “Excuse me, but I’m LARPing right now.”

Later, I attend a Xena panel that features Katherine Fugate, the writer who penned the episode “When Fates Collide,” a fannish favorite in which Xena and Gabrielle learn that no matter how their lives could have turned out, their fates would still have been tied together. It also includes some steamy girl-on-girl kissing. The large room is packed with women, many of them openly snuggling with their girlfriends. I’m smitten by them, moved by all these heartfelt displays of queerness in a Southern state hardly known for tolerance.

Finally, a gray-haired woman stands up and asks the first question. She has a clear Southern twang in her voice, and asks in the politest possible way, “What do you think of scenes between women in Xena?” We all know what she’s really asking: She wants Fugate’s opinion on the infamous “Xena subtext,” the possible sexual relationship between Xena and her friend Gabrielle.

Fugate says simply, “I always thought they were lovers.”

The entire room bursts into cheers and applause. Some women even stand up and stamp their feet.

Filled with elation, I exit the room and cross the hall to watch a roomful of “Buffy” fans putting on vampire makeup. In an environment where vampires, hobbits and dragonriders can roam free, there is tolerance — even enthusiasm — for other kinds of difference as well. If Xena is queer, then why not hundreds of DragonConians? And if two strangers can get it on while LARPing, then surely casual sex is just another form of play.

At DragonCon, all eroticism seems to emanate from the Fantasm group. Fantasm is another Atlanta convention, much smaller, whose organizers are more interested in “speculative sex” than they are in “Star Wars” action figures. I find the Fantasm booth in the expo room with the help of Fred, a longtime con-goer who is an emeritus member of the Secret Masters of Fandom (SMOF), an Illuminati-style group whose covert e-mail list controls the con universe.

The Fantasm folks are selling T-shirts that say things like “Klingons don’t need ribbed condoms,” and pirated videos of Japanese live-action tentacle porn. Charles and I finagle a ticket to Fantasm’s Saturday night party, which will feature Fred auctioning off naked slaves to partiers. “I also hear they’re building a rack,” Fred says conspiratorially.

Saturday night arrives, and Charles is dressed as Wonder Woman. I’m wearing my nicest “Men in Black” suit and tie. After having some drinks with members of Atlanta’s queer SF group, Outworlders, I tangle briefly with some horny teenage boys who want to show me their swords (“They’re really sharp! Can I have a hug?”) and make my way to the Fantasm suite. The naked slaves are lovely; the cute young boy on the rack is turning a nice shade of red under a nerdy goth’s flogger; and a foxy young game designer (why are they all game designers?) named Tony is ready to do whatever I want on the balcony. Some hottie who tells me he owns several comic book stores grabs me and we start kissing. Apparently, he helped organize Atlanta Comicon. So many luscious choices in my quest for sex!

But Charles and our friend Mehitabel decide that they absolutely must fuck a storm trooper in uniform. All weekend, we’ve been drawn by the fetishist outfits of the storm troopers: Swathed in shiny white plastic, their faces hidden behind imperturbable death masks, they make pleasingly mechanical sounds when they walk. They’re like cars, or computers, or giant fascist sex toys. Rumor has it that they make their armor by hand, carefully cutting each piece of plastic out of a certain type of truck shell whose contours are well-suited for storm trooper conversion. The storm troopers’ dedication to their appearance just makes them sexier. Not even Cindy Crawford works this hard to look good.

And so we leave the safe confines of the Fantasm party and run into the midnight hallways of the Hyatt, searching for storm troopers. Somebody at the Fantasm party has stolen one of the storm trooper walkie-talkies (yes, they’re all in radio contact) and vows to help us out. As we begin our pilgrimage, we hear him sounding very official, intoning, “Calling all storm troopers. Report to the Fantasm party in Room 931 at once.”

On the main floor, we see two people in partial storm trooper outfits.

“Could you put your full uniform on for us?” Charles asks. Mehitabel giggles.

“I guess so,” one of the troopers says uncertainly. “Why?”

“Well, we need you for sexual activities,” I explain. “But just oral sex. See, we’re at this party, and everyone really wants to have sex with a storm trooper. But you need to be in full uniform.”

