Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the genderbending animateurs of Minitel’s sexchat sites, whose work linked postindustrial attention economies, cyborgized digital microwork, and the commodification of digital selves, as a counterpoint to other paradigmatic figures in the theorization of digital affective labor.

Paper long abstract:

Minitel's demise at the hands of the American Internet has become a cautionary tale against state intervention in technological innovation and a vindication of Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial free market capitalism over European dirigisme.  But Minitel succeeded in getting an unprecedented number of citizens online, and its private services were highly profitable: none more profitable, popular, or infamous than its messageries roses.  These sex chat sites accounted for a large percentage of traffic on the network, and were instrumental to the system's social and economic viability: Manuel Castells called them "a democratized sexual fantasy" that facilitated "the hooking-up of the French public."  Between 1985 and 1995, millions of French citizens dialed up rose kiosks like 3615 Aline and Ulla, where they paid by the minute to chat anonymously with each other and with, unbeknownst to them, professional animateurs.  Mostly young men, these animateurs shaped their digital subjectivities to meet the specific sexual desires of their interlocutors, genderbending for pay.  Chatbots permitted them to run a half dozen pseudonyms simultaneously, monitoring conversation flows and intervening at any sign the user might realize their partner was more silicon than (female-gendered) skin.  The animateur provides a non-American counterpoint to Terranova's chat mods, the paradigmatic example of free labor, or to the reluctantly regulating wizards of Lessig's MOOs and MUDs, and their cyborgized sex work connects nascent postindustrial economies of attention, digital microwork coordinated between human subjects and algorithmic agents, and the production of signifiers of the self as digital commodities.