It’s an old and partially true joke that “the internet is for porn,” but it’s also true that the demand for new ways for horny people to enjoy nasty content has been a major force driving technology forward. ASCII art. Streaming video. VR. Smart refrigerators. Porn has been at the forefront of—wait, smart refrigerators?
Hell yeah. The “Internet of Things” is already making life more convenient by networking every appliance we own, including many that nobody really asked for. And it’s also a big security risk, because we don’t defend our “smart” appliances the way we defend our phones or computers.
That’s the point that famous wild man and hallucinogenic drug advocate John McAfee, whose name is on a popular antivirus app, was making with this tweet from Home Depot Sunday:
The IOT…. do you believe me now? Pornhub on a refrigerator. What, in our current cybersecurity paradigm, accounts for this? pic.twitter.com/po5MezPjzJ
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) October 2, 2016
But there’s another, much less subtle point here: PornHub on a refrigerator. Were people openly clamoring for this functionality? Not really! But sometimes you’ve got to give the people what they didn’t know they wanted: the ability to sneak to the fridge for a midnight whack.
“What, in our current cybersecurity paradigm, accounts for this?” asks McAfee, but the more interesting question might be “What, in our current psychosexual paradigm, accounts for this?’
This is a completely ludicrous display of humanity’s relationship to its machines, bordering on parody. Countless dystopian visions of the future—see, e.g., Idiocracy—have posited that our encounters with hardcore sex will become more frequent and less private. Today, someone’s hacking porn onto the fridge as a joke. Tomorrow, that channel might come pre-programmed.
Even if American society isn’t ready yet, PornHub is! Their official account retweeted the fridge pic twice.
H/T Gizmodo