Both storm troopers are looking a little disturbed. “Why don’t you try some of the other guys? They’re downstairs.”

Downstairs, we find more partially outfitted storm troopers. They look far less enticing with only the top half of their armor on. Each time we request sex, they send us to another part of the hotel. All the troopers seem to like the idea of putting on their full uniform for us, but when we bring up sex, they send us on to someone else. Don’t they see the connection between their fetishistic uniforms and kinky sex?

“Storm troopers are all bark and no bite,” a nontrooper tells us helpfully, adjusting her breasts inside a latex dress.

“They can’t have sex in their uniforms because they’re in command,” Mehitabel replies mournfully.

But wonder of wonders, when we return to the Fantasm party for more groping, the walkie-talkie plan has worked. There are three storm troopers waiting for us, looking extremely confused. Unfortunately, they aren’t in full uniform. After a long discussion about storm trooper design, we discover that the uniforms are like overalls — they’re mostly one piece, and once you have them on, it’s hard to lie down or bend over or, um, anything else. Sadly, the one trooper who is interested in debauchery doesn’t have a hinge on his plastic storm trooper crotch guard, so we can’t get access.

“What were you thinking?” I berate him. “How could you make a uniform like this without hinges on the crotch?” I tap the thick white plastic over his underwear and frown.

“I’m sorry,” he says, looking genuinely contrite. “I didn’t have time.” Another trooper proudly shows off his crotch hinge, but declines the oral sex.

“Hasn’t anyone ever wanted to fuck you in uniform?” I ask the third trooper, who doesn’t look very Imperial in his Gap khakis. Apparently not. We have reached the limits of our shared fantasies with these troopers. They’re not going to play by our rules, and we’re not going to play by theirs. I’ve learned another rule of tolerance at DragonCon: All LARPing is consensual, and if you find yourself in a LARP you don’t like you can just go find another one.

Our storm troopers wander off in search of the Empire. Luckily, there are sexy goths, game designers and comic book geeks aplenty at the Fantasm shindig. A slave feeds me some melon and then demands, “Do you think I’m only worth $5? That’s all my master paid for me. And I even showed him my cock!”

And so it comes back to money, finally, the only social fantasy that DragonCon shares with the Mundane world. And yet somehow the science fiction fans who flock to Atlanta every year have managed to change the meaning of money to the point where it is practically unrecognizable. In Mundane life, there are no happy slaves. At DragonCon, every role is alluring because the whole social scene is treated like a game. Somehow, playing at life allows us to break the rules.

Created in the late ’70s and ’80s, ASCII pr0n was the world’s first Internet pornography. It was the kind of sexual expression only a hardcore computer dork could love: ASCII pr0n jokes and pinups provided a common culture for a community of outcasts and misfits whose sex lives were portrayed by the mass media as weird or nonexistent. These ridiculously low-quality nudie picture-cum-text files were popular back in the days when putting photographs online was but a dream. ASCII pr0n was of generally poor quality — so much so that its lameness was an in-group joke among hackers at the time — but it also recalls a beautiful, innocent era in many coders’ lives. Its low-res allure and retro cheese factor provide a cool, inspirational aesthetic for today’s younger hackers.

As an almost forgotten footnote of Net history, ASCII pr0n doesn’t seem to have much relevance to an age begging for 3-D “fully immersive” stimulation. But in a weird display of how what goes around comes around applies even to the vagaries of online evolution, ASCII pr0n is suddenly important again. Or at least it should be, if the latest wave of pornography entrepreneurs is willing to pay attention to its own history.

Get ready for “mobile” porn. Big-league adult content companies are getting into the “m” business. They’re ready to sell pornographic movies, magazines and real-time interactivity on people’s PDAs, cellphones and wireless devices.

But there’s just one problem. The porn sucks.

“The quality is nonexistent right now,” confesses Dave James, co-founder of Vivid Entertainment, one of the major players in the digital adult content market.

