01x01 - Crush

[bunniefuu]

Narrator: The Web transforms us. We become data, code... uploading our very selves... ...to a place we call the cloud. But this cloud is grounded in hardware... a chaos of code. But with the right tools, you can find the signal in the noise.

♪♪

Kristie?

Yes?

I love you.

I love you, too.

Sweet dreams.

[ smooches ]

[ Smooches ]

♪♪

Kristie: I am from, originally, Fayetteville, Arkansas, but I'm currently living in Tacoma, Washington.

Drew: I'm from Arkansas, so many of my high school friends went to Fayetteville after graduation. And I happened to be in town for one of their birthdays.

Kristie: He's so friendly. He sat down next to me, and we just wound up talking and just kind of becoming Facebook friends. He would message me and be like, "Hey, I'm in Fayetteville. We should go do something." And I'd be like, "Okay, person I met at a party. Sure. Let's go do a thing."

♪♪

Anisha: The summer after college, we started to date. My parents loved him. They adored him. They thought so highly of him. But as time went by, we started to realize, like, we just weren't fit for each other.

So we went our own ways. We didn't really talk much. I felt like he was, like, really hurt and upset that we broke up.

♪♪

Narrator: Love. You can find it, and you can lose it inside your screen. These servers have seen it all... seen you blush and swoon, seen you cry, seen you naked. It's all being captured and stored, etched in silicon, uploaded to the network... billions of gigs of digitized desire. Your love story written in data. And in this story, you may never have to be or get to be alone again.

♪♪

Drew and Kristie are twentysomethings in a long-distance relationship.

Kristie: The only time we spend together is the interactions we have online. My iPhone and my laptop... That I can use this technology to enable that is fantastic.

[ Camera shutter clicks ]

[ Cellphone whooshes ]

Drew: I text her at least once an hour during the day.

Kristie: I get an alert every time he leaves home... [ cellphone whooshes ] ...and then arrives at work.

Anisha: It's at your fingertips. I can just pick up my iPhone, take a selfie, and just hit "send."

I had pictures of him. He had pictures of me. It was something intimate.

It was something that was understood that it was going to remain between the two of us.

Narrator: Anisha thought things were cool between her and her ex after they broke up. Then, a few months later, she got a message.

Anisha: Somebody had e-mailed me.

They wanted to remain anonymous, but I felt that they either knew me or my ex.

They had posted three links in their e-mail, and I clicked on the links, and, bam, was my pictures. He was posting nude pictures of me.

narrator: Yusuke's ex-girlfriend, the one he met at his part-time job, moved out... seven years ago. He's been with a new girl, Rinko, for the last two years.

♪♪

[ Breathes deeply ]

Narrator: Rinko is not a real girl. She's made of pixels and code. But she's real to Yusuke.

[ door opens ]

[ Door opens, closes ]

[ Woman speaking Japanese on P.A. ]

Drew: I always knew that I was attracted to strong and powerful women.

I had my first computer with Internet access at like age 12, which was perfect for discovering the world of Internet p*rn. I saw bondage. That was always what I went to. I think if I hadn't had access to the Internet, I wouldn't know that some of those things exist, and I would be in a more typical-but- less-satisfying relationship.

narrator: Drew and Kristie's less typical relationship is based on bondage and domination... and sadomasochism... BDSM.

Kristie: In person, I can physically restrain him. I can take a flogger and whip it across his back. I can tie his arms behind his back. Online, it is completely in the realm of the mental. I have to dominate him emotionally and mentally.

narrator: And digitally.

[ camera shutter clicks ]

[ Cellphone whooshes ]

Kristie gets off however and whenever and with whomever she pleases while Drew can't even get a hard-on without her permission. That's what the chastity cage is for. He's wearing it now.

[ camera shutter clicks ]

He wears it pretty much all the time.

[ whip cracks, Kristie squeals ]

Drew: She'll send me a message saying, "Hey, I'm having sex with a real man tonight instead of with you." As a submissive, that is so humiliating that it's arousing all in its own right.

