Sex Workers Built the Internet came online in April 2022, and was updated and relaunched in December 2025. It was researched, written, assembled, and designed by Livia Foldes. I’m an artist and educator working between technology, design, and activism. I’ve been involved with sex workers’ rights activism as an ally and accomplice since 2019, and I was a co-founder of Decoding Stigma (2020–23), a collective amplifying sex worker voices in design and technology. Led by Gabriella Garcia, we were a group of academics and organizers, artists and social scientists, dommes and game designers, all working to prioritize sexual autonomy as a necessary ethics question for futurists.

Sex Workers Built the Internet grew from that work, and it would not exist without the ideas and creative labor of our collective’s members. An archive, an oral history, and a piece of net art, this site builds on and contributes to an existing body of sex worker-led art, research, and scholarship. It collects stories and material traces of an emerging online culture that would radically redefine how we experience and perform gender, sexuality, intimacy, and labor. Both a resource and an act of resistance, it documents and preserves crucial internet, activist, and design histories that are at constant risk of erasure.

As this site’s contributors detail, sex workers are perpetually at the vanguard of an unevenly distributed techno-political future. They have long built and shaped new forms of communication — and been subjected to new modes of control — years before the general public. As a result, sex working communities have been the first to develop critical strategies for survival in digital spaces that are, increasingly, as stratified, gentrified, and surveilled as our physical spaces.

This website was written, facilitated, and gathered by Livia Foldes. I’m an artist, designer, and a co-founder of Decoding Stigma, a collective working to prioritize sexual autonomy as a necessary ethics question for futurists.

Sex Workers Built the Internet emerged while I pursued an MFA in design and technology at Parsons School of Design, and it addresses what I came to recognize as a large and problematic knowledge gap in the field. When sharing my work related to Decoding Stigma, I found it was necessary to spend a good portion of each presentation establishing basic information about sex work and its relationship with technology—information I was also unaware of until actively seeking it out. With this project, I aim to share a growing body of knowledge rooted in sex worker rights activism with a broad audience of designers, technologists, and educators for whom this information is both relevant and essential.

Sex Workers Built the Internet builds on the urgent scholarship of Hacking Hustling. This site gathers many sources, but it quotes extensively from two conferences the collective organized in April and May, 2021.

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