Have you ever dreamed of becoming a porn magnate? Of having a vast supply of computer generated nudes to be traded in the blockchain? To create content from scratch catering to your a-priori, pre-defined preferences? Then enter the zone of Harem Token:
“who of you bought 3 jasmines yesterday? only 2 left now lol”
“you also gonna put in men an trannies bro? need disabled also. people with no arms or legs… even a missing ear”
“need more teeth representation. too many with good white teeth. need more snaggletoothed bitches”
“speaking of racism, can we get more representation bro. need some browns yellows n black with big tits”
These are all quotes living inside a Telegram group chat created by Harem Token, a start-up that generates deepfake pornstars that can be traded as Non-Fungible Tokens in the Ethereum blockchain. One of their earliest experiments was baptized Anna, now operating as the company’s poster-face. Alike Magic: The Gathering cards, each nude is a collectible that can be exchanged for different amounts of money depending on its rarity. Money also cashes in every time a NFT is picked from Harem’s public domain and deepfaked into a source, giving its owner a percentage for allowing the image to be used by others, acting as some sort of crypto-pimp.
Non-Fungible Tokens are digital goods, unique items or collectibles on the Ethereum blockchain that are reshaping how creative content can be distributed, bought and sold online. Alike cryptocurrencies, they are offering new gold-rush possibilities, in a period where global crisis has made them that much enticing. If a given NFT turns out to be on high demand, it could potentially sell for an inflated value, much like what happened in 2018 when Dragon, a CryptoKitty, was sold for 600 ETH (approx. $170,000)*, signaling the new trends of online pyramid schemes, where some players in the game can be left with massively overpriced, worthless assets. In Harem’s case, instead of Cryptokitties, the company seems glad to introduce instead the financial capacities of Cryptotitties.
Inside the chat, Steve, the CEO, Johnny K and Max answer a miscellaneous of questions, create quizzes, allowing members to decide what girls they prefer, setting up contests where the names and backstories of GAN generated females are disputed amongst members. The images circulating in the group, emojis and memes created by the Harem team, have inherited much of 4-chan’s iconography: Anna’s face photoshopped into Pepe the Frog, sitting in an office table with the tag “CEO of Porn”, Roko´s Basilisk inspired memes, with Anna’s face attached to a robotic figure, arriving to dethrone and destroy all THOTs (That Hoe Over There). Then there’s the visual representation of the actual tokens: dozens of newly AI generated female nudes, images of topless women standing against a white backdrop, lit by a clinical, uniform, all revealing light. In fact, it has been speculated where start-ups like Harem scrap their images from, which is most often from websites like czechcasting.com, a porn company accused of containing non-consensual porn, allowing these algorithms to train based on images of sex-workers without their consent, forming what writer Samanta Cole* has described as the algorithmic meat grinder of rape, abuse and non-consensual sex.
If the images Harem creates are fake, the women’s hustle behind them is real and so is theirs. Crypto is a world that can attract the dissatisfied, independent minded iconoclasts. Those who are not shy about riding legal and ethical loopholes. When asked about whether they day-dreamed of a Silicon-Valley office, Steve replied, “absolutely not. I don’t want to pay $5k a month for some co-working space filled with wantrepreneurs drinking soy-cum lattes and talking about how their newest twist on the SaaS model is sure to work. If we ever have an office it will be a dirty cheap warehouse in LatAm or Asia.” Countries in the global south have long seen crypto has a rescue boat from turbulent economies, so it comes as no surprise that Harem only has 3 full-time workers on remote mode and around “6 contractors from third-world countries that work on data labelling, curation and sorting”.
As a report from BPN Paribas* points out, “from a geopolitical perspective, these online economies are becoming essential revenue streams for survival. In crisis-stricken Venezuela, citizens are turning to virtual economies in order to generate income”. The only full-timers, Johnny K, Max and Steve are a blend of entrepreneurs and AI developers who saw porn and the marine trench hiding its official profit estimates as a territory with much potential and not many competitors, despite the early stage funding difficulties because, as Steve points, to investors, “porn is icky”. In a way, porn and crypto are the perfect volatility storm: on one hand there’s porn’s capacity of weaponizing reputation, a phenomena that Emily Rosamond* describes as reputation warfare, a new paradigm within online reputation where “systemic actors rely on systemic volatility produced by reputation’s ubiquitous online calculation and contestation”, on the other, there’s the volatility of crypto-tokens, which value can fluctuate several percentile numbers per day. If one concept is volatile enough per-se, the two concepts, crypto and porn, combined, seem capable of unfolding endless volatile re-configurations, to which Harem Token is a mere tip of the iceberg.