In fact, mobile porn sucks so hard that its ubiquity is fueling nostalgia for ASCII pr0n. Porn for today’s cellphones is usually written in WAP (wireless application protocol) format, and generally looks far worse than most ASCII pr0n. And the hazy pictures or text tales available for your porno-enhanced hand-held devices are mind-bogglingly lame. One of the truisms of the modern age is that pornography is often first to exploit new advances in technology. But maybe there should be an amendment: Bad pornography always comes first, out on the cutting edge.

Twenty-year-old Irish hacker Cliff Flood is a self-acknowledged fan of ASCII pr0n, and boasts a small collection of ASCII pinups on his Web site, which is otherwise devoted to electronic music and life as a computer science major at the Institute of Technology in Carlow, Ireland.

Over e-mail, Cliff told me that his interest in ASCII pr0n isn’t really prurient. “Mostly the ASCII material is just interesting because it is a curious novelty,” he wrote. “It’s quite uncommon, and seeing the images that some of the authors can come up with using just a few characters is intriguing. My friends and I are mostly brought together by our love for electronic music, creation and consumption, which sometimes involves ancient equipment and a love for all things retro like Atari [computers] and so on. I guess this is where the interest in ASCII pr0n comes in.” This is pr0n as pop art, not, um, as personal aid.

The average cellphone WAP porn, most of which appears to originate mysteriously from the United Kingdom, looks like a haze of dots accompanied by terse textual suggestions, such as “Oh please, fuck my ass!” Porn for PDAs isn’t much better. Tony O’Neill, president of one of the few adult content sites exclusively for PDAs, PalmStories.com, provides his 400 subscription members with a few hot-synced pictures and text stories every day on an AvantGo adult channel. Even he admits that “nobody knows where it’s going yet.”

But in 1997, a celebrity hacker named Kingpin saw the future of PDA porn. In a crypto-masturbatory moment, Kingpin invented a silly software application called HairyPalm, a hack of the Palm operating system that allowed users to play Apple IIE “porno demos” on their Palm Pilots. The app was basically a tool for viewing ASCII pr0n, but when hundreds of present-day ASCII enthusiasts began implementing HairyPalm, the thing worked so badly that it was rumored to be a Palm OS virus.

Despite HairyPalm’s abysmal reputation, Kingpin did manage to make his point. Porn for hand-helds is about as sophisticated and arousing as the old ASCII pr0n that pre-Web nerds used to play with back in the day. In his readme file for HairyPalm 1.5, Kingpin described it as “taking a step back to the early age of computer pornography … HairyPalm demonstrates the beautiful quality of that era.”

Alexei Shulgin, a Moscow artist and webmaster for the notorious FuckU-FuckMe Web site, designed his ASCII pr0n site with an explicitly artistic goal. “I made the site in 1997-98 after I registered Easylife.org and gathered information about access statistics for artists’ Web sites,” he explained to me via e-mail. “It was really painful — not very many people were interested [in art]. Unlike that, porn seemed to be really popular. So my decision was to make a porn interface to art — a Web site that looks like a normal porn site but if you go deeper in it and follow links you’ll end up at art projects.”

The question is, are today’s graphically challenged, bitmappy and text-heavy bits of mobile porn just as imaginative as yesterday’s pr0n? Will there be cult Web sites devoted to WAP porn in 20 years?

Probably not. Many people look back fondly on ASCII pr0n — which was available only to the small group of techno-literates in the 1970s and ’80s — because it was symbolic of a very specific epoch in hacker culture. The ASCII pr0n era was a time before spam, before dot-coms, before things like AOL chat blotted out the close-knit digital communities of Usenet. ASCII pr0n was by geeks, for geeks, disseminated for free in the (sort of) secret directories of BBSs and campus mainframes. ASCII pr0n isn’t just a format — it’s a piece of hacker lore. No wonder it’s being treated like cult art.

Mobile porn, despite its surface resemblance to ASCII pr0n, is clearly being manufactured by large corporations for the masses. Even if said masses haven’t really arrived yet, the point, as Penthouse.com director Gerard Van der Leun says, is to start attracting them now. Penthouse.com has just started releasing what it calls “Petfolios,” or minimagazines for PDAs that feature a Penthouse pet in a mixture of Windows-compatible text, video clips and pictures. “We’re doing a couple of these for free, just to put them out on the Net in the real world,” Van der Leun says, noting that Penthouse.com visitors can download them from the site.

