Introduction

In a reflection on discourses surrounding economic development, media scholar Lilly Irani (2019, 223) asks, “How do you popularize an infrastructure?”—and, more particularly, “What if infrastructure exists but people have not taken it up?” To these questions this article proposes one possible answer: a strategy we refer to as “perverse attraction.” Through this concept, we mean to highlight practices that employ the inversion of dominant moral hierarchies as a means of cultivating faithful practice around a still-incomplete infrastructural project.

This article presents perverse attraction through the examination of public texts related to the work of Ameen Soleimani, a contemporary entrepreneur influential in the subculture surrounding the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is a distributed-ledger protocol, first released in 2015, capable of processing arbitrary “smart contract” programs across a decentralized network. Supporters believe Ethereum is capable of far larger influence and importance than it has thus far achieved, to the point of restructuring economic and organizational life (Swartz 2017; Buterin 2022). A deep-seated commitment to the idea of decentralization has drawn a loyal base of advocates. However, their visions of its potential can be realized only through mass adoption. Since Ethereum is not a governmental public works program imposed from above, adoption is contingent on its ability to spread through voluntary use: early adopters, on multiple sides of markets, inviting in those around them until the boundaries of its periphery dissolve into ubiquity. Soleimani is among those who have adopted this goal as a way of life and a livelihood. He is best known as the founder of MolochDAO and SpankChain, an idolatry-themed grant fund and a sex-worker payments network, respectively.

This article draws on Soleimani’s career, along with its broader context, to inductively theorize perverse attraction for the analysis of mediating technologies and religious cultures. To be clear, it is not our intent to claim that perverse attraction is a necessary, or effective, strategy for building infrastructure. We restrict our ambition simply to identifying, describing, and considering its ethical implications. Further, when we speak of the “perverse,” we do not mean to make a claim about the ultimate moral status of any particular phenomena; rather, we refer to their perversity in relationship to dominant moral and religious norms—as an analytic concept rather than a normative one. This article details how perversion can operate as a technique for establishing novel, voluntary infrastructures.

While this analysis focuses on Soleimani’s career, we suspect perverse attraction has been used across diverse contexts, long before the advent of blockchains. Slavoj Žižek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003) claims to identify, as its subtitle puts it, a “perverse core of Christianity”—particularly in the thought of the religion’s most prolific early church-planter, the apostle Paul. Paul celebrated the off-putting quality of his gospel, writing to his followers, “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:18 NRSV). If Žižek is right, Paul built the network infrastructure of early Christianity on the attractions of the perverse; the use of perverse attraction seems to appear not only among subversive startups but also in new religious movements that eventually establish dominant moral orders. Although Paul and Soleimani represent very different kinds of infrastructural aspirations, both find in perversity a strategy for constructing still-aspirational networks, attracting the early adopters who will form the basis of eventual mass adoption—whether it is the conversion of the Roman Empire or the rise of a new digital infrastructure for decentralized coordination. As Silvia Federici (2004) shows in her analysis of witch hunts and the rise of capitalism, performances of perversion can also repel people away from legacy infrastructures and draw them toward new ones.

This article builds on and contributes to past scholarship exploring the interrelations of religious phenomena and mediating technologies (Hoover 2006; Stolow 2005; Campbell 2012). Since our case study involves the intentional use of idolatry and pornography, its symbolic universe implicitly relies on dominant religious norms that categorize certain activities as perverse. In particular, we engage with research on religious entanglements with media infrastructures (Supp-Montgomerie 2021a; Ellis 2020). Infrastructure scholars have stressed the theme of visibility and invisibility (Parks 2007, 2015; Supp-Montgomerie 2021b), which is also a central theme for us—in this case, the visibility that can occur through the practice of pornography. We thus bridge infrastructure studies with literature exploring pornography as a pioneering practice for new technologies (Coopersmith 1998, 2000; Barss 2010; P. Johnson 1996). The stakes of blockchain infrastructure are particularly high given the degrees of control possible through protocols (Galloway 2006)—a type of infrastructure that sets the basic rules of communication across a network.

The article begins with an overview of the case study, introducing the two major projects of Soleimani’s career. It then explores historical precedents and, through an analysis of the case, presents the concept of perverse attraction. The subsequent section considers the claims of empowerment through blockchain-based pornography in light of past experience and scholarship. By the end, it will have introduced a strategy for infrastructure development and called into question some of this strategy’s basic claims.

