They're easier to use for two reasons: the obvious reason is that you're more likely to be familiar with an existing technology than you are with a new technology. After all, it's literally impossible to be familiar with a technology that has just been invented!

But the *other* reason that existing communications technologies are easier to use is that communication is - again, by definition - something you do with other people.

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That means that if you want to use a new communications tool to talk with someone else, it is not sufficient for you to master that technology's use - you must also *convince the other person* you're hoping to reach to master that technology, too.

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In economic terms, the "opportunity cost" (the amount of time you lose for doing other things) of mastering a new communications tool isn't limited to your own education, but also to the project of convincing someone else to master that tool, and then showing them how to use it.

If the existing communications technology is working for you, mastering the new tool is mostly cost, with very little upside.

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Perhaps *you* are a technophile by temperament and derive intrinsic satisfaction from exploring a new tool, and that's why you do it, but even so, you're going to find yourself in the bind of trying to convince the people you'd like to communicate with to follow your lead.

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And if *they're* all being well-served by the existing communications tools, and if they're *not* technophiles, you're asking them to engage in a lot of labor and endure a high opportunity cost for no obvious benefit. It's a hard slog.

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But there are many groups of people for whom the existing technology does *not* work, and one of the biggest ways an existing technology can fail is if the authorities are using it to suppress your communications and/or spy on your usage in order to frustrate your goals.

This brings us back to sex workers, kids and terrorists. All three groups are typically poorly served by the existing communications technology.

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If you're a pornographer in the age of celluloid film, you either have to convince your customers to visit (and risk being seen entering) an adult movie theater, or you have to convince them to buy an 8mm projector and mail order your reels (and risk being caught having them delivered).

No wonder pornographers and sex workers embraced the VCR! No wonder they embraced the internet!

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No wonder they embraced cryptocurrency (if your bank accounts are liable to being frozen and/or seized, it's worth figuring out how to use an esoteric payment method and endure the risk of its volatility and technological uncertainty). Today, sex workers and their customers are doubtless mastering VPNs (to evade anonymity-stripping "age verification" systems) and Tor hidden services (to evade "online safety" laws).

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The alternative to using these systems isn't the status quo - making use of existing websites, existing payment methods, existing connection tools. The alternative is *nothing*. So it's worth learning to use these new tools, and to engage in the social labor of convincing others to join you in using them.

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Then there's kids. Unlike sex workers, kids' communications aren't broadly at risk of being suppressed so much as they are at risk of being observed by authority figures with whom they have an adversarial relationship.

When you're a kid, you want to talk about things without your parents, teachers, principals, or (some of) your peers or siblings listening in.

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You want to *plan* things without these people listening in, because they might try and stop you from doing them, or punish you if you succeed.

So again, it's worth figuring out how to use new technologies, because the existing ones are riddled with censorship and surveillance back-doors ("parental controls") that can be deployed to observe your communications, interdict your actions, and punish you for the things that you manage to pull off.

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So of course kids are also "early adopters" - but not because being a kid makes you a technophile. Many kids are technophiles and many are not, but whether or not a kid finds mastering a new technology intrinsically satisfying, they will likely have to do so, if they want to communicate with their peers.

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For terrorists, the case for mastering new technologies combines the sex-workers' cases and kids' cases: terrorists' communications are both illegal and societally unacceptable (like sexual content) and terrorists operate in an environment in which entities far more powerful than them seek to observe and interdict their plans, and punish them after the fact for their actions (like kids).

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So once again, terrorists are apt to master new communications technologies, but not because seeking to influence political outcomes by acts of violence against civilian populations is somehow tied to deriving intrinsic satisfaction from mastering new technologies, but rather because the existing technologies are dangerously unsuitable for your needs.

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Note that just because being in one of these groups doesn't automatically *make you* a technophile, it doesn't mean that there are no technophiles among these groups. Some people are into tech *and* the sex industry. Some kids *love* mastering new technologies. Doubtless this is true of some terrorists, too.

I haven't seen any evidence that being a kid, or a terrorist, or a sex-worker, makes you any less (or any more) interested in technology than anyone else.

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Some of us just love this stuff for its own sake. Other people just want a tool that works so they can get on with their lives. That's true of every group of people.

The difference is that if you're a technophile *in a group of people* who have a damned good reason to endure the opportunity cost of mastering a new technology, you have a much more receptive audience for your overheated exhortations to try this amazing new cool thing you've discovered.

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What's more, there are some situational and second-order effects that come into play as a result of these dynamics. For example, kids are famously "cash-poor and time-rich" which means that spending them time to figure out new technologies when they're still in stage one of enshittification (when they deliver a lot of value at their lowest cost, often free) is absolutely worth it.

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Likewise, the fact that sex-workers are often the first commercial users of a new communications technology means that there's something especially ugly about the fact that these services jettison sex workers the instant they get leaned on by official prudes. The story of the internet is the story of businesses who owe their commercial existence to sex workers, who have since rejected them and written them out of their official history.

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It also means that technophiles who aren't kids, pornographers or terrorists are more likely to find themselves in techno-social spaces that have higher-than-average cohorts of all three groups. This means that bright young technologists can find themselves being treated as peers by accomplished adults (think of Aaron Swartz attending W3C meetings as a pre-teen after being welcomed as a peer in web standardization online forums).

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It also means that technophiles are more likely than the average person to have accidentally clicked on a terrorist atrocity video. And it means that pornographers and sex-workers are more likely to be exposed to technologically adventurous people in purely social, non-sexual online interactions.

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Because sex-workers are among the first arrivals in new technological spaces, when they are still mostly esoteric, high-tech realms, which means that even among the less technophilic members of that group, there's probably an above-average degree of familiarity with things that are still way ahead of the tech mainstream.

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My point is that we should understand that the adoption of technology by disfavored, at risk, or prohibited groups is driven by material factors, not by some hidden ideological link between sex and tech, or youth and tech, or terrorism at tech.

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I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller *Enshittification*!

Catch me next in #Toronto (TOMORROW!), #SanDiego and #Seattle!

Full schedule with dates and links at:

pluralistic.net/tour

eof/