Vivid is also working the hand-held angle, expecting to launch streaming video content for iPAQ hand-helds by Comdex time. “At the end of 2001, there will be a billion hand-helds out there,” says Vivid’s James. “We only need a small portion of that as a value add in order to make a profit.”

The biggest questions for corporations like Penthouse.com and Vivid aren’t how to work creatively in the WAP and PDA formats available, nor are they about creating porn for techno-geeks. Instead, Van der Leun and his counterparts at Vivid worry about how they’ll prevent your average Joe or Jane from violating copyright laws. Van der Leun says Penthouse.com’s Petfolios are protected from pirating because “in order to share these files, consumers have to disclose the credit card number they used to purchase it.” He believes this disincentive to sharing porn will cut down on piracy. Gary Thompson, Vivid’s V.P. of business development, says his biggest concern in the company’s growing PDA market is “digital rights management.” He adds, “We’ll use something along the lines of a digital encryption code where the files disappear after 24 hours. Part of the reason why we’re delaying release on this stuff is because we want technology in place that will keep people from copying our stuff Napster style.”

Mobile porn will, in the end, be just like today’s Web porn. It will be made by professionals for corporations, which will sell it to the masses. It will have none of ASCII pr0n’s artistic or cultish appeal. Despite all the hype, cellphone porn and PDA porn are nothing new, nor will they be remembered in the glowing terms that ASCII — or, for that matter, Napster — will be.

Perhaps the ASCII pr0n nostalgia trend is a reaction against the always-expanding digital porn empire. Or maybe it’s a way of making fun of how bad today’s allegedly high-tech porn really is. Either way, it’s clear that ASCII pr0n will continue to have a place in hacker history. And mobile porn will be just another notch in some CEO’s titanium PDA case.

Joining Marston in the struggle to make mixed-race people a target market is 21-year-old Art Harrison, whose Mixedrace.com launched as a beta site in September. Like Marston, Harrison’s investment in his Web site is personal as well as financial. A Canadian whose father is African and whose mother is Scottish, Harrison says he’s been interested in mixed-race identity since he launched a joke site two years ago called Biracial World Domination. Since that time, he’s been invited to speak at Harvard’s annual conference on mixed-race issues, and has been studying computer science at Carleton College in Ottawa, Ontario.

Harrison is raising venture capital for Mixedrace.com, hoping to expand it into a comprehensive community site featuring instant messaging, e-mail groups and content subchannels on issues such as interracial dating and culture. Community is the key term for Marston and Harrison, who both decry the lack of cohesiveness among people who come from mixed backgrounds.

The Web, with its focus on interactivity, seemed to offer the perfect solution. They could create the mixed communities they longed for and make some money too. Although the financial future for both sites is still unclear, the CEOs are already dealing with sticky questions about content. Specifically, who counts as a half-Jew or a mixed-race person? “It’s a self-identification thing,” affirmed Harrison. “Mixedrace represents people without the barriers of race, yet these people exist because of those barriers. You have to have whole race people to have mixed race people.” Marston admitted that she’s not sure whether to define half-Jewish identity as racial or not. “Judaism is measured genetically, since you are considered Jewish only if your mother is Jewish, thus proving your parentage,” she mused. “And that sounds like a racial identity to me. But I’m still not sure if I’d be considered mixed-race.”

HalfJew.com and Mixedrace.com will be competing with whole-race sites such as AsianAvenue.com, Black Voices and NetNoir, all of which have been fairly successful in the burgeoning market for ethnic and racial content online. But as the mixed race magazine Mavin pointed out in a recent issue, the numbers of mixed-race people in the U.S. are growing by leaps and bounds. Quoting the U.S. Census Bureau, Mavin reported that by 2050, 30 million U.S. citizens will be of mixed racial backgrounds. “I think it’s a good sign if people want to identify as mixed-race,” Harrison said decisively. “It means that racial barriers are breaking down.” His sentiment might fly with the Census people. But in the dot-com world, all that matters is whether mixed-race people and half-Jews have money to burn online.