From MolochDAO to SpankChain

On Valentine’s Day 2019, Ameen Soleimani announced the deployment of the smart contract representing MolochDAO on the Ethereum blockchain (MolochDAO, n.d.-b). As the name suggests, the code was intended to be the basis of a DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization—an organization governed by rules described in software on a blockchain and carried out through virtual tokens rather than conventional processes of legal incorporation. MolochDAO proved a landmark moment in the development of the growing subculture surrounding blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and DAOs that this article refers to collectively as “crypto.”

The arrival of MolochDAO occurred in the depths of the “crypto winter,” a downturn following the speculative frenzy of early 2018. The first prominent DAO, called simply “The DAO,” had been decimated by a hacker soon after its launch in 2016, nearly taking Ethereum as a whole down with it (Reijers et al. 2018). MolochDAO would involve many of the same leading figures in the Ethereum community. It was a collectively governed grant fund, an attempt to lift the spirits of Ethereum true believers by channeling valuable digital tokens to projects deemed worthwhile (Soleimani et al. 2019). Soon, it was distributing hundreds of thousands of dollars in donated cryptocurrency each year (MolochDAO 2022).

The “Moloch” part of MolochDAO’s name was suggestive as well. Moloch is an ancient Canaanite god in the Hebrew Bible whose followers appear to practice child sacrifice. In this story, Moloch stands as a canonical example of the Jewish and eventually Christian concepts of idolatry (C. L. Johnson 2006). Soleimani explains that he took the name for the project from an essay by the blogger Scott Alexander. The essay, “Meditations on Moloch,” dwells on the portions of Allen Ginsberg’s mid-1950s poem “Howl” that invoke Moloch (Alexander 2014).

This passage from “Howl,” for instance, became the background of MolochDAO’s Twitter account: “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!” (Ginsberg 1956)

The conventional reading of Ginsberg’s poem is as a denunciation of 1950s America—“ensconced in suburban comfort, conformity, and the official ideology of containment” (Gray 2010). Against the buttoned-down Cold War empire of IBM suits and “one nation under God,” Ginsberg presaged the 1960s rebellions that were only beginning to brew. Half a century after it was written, however, Alexander read “Howl” differently. Ginsberg’s Moloch, for Alexander (2014), represents a more technocratic sort of complaint: “insufficient coordination,” “a perverse failure to optimize.” Moloch is the condition in which “every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures” (Alexander 2014). No longer is “machinery” really the problem, because for Alexander, “technology has the potential to seriously improve coordination efforts” (Alexander 2014).

With this reading in mind, the homepage for MolochDAO situates the DAO’s participants in a cosmic, technology-aided showdown: “This demon god of coordination failure, who consumes our future potential for perverse immediate gain, will be slain. Pledge your oath to his demise, or go down with him.” (MolochDAO, n.d.-a)

MolochDAO iconography, on its website and elsewhere, warns against too much seriousness about any of this. There are scary drawings of a horned god crowned with an Ethereum logo and a color scheme of black covered in dripping red blood. This depiction reflects the negative associations that tend to accompany the idol Moloch in societies heavily influenced by Christian traditions. Then comes a bright stock photo of people in office wear collaborating happily around a computer, with a bloody logo hastily added to the papers on their desk. The purpose appears to be not some literalistic belief in or against Moloch but a unifying mythology for a community in the crisis of an economic downturn, both a dead serious and inside joke. It served to organize the Ethereum community around a shared purpose, one not reducible to a token price or immediate use-value in the world as it is. As Soleimani puts it, “If you can’t name your enemy, you can’t fight them” (Soleimani, Twitter direct message to authors, January 12, 2023).

By the end of 2020, coronavirus-induced lockdowns began to fuel a speculative boom in crypto. Sales of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) tied to digital artworks led to an unprecedented rise in Ethereum’s value. That year, the Moloch mythology took hold in another Ethereum-based DAO, Gitcoin. Like MolochDAO, Gitcoin’s mission is to direct funds toward “public goods”—typically understood in these contexts as open-source software in the Ethereum ecosystem. To bring donations into its grant-making pool, Gitcoin produced a trio of comic books depicting the horned beast, determined to dis-coordinate the Earth, and doing battle against ETHbot, a neon-green, Transformers-style mechanical protagonist (Owocki 2021a, 2021b). The aesthetic was markedly different from MolochDAO’s spooky black-and-red color scheme; Gitcoin paraphernalia emphasized the green robot, inviting people into the noble work of slaying Moloch rather than into the world of Moloch himself (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Excerpts from the websites of MolochDAO (top) and the Greatest LARP (bottom) circa September 2022.

