Downstream: Porn Addiction Defines Our Political Age. Here’s How w/ Ash Sarkar
Summary
Investigative journalist Patricia Nielsen discusses her book *Guilty Pleasure*, which examines the modern porn industry as a financial and technological ecosystem rather than a traditional entertainment sector. The episode explores how Wall Street investors and software engineers transformed the industry, pioneering technologies like affiliate marketing, live streaming, and algorithmic tracking that now underpin the broader internet. Nielsen details the complex regulatory landscape, including the impact of Section 230 and the rise of "friendly fraud," while analyzing how sexual data is uniq…
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