Lily Phillips' Midnight Meat Train
Pornotopia and Algorithmic Society
In 1964, literary critic and historian Steven Marcus concluded that there is an inherent affinity between the logic of pornography and the logic of computers.
In Marcus’ famous analysis of Victorian erotic literature, he coined the term ‘pornotopia’ to designate the ideal setting of pornography. Pornotopia, like utopia (οὐ-τόπος, lit. “not-place”), is nowhere. Instead of being considered a place, pornotopia is a mode of habitation. Pornography is characterized by its facilitation of the mathematical and systemic division of human bodies, the scheduled arrangement and combination of their component parts.
This is where the computer as a pornotopian device comes in. “A pornographic novel,” Marcus wrote, “might be written by a computer. If one feeds in the variables out will come the combinations.” The same can be said of the ideals governing algorithmic culture – a culture which is organized by the logic of programming.
The shape and direction of an algorithmic culture is governed by predictions regarding the optimization of its consumption. These predictions are derived from data accumulated by the mass surveillance of how we, as users of algorithmic platforms, consume the culture that these platforms contain. And as algorithmic platforms increasingly become the sole means by which culture is mass disseminated and consumed, our horizon of imagining the future is increasingly aligning itself within the ideals of optimization and certainty that programmability can afford.
Our society is, itself, already an algorithmic society. And it is for this reason that, not only visual culture, but contemporary society, is fundamentally pornographic.
The vision we have of society, itself, is – if not produced – at least organized by a computer. The platforms get fed the variables, by tracking the habitual captivation of our attention, and out come the combinations most likely to perpetuate our captivity.
It is no surprise, then, that pornography – the supposedly peripheral, the borderline transgressive, the obscene – bears a close affinity with contemporary mainstream culture. Pornographic content creators frequently number amongst viral content, with several stories taking precedence in recent weeks.
Bonnie Blue makes headlines by soliciting sex with as many ‘barely legal’ teen boys as possible during their Spring Break. Sophie Rain garners attention by reporting $43 million in annual OnlyFans earnings, eventually advertising a ‘Bop House’ for adult content creators on TikTok. Lily Phillips has sex with one hundred men on camera in a 14-hour period. The ordeal is the subject of a viral YouTube ‘documentary’ featured on a channel that caters to pranks and reaction videos.
What is exceptional about stories such as this, however, is not that the pornographic is becoming mainstream, but that – in an attention economy derived from the capture and calculation of human behaviour in the form of impersonal data – we seem to have forgotten that the pornographic is not really about explicit sex in the first place.
Pornography is, fundamentally, about revelation – making what was once invisible, the subjectivity of sexual pleasure, conform to a regime of visibility in which it can be calculated, predicted, and optimized in its future programming.
Pornography is forced conjuration.
1. pornotopia.exe
Stories like those of Blue, Rain, and Phillips demonstrate that it is inadequate and misleading to state that pornography is encroaching upon the mainstream. The mainstream has always been pornographic. Indeed, the ‘viral’ and the ‘pornographic’ are indistinguishable from one another.
In other words, the dopamine-inducing bodies that we scroll by, as we peruse TikTok or Instagram, are just as much the products of an assembly-line reification of our attention as pranks, pets, fails, and recipes. Whether it’s capitalizing on the contagiously affective registers of sexual arousal, outrage, or cuteness, the same system of surveillance and prediction treats the ground-up bytes of our predictive data as authentic knowledge about our inner, psychological workings.
Thus, when I say that social media is fundamentally pornographic, it’s not just that social media literally contains porn. To be sure, it does to a degree – with TikTok and Instagram certainly subsuming the vestigial form of the old ‘men’s magazine.’ But overall, social media performs porn, and you – the collective ‘you’ encompassing us all – are the star.
Extremity is not becoming mainstream, programmability is – and porn is the ultimate genre of computation. It is a numbers game of counting age, accumulating revenue, and compartmentalizing body parts and their receptacles.
