The second chapter in Mindy Seu’s new, 700-plus-page artist book A Sexual History of the Internet explores the computer mouse as vulva, referencing Ali Na’s “The Fetish of the Click” article. “The computer mouse was a very yawn shape: two halves and the rolling wheel in the middle,” says Seu. “I think touch pads, even if they’re not physically shaped in that way, are very haptic.”

Even the precursor to the mouse (and the touch pad), the light pen and the light gun, were also very phallic. The artist and technologist explores these pervasive and perverted origins of digital tools in A Sexual History of the Internet, which originally started as a standalone lecture in the format of Instagram stories, before it became a participatory lecture performance, where citations are read aloud by the audience through a shared script on their mobile devices. The performance of re-citation is currently travelling across North America, Europe and Asia.

As the name suggests, *A Sexual History of the Internet *is about techno-development and sexuality. As we head deeper into the AI era, where one in five high schoolers has had a romantic AI relationship, Seu builds a compelling case for the inherent erotic nature of engaging with technology and existing online, with citations of 45 people who shaped new understandings of sexual technologies. But both the performance and the book are also about extraction. Seu compiled anecdotes, artworks and historical artefacts documenting the internet being “built” by sex workers, and Liara Roux’s concept of “pussy capital”. As Mistress Harley, who coined the term “techdomme”, put it before one of Seu’s performances at Performance Space New York in October: “Everyone on the internet has built their livelihood on the backs of sex workers and then eliminated them from their platform in an effort to make it clean.” This includes platforms like Patreon and OnlyFans.

A Sexual History of the Internet follows Seu’s first (also experimental and extremely popular) book,** **the Cyberfeminism Index, a compendium of cyberfeminist works from the 1980s to the present day. “Cyberfeminism injected the cold, sterile, militaristic internet with the slimy viscera of the body,” writes Seu in *A Sexual History of the Internet. *And it’s true that it was in writing her first book that the sexual connotations and connections of the digital age came to life. “We just have so much language and action around how humans or bodies work, and have just applied that to our devices,” she says.

Dazed spoke to Seu about the mouse as a vulva, Instagram stories as a lecture, a book as a redistribution experiment, AI as intimacy and the anthropomorphisation of machines.

Photography Tim Schutsky, art direction Laura Coombs

A lot of people know you from the Cyberfeminism Index. So what inspired you to explore the sexual history of the internet next?

**Mindy Seu: **The Cyberfeminism Index still feels very much like a work in progress. We did print that compendium in 2023, and it feels like a very odd book. It’s an encyclopedia rather than an essay anthology. So while working on that, I found that there were through lines that were connected by this very broad phrase, cyberfeminism, like hacker spaces and biotech surveillance. One of these through lines that felt a bit unresolved and pressing was the relationship between technology and sexuality. I decided to focus more specifically on that theme and began working on a script to write a standalone lecture. Then it evolved from that lecture to a performance.

And also now into a book. So, how do you want people to receive this? Especially those who aren’t in the cities where the performance is happening.

**Mindy Seu: **It’s actually an interesting challenge. The impetus for the book was when we were doing prototypes of the lecture performance, which is a lecture that takes place on the audience’s iPhones, all of our Finstas kept getting deleted because of Meta’s very opaque community guidelines. Through the prototyping process, we learned how to censor it in ways it wouldn’t get flagged, but that also inspired this idea that we should create a printed record of this kind of history because it’s so vulnerable. The book reprints the Instagram story lecture slides, but it also acts as a financial experiment where every single person who is cited in the book splits 30 per cent of all profits. It feels like a pretty interesting proof of concept for how an artist project might deal with redistribution.

I was actually meaning to ask: why was this experiment with redistribution so important to you?

**Mindy Seu: **Many people will say that citations are kind of the ultimate feminist technology because they’re really talking about a social network of how ideas come together through community and not because of some individual genius. So while I’ve been thinking about ways of social citation, oral histories and community citations, it felt like an interesting extension of that to then add a financial component also, because micropayments through clicks and this kind of thing has been around since the conception of search engines.

My friend Melanie Hoff and I were at a bar, and she just casually referred to the phone as a sex toy because it’s how we have sex with people. We send nudes, we watch porn, we listen to erotica. It’s also very haptic: it vibrates, it’s pressure sensitive

In the original standalone lecture, what were some of the ways you got around the algorithm?

