Technology and Sex Work — it will get better.

Last week my girlfriend, a professional dominatrix, was assaulted (punched in the head actually) by a first time client who works at the Blue Cross Blue Shield headquarters here in downtown Chicago.

The last few weeks have been a bit of a downer in our household, to say the least. My girlfriend used to get the majority of her clients off Backpage. This in and of itself was fraught with danger — due to the anonymity of sites like Backpage, you never were quite sure who you were getting. When Backpage, craigslist and various forums shut down over SESTA/FOSTA, we had a minor rent emergency in the household. Would there be enough to make it by May 1st? As it turned out our fears were unfounded as she got approved by Eros.com. But the flip side is that predators have sensed that everyone is uneasy and desperate to make enough to have some cushion —so there are more of them and a couple of dubious clients slipped through her rather meticulous and paranoid screening process, even though there were warning signs. Statistically I know it will happen eventually.

I have encouraged her to use technology to do a lot of the heavy lifting of screening for her. There is a world of information you can glean from a simple phone number and name, and there are a few apps that make sharing anonymous notes about a phone number easier. One of the first apps I installed on her phone was https://www.sync.me, a wonderful app I recognized would be a great tool to share information about a phone number. As it turns out, it seems sex workers had the same idea I had. When our rather punchy new client sent a text, Sync.me identified him as FUCKING ASSHOLE PHILLIP DO NOT SEE. Against her better judgement, she went ahead and took the session for a number of reasons and regretted it. Luckily he was a tiny guy and she has a hard head.

Phillip is not actually his name. I am prohibited by Medium’s Terms of Service from telling you his exact real name, or his phone number, or the address of Blue Cross Blue Shield where he works in Chicago. I know all of this though. I can tell you that Phillip is what he calls himself when he talks to pro-dommes that he tries to get sessions with and then punches them in the head.

I’m obsessed with greylisting, the process that Uber used to identify government agents trying to get rides and nail the company for operating in spaces where they were not allowed to — I developed a system like this for my own website for our hosts to identify problem guests. Sync.Me started as a kind of phone spammer/caller ID app and slowly has become a central “underground greylist” for notes on phone numbers for sex workers. I am reminded of William Gibson’s quote from Burning Chrome: “The street finds its own uses for things.”

Sync.Me has one problem though, and that is that it has a single point of failure. The corporate offices of Sync.Me are just one federal raid away from being taken from sex workers as a way to communicate info, because it relies on a central database and API stored on a server, likely on an Amazon AWS instance somewhere. This means the government can shut it down. Other apps that sex workers rely upon have the same problem. Another good example is Signal, the SMS replacement that fully encrypts your text messages end to end. This app relies upon a centralized database of cryptographic keys to let users send messages back and forth. Because this is an awesome way for people to hide what they are sending, authoritarian regimes in places like Egypt, Qatar, and Iran have blocked Signal’s domain so that nobody can trade keys. In a blog post Tuesday, the creator of Signal described how he got around this ban and how Signal is likely coming to an end for those countries again. This highlights the single point of failure problem for these solutions.

This next paragraph is going to sound like every other asshole on the internet right now, but the technology that will revolutionize these apps is the blockchain (at least until quantum computers get cheap). Most people think cryptocurrency when you talk about blockchain, but in reality a blockchain is a publicly distributed database of sequential data rows that gets hopelessly corrupted if you remove any of them. It’s the perfect way to store something like cryptographic keys and the phone number they go to, or maybe some kind of notes about a specific phone number and whether the person who uses it will punch you in the head if you make a session with him. Something you want to make public and permanent. This is called decentralization, and all it would take would be a bit of coding to make a decentralized version of Signal, (solving for a couple of problems like revocation of keys) or a decentralized version of Sync.Me. These are just ideas off the top of my head to be honest, if anyone wants to do them. It’s far more likely that the type of person attracted to anything with the word “blockchain” in it has visions of getting rich quick so I’ll just have to say something douchey like “I am sure your cryptocurrency startup is totally going to change the world, bro. More power to you!”

For those of you wondering, my girlfriend is OK. She has been in these situations before. She is a professional, with years of experience dealing with unruly clients. It’s upsetting to have to watch her deal with these situations (and yes, there have been worse situations). But at the end of the day, it’s absolutely criminal for the government to try and take away her ability to screen clients, or to safely get clients. It’s just really frustrating to not know exactly what the cops would say if they responded to a pro-domme in Chicago getting assaulted. So we’re basically on our own and she’s worried that I might do some hacker trick and SWAT the Blue Cross Blue Shield (I would never).

Until then, I’m exploring even more tools that she could use in her job. If you have any tools you’d like to share with the class past Sync.Me and Signal, I’m all ears — leave a comment.

Technology and Sex Work — it will get better. was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.