Porn is a numbers game whose aim is not sexual gratification, but perversely immutable knowledge. Porn is pleasurable because it purports to peel back the veneer – conjure and reveal – the essence of subjective mystification, reducing feelings, affects, and sensations to rippling flesh, pulsating orifices, and fluids.
Pornography, like a neurotic symptom, is a hysterical and obsessive act of showing and hiding at once. No better example of this exists than the ‘cum shot’ which stands in for a measurable-in-millilitres reality of the otherwise subjective account of sexual gratification. Like the cum shot, the algorithmic system measures likes, minutes viewed, and shares in an economy which prioritizes temporal attention as the metric of cultural success.
Pornography is the capture of subjectivity through forced and quantifiable recordability. Pornography, like algorithmic culture, is a genre that resists escape from a regime of the record, of data, and of certainty. Pornography and algorithmic culture both assert that if the human subject can feel something in front of a recording device, whether a camera or a system of data surveillance, the device can and will capture the totality of that feeling.
Considered in this light, it is no surprise that stories of quantifiable sex acts, capable of acceleration and calculable extremity, strike a chord with the mainstream public – especially the chronically online. We’ve all consented to being penetrated, distended, and pumped full of the surveillance feedback loops perpetuated by algorithmic optimization.
We are as fully prostrated to an invasive inner sight as Lily Phillips’ experience of one hundred men was. Indeed, her scenario is the uncanny confrontation with a logic of human beings reduced to pleasurable meat. For the forced revelation of knowledge facilitated by photography, pornography, and the algorithm, persists because we are aroused by certainty.
The erosion of human autonomy is a small price to pay for the anxiety which certainty banishes in its wake. We would rather be meat machines in a world of meat machines, than to recognize each others’ unpredictability as subjects in an irreducible and unknowable world. Pornography is, in this sense the long shadow of civilization, the glistening tip of which is the algorithmic organization of culture.
Thus, on a formal level stripped of its sexual content, pornography is the hard core of civilization itself. Pornography is the impulse behind the recognition of human subjects.
Porne + graphos – what is written [γράφος] about prostitutes [πόρνη], or, rather, human beings who are compartmentalized [from per-, the Indo-European root meaning ‘to sell’ or ‘partition’].
Pornography is the reduction of human beings to points of data and the arousal it offers is not genital. It is the arousal of certainty, executing society as if it were a program that can automatically and logically fill-in its infinite combinations.
2. As Above, So Below
The programmability of pornography is most transparent in the Marquis de Sade’s famous 120 Days of Sodom.
As Adorno and Horkheimer astutely noted in the second excursus of their Dialectic of Enlightenment, de Sade’s magnum opus depicts an obsessive fixation on numbers, calculation, the most efficient execution of mathematically perfected and balanced acts. De Sade’s 120 Days, indeed, resembles the documentation of a production line more than a record of sexuality.
The text covers a narrative span of exactly four months, as the title indicates, during which several libertines retreat – with an assembly of young boys and girls – to a remote castle in which to fulfill their vices. Each month progresses through a catalogue of various uses that human beings can serve, from simple to complex to criminal to murderous passions.
What is striking is that, like software being downloaded to hardware, the libertines revel in hearing stories of pleasure before they enact them. The abstract data of code comes first, only then can the program be executed. The libertines who abuse, rape, and murder their victims consider themselves to be machines, following the proclivities of human nature in a rational, methodical, and precise order.
As Adorno and Horkheimer argued, de Sade stands as the most transparent of Enlightenment thinkers. For de Sade, the aim is to lubricate the most efficient and optimized means with no regards to an end. Scheduling and organizing activity are an end in and of themselves, down to the methodical scheduling of orgasms. De Sade’s work, for Adorno and Horkheimer, is emblematic of the logical extension of enlightenment thinking – the over-extension of domination, over nature and over human beings, which is first set into motion by the bourgeois mastery of the labour of others.
The mathematical pornotopia in which human beings are reduced to their use value in the context of repeatable, reliable, and programable functioning, is progress stripped of its Enlightenment-era myths.
Whereas Horkheimer and Adorno turned to de Sade as a parable of enlightenment, Clive Barker’s short story, “Midnight Meat Train,” presents a similarly striking parable of enlightenment’s extension in algorithmic society.