On the website greatestlarp.com, during the fall of 2021, Gitcoin orchestrated the sale of Moloch-themed NFTs, the proceeds of which would fund the matching pool for grants (Owocki 2021a). The reference to LARPing—live-action role playing—once again signaled that this cult of Moloch was not to be taken as a genuine religious movement. And yet, the performance raised genuine quantities of virtual money: 275.05 Ethereum tokens, or the equivalent of US$494,034.13 when the sale ended on October 8.

All the while, Soleimani had another project in the works. In 2017, he attempted to pitch the New York crypto venture fund where he worked, ConsenSys, on creating an “evil” branch in San Francisco. His slide deck included a drawing of Moloch accepting a child as sacrifice (Munster 2019). In a later deck introducing his new company, SpankChain, he explained that the most likely path to widespread consumer adoption of crypto would be through the kinds of activities that lend themselves to illicit subcultures. The drugs phase happened with the early Bitcoin marketplace Silk Road (Van Hout and Bingham 2014), and pornography was next. ConsenSys founder Joe Lubin told a reporter, “He wanted to do all the dark things” (Munster 2019). When Lubin did not support the proposal, Soleimani went West anyway. SpankChain initially launched as a webcam platform that enabled performers to host shows. The brand eventually grew to include a SpankChain-specific token, Booty. SpankChain raised the equivalent of US$7.5 million in the 2017 “initial coin offering” craze—selling tokens to investors on the promise of a future product—and released a demo on the first day of 2018 (Figure 2).

Figure 2

The top of the SpankChain website, circa September 2022.

Despite the existence of over a dozen pornography-related crypto projects at the time (Klein 2018), SpankChain gained traction as the first to generate a meaningful user base (Cuen 2018). With help from advisors in the adult entertainment industry and a strong technical team, SpankChain drew over 700 performers and 4,000 users within a year of its initial release (Munster 2019). Soleimani’s branding prowess became apparent as news of SpankChain appeared in outlets ranging from the industry website Decrypt (Munster 2019) to Rolling Stone (Barrett-Ibarria 2019). Adult entertainers and SpankChain advisors espoused the potential of blockchains to liberate sex workers from the discrimination of financial institutions. Major credit card companies and online payment processors have been known to reverse charges made for sex work or ban alleged sex workers from using their platforms (Barss 2010; Motherboard 2022; Barrett-Ibarria 2019). Gabi, a SpankChain ambassador and cam model, told one reporter, “I think SpankChain is on the cutting edge. It’s trying to solve a lot of these problems that are rampant in the industry” (Barrett-Ibarria 2019). Multiple performers echoed this sentiment. In a SpankChain blog post, pornography performer Janice Griffith wrote, “[SpankChain] is going to change everything we know about how to run our businesses” (Griffith 2017).

Meanwhile, on crypto-centered podcasts and in publications, Soleimani repeatedly explained how the adult entertainment industry could demonstrate the potential of crypto across society. SpankChain garnered acceptance, notoriety, and faith from subsets of both the crypto and adult entertainment communities. In 2019, the company introduced SpankPay, a tool that enabled performers to accept crypto payments. SpankPay allowed performers to retain 99.5 percent of their earnings, in contrast to third-party payment processors that frequently charge a 10 percent fee from adult performers.

This part of the project, however, was short-lived. In March 2023, SpankPay shut down after Wyre Payments terminated its contract. The upstream payment processor claimed SpankChain had violated the network’s terms of service (Nelson 2023). SpankChain’s cam site is no longer active, and as of early 2023, the combined value of SPANK, the utility token that can be used to generate Booty, had fallen from its all-time high of US$178 million to US$0. As of January 2024, SpankChain continues to operate SpankMatch, a professional networking platform for the adult entertainment industry, and SpankUniversity, an educational platform focused on sex-worker health, as well as political advocacy initiatives for the industry.

Meanwhile, MolochDAO’s design and nomenclature became the basis of DAOHaus, a popular platform for creating—or “summoning”—new DAOs. In that way and more, the singular intervention became infrastructure. SpankChain was also an early adopter of “state channels” for payments, which allow many transactions to be packaged within just two transactions on the blockchain—an efficient technique that has since become an important part of the broader Ethereum ecosystem.

