The Dark Net (20 page)

Blath and Vex making out

Blath and Auryn making out

Auryn and Vex making out

Auryn, Vex and Blath making out

Boobies

Oiling up

Nipple kissing

Pussy flash

Extra-gropey make-out between two girls of your choice

Oral triangle

Vibrator: one minute

Vex adds a ‘firm handshake’ for fun. ‘Gosh,’ she says, ‘there are a lot of prizes.’ They decide that the final goal will be a password-protected ‘cum-show’. Only viewers who have paid 200 tokens each – approximately £12 – will be able to watch.

Finally we are ready to go. The three of them are sitting on the bed in sexy clothes, arms around each other like a school gang. I am sitting just off-camera, two feet away from the bed, a pad of paper and my laptop on my knees, logged into Vex’s virtual room. It all feels a little strange, to say the least.

One last swig of champagne. ‘Right. Are we ready?’ asks Vex. Loud cries of ‘yes’ all round. ‘OK, let’s go!’ She turns on her camera, and suddenly the three of them appear onscreen in Vex’s digital room.

As soon as Vex’s camera is turned on, Chaturbate automatically sends a notification to her 60,000 Chaturbate fans, informing them
that she is now in her room and ready to perform. We are live. If I expected a dramatic transformation when the cam starts rolling, I was mistaken. The show begins in a quiet and pleasantly haphazard way. The first ten minutes are characterised by minor technical glitches. The frame speed is too slow. The Keno boards seem to be deleting prizes. The computer, which is positioned on a table three feet away from the bed with an expensive clip-on webcam, is still being adjusted by Vex as people start to join her virtual room.

And
a lot
of people are joining. The first to arrive is a regular visitor from the US called Danny. ‘Hey, Danny!’ the girls say in unison. ‘You’re the first one in!’ More regulars join and start communicating via the chat box. When you watch a show on Chaturbate, your screen is split in two. On the left side is the live video stream from the webcam. On the right is a constantly updating chat box, which is where the audience communicates to the performers and each other. Vex, it quickly transpires, has a very large fan base who watch nearly all of her shows. As the regulars join, they typically greet the performers by typing in the box, and the girls greet them back by talking into the camera. Oh hey, Night-shadow, how are you? Welcome back, Stroker! Ox! So nice to see you. But far too many people are pouring in to greet each individually. Within five minutes, over 600 have joined us.

Chaturbate has a handy – if slightly ruthless – trick to help the performers manage these large crowds. Visitors with no tokens in their account appear as grey in the chat box. Everyone calls them ‘greys’. These are the freeloaders. Performers sometimes decide to ‘turn the greys off’, which means they can watch, but not talk in the chat box. Users whose names appear as light blue have tokens
but haven’t tipped more than fifty tokens in the last twenty-four hours. They are the cautious, parsimonious tippers. Dark blue means they have plenty of tokens, and they spend them regularly. If a dark blue says something in the chat box, they are more likely to get a response. It’s a board-specific class system.

Within thirty seconds, the first tip arrives. It’s ten tokens from Danny. Every time someone tips, it appears next to their name in the chat box, and there is a small ‘ding’ noise. Ding! Someone throws in enough to open a Keno prize: fifty-three tokens. ‘Thank you, Bumbler!’ says Vex. It’s the Firm Handshake. The three girls laugh, and earnestly perform their task. I laugh. The 2,000 or so people now in the room laugh too, albeit in text speak.

This show isn’t all about sex. It’s about entertainment and socialising. The girls seem to be having a lot of fun. They draw on each other’s bodies. Poke fun at each other. Clothes come off, and then go back on again. Vex falls off the bed. Auryn chats with viewers about various news items. There is a
Ding!
every three or four minutes, and every five minutes or so a prize is won and performed. After the handshake comes the ‘extra-gropey make-out between two girls of your choice’. ‘Oh, that’s a good one!’ says Vex. And for the next two minutes, she and Auryn perform what must be an extra-gropey make-out.

The chatter is constant. Most conversations are led by a relatively small band of regular fans, who all know Vex and appear to know each other. I identify around two dozen regulars, and begin to contact them individually. They are a fun and welcoming bunch. One, Bob, is a thirty-two-year-old single man from the UK and ‘not a hermit who lives in a virtual world!’ he tells me. He has made a lot of
friends in and around Vex’s room: ‘I have come to consider the time spent hanging out in cam rooms as important as spending time with what I would call “real-world” friends,’ he says. There is certainly a social aspect to it. This show lasts for three hours, and the majority of viewers stay from beginning to end.

