This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we talk about looking at NSFW stuff in offices and Indonesian cafes and adding KYC to your KYC.
EMANUEL: One thing I will miss about working in an office with an open floor plan is having a legitimate reason to scroll through hundreds of grandma porn videos for hours in full public view. I don’t get off on offending anyone, and when we used to work at the VICE office before the pandemic we actually did make an effort to hide the truly vile shit we looked at on a regular basis. I sat at the end of a table between a wall and Jason, so he was mostly who saw my monitor and I knew he didn’t mind, and Sam was incredibly considerate and at some point got one of those cheap privacy screens that made it near impossible to see what was on her monitor unless you were in her seat.
It is, however, incredibly funny. Covering adult content and internet platforms often involves looking directly at some of the worst things that can happen to a person, so scrolling through walls of AI-generated sexy grandmas, which as far as I can tell at this point aren’t hurting anyone, is much needed comedic relief, and the fact that doing something like this is simply our job made it even funnier. This is not to make fun of what gets people off, either. It’s just that broadly speaking, despite all the progress we’ve made on this subject as a society, sex is still relatively taboo, and when you look closely at the taboo thing and see that most of the time it’s entirely harmless and sweetly sincere, that’s kind of funny. Sometimes you do the reporting and discover that the man behind the curtain is just beating it to inflatable pool toys, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Many of Sam’s “Rule 34” stories fit this bill and I highly encourage you to read those if you haven’t. Some of them are genuinely uplifting.