Belief, Infrastructure, and Perverse Attraction

In an October 2020 podcast, Gitcoin founder Kevin Owocki and Soleimani riffed together on the Moloch mythology, during which Owocki spoke of “belief”:

If everyone went home and believed really hard in Bitcoin as a store of value, then it would win, immediately. And that is interesting, because it points out how much of these things are just based on belief. With Ethereum it’s a little harder. It’s not so much enough to believe in Ethereum. You also have to build useful stuff on it to get people to use it and then believe in it. (Soleimani and Owocki 2020, 00:33:22–00:34:07)

That is, as just a currency, Bitcoin could succeed on assent alone; but as an infrastructure for far more expansive applications, such as programmable contracts and entire organizations, Ethereum requires works as well as faith. Both MolochDAO and Gitcoin took that theory to heart as projects designed to funnel funds toward people who would build “public goods” with Ethereum (Soleimani and Owocki 2020). Both got their start at a time when faith seemed most necessary, during a severe downturn in the cryptocurrency market. They used the specter of Moloch, as the god of coordination failure, to motivate the “public goods” that could undergird faith in the nascent crypto infrastructure.

The idea that building infrastructure might have something to do with faith is not original to crypto. Scholar of religion and media Jenna Supp-Montgomerie’s book When the Medium Was the Mission (2021a), for instance, documents in detail how Evangelical Christian theology informed and motivated the “infrastructuralist meaning” of telegraph lines, as well as other electronic communications networks. Writes Supp-Montgomerie (2021a, 23; emphasis added):

Cabled network media came into being tethered to a series of promises about the possibilities for technology, social life, the future, and communication. They were understood—even before they worked—as a brand-new technology that would create social unity in a flawless future through instantaneous, ubiquitous, frictionless communication. They were understood as connective and divine.

New infrastructures propose to make possible what was not possible before them. But infrastructures do not manifest their possibilities immediately or all at once. They are frequently subject to network effects (Katz and Shapiro 1994), whereby their value becomes evident only as they connect a large number of nodes. If there is only one road to drive on, most people will not see fit to buy a car; when roads cover the most desirable routes of travel, cars seem essential. From start to finish, the making of infrastructure is a matter of promulgating certain imaginaries. Kelsie Kabben characterizes crypto as “a collective exploration in ‘self-infrastructuring,’” an ongoing and prefigurative process (Nabben 2023, 1). For those outside crypto’s devoted subcultures, even its most basic infrastructures seem to remain in that stage of “even before they worked.” Using them requires patience and technical workarounds, motivated by a kind of faith that the new infrastructures will continue growing in power and someday overtake the old ones. Lana Swartz (2022) has gone so far as to suggest that the development of crypto infrastructure has amounted to a “network scam,” ultimately designed not to work but to extract from people who believe it will.

Gitcoin’s strategy surrounding Moloch was much like that of the telegraph missionaries Supp-Montgomerie has studied—an evangelical optimism based on the expectation of imminent triumph. While Gitcoin presented a hopeful story about people coming together, coordinating, and slaying Moloch, MolochDAO’s iconography bet on a kind of dark kinship. Both the idolatry of Moloch and the pornography of SpankChain reflect a theory that the best way to achieve the network effects necessary for functional infrastructure is to start in spaces that the dominant culture regards as illicit. This theory builds on the concept of “disruptive innovation,” canonical among technology startups, which holds that the most transformative businesses arise from once-marginal markets (Christensen, Raynor, and McDonald 2015). Perverse attraction adds the supposition that, in order to find those marginal subcultures of true-believing early adopters, the entrepreneur should identify dominant moral norms and subvert them.

Economies of Questionable Empowerment

In their white paper introducing SpankChain, Soleimani and co-founder William Bentley de Vogelaere describe the project as an “alternative to discrimination” (Soleimani and de Vogelaere 2017, 3). Similarly, a 2017 blog post published by SpankChain promised in its headline to explain “How SpankChain Brings Power to Performers.” Soleimani frequently posts to his social media accounts about news and advocacy for sex-worker rights. Multiple pornography performers have expressed hopes for what SpankChain might enable. Courtni Demilune, for example, recounts her previous experiences of discrimination as a transgender woman in pornography, concluding, “Spank[C]hain provides a solution to all of this . . . They are empowering us with the infrastructure we need” (Demilune 2017).

