Past events

☁️ Join us for the second of two Cloud Salon events we're co-hosting with Parsons Design & Technology ☁️

Veil Machine, the project of sex worker artists Sybil Fury, Cléo Ouyuang, and Empress Wu, will discuss developing a practice that is relational, intimate, and ambivalent towards the authentic. At its core, sex work, like artwork, works through the interplay between fantasy and reality, intimacy and lies. Moderated by Decoding Stigma's Gabriella Garcia, join us to explore how Veil Machine, like the sex worker and artist, manipulate through masks and connect through commodification.

☁️ Join us for the first of two Cloud Salon events we're co-hosting with Parsons Design & Technology ☁️

In the first Cloud Salon, Maggie Oates (she/her) and Lena Chen (she/her) will talk about their process creating OnlyBans, an interactive game that critically examines the policing of marginalized bodies and sexual labor to empathetically teach people about discrimination faced by sex workers online.

Collecting our memories at the intersection of sex work and tech in a post-seminar chillout session for Trains, Texts & Tits.

Over the past four weeks, Hacking//Hustling brought us on an amazing journey through 150 years of sex work and tech history in the United States in the 4-part seminar, Trains, Texts & Tits.

To celebrate the seminar’s finale, we offer Browser Histories, a post-seminar chillout where we can connect our own memories and personal histories related to sex work, technology, and movement! For just one night, we’ll create a temporary digital collection of "keepsakes" that honor our own personal experiences and memories as related to Trains, Texts & Tits.

“Keepsakes” can include:
- Photos, artwork, screenshots, visual inspirations
- Rituals, session songs, tributes & gifts
- Personal stories, quotes, acronyms, pseudonyms
- Tips, hacks, thematic media/reading suggestions
- Digital archeology relics, live journals, dead links
- Whatever else you’d want to share!

The erasure of sex work from the history of technology continues a long history of devaluing the feminized labor and communal innovation that is actually the foundation upon which social technology is built. This erasure enforces the false narrative that extractive Capitalism is the only way forward for tech. By compiling our own intimately-produced evidence, we rebel against this attempt to delete history, while honoring the necessity of desire—as fantasy, as survival, as collectivity—in driving the ways we communicate forward.

This gathering is temporally-bound. There will be no recording, and the final artifact will only be shared among those who participate. In this way, we visit the interstitial space in which the sex worker feels most at home.

Though designed as a companion event for the Trains, Texts and Tits seminar, Browser Histories is open to all sex workers and their accomplices who wish to participate (seminar attendance not required). Please let us know if you need a stipend to attend, or a free ticket in the event that they have sold out, no questions asked: decodingstigma@protonmail.com

If necessity is the mother of invention, that mama was clearly a hustler. Whether trains, texts or tits on film, sex workers have been some of the greatest innovators on the possibilities of harnessing technology and making new spaces desirable.

Join us for the last panel in this four-part course from Hacking//Hustling, where Gabriella Garcia will talk about Backpage, Craigslist, SESTA/FOSTA, and payment processors over the last decade.

What would the Internet look like if it was designed by sex workers? Taking a sex worker lens to tech ethics envisions a radically different online space. Sex workers hold unique insights into the real world impacts of platform capitalism, carceral politics, digital surveillance, and sexual gentrification. Yet sex workers face significant structural barriers to inclusion in both tech and academic spaces.

This panel elevates sex worker expertise and offers new ways for regulators, ethicists, policy-makers, and technologists to think about community standards, technologies of violence, data privacy, online safety, and virtual intimacies, and will explore how we might code sex worker ethics into future design.

Speakers: Chibundo Egwuatu, Yin Q, Gabriella Garcia
Moderator: Zahra Stardust
Host: Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society

Zahra Stardust and Gabriella Garcia talk to Peepshow Podcast about the work they are doing with Decoding Stigma.

We talk about the tech, intersectionality, and sex work values and solidarity, imagining an internet designed by sex workers.

Join us at “Co-Opting AI: Public Conversations About Design, Inequality, and Technology,” a panel organized by Dr. Mona Sloane and hosted by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge and the Center for Responsible AI. Decoding Stigma’s Gabriella Garcia will join Hannah Zeavin in a conversation about how our intimate lives are mediated by technology, and artificial intelligence specifically, and vice versa.

In Gabriella’s words:
I’ve been asked to provide a “provocation” as part of my presentation, so I decided to use two projects to explore questions of intimacy as it relates to AI from two different but inevitably converging perspectives.

@virtuoso.vibe
What does it mean to train artificial neural networks in a society that shames us from exploring certain naturally-occurring neural networks in our bodies?

@decodingstigma
What could algorithms look like if those who labor in sex industries are asked about their experienced observations from the frontlines of intimate encounter?

A workshop for sex workers and allies to radically imagine alternate futures for tech, co-hosted by Decoding Stigma & Hacking//Hustling.

We live in a present in which technology is explicitly built to target and eliminate sex work, perpetuating violence experienced by society’s most vulnerable bodies. Yet it was sexual labor that helped build the internet. It was sex worker imagery that has generated some of technology’s most creative uses. Sex workers’ ability to find each other and organize online has aided in an international sex worker rights movement.

Freedom to F*cking Dream is a call for healing the heteropatriarchal whorephobia that has been embedded into technology. With the help of the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies, we will create a space to joyfully worldbuild to nourish the spirit of the movement, and celebrate the radical network of laborers and accomplices endeavoring to dismantle imperialist ideologies so that all can flourish. The workshop is facilitated by Sasha Costanza-Chock and Joana Varon.

An interactive workshop with Amanda Levendowski, co-hosted by Decoding Stigma and Hacking//Hustling.

We know very little about the technologies that watch us. From cell site simulators to predictive policing algorithms, the lack of transparency around surveillance technologies makes it difficult for the public to engage in meaningful oversight.

This workshop examines the powerful and unexplored role of trademark law in exercising oversight within and beyond surveillance. The Trademark Electronic Search System, or TESS, is a free and easily accessible database of millions of pending, registered, canceled, expired or abandoned trademarks.

It’s almost overwhelming to consider all the issues that need to be addressed when sex workers are rendered voiceless by tech/academic researchers and developers. At Decoding Stigma’s first group meeting in August, we used the hour to have an open discussion about why a group such as Decoding Stigma was necessary, and ideate on things we would like to achieve.

Participants described themselves as tired of having to explain why these topics are important to their academic peers or mentors, and as feeling relieved to have a space held where others in the room “get it.” This is just a sampling of a fully exhaustive list, and goes to show just how much work there is to do in this arena.