I can see why. Vex is extremely friendly, funny and attentive, and a natural performer. She doesn’t try to be perfect. She tries to be normal. Danny tells me that the best camgirls are the ones who can laugh at themselves: ‘Vex does something silly on at least a weekly basis,’ he explains, ‘if not more regularly. So aside from being breathtakingly attractive, it’s always interesting to see what games and incentives she has planned.’ Before meeting Vex, I watched several of her shows from the other side of the screen. It looked effortless. But being so close to the action I get a sense of how hard it must be. Vex – with excellent support from Blath and Auryn – is keeping thousands of people entertained with nothing but herself and a webcam. This takes a lot of imagination, according to Danny – taking your clothes off and touching yourself gets stale and predictable very quickly.

In a world awash with hard-core pornography, it’s personality and inventiveness that set the best apart. Aella, another of the more popular camgirls on Chaturbate, often puts on entire shows as a mime. She humps chairs, plays with toy gnomes, and sometimes does shows where she doesn’t take any clothes off at all. Even so, there is a lot of time to fill. On WeCamGirls – a community website for cam-models – the most popular forum is for sharing lesson plans, tricks, tips and ideas. ‘You have to be really, really imaginative,’ Vex agrees. ‘It’s not easy.’

Vex has a strange knack of being able to twist everything into a
part of her show. Her cat, Duchamp, keeps wandering in and out of the room, and is often brought on camera.
^fn1
Last year she started a sticker club, and created an enormous wall chart, with a list of regular viewers’ names. If you see Duchamp – sticker. If you tip a certain amount – sticker. It was wildly popular.

Although I was well hidden, I worried that I would ruin the show – perhaps I’d put off the girls, or the viewers. That was surprisingly not the case.

‘So, we have a writer here today with us, guys,’ says Vex to the camera suddenly. I start shaking my head. Violently. ‘And if you tip one thousand tokens in the next minute, he’s promised he’ll say hello.’
Ding! Ding! Ding!
Vex jumps off the bed and drags me over.

‘Hello, everyone,’ I say.

‘Hello,’ reply a dozen light and dark blue names.

‘I’m writing a book too?’ types one.

‘I’ll pay you ten thousand tokens to suck his cock,’ adds another.

‘Guys! Stop it! What shall his Chaturbate name be?’

‘The Pen-is-Mightier!’

I hastily retreat. Despite my appearance, the show is a success. The tips are coming in rapidly. That’s perhaps because Vex’s real talent – refined over hundreds of shows – is to keep business ticking over. ‘Remember, guys,’ she says after spanking Auryn with a horse crop, ‘there will be a very special password-only show after this, and it’s only two hundred tokens to join.’

About forty minutes into the show, something remarkable happens. One user pays a big tip – 999 tokens – for no apparent reason. Someone else matches him. And then so does another. The girls freeze. For about three minutes there is a tipping frenzy. When it’s over Blath, Vex and Auryn are each about £60 richer, and all of the hard-core Keno goals have been met. This is known in the trade as a ‘tip-bomb’. They now owe the room a Keno board’s worth of seriously heavy petting.

‘Holy fuck,’ says Vex to the fans. ‘I have
never
seen a board go so quickly. We have so much shit to do. Awesome!’

‘What the hell are the prizes, again?’ says Auryn.

‘Someone needs to go down on me,’ says Blath.

‘Shouldn’t we just, like, do everything to each other?’ suggests Vex.

The tokens continue to flood in but I am beginning to notice that the tipping largely follows its own rhythm, unconnected to what’s happening onscreen. There are lists and leaderboards everywhere on Chaturbate. The top tipper in today’s room will win a prize: custom Polaroids that the girls will make after the show. Every few minutes a tipper leaderboard is displayed in the chat box (titled ‘most
valued
tippers’, and not ‘highest tippers’). When you first join Chaturbate there’s a leaderboard of popular rooms, and a list of the most popular performers. Vex displays a list of her top all-time tippers on her profile page. On MyFreeCams, cam-models have a ‘camscore’, which is a formula based on average tokens received per minute.

