Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (Mailland and Driscoll; MIT Press) describes how people used the first mass-market Internet-style service for sex-related applications.
Why would anyone turn to the online sex-oriented message boards? Minitel Magazine, Jan-Feb 1987:
It was a chance to step out of their normal identity and be superman or a beautiful woman and say all the things that they only think about in their most secret fantasies. You are a nobody at work. You have to fight a commute to work and back. You are lonely, or you are married. Indulging in an hour of sex chat is a crude but effective way of creating a different self.
Department of Know-Your-Customer: Before the system launched, Jean Autin, a French bureaucrat said that if the government didn’t control the content providers the result would be a “race to the bottom” and “You will transform France into one giant porno theatre!”
With messageries accounting for up 50 percent of all traffic, revenue was enormous. And with the top twenty sites garnering 85 percent of pink connections, visibility was key. The result was a feedback loop that incentivized the messageries to put out more and more ads, in more and more public places. By the late 1980s, ads for Minitel rose were pervasive on the streets of Paris. Short codes such as 3615 SEXTEL appeared on any surface that could carry an ad—billboards, buses, subway stations, magazines, and television. Everywhere. Most ads were playful rather than crude; they were, after all, displayed in public for eyes of all ages. But while their level of explicitness varied, there was no question what was being advertised.
The government-run system encouraged the use of Minitel for naughty stuff because there was no detail on the bill. The spouse would see “X francs for Y hours of connect time.” The government also protected users from being known to application providers:
Minitel, unlike the Internet, was private by design, and the privacy features of Minitel took sex chat into the workplace. Minitel flows were anonymized both on the upstream and downstream. On the host side of the platform, service providers did not see from what number users were calling. This precluded later Internet innovations such as user tracking and micro-targeted advertising, as well as prevented service operators from getting an accurate head count of their client base. On the user side of the platform, connections were anonymized as well: the phone bill would only list connection minutes in bulk, without detailing either the specific times of connection or destination addresses. The privacy features were key in helping the DGT move forward despite popular opprobrium in the early days of Minitel; remember that the regional press has cried Big Brother in its campaign to kill the high modernist project. Full privacy was therefore a crucial public relations tool for the DGT.
With all digital destinations anonymized on the bill by the DGT, it was easy for Minitel-enabled workers to escape the gloom of the workday for a few minutes here and there, and ramble into rosy paradises. Visually, the text-mode interfaces of these digital frolics also made it difficult for a zealous boss to discern the specific nature of the computing act from a distance. Just in case a compliance officer happened to pop in, some sites built in a feature that enabled the user to display a fake, “clean,” home page at the touch of a button. And as an added forbidden pleasure, self-employed business owners could even write off the not-so-rosy phone bill as a business expense.
As with Facebook today, companies found that they had to try to block workers from connecting in order to avoid productivity losses:
Minitel filtering systems offered upstream control mechanisms. Maya, a board connected to the Minitel through the peripheral DIN output, could limit upstream connections to a select forty sites as well as offer time limit controls. Despite France Telecom’s denial that the pink workplace was even a thing, four thousand Mayas were said to have been ordered in the first month.
As in the U.S. society today, people were horrified by what might happen to children online:
Associations of Catholic families became active in initiating complaints and lawsuits against what became dubbed “the pimp State,” and other critics would raise the alarm about “the moral decadence of the State and of the high administration.” The criminal code was even amended in order to increase penalties for the crimes of “offense to good morals” (outrage aux bonnes moeurs), “incitement to debauchery” (incitation à la débauche), and the publication of messages that “adversely affect human dignity” (porter atteinte à la dignité humaine) when the target of the messages are under fifteen years old—the legal age of consent in France.
One of most vivid memories of Boston-area nightlife is from circa 2005. A restaurant in Somerville brought in a solo guitarist who was singing the Piña Colada song. It turns out that they had this in France too!
Les Ignobles du Bordelais narrate the story of a gentleman who meets a young lady over Minitel while his wife, Simone, is at work. After days of electronic flirting, she agrees to speak on the phone. His anticipation peaks as she picks up the phone—she must be naked!—only to discover that the voice on the other end belongs to Simone, who was herself expecting a young stud.
More: read Minitel: Welcome to the Internet