Histories of economic innovation, however, show a pattern of entrepreneurs bestowing financial empowerment and increased visibility on marginalized communities only to rescind access when the image of perversion no longer serves the ambitions of the infrastructure. Future infrastructure builders, in turn, benefit from the continued marginalization of those in the pornography industry, as it generates opportunities for further innovation.

This is not to say that blockchains are devoid of potential to empower workers in the adult entertainment industry. Crypto platforms codesigned with and by sex workers—including SpankChain, WetSpace, and MintStars—have provoked meaningful conversations about establishing a more just technological ecosystem for people engaged in sex work (Barrett-Ibarria 2019; Sigalos 2022; Salmond and Deyoung 2022; Garcia et al. 2021). But when platform-building is motivated primarily by the potential for sex workers to engender infrastructure adoption—as opposed to the ability of infrastructures to mitigate the marginalization of sex workers—the benefits to sex workers tend to be short-lived.

The British company UKash, for instance, achieved early success as a payment processing system for online adult entertainment (Barss 2010). The company was initially founded as a digital payment method for gamblers in 2005. It struggled before turning to pornography. The continued marginalization of pornography enabled UKash to find a motivated user base—until it was acquired by the US-based company Skrill, which has since banned sex workers from the platform. This kind of transition has been common. As the online adult entertainment industry gained popularity, many financial institutions became wary of working with adult entertainers. By 2002, most major credit card companies had placed significant restrictions on processing payments for pornography or had stopped working with the industry altogether. This kind of systematic exclusion produces a gap in the market. It enables alternative infrastructures to emerge and innovate in response to the pornography industry’s demands. But that infrastructure is not ultimately controlled by, nor designed for, sex workers themselves. As legal scholar Zahra Stardust summarizes, “Sex workers [are] treated on the one hand as a source of profit and data, and on the other as collateral damage in an online gentrification project” (Blunt and Stardust 2021).

In March 2023, the SpankPay service was forced to suspend payments because its banking partner, Wyre, began using a third-party payment processor that regarded pornographic content as a violation of its rules. On Twitter, pornography performer Ally Sparkles (2023) responded in a way that expressed both disappointment and persistent confidence in the liberating prospects of blockchain infrastructures: “What a shame. Hopefully you can build back in a more decentralized fashion.” SpankPay advisor and pornography performer Allie Eve Knox emphasized the power of blockchain technology when coupled with legislative reform. Knox (2023) wrote, “I joined Spank in 2017 [because sex workers] needed these tech tools. SpankPay can no longer exist under discrimination, but SpankChain will continue to support the community and build the tools we need. We are committed to making legislative change to secure our financial futures.”

Conclusion

This article has outlined the strategy of perverse attraction—a method of developing technological infrastructure through targeted subcultures based on inverting dominant moral norms. To illustrate this, it has considered the career of crypto entrepreneur Ameen Soleimani, who has employed the strategy in two projects, MolochDAO and SpankChain. It has further raised concerns about the consequences of this strategy for the people who become the perverse attractors, such as the people engaged in the production of pornography. Historical experience suggests that claims of empowerment may be short-lived, and that the goal of producing a kind of mainstream infrastructure typically involves further stigmatizing the people who were supposed to be empowered. The critical question at hand is whether the highest priority for entrepreneurs and organizations is the infrastructure or the people whose safety and livelihoods depend on it.

The concept of perverse attraction contributes to a growing set of conceptual resources in the study of infrastructure—particularly, in this case, in understanding strategies for developing infrastructures through entrepreneurship. We follow scholars such as Isaiah Ellis (2020) and Supp-Montgomerie (2021a) in recognizing that religious imaginaries (or, in this case, sacrilegious ones) can help produce a faith that animates still-incomplete infrastructure projects and draws people to them.

Finally, we hope this analysis surfaces useful insights—and causes for concern—among those tempted to employ perverse attraction for the making of infrastructure. We do not claim to have arrived at solutions that can save the strategy from itself. So long as the cause of infrastructure retains priority over the people involved, that cause carries the risk of turning against them.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for feedback on earlier drafts from Jenna Supp-Montgomerie, Bailey Reutzel, Ameen Soleimani, and Jessica Van Meir, as well as from anonymous reviewers. Disclosure: One of the authors, Nathan Schneider, has collaborated with Gitcoin, a project discussed in this paper, and holds its governance tokens.