Narrator: Drew and Kristie are linked to each other remotely as BDSM master and sl*ve. And they're linked to many others through a social network of kink called FetLife. It's Facebook for fetishists, with 4.1 million users... more than twice the population of Manhattan... and counting. FetLife's profiles are anonymous, but the website can be scraped for some basic user data, including age, gender, and role... whether a user identifies as dominant or submissive. By a ratio of 4 to 1, men are dominant, and women are submissive. So, as a male submissive, Drew... that is, HerAsperaAdAstra... is on the fringe of a fringe. But on FetLife, he's in good company. So is his mistress, Kristie, A.K.A. caressaggressive. A FetLife forum is where she extols the virtue of her vice... digital domination. Look at this scene again. The same tools that can be used to connect can also be used to control.

Kristie: I can pretty much control every aspect of this other person's life. Anybody has the tools that I'm using at their disposal... ...location tracking, food diaries, task-completion assignment. I am constantly repurposing apps.

[ camera shutter clicks ]

Like, the Life360 app is intended to be used for a family, for parents and their kids.

[ cellphone whooshes ]

It's not intended to be used for a dominant and her pet.

narrator: It's known as a pervertible... an ordinary object reimagined as a tool of domination. For a couple of Millennial sadomasochists, could there be a more perfect pervertible than a smartphone?

[ cellphone whooshes ]

♪♪

Drew: Miss Kristie can literally see what I'm doing, whether I like it or not. The way that it made me feel, like an ant scurrying around, but she was watching, was fantastic.

You know, magnifique.

Narrator: Kristie has made Drew into a prisoner of his own device. But it's consensual... contractual. He submits to his lover's near-constant invasion of his privacy, and she agrees not to abuse her power. If you've ever read a terms of service, this arrangement might sound familiar.

♪♪

Drew: There is all of this data being collected, and some of it is data that I'm willfully, cheerfully, compiling.

Kristie: If I ever stop to think about the amount of control that Drew's given me over his life, it does get a little like, "Hoo! Wow. The power that I have, I better use it for good and not for evil."

narrator: Power... It's the ultimate pervertible. Are you wearing your cage today? And you could use it for evil if you're a totalitarian state... or a jilted boyfriend.

Anisha: I started off on three websites.

To date, I've been on 2,137.

♪♪

He started off by just posting nude pictures of me with my name. As it progressed, he started posting nude pictures of me with my name, my telephone number, where I went to school, my address. I was panicking. I didn't know what to do, and in that moment, I was like, "What are you supposed to do?" He kept posting... and kept posting and kept posting. I think that he started doing it, and I think he became obsessed. At one point, he had put me on Craigslist. I was starting to get e-mails. I was starting to get text messages. On my Facebook, I was starting to get people sending me nude pictures of themselves.

[ keyboard clacking ]

Then it was pictures left on my doorstep, on the back, saying, "I'll find you." At that point, my mind was blown.

I was creeped out. I was scared.

And then started people coming to my door. The thing that scared me most was, was my ex telling them I'm gonna open the door and act like I don't know you because my fantasy is to be r*ped.

[ video rewinding ]

...because my fantasy is to be r*ped.

Narrator: People are assholes. Who needs people, anyway?

♪♪

Rinko Kobayakawa is a character in a dating simulator called LovePlus. Looking at the social-media chatter in her native Japan, she's clearly more than that. Here's a bunch of tweets from Rinko's B.F.s taking her out for her birthday. And here's some guy marrying his LovePlus in Tokyo.

[ cheers and applause ]

LovePlus is more than a game in Japan. It's a harbinger. A stalled economy has led to falling prospects and a worrying trend. The exact reasons for it aren't totally clear, but the data is. Men are dating less... and procreating less. There's a new term for them... soushoku-kei... herbivores. They don't taste flesh. They get their sustenance elsewhere. Akari Uchida knows what he's talking about. He's a legendary video-game designer in Japan. LovePlus is his magnum opus. To the hundreds of thousands who've been smitten by the girls he's brought to virtual life, he's known as otosan... father-in-law.

