“There’s something compelling about real life”: Technologies of security and acceleration on Chaturbate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adult webcam platforms, or sexcams, can be considered platforms for the laboring of affect: machines that exploit, accelerate, and capitalize on it. As expected, the primary source of value is the broadcast of sexual performances. However, this article argues, the extraction of value on sexcam platforms relies as well on some of the early established conventions of webcamming, such as the perception of real-time and real-life. The location and quality of the shows are relevant for these reasons, along with the various sorts of personal interactions between the audience and performers. While some of these interactions resemble personal or human ones, the characteristics and scale of exchange that the platform enables, with thousands of viewers connected at the same time demanding the attention of one performer, require new technologies of assistance that involve humans and software—and some entanglements in between. Those technologies are located in the tension of generating value by accelerating exchanges while preserving the attributes that give them value in the first place. This article identifies some of the actors involved and investigates how they contribute to this double articulation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".