The Whore Singularity

September 4, 2026 Spring 2026

In The Whore Singularity, taught by Tina Horn, we traced the history of sex work from the advent of the internet to cultural and criminal developments in our current moment to imagine liberatory futures for sex workers, by sex workers.

SPOILER ALERT:

When playing OnlyBans, no matter what paths you take to get there, you finish in a group chat full of sex workers of the content creator variety. Together, you decry the state of things: suppression of your account by the platform you rely on to get your bills paid, stigma and social consequence, and countless attempts to marginalize, isolate, and steal from the very people powering the engine of commerce online. Options include: “Lobby our representatives to repeal FOSTA-SESTA. Improve representation of sex workers in the tech industry. Perform a spell to uncurse the Internet for sex workers.” Obviously, both sections opted for magic. Calliope O’Kelly,[1] OnlyBans's game designer, says to us, “Earlier iterations of the game didn’t have things like the spell at the end, and we quickly realized it is not satisfying at all to build work that just describes how frustrating it is to be making content, and that we needed to dream a little.” And dream we do. Together, we summon a black-and-green monochrome CRT monitor, and the digitized void that is the Mother of the Internet offers us her wisdom: “Erotic energy flows through my undersea communications cables. I have been created from your desire, dreams, and labor. You have been a part of my past and you will shape my future.” With a click, we lift the curse of whorephobia.

This imaginative imperative clarifies something about the project of futurity and speculative practice. Without it, do we commit to retraumatizing ourselves with reality? Disappointing ourselves with the mundane and familiar? On the first day of class, many students expressed various opinions of this digital age. We arrived as a group of pessimists, skeptics, self-identified Luddites (which raised interesting questions about labor rights and resistance), optimists, as the exhausted or enthusiastic veterans of tech-mediated work or the corporate tech-dev world, and journalistic, academic, and analog interlopers in the industries of the internet. We left having utilized utopia as a means of engaging the now, without acceptance or acquiescence, without dreaming small or pragmatically. When we became bogged down by the horrors of the far and recent pasts, and daunted by our current realities, we returned over and over to “whoretopia.”

“Desire built the internet,” begins the web essay Sex Workers Built the Internet, one of our foundational texts. Intimately acquainted with the libidinal economy and the potential for big change in advent of the computer age, the emergent needs and creative capacity of sex workers expanded the frontier of the new internet, with many different kinds of providers in the industry beta-testing, innovating, and incentivizing investment in the fundamental technologies of our current digital landscape. For capabilities like increased bandwidth, web analytics, livestreaming, subscription sites, e-commerce processing, and cryptocurrencies, we all have sex workers to thank.

Tina offered us, through lecture and readings, incredible insight from her wealth of knowledge. Her research and lived experience, paired with her background in storytelling on the page, in podcasts, and in person, offered historical accounts and much to chew on. Tina painted a picture of how we find ourselves where we are so that we might ask where we go next. Tina regards sex worker histories as vibrant and vital, essential and esteemed, and curates a classroom that is unapologetically pro-hoe.

What is a whore?

This question launched our ten weeks of study. The whore is a sex worker—an epithet, an identity, perhaps an archetype—named for its pejorative, now reclaimed. (Civilians, this is not your word to reclaim! Do not start referring to the sex workers in your life as such, please and thank you.) “Whore” accounts for criminalization and stigmatization, integrating the margin with the labor itself. “Whore” is the act of reclamation as an expression of agency and dignity. Or, “whore” simply calls the work and worker what they are understood and understand themselves to be.

What is the singularity?

We ask this secondarily, attending to the anxiety and hope of that particular apocalypse. Originating at the inception of computer programming as early as the 1950s, the singularity is almost religiously thought to arrive at the moment that artificial intelligences become autonomous and opaque, and (re)make a reality beyond human comprehension or capability, therefore ruling and running our world.

What, then, is a whore singularity?

“The whore singularity contains the possibility that whores might create even more advanced versions of ourselves,” Tina posits, “shifting humanity into a new reality where technocrats and the broligarchy are no longer the most capable entities.” Our material conditions have been shaped by the sci-fi dystopian dissociative imaginations of the uber wealthy patriarchal colonial elite, their rapturous dream of the singularity that saves humanity from itself (and nature from itself, at whatever cost), their inability to face their own mortality, their rejection of collectivity or continuity with the whole. These figures and their governments enact and enforce increasingly restrictive terms of service, incomprehensible and algorithmic shadowbanning, ID-verification legislation, mass-deplatforming, and data-body surveillance online and AFK, all against the best interests of the people at large, and sex workers in particular, especially at the axes of other oppressions.