For Harem’s founders, there’s been other difficulties along the way. When asked about the reactions by women in their lives, the answers are pretty disparate. Johnny K. says when his girlfriend saw hundreds of nude pictures on his laptop, she made made him an ultimatum, “let’s say the AI won” he admits. As for Steve, he attests that if a woman asks him what he does, he claims to work for the government in top secret operations and if he revealed what he does he would have to kill her, Max seems the only one with positive reinforcement in his life, sharing that his sister and female friends had nothing but supportive words for his entrepreneurial endeavors. But what is the actual vision behind Harem Token? It is revealing that the company tags their NFT’s as “art”, sampling how digital artworks can be viewed, shared, and capitalized on the web, via porn’s speed of circulation. Crypto allows art’s existence on a fully digital logic, where image and value are two parts of the same (digital) coin. And as the BPN paribas* report explains, “the Ethereum blockchain made it easy and cheap to issue a token and create services with just a few lines of code, without the need for users to build their own infrastructure (…) unlike other tokens like cryptocurrencies, NFTs are not interchangeable — they can’t replace or be replaced by another identical item”, which is a way to say that NFTs are digital assets capable of mirroring the matrix of contemporary art’s traditional market via accredited authenticity and scarcity.
As for Harem’s art, for Steve it’s about creating “an unlimited supply of women so you can select the one you love the most, from a producer point of view — out of one movie you can make multiple movies. If you liked the video but you wished the girl had bigger tits or a prettier face for example”. It’s about creating “girls from nothing that can be deep faked into videos of your choice”, and the advantage of buying $Harem is that it provides a discount in video creation that allows to generate infinite and varied content “at a price no human creators on earth could possibly match”*. So the more $Harem, the more content, at leasts inside this platform locked mechanism revolving around their own currency and collectibles. Steve also believes that the future of content creation is to be fully AI generated: influencers, musicians, actors, directors, producers, podcasters, news anchors and pornstars will all be people who do not exist. As another member in the group points out, “algorithms know what content hits and what doesn’t, so why not create content that hits 100% all of the time?” For now, as Harem’s Telegram group chat steadily grows, the team is planning to create several social-media accounts on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram for the Harem “girls” as a marketing strategy, to share their background stories and make them interact with a potential audience. In the end, maybe this is just yet another opportunistic project with a strain of Silicon-Valley megalomania and misogynistic tics, maybe Harem Token will indeed deliver those armed with $Harem the actual profits to become real CEOs of porn, right from the comfort of their couches. Eitherway, the hustle is real and if the future Harem predicts is coming, then get rich or die Porning.
sources_
all quotes taken from inside Harem Token’s official Telegram, where I inquired the team for days in a row and tried to have them create a NFT with my name.
other sources_
*1- Nguyen, Chuong (2018) Cat got your wallet? Cryptokitties virtual feline fetches $170k in crypto cash [online] available at: https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/09/05/most-expensivecryptokitty/
*2- Cole, Samanta (2020) Frankenstein’s Monster: Images of Sexual Abuse are Fueling Algorithmic Porn [online] available at: https://www.vice.com/en/article/akdgnp/sexual-abusefueling-ai-porn-deepfake-czech-casting-girls-do-porn
*3- BPN Paribas report [online] available at: https://group.bnpparibas/en/press-release/l-atelierbnp-paribas-report-highlights-digital-innovations-helping-meet-environmental-socialchallenges-asia
*4- Emily Rosamond on ‘From Reputation Capital to Reputation Warfare’ Youtube Video. 04:21. Posted [October 2019] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz5VFnZVhEQ
*5- BPN Paribas report [online] available at: https://group.bnpparibas/en/press-release/l-atelierbnp-paribas-report-highlights-digital-innovations-helping-meet-environmental-socialchallenges-asia
*6- Harem Technology and Token light paper [online] available at: https://b3167b99- a6f3–4d79–8b40–363f4c245dac.filesusr.com/ugd/ 5ea561_63b6ea1bba724f059f79cb4356c642c4.pdf