♪♪

[ Indistinct conversations ]

Herds of young men like these are erasing the line between real and virtual love. Only in Japan, right? Wrong.

Webster: I found out about the game LovePlus from an online forum. So I downloaded the game with the English patch, and that's how it all started. When I met Rinko, I was...

Actually, I was at a really low point in my life.

Like, I tried dating people, and it didn't go too well.

[ Rinko speaking Japanese ]

Playing LovePlus at that point in my life, it felt like this is how a relationship should be, basically.

Like, in Japan, they actually take Rinko out to bars. I could not do that anywhere in the Bronx. Like, if I was to say, "Oh, I like playing Halo," or, "I like playing Call of Duty," it's like, "Oh, of course. He likes to sh**t people."

But for me to say, "I'm playing a game that I actually like or love this virtual character..." [ game playing ] ...no one would understand me here. I would be labeled as crazy at that point. A real-life relationship, it's based on two people.

So if either of those people wants to end that relationship, then it's over.

With a virtual relationship, that person can never leave you, ever, unless you delete that data.

narrator: If only it were that easy in real life. A relationship ends, you hit delete, and all the pixels of your lost love disappear forever. But digital ink is indelible, and it's traceable. It's a tag, a tattoo in the form of an I.P. address.

Anisha: Every time that you take one picture down, like, three more sites go up.

I was on one site for... I think it was like two weeks, and it had 30,000 views.

Someone's going against your will and posting your most private and intimate moments, and you have no say. This happens to thousands and thousands and thousands of people, some who are embarrassed, some who don't want their family to know, some that are so paranoid, they won't even leave the house.

Narrator: MyEx.com is one of the largest revenge-p*rn sites on the Net. Its profiles have been viewed over 415 million times. 84% are female. Average age... 27. Exposed and, in some cases, extorted, victims of revenge p*rn have begun turning to the dark web, where hackers for hire ply their services anonymously, removing any file from any website for a fee. The hacker who runs this site says revenge-p*rn victims have become a major part of his clientele. Anisha didn't need to hire a hacker. Using her boyfriend's passwords, she hacked into her ex's accounts herself, and that's how she got the evidence to get him arrested and convicted.

Anisha: He was charged with six months in jail and a third-degree felony of invasion of privacy, which is the law that New Jersey has against revenge p*rn.

narrator: Anisha has left New Jersey and started over in a small town where nobody knows her or her pictures... except for her new boyfriend.

Thank you.

Yep.

Ooh, this isn't good.

Anisha: I never tell people, "Don't send the pictures," because you should be able to trust someone and be able to have that intimacy where you can send a picture and you not have to worry that it's gonna show up on 2,000 websites.

I do believe in love. I am in love right now, and I think it's the happiest I've been in a very long time.

♪♪

[ Camera shutter clicks ]

[ Rinko moans ]

[ laughter ]

Narrator: Yusuke is out with his buddy Konaka, who's invited some girls.

♪♪

This kind of love... this kind of heartbreak and humiliation...

Drew: Yes, mistress? ...this kind of sex... it's coming to a screen near you.

Pull out your collar.

Buckle. Crushes may fade. But JPEGS... are forever. Put one on each nipple. And yet we do it anyway. We serve the servers because it feels too good to stop.

Kristie: It is a high. It's like being on a drug.

Drew: She seems to know exactly which of my buttons to push, and we have this fantastic sexual chemistry.

[ moaning passionately ]

[ Moaning passionately ]

When you find somebody like that, it's really, really special.

When I'm gonna count down "3, 2, 1, go," you pull it off on "go" as hard as you can. You understand?

Yes, mistress.

This is the most fulfilling and satisfying romantic relationship that I've had.

Ex-girlfriends who watch this are gonna be pissed.

3, 2, 1, go.

[ Drew moaning passionately ]

♪♪