Patchen Barss might well have called his first book Hard Drive.

After all, the central thesis of The Erotic Engine is that pornography has almost always powered human communication, all the way from dirty cave paintings to Google.

The cover shows a couple of computer mice in a compromising position, an illustration reflective of the wit the 40-year-old Toronto author has brought to his research.

Today, the international pornography industry is estimated to be a $25-billion business, and, technologically, it’s driving all sorts of things that nobody would ever connect with one-handed typing.

The Star spoke with Barss, a former technology columnist and now communications director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, at a restaurant near his Danforth home. This is an edited version of that interview.

Star: Who knew our prehistoric ancestors were into drawing much more than buffalo on those cave walls?

Barss: In addition to the drawings that people think of — the hunting of a deer and odd shamanic ritual things — were pictures of naked women, erect penises, things that would be very familiar to anybody who has visited a high school boys’ bathroom.

Star: Your book peels the dirty raincoat off the porn industry and looks at its contributions to communications. How do you account for porn’s influence?

Barss: In my research, I found when people think about the relationship between pornography and communication technology, they think about greater privacy, greater convenience, and greater anonymity.

A good example is adult cinema.

Before 1975, before the VCR came out, if you wanted to see a movie, you had to go to a cinema. For mainstream audiences that was great. But somebody who wanted to go to an adult movie had to go to a rough part of town and sit with a crowd of other people. You risked being seen coming in or going out.

So along comes the VCR, which cost about $1300 in 1975 dollars, a terrible technology, slow, undependable and on top of all of that, there were competing formats, Betamax or VHS.

The people looking into investing in all that were those looking for privacy, pornography consumers. They created the initial market that kept the technology going long enough to get faster, cheaper, more dependable, so that the mainstream could get on board with it.

And, of course, the Internet is the ultimate manifestation of privacy. With the Internet in its current form, you can both acquire and view your media completely anonymously.

Star: But you claim that just about every mass medium owes its growth and development to porn — photography, film, cable, pay-per-view, even the telephone.

Barss: This is a pattern that is repeated over and over again, which is, having that initial market — this is the idea of pornographers being early adopters — that allows the technology to develop to the point where mainstream use and demand can overtake pornographic ones.

Star: Now, of course, not only do we have online porn, we have interactive fantasy games such as Second Life.

Barss: It is so easy to forget how monumentally awful Internet technology was at the beginning. But, if you could make it all work, you could send a message out there into the ether and get a message back from another person.

Everybody who came of age as that technology was evolving talks with awe and reverence about the power of that experience, even though it was all text-based.

It unleashed a torrent of erotic material. It was not pornographers selling their product. It was just people creating their erotica for and with other people. Those experiences drew more and more people in.

That was true then, it’s true in Second Life now and it’s true in other pornographic virtual worlds.

Despite the fact that some of this technology was decidedly unsexy, sex drive is at the heart of our survival as a species . . . as is the desire to express our sexuality. It’s an important reason why communications technology in particular is affected by porn and erotica.

Star: While the technology has advanced, pornography has become more ubiquitous, and more extreme and exploitative. So what’s driving what?

Barss: I am not an apologist for the pornography industry and, while my book is about this relationship between porn and technology, I don’t pretend that these problems don’t exist. These are difficult issues and I grappled with them when I started the book.

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Star: I don’t think most people have a clue how much life today is in debt to the porn industry. Online banking and shopping are secure because porn distributors needed to make their transactions with consumers secure.

Barss: Pornographers and pornography consumers are early adopters of a technology. They get familiar with it, improve it and then the mainstream comes in.

At that point the pornographic origins of that technology are scrubbed from that history.

Some of the technologies have come from heinous activities. So, for instance, some of the technologies that have been used to track online predators and dealers of child porn are beneficial for companies dealing with digital piracy and copyright.

I want to be really clear. I am not saying there’s an upside to any of those heinous activities. That’s not what I am saying. But there is a technological arms race between lawbreakers and law enforcers that has affected the technology that people who have nothing to do with pornography benefit from.

Star: So, where to next?

Barss: Pornography profits are plummeting because porn is so easily available. So people are saying maybe that’s it.

There’s also less resistance to new technology today. Before, you really had to push people to adopt something like the VCR, but now you can invent a new device like the iPhone and people will adopt it more readily.

But for 40,000 years this has been going on; I don’t think it’s done yet.

I think there are new technologies coming that people will be uncomfortable with.

For example, almost all of the communications technologies either communicate sound, picture or both. Haptic technologies communicate touch, anything from temperature, texture, vibration. It’s a very different kind of communications technology and in some ways a lot more intimate and invasive.

Some of the initial haptic applications are coming from the pornography industry. So what some of the pornography companies are doing is that they can essentially connect an actual physical machine, a vibrator or, more likely, an artificial vagina, to a movie that’s encoded in such a way that what’s happening on the screen happens to the watcher.

Star: Oh, that’s so sad.

Barss: This can creep people out. But just think for a sec. Imagine if that technology develops to where you can record a hug and send it to a friend across the country or record your massage therapist’s most useful therapy. There are haptic applications that, if the technology developed enough, would change many people’s lives in non-sexual ways.

I am not saying that is the next thing, but it’s one of the possibilities.

What I’m really saying is that there are technologies that are still going to make people cringe and make people resist. The ones that do succeed will owe a debt to pornography.