She's the internets sexual historian. Her book will give you dinner party fodder for days

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The technologist and professor Mindy Seu was having drinks when her friend casually referred to the phone as a sex toy.Think about it, her friend, Melanie Hoff, explained: We send nudes or watch porn, it’s vibrating and touch-sensitive — it’s practically an appendage.“What exactly is sex, and what exactly is technology?” Seu wondered.

“Neither can be cleanly defined.”Around the same time, in 2023, Seu had just published “Cyberfeminism Index,” a viral Google Sheet-turned-Brat-green-doorstopper from Inventory Press.Critics and digital subcultures embraced the niche volume like a manifesto — and a marker of Seu’s arrival as a public intellectual whose archiving was itself a form of activism.

The cool design didn’t hurt.“If you’re a woman who owns a pair of Tabis or Miistas, you are going to have this tome,” joked comedian Brian Park on his culture podcast “Middlebrow.”Still, the knot between sexuality and technology tugged at her.

“Recently, my practice has evolved toward technology-driven performance and publication,” she said.“It’s not exactly traditional performance art, but I believe that spaces like lectures and readings can be made performative.” Though she wasn’t yet finished exploring this theme, she wasn’t sure how to approach it next — until an experiment by Julio Correa, a former Yale graduate student, sparked an idea.

Correa had devised an Instagram Stories-based lecture format, and she immediately saw its potential.She reached out to ask if she could “manipulate” his idea into a performance piece, and would he like to collaborate?Thus, “A Sexual History of the Internet” was born.

The work is two things at once: a participatory lecture-performance conducted through the audience’s phones, and an accompanying, palm-sized, 700-plus-page “script” examining how our devices serve as bodily extensions.The book ...