**Mindy Seu: **We just use asterisks to wipe the vowel. So sex, porn, pussy, anything like that, we just remove the vowel and use an asterisk. And then, of course, you just have to mask all forms of nudity, even if it’s artificially generated. It was interesting to actually see what would get flagged or not. Even if the word sex were in a citation in a link, that would still get a flag.

How did it translate into a performance series and then the physical book? What was the process of writing the script?

**Mindy Seu: **My friend Melanie Hoff and I were at a bar, and she just casually referred to the phone as a sex toy because it’s how we have sex with people. We send nudes, we watch porn, we listen to erotica. It’s also very haptic: it vibrates, it’s pressure sensitive. That anecdote, paired with one of my grad students, when I was teaching a lecture performance studio at Yale School of Art, Julio Correa, experimented with an Instagram story as a lecture format. He retired the idea, but when I remembered it, I looped back with him like, Do you want to work on this together? So he came on to help fine-tune that format, and we spent all of 2024 doing live tests.

**I personally had no idea that the internet had such a sexual history. Was there anything in particular during your research for the *****Cyberfeminism Index ***where it all clicked?

**Mindy Seu: **We’ve seen how much of our sexuality is shaped through the internet and social media. It’s shaped trends, it’s shaped filters. It’s shaped what kind of body modification people are getting. But when we were tracing this back, it is also quite insidious with the origins of computers generally. One of the first nodes in ANet, which was a proto-internet built by the military, was called Sex os, sex operating system. That was because an engineer made a joke, and they truncated set X to sex. Or the very first image that was used to test the compression algorithm was of the Playboy model. So, part of this is talking about extraction, and part is talking about a lot of these early people who made the internet were just like male engineers who made immature jokes.

Performance Space New York performance of A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET on October 18, 2025Photography Chaz Deausen, courtesy Deem Journal

I also liked the mention of the computer mouse resembling a vulva.

Mindy Seu: I think people like to think that our tools are metal and militaristic, but the way we interact with them is super embodied. We think these devices are really sterile, but they are messy. The materials are pulled out of the earth through rare earth minerals, and you can’t separate cold technology from a very messy physical environment. Not to mention, there’s also a history of embodied computing. The first computers were literally women who would compute, who would crunch numbers, and they were called computers. The lineage is quite deep. And I do think that using our devices is extremely intimate. They’ve become extensions of the body.

In the book, you also share some personal stories about growing up in a conservative religious household and looking for porn on your family’s shared computer. How do you think your background influenced your approach to this project?

**Mindy Seu: **It feels so connected to one of my favourite examples in the book, which is Mistress Harley. It is not about sex as we know it – you basically give your dom remote access to your computer, and they can access all of your files and bank accounts. She thinks this is happening because a lot of our sexual proclivities emerge when we are young, as part of the generation that grew up with parental controls. So I think this idea of secrecy has always been part of sexual orientation, of how puritanical our societies are, but especially that component of restriction in online environments has seeped into everything.

There’s a chapter on ‘pussy capital’ and the sex work industry being impacted by AI. As a relatively new technology, how did that research come about? It feels especially relevant right now.

**Mindy Seu: **Just through being in creative tech communities, you meet so many people who have the same goals but work on them from a lot of different disciplines. Some are artists, some are lawyers and policymakers, some are sex workers. They’re all concerned about surveillance, they’re all concerned about attribution and antitrust. It’s so present in this moment.

I think people like to think that our tools are metal and militaristic, but the way we interact with them is super embodied. We think these devices are really sterile, but they are messy

**Exactly. For example, I was initially shocked to hear about people having romantic relationships with AI, but *****A Sexual History of the Internet *suggests ****this sexual dynamic between humans and technology has been there all along. **

**Mindy Seu: **This stuff actually isn’t new at all. I think people like to say that technology is ruining how humans interact with other humans, but that’s not the case. Humans are naturally very empathetic, and they will anthropomorphise their machines. I think that people are just finding ways of communicating with themselves through whatever prompts they can find.

I know the Cyberfeminism Index is a living archive, so what’s the plan for the future of The Sexual History of the Internet?

**Mindy Seu: **We’re doing an international tour right now, which has been amazing. Everyone in the audience will read a quote by one of the people cited at some point, and it’s a really powerful moment when your work is rarely cited to hear strangers saying it aloud. It feels like such an embodied transmission of your research into another human.

A Sexual History of the Internet* by Mindy Seu is out now.*