Speakers: No Porn to Hide from Rose White

“The first time I found my father’s porn I was trying to read his back issues of Mother Earth News. One day I did this while my mother was doing laundry…I was eight or nine years old.”

Rose White wants to find your porn stash. She is trying to unearth how we collect, store, organize (and hide) our collections, asking what these troves say about us.

“I think I was born a little socially miswired. I never quite understood why there should be anything wrong with talking about sex. In fourth grade I got in trouble at school for explaining to the other kids how human reproduction worked. I read it in the encyclopedia! They were wrong on the playground!,” says White.

Never one to shy away from topics of sexuality, Rose is presenting the initial findings of her research at the 25C3. Her talk, “The Infinite Library: Storage and Access of Pornographic Information” is one of many interesting events in the Society track. This track looks at many aspects of Society from a hacker’s perspective, covering everything from safely getting the truth out to protecting the elections process and even thoughts on laws a robot society needs. Fitting in with this year’s theme, there are naturally talks about protecting privacy and talks about embracing a world where there really is nothing left to hide.

Currently a student in sociology at CUNY Graduate Center, Rose is actively engaging those who have something to hide. What our porn collections say about us is truly personal and how we store and access them are fascinating issues for Rose.

“I love how this is a problem that never goes away, no matter what the medium is. People hid handwritten letters and drawings centuries ago; now they encrypt files; in between they looked for places to stash Polaroids. Everything boils down to information management and retrieval — but now there’s more information to manage, and the person who accidentally finds your porn could be sitting at a desk in a Google or Flickr office half a planet away, as Violet Blue reminded us at Arse Elektronika last year. So this is a deeply personal, individual problem, but it’s also partly a public policy issue, which makes the topic really irresistible,” says White.

Rose is no stranger to the congress, having spoken on The Role of Brilliant Deviants in the Liberalization of Society and The History of Guerilla Knitting at the 24C3. Never one to shy from a good yarn, she is also leading a Stitch & Bits workshop on Day 1.