What ain’t it?

Rob Lowe makes the well-known point that most modern technology started with porn.

How about older tech?

Music and dance? Courtship rituals. Clear in our direct bird ancestors.

Water and sewer systems? See bainea and thermae.

Modern informal music unquestionably started with sexual connotations. Jazz means jism, and rock-n-roll means what you do in bed. Two of our cherished “patriotic” songs were originally sex songs, modified into parodies of war, then recast by prudes as dull war songs.

Motion pictures started with melodrama, but made money with peep shows.

The telephone started as business-to-business, but gained popularity and profit when lovers discovered it. Long conversations are not business calls.

= = = = =

Old joke:

Money ain’t everything!
Oh yeah? What ain’t it?

Well, what didn’t start with porn?

Text-only technology. Printing was spread by the Protestant reformers who were trying to break Rome’s monopoly on scriptures. The reform gained popularity because it freed up heterosexual peasants from Rome’s monopoly on sex rules, but that wasn’t the only purpose by any means.

Much later printers made money with dime novels, the Harlequin Romances of the era, but printing was already mature at that point. Dime novels didn’t help to develop the technology.

The telegraph is a pure exception. It started as a governmental project in France, serving military and stock market purposes. Wheatstone tried to introduce a personal version that could have been used for courtship, but Morse’s centralized business and government system quickly knocked down Wheatstone.