Written by Zahra Stardust, Kath Albury and Jenny Kennedy, researchers at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society.
Sex tech includes a diverse range of products from sex therapy apps, sex education chatbots, dating apps, sexual entertainment platforms, smart vibrators, teledildonics, menstrual tracking apps, virtual companions and AI-powered sex robots.
There is a substantial media buzz around the potential profits to be made from sextech. But less attention has been paid to questions of equity, inclusion, and public interest associated with these intimate technologies.
In February 2022 we coordinated a three-day Public Interest Sex Tech Hackathon in collaboration with global software developers Thoughtworks and SexTech School, an online training academy for sex tech entrepreneurs.
The Hackathon brought together designers, technologists and communities to workshop how sexual technologies can be designed and governed in ways that prioritise public interest benefit.
We prompted participants to consider how the values of designers become embedded in the technologies themselves, and how we might pivot from purely market-driven approaches to sexual commerce towards technologies that have collective benefits.
While many sextech professionals collaborate with researchers, to date these partnerships have focused on the more individualised biomedical or sexological aspects of sexuality and tech use.
Our own work adopts a feminist socio-technical perspective, which aims to better understand the ways that both individuals and communities interact with sextech platforms and devices, and the organisations and infrastructures that support them (ranging from sextech startups to the servers that support ‘the cloud’).
We approached the hackathon in two stages. Firstly, we sought insights from prospective sextech entrepreneurs regarding the ways they currently understand the politics and economics associated with intimate data.
We then invited hackathon participants to speculate on how sextech could be reimagined to speak back to power, to dismantle structural oppressions, to undertake counter surveillance, or to put power back into the hands of communities.
Hackathons typically involve a series of intensive design sprints, and often involve groups of strangers who come together to prototype a project. Ours followed this model, and we sought to inspire and energise participants via educational panel presentations, and access to industry mentors over the 3-day period. On the third day, panellists competed to ‘pitch’ their idea to a panel of judges with broad expertise in sextech, and public interest technologies.
Hackathons are intrinsically creative and experimental in nature. At the same time, they ask for concrete outcomes – in the form of pitches and prototypes for new technologies. These contradictions put pressure on our participants to be both pragmatic and speculative, while collaborating with strangers in a 3 day Zoom meeting.
In order to lay the ground, we invited an opening panel of activists to present their vision of sextech in the public interest. Panelists represented marginalised communities disproportionately impacted by the collection, regulation, aggregation and commercialisation of sexual and/or intimate data – including people living with HIV, people with disabilities, First Nations people, sex workers and LGBTQ+ people.
The panel challenged us to design technologies that broke down access barriers for LGBTQ+ people living in remote or regional communities, or for people living in supported accommodation (such as aged care). They also called attention to the barriers presented by technologies themselves – such as voice and facial recognition software that does not adequately account for users who do not conform to gender binaries.
Panelists called for technologies that challenge stigma – for example, by designing dating apps and sextoys that do not just de-pathologise disabilities, but actively celebrate different bodies and diverse ways of being sexual.
Finally, our panelists challenged anyone interested in designing ‘better sextech’ to learn more about the ways that existing laws and policy governing online content (and commerce) have resulted in exclusion, de-platforming and censorship of sex workers – and the flow-on effect this has for other forms of sexual content.
Our expert judges and mentors – all with experience in sex tech production, or digital and design equity and advocacy – challenged us to move beyond simplistic models of ‘community consultation’ to consider the potential harms associated with tech development. Eliza Sorensen, of sex worker-led tech company Assembly Four said:
I want participants consider the current political and regulatory climate…considering questions like: What measures could you take to prevent your idea from being used against your community by the state? What happens if your idea or community is being actively targeted by an anti-sex group?
Throughout the hackathon, panellists (and activist participants) focused on local, collective approaches and/ or political outcomes – such as responses to policing, cultural protocols, counter-surveillance and building community partnerships.
In contrast, other participants prioritised opportunities for commercialisation and
global scaleability, through supporting individual (and often medicalised) experiences of sexual health, sexual pleasure and wellbeing. Despite the friction between these approaches, all of the small groups participating in the event proposed novel and innovative technologies. These ranged from a proposal to reduce waste in sextech manufacturing by developing sustainable algal lubricants, to a prototype chat interface to assist neurodivergent people to establish comfortable communication on dating apps.
We observed that the process of designing sex tech – and indeed, the hackathon process itself – stirs up contradictions, tensions and rifts between the market demands of start-up cultures and the more collective and communally focused approaches by activists and stakeholders from marginalised communities.
In the final de-briefing session, we received constructive feedback about how a sex tech hackathon might be conducted in the future. Some participants requested more support expectations prior to the event, such as pre-reading around values-based issues such as intersectionality; or resources that brought everyone up to speed on industry-related issues such as data privacy.
Others wanted more hands-on facilitation and tech tutorials, and additional time with the mentors so they could take greater advantage of their skills and experience. As a venue for skill-sharing and knowledge exchange, the hackathon facilitated the beginning of a larger conversation about public interest sex tech and participatory design.
The full Public Interest Sex Tech Hackathon report can be accessed here.
Please note that blog posts are not peer-reviewed and do not necessarily reflect the views of SRHM as an organisation.