Mindy Seu’s A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET is a landmark new work: a 700-page leather-bound book, no larger than a phone, that traces how technology and sexuality have continually shaped one another. Originally conceived as a live performance, the book gathers histories, images, and references high and low to tell a story about who we are and how we got here.
Seu, author of the cult CYBERFEMINISM INDEX (2023), has again created a singular object with designer Laura Coombs: a palm-sized tome overflowing with images, documents, and research that reveal the erotic undercurrents of our digital lives. Only 5,000 copies of the first edition will be made, available exclusively on Metalabel and on Seu’s forthcoming world tour.
Like many Metalabel releases, A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET is both a cultural artifact and an experiment in how culture is produced. Royalties will be distributed not only to the book’s makers but also split among the people cited within it. A new model of compensation designed by Seu and enabled by Metalabel that recognizes the collectivity of cultural lineage and ideas (more on this soon).
A SEXUAL HISTORY is the third book and fifth release from the Dark Forest Collective, a group that previously published The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet and Antimemetics — two books that have sold thousands of copies and distributed tens of thousands of dollars within the collective. Together these releases show the power of collaborative self-legitimization and how much agency and value we unlock when we come together around the dreams and visions we share.
To celebrate this monumental release, we asked Seu about the origins of the project and her vision for how it might reshape how we think about technology, sexuality, and the ways they intertwine.
Q&A with Mindy Seu
METALABEL: What are the origins of this project?
SEU: Years ago, Ann Hirsch stated, “Whenever [you put your] body online, in some way you are in conversation with porn.” I have been actively using the internet since my dad brought home an iMac G3 in the late 1990s. Three decades of online life have shown me that everything is in relation to sex and power. My interest in sexual technologies was formalized while working on my first book CYBERFEMINISM INDEX, a pseudo-encyclopedia with hundreds of examples of online activism, net art, academic articles, et al, about technology and its discontents, and the people who actively work to reshape it. And while several rhizomatic strands emerged from that project, I felt the most pressing was to tell a tale focused on sex-tech.
METALABEL: Can you tell us about the object itself?
SEU: A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET is a project in two parts: (1) a participatory lecture performance told through the audience’s phones, and (2) an artist book. Here is a video trailer for the lecture performance by Gabriel Noguez:
I worked with Laura Coombs, a good friend and my favorite designer, to translate the lecture performance into a printed object. Our two primary material references were the iPhone and the little black book. We ended up with a black vinyl-leather cover that wraps 704 black pages printed with silver ink. It’s like a brick — the dimensions of an iPhone extruded to 3 inches.
METALABEL: What does the sexual history of the internet say about us and the technology we use?
These are stories of lust and extraction, policing and innovation. The first node in ARPANET was a Sigma 7 computer that ran the SEX operating system, shorthand for “set X.” The first ASCII nude was a prank. The first JPEG was a stolen image. In “The Cybernetic Sex Worker” (2021), Gabriella Garcia wrote, “From e-commerce to streaming video to content creators, the internet as we know it was built on the back of sex work.” And now, as the discourse of sex work has hit the mainstream, from MasterCard cutting ties with PornHub, OnlyFans becoming a household name, or TikToks sharing tips about Findom side hustles, it’s time for any adult who has sex and uses the internet to learn about the longstanding history of the two.
METALABEL: A lot of people are credited on this. Why is that?
SEU: All books are publics — they are built from references, quotes, and ideas from others. For several years, I’ve contemplated different modes of citational praxis, from my essay “On Gathering” for the Knight Foundation or “Multidimensional Citation” co-written with Laura Coombs and Laurel Schwulst for Serving Library. Community citations, social citations, academic citations — each includes some version of social capital. But what if we could redistribute fiscal capital? With Metalabel, I wanted to test out a new model of attribution (more on this soon).
METALABEL: Why publish with the Dark Forest Collective?
SEU: Dark Forest, the undercommons, marginalia, the “domestic cozy” — all of these are different names for the communal other, an inclusive place for discourse rather than our current platforms of broadcast.
Sold! Grateful for the opportunity to support this project & Metalabel.
It is somewhat undermining to your positioning as a platform democratizing artistic expression when you fill up my inbox talking your own book, your own collective. Doesn't sit right, Yancey.