This is an extremely clever system, applying a soft competitive pressure on everyone to keep spending. Vex’s regular tippers are loyal to her – and on the whole they tip because they appreciate the show she puts on, or simply because they like to see her happy. But some float around different rooms, dispensing enormous tips to several girls, just to be top of their list. (Some take being a model’s highest tipper very seriously indeed, and do not like it if someone dislodges them as The Favourite.) I suspect the tippers here have one eye on each other, too. Tipping big certainly impresses the 5,000 others in the room. If you tip-bomb the Keno board, everyone gets to enjoy the show. Some of Vex’s fans really do tip her very well indeed. One tells me via email that he typically spends £300–400 every month on cam-models. Another viewer tipped £500 in this show alone.

These fans make Vex one of Chaturbate’s top earners. After a bit of head counting, she estimates her salary to be around £40,000 per year. The most she’s ever earnt in a single show is about £1,000, thanks to enormous, unsolicited tips, often from regulars. But there are other girls who make even more. Vex told me of one girl who’d made $20,000 in a single month. The money from tonight’s show will arrive in a couple of weeks. The tokens she earns will get exchanged into dollars, Chaturbate takes its cut, and transfers the rest on to a prepaid card called a Payoneer. Payoneer, in turn, takes a small percentage every time it is used. Vex, Auryn and Blath all complain about this. ‘There has to be a better way,’ Vex says after the show. ‘Have you heard of this new thing called Bitcoin?’

Tokens are not the only perk of the job. Vex, like many performers, has a ‘wish-list’ – a personalised page on Amazon filled
with things fans can buy her. Chaturbate’s chief technical officer tells me one girl had a fan pay for breast enlargement; another was bought a washing machine. Vex said she was once sent a set of Le Creuset cooking pots. I found one cam-model wish-list that included books of left-wing political and social criticism, a Black & Decker Dust Buster, and something called a Ruckus motorcycle atv car valve spring compressor tool.

Partly because of the possible rewards, Vex tells me that cam-modelling sites are becoming increasingly crowded. There are more performers joining every week. More girls means more competition, and this is driving down what each girl can expect to make. WeCamGirls ran an internal poll of its members, and found that while around 7 per cent of them make over $5,000 a month (Vex’s sort of range), half of them earn under $1,000.

So cam-models are looking for other ways to supplement their income, and find new fans. It turns out that making money from sex online goes far beyond the webcam.

Jessica is a professional porn star who has worked in the industry for over a decade. She is also an extremely popular cam-model, and does private cam-shows every day, to a small group of high-paying subscribers.

But the majority of Jessica’s clients are to be found in a virtual world called Utherverse. Utherverse is a sort of sexed-up version of Second Life. It has all the trappings of the real world: you can own your own
flat (called a Zaby), bought with ‘Rays’ that can be exchanged for American dollars. If it’s your thing, you’re free to settle down with a virtual family in virtual suburbia. But most people are here to meet other avatars, and for twenty-four-hour parties, nightclubs and strip bars. Around 3,000 people join this parallel universe every day. ‘It’s a strange mix of fantasy and reality, and that makes it the perfect place to sell sex,’ explains Jessica. According to Utherverse’s friendly president, Anna-Lee, there are currently 25,000 avatars selling cyber-, phone- or cam-sex in Utherverse. These avatars are easy to spot – they each have a sign that floats over their head: ‘working guy’ or ‘working girl’. Anna-Lee tells me that a lot of cam-models come to Utherverse to ‘troll’ – a term confusingly used here to refer to soliciting for business.

Along with her wife Elle, Jessica runs her own real-world multi-purpose pornography company in Massachusetts. Both are veterans of the adult entertainment industry, and both maintain a strong online and offline presence. Neither is happy with the direction that pornography is taking. ‘People’s standards used to be higher,’ says Jessica. ‘And because the technology’s gotten better, every Tom, Dick and Harry now thinks they’re a videographer or cam-model!’ adds Elle. But both have adapted to this new world, and both offer a remarkable array of cam-shows, phone sex and avatar sex, in addition to the more traditional video shoots.

You don’t need to be a professional porn star to sell sex here. Anyone can become a working girl or boy and offer their services. I met Julia in one of Utherverse’s carefully designed seedy brothels. As I walked in, three scantily clad women were dancing, all ‘working’. Julia was tall, tanned and sultry, wearing some kind of all-in-one string dress.