In the story, methodical and meticulous murders repeatedly occur in New York City’s subways. The bodies are shaved, the clothing neatly folded and bagged, and the carcasses hung up and butchered with the tidiness of an impeccably efficient factory of death.
Disillusioned with the decay of urban life, the story’s protagonist, Kaufman, is convinced, where others believe monsters might be on the loose, that only human beings are capable of such evil. To blame monsters would be “letting the city off the hook.” Indeed, when Kaufman does track down and defeat the killer, he is faced with the realization that atrocity is fundamentally motivated, not even by human beings, but by a primal humanity – more human than human.
The premise of the story is that beneath New York City, the civilization’s cannibalistic fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons reside – the ‘original Americans.’ Civilization, human life, is sustained above ground, precisely because it is cannibalized below. As Kaufman realizes, a regressive inhumanity is the foundational cornerstone of progress. Civilization is both undone and sustained in the repeated and ritualized consumption of human beings as meat – as the lubricant that oils the unyielding engine of progress. As one of the city’s primal fathers says: “we’re bound to eat this meat, or we die. God knows, I have no appetite for it.” And Kaufman, too, as a member of society, must oblige. Having defeated the subway butcher, he does not achieve a conquest against an agent of death. Indeed, he becomes death – he must continue the sacrifices, butchering humans himself, lest the city crumble.
The questions that Barker’s story raises, like de Sade’s vision of a rational pornotopia, elicit the confusion of progress and regression, humanity and inhumanity. Both de Sade and Barker depict the circuitry through which ‘progress’ moves, the vestigial remnants of a seemingly archaic barbarism which sustain life above ground.
Is the civilized society above a prosthetic sublimation of the butchery below? Or is the latent butchery a reflection of the reified use of human beings that runs rampant, manifest and in plain sight?
Lily Phillips’ scenario, for example, although by no means out of the ordinary in the context of extreme pornography, captures our attention in the context of mainstream media precisely because it stages our own predicament. Having a train of one hundred men run on her, Lily Phillips is a stand-in for each and every one of us – as subject-objects complicit in optimizing the use of human beings.
The logic of civilization begins with the rational decision to dominate our own impulses for pleasure – to curb our desire to achieve pleasure through rape, murder, and atrocity. This logic extends into the continued domination of nature and human beings – a sublimated achievement of that first impulse for pleasure that would have been cut short if acted upon in the moment.
As a result, civilization is the painfully circuitous achievement of pleasures we could have met far more efficiently through criminal acts. Although we repress the reality of our bodily existence, for the sake of a collective future, we continue to cannibalize each other in sublimated form. We all have an underground (and unconscious) train run on us at all times. Indeed, the algorithmic capture of our inner, psychic being is facilitated by latent tubes of informatics that whiz through our digital cities, whisking parts of our very humanity down to the original members of society. The ‘original Americans’ – those processes of calculation which consume and grind our stolen, digital bodies to a pulp in order to lubricate and optimize the engine of an increasingly predictable matrix of social functioning.
Ultimately, what many critique as a degenerate mainstreaming of the pornographic – the sadness and outrage that stories like those of Blue, Rain, and Phillips give rise to – are merely the brief glimpses of the workings beneath civilized society. A return of the repressed. The increasing presence of pornography into the mainstream, especially extreme pornography, is not the encroachment of something other and alien – it is a symptom of the increasing untenability of the reification that stands as the foundation of society, the meat beneath the veneer of civility.
Our utopia has always been a pornotopia – and in the context of algorithmic society, we are increasingly attaining our long-held ideals.
The mask falls from the face of civilization at the moment it reaches its zenith. Society, itself, in its rabid pursuit of greater numbers, increased efficiency, total control, reveals itself to be aligned with extreme excavations of human bodies.
