Patricia Nilsson

A fascinating and terrifying read about the history of porn - and the unsettling ways it has come to shape our everyday lives and desires, whether we realise it or not. Nilsson’s thorough research illuminates dark corners of the internet, revealing truths that shouldn’t be ignored

A brave and remarkable journey into a dark world, and a remarkable feat of investigative journalism. This is a book everyone should read - especially parents

From streaming video clips to creators broadcasting themselves for money, pornography pioneered much of what we know and (sometimes) love about the internet today. Patricia Nilsson's vital volume makes an important argument that we're living an online life created by porn, even if we're not all on OnlyFans. Revealing and insightful, this book offers a key to understanding not just digital technology but the way we are all but forced to commodify our selves online. Some people just embrace the commodification more than others

Patricia Nilsson has cracked open an industry most have squeamishly dismissed – and, with a cool incisiveness, convincingly argued how it has laid the rails for the entire online economy. She takes the reader for a wild ride, where her forensic and colourful examination of pornography reveals a chilling truth about the co-optability of our attention and desires. This is a foundational work if you want to understand how capitalism has come for pleasure and how the commodification of the self in the name of intimacy has, in fact, fractured real connection. Nilsson has threaded the needle here with a perspective that is unflinching and which carefully avoids relying on easy, obvious narratives

The Pornification of the Internet, the Economy, and Everything Else

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.

Patricia Nilsson

Praise for Guilty Pleasure

A fascinating and terrifying read about the history of porn - and the unsettling ways it has come to shape our everyday lives and desires, whether we realise it or not. Nilsson’s thorough research illuminates dar ...

A brave and remarkable journey into a dark world, and a remarkable feat of investigative journalism. This is a book everyone should read - especially parents

From streaming video clips to creators broadcasting themselves for money, pornography pioneered much of what we know and (sometimes) love about the internet today. Patricia Nilsson's vital volume makes an importa ...

A fascinating and terrifying read about the history of porn - and the unsettling ways it has come to shape our everyday lives and desires, whether we realise it or not. Nilsson’s thorough research illuminates dar ...

A brave and remarkable journey into a dark world, and a remarkable feat of investigative journalism. This is a book everyone should read - especially parents

From streaming video clips to creators broadcasting themselves for money, pornography pioneered much of what we know and (sometimes) love about the internet today. Patricia Nilsson's vital volume makes an importa ...

A fascinating and terrifying read about the history of porn - and the unsettling ways it has come to shape our everyday lives and desires, whether we realise it or not. Nilsson’s thorough research illuminates dar ...

A brave and remarkable journey into a dark world, and a remarkable feat of investigative journalism. This is a book everyone should read - especially parents

From streaming video clips to creators broadcasting themselves for money, pornography pioneered much of what we know and (sometimes) love about the internet today. Patricia Nilsson's vital volume makes an importa ...

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