The whore complicates and disrupts hegemony through their relationship to power, criminality, and desire. Desire, driver of technological development. Eroticism[2]—sensual, romantic, sexual—instigator of erotic economies. The whore understands the (w)hole, consciously or not, by nature of their work and social position. The whore attempts, for power exchange and pleasure, for spirit and for art, for survival, for money, to bridge the subject and object, to integrate the individual with the pleasure of connection—not toward reproduction, but toward being and (be)cum(ing).[3] The whore is adaptive, responsive, and understands that resources emerge from relationships. The whore is quantum, “dynamic, deliberate, complex and ripe with reverberations across time and space.”[4] The whore is a hustler.

And for this, the whore is punished.

From this place of violence, of ingenuity, of creativity, of refusal, we began to explore utopic future making and the multigenre, expansive forms that might hold such ideation: the film, the poem, the archive, the installation, the manifesto, the game, the performance, the speculative technology, the personal narrative. Finally, we asked,

What is your whoretopia?

• My work is treated as just work.
• Sex workers develop and operate the intimate technologies we make and use.
• Sexuality is no longer a mechanism for categorization.
• The archive considers the whore.
• Sex workers can live together, work together, and share resources freely.
• I am permitted the rights of a whole human being.
• The sex bots revolt!
• Print and physical media interrupt surveillance technologies.
• We all might own our own images.
• Decriminalization requires a world without capitalism.
• Sex worker knowledge is epistemological infrastructure.
• The body can be integrated with the machine.
• The land is considered a technology.

This is just some of what emerged. Students were able to share their final projects at a hybrid event at Cash Machine in Los Angeles and on Zoom. Using the technology of digital gathering combined with in-person, embodied presence, the class co created a platform on which to express themselves and their ideas (much like the balancing act required of sex workers that we explored through our coursework).

Student projects and classroom camaraderie reflected this desire for connection and solidarity, for autonomy and self-ownership. Might we find solidarity among sex workers among those differently positioned across the Choice-Circumstance-Coercion spectrum, or within the whorearchy? Might sex worker technologies—past, present, and future—inform our capacity to uncover another solidarity between the organic and alive, and the inanimate and artificial? The whore, dehumanized, complicates ideas of personhood. Might, then, we see extraction as the shared harm experienced by human workers, machine labor, and the more-than-human world, including animals, minerals, landforms, and elemental forces?

Might we find solidarity with the sex bot?[5] “sexbot, my sister,” writes sisterexcess in the poem “incantation (for what has been and has yet to be).”

The project of The Whore Singularity is best when we dream our biggest, our most illegible, nonlinear, magical, to rocket past tomorrow toward futures we can’t yet touch but that are spiraling into focus and possibility. To quote Tina Horn paraphrasing José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, “Whoreness is not yet here.” Over these past weeks, we’ve kept our eyes on those horizons, engaging the whore as “a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present,” finding each other as collaborators, contemporaries, and coconspirators, visioning otherwise.

Notes

[1] Other members of the team—Karren, Goofy Toof, and Lena Chen—made appearances for the in-class playthroughs and to talk about the conception of the game. Thank you for coming to visit!

[2] I was reading Georges Bataille’s Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1957) in a group during the early days of The Whore Singularity. Eroticism as defined by Bataille is the drive to blend the discontinuous, solitary self with the other, with the all. Informed by the agony of our persistent and inevitable solitude, eroticism is the excessive and consuming compulsion toward the (w)holeness, the continuity, the singularity, of existence. We want to touch to the point of blending. Bataille suggests, that, informed by the agony of our separateness, our desire to return to the primordial soup is only truly achievable through death, and attempted during the life through sex.

Shouts out to Althea Baird and the homies for holding down a DIY guerilla-style audiobook recording reading group text chat this past spring and for dreaming how we might read and reckon together <3 This extracurricular text totally shaped my experience of The Whore Singularity at SFPC and I’m deeply grateful.

[3] (be)cum(ing): on humanist edging (2024), n0humaninv0lved aka by Zalika U. Ibaorimi, PhD.

[4] “Quantum Whore” by Evie Vigil, published in The Holy Hour: An Anthology on Sex Work, Magic, and the Divine, edited by Molly B. Simmons and Emily Marie Passos Duffy (Working Girls Press, 2024).

[5] This is not to say that the way extraction (or capitalist dreams and demands) creates and proliferates the sex bot is not fraught in itself by the harm of its inception and should not be mitigated, but it complicates the devaluation of the mechanical and technological as (un)natural or inherently at odds with humanity (see Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Kathrine McKittrick, 2015), personhood (see Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 1985), and other animisms (see Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013). It is to say, the sex bot is already here, so who is our shared opponent/oppressor?