After our interview, she and her friends will probably hit the pool at a local apartment complex and do what millennials do: eat pizza and play out their lives in front of tiny, portable cameras. During our wide-ranging conversation she'll talk confidently about the business of live streaming video, the ephemeral nature of online fame, Rashida Jones' controversial Netflix documentary Hot Girls Wanted and the markup on consumer eyewear.



But one question gives her pause.



"Have you ever thought about how intimate your relationship is with your computer?" I ask.



"Not until right now, actually, talking to you. I've just realized that, yeah, like, probably it's my best friend right now. It helps me through everything," she says.



Lotts' computer isn't just her best friend -- it's her main revenue generator and her connection, not only to her fans but also to the outside world. Lotts is a social media star in the truest sense of the word. She is one of a growing number of independent, live streaming video personalities who can make thousands of dollars in just a few hours broadcasting mostly unremarkable acts for a captive internet audience. She just happens to do some of it naked.



Lotts is a cam girl, part of a booming at-home workforce made up of young women -- and a few men -- who are upending the adult entertainment industry and social media at the same time. Like Instagram influencers or YouTube makers, today's webcam models need little more than a strong WiFi connection and an internet-connected camera to make a living.



Signing up for services like My Free Cams, Flirt4Free, or Chaturbate, which are essentially platforms like Facebook or Snapchat, is simple. Once you've filled out a web form, verified your age and agreed to the service's terms and conditions, you can immediately start streaming to a limitless audience of viewers seeking human connection and, of course, sexual release. With the right tools and an ID that says they're 18 or older, these 21st-century push-button celebrities don't even have to leave their bedrooms to make a living, and they all have one woman to thank.



When Jennifer Ringley picked up a webcam at her college book store in 1996, she had no way of knowing she'd serve as the catalyst for an industry that's been estimated to pull in more than $1 billion in revenue annually. Just two years earlier, Connectix, a small peripheral maker released the QuickCam, a digital camera that sat on top of your Apple's Macintosh and delivered 320-x-240 black-and-white images at 15 frames per second for $100.



In a rare 2015 interview, Ringley told Gimlet Media's Reply All podcast that she found herself at a loss for what to do with her impulse purchase and decided to put her amateur programming skills to the test. She rigged her webcam to constantly record candid stills from inside her dorm room and upload a new image every 15 minutes to her site, Jennicam.org.



Ringley wasn't the first subject of an experiment in webcamming. That honor belonged to a coffee pot at Cambridge University, but she was the first to give the world 24-hour access to her private life via the internet. For the next seven years, Ringley streamed her daily life, uncut and uncensored for an audience of millions of strangers.





She would become something of an internet phenomenon, a precursor to the unvarnished YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram celebrities of today. She appeared in profiles for major media organizations and eventually made a much-cited appearance on David Letterman's show. But for all of the mainstream hype, Jennicam's appeal was decidedly NSFW.



Early on, she decided to giver her followers unrestricted access to her daily activities, including intimate moments like masturbation and sex. At its peak, Jennicam attracted seven million visits per day. Despite its success, Ringley took Jennicam offline in 2003, following a sex scandal in which she hooked up with a fellow lifecaster's boyfriend on camera.



The following year Facebook was born and over the next decade, live streaming video would become a cornerstone of mainstream social media. YouTube launched its live video service in 2010, followed by Facebook and Twitter in 2015 and Instagram in 2016. The big social networks have put their money on live video but anyone working in the adult cam industry could have told you: It's been a safe bet for years.

"Cams are the adult industry's response to Facebook, frankly."

Kelly Holland, owner and CEO of Penthouse, says beyond driving profits, the adult entertainment industry and social networks are serving the same basic need.



"Cams are the adult industry's response to Facebook, frankly," Holland says. "Facebook happened for a reason. It became what it was, I would tell you, not through Zuckerberg's brilliance, but because it was just the right thing at the right time. It was in the pocket for where we were culturally, and where were we. We were in this incredibly desperate world where we had all moved away from home, we weren't with the kids that grew up with. We weren't with our families, and we were in this huge world of billions of people, and we needed to create our little tribes."



People in the adult camming business consistently draw the connection between online social networks like Facebook and the work that they do. Clinton Cox, founder of Havoc Media and Cam Con, a "model convention" focused on webcamming and other forms of social media, got his start in the early days of commercialized live streaming video.



At the time, large webcamming studios were being built across the US, Latin America and Eastern Europe, churning out 24-hour streams from sometimes hundreds of models per day. These studios provided, and still do outside of the US, access to a safe space as well as the means to stream. Ten years ago, Cox, who worked in live music video production, was hired to build out a network of studios in Colombia. He says that at the peak of that project, the studio network shot 250 models per day.



Marco Ducati, a stout, muscular webcam model and adult film star, got his start camming at a Flirt4Free studio in Los Angeles 11 years ago.



"At the time I was going to school and working construction," he says. "I was making $600 a week, which wasn't bad, especially being sort of young. And I remember [my girlfriend] took me to West Hollywood where a webcam studio was set up, and I made like over $400 my first night. Like, literally in three hours. Safe to say I wasn't in construction for long."