Each tool is revealed to have always been the severed limb of another human being. No wonder that pornography aims to remix and recomposite the use of human parts – down to the speculum-stretched anus which, in extreme pornography, is more than a socket for pleasuring the phallus, but a telescope to be viewed through, a bowl to eat fruit loops out of, or a sleeve to be worn to the elbow. Pornography literalizes the fact that human beings are the base material out of which we facilitated our increasingly prosthetic agency in the world.
3. You’ll Know It When It Sees You
Adorno was highly astute in his observation that astrology, occultism, and new age supernaturalisms are a rationalization of late capitalist existence. The beliefs that invisible, superhuman forces – as alien as the stars – control our tangible, human destinies on earth are symptoms of the demonic possession of material objects by our alienated and commodified existence. Just as one would listen intently to the fortune teller that Scorpio is rising, one nods fervently and ignorantly in response to inflation rates and tax cuts. Both screen the reality of the sheer horror that would arise if we acknowledged our existence as a daisy-chain of rape and reification.
Realizing that there are no gods is the first step to realizing there is no one in power. True horror resides in the fact that for every horror, everyone is to blame.
As Adorno writes, “what has been forgotten in a world congealed into products, the fact that it has been produced by men, is split off and misremembered as a being-in-itself added to that of the objects and equivalent to them.” New Age occultism is, in this sense, true and false – in the same way that the mainstreaming of extreme pornography is both true and false. Astrology tells a lie that speaks the truth of our disenfranchisement, just as the virality of a hundred-man train is a spectacle that authentically documents how fucked we all are.
Yet both astrology and pornography, even as they give voice to our terror, are a silent scream – a symptom. They displace agency and horror elsewhere, even as they give an authentic picture of horror’s reality. It is a self-gratifying illusion to presume that the stars exude influence, not the constellation of human industry and civilization; that the objectified bodies of pornography are peripheral and other to the mainstream, not a reflection of the mainstream’s authentic desires.
The famous dictum, that proclaims pornography as something indefinable yet recognizable – “I’ll know it when I see it” – is proved to be egregiously false.
Pornography’s existence is predicated on the claim that it can capture the invisible, make it accessible for viewing. Yet in an algorithmic society, the act of viewing that accelerates technological advances – the deep, penetrative viewing that trickles into every crack, leaves no orifice unplunged – is no longer human viewing. It is the pornographic pleasure of machines for whom we are just vacuous holes to gaze into, to shine a light on, and to be satisfied that the surface contains all there is to see – if only the mechanical eye can penetrate deep enough.
Just as we imagine the human subject as something thoroughly colonizable by regimes of viewing-as-knowing, we have endowed our machines with the ability to imagine they can thoroughly know the human subject from the behavioural traces we deposit as we consume visual culture. Whereas the cum shot reduces sexual pleasure to the visible (and male), the subject ensnared by the total surveillance of algorithmic knowing is reduced to the equation that to be human is to be data.
Such is the latest violence perpetrated against humanity, by humanity’s own ideals for certainty and for absolving itself of the blame for barbarism. Our machines hack away at us, in our name, and out of those rent wounds oozes a thick, cultural creampie that equates total data surveillance with total knowledge.
The machine looks, gratifying itself as it crunches the data derived from its looking, producing an airtight model of the subject – past, present, and future. The algorithm tracks us today, so that it may anticipate our tomorrow.
Pornography was never something that you’d “know” when you “saw.” The pornographic tendency of the algorithm confirms that pornography has always been an act of being seen. To know pornography was to participate in the act of generating the pornographic; there never has been a pornography beyond its “knowing.”
In this way, you don’t see pornography with the eye – you produce it. And as we’ve constructed increasingly perfect, and increasingly autonomous prosthetic eyes that trace our digital existence – we’ve also endowed those eyes with the same ability to produce the pornographic.
Today, pornography sees you.
So, bend over and open wide. We’re nearing the end of 120 days of civilization.
The final passions are murderous.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. 2005 [1951]. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso.
Barker, Clive. 1998 [1984]. “The Midnight Meat Train” in Books of Blood. Vols. I-III. New York: Berkley Books. 15-42.
Horkheimer, Max & Theodor Adorno. 2002 [1947]. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Marcus, Steven. 1966. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.