Welcome!

Last day of July.

You know what that means?

I’m coming good on my promise to launch the inaugural edition of Unofficial Space - your go-to sextech industry newsletter.

“The best source of sextech news on the planet!” - said someone cool in the future. 😉 

But let's not dwell on my imaginary hype; time to let the content speak for itself.

Let's dive right in, shall we?

This week in sextech

1. The first mind-control sex toy 🤯 

Powered by advancements in Artificial Intelligence, the Autoblow device incorporates electroencephalography (EEG) technology.

As usual, excellent reporting by Samantha Cole at Vice on this. Read more here.

2. Meta faces FTC investigation 🔍️ 

The discriminatory censorship of women’s sexual health ads is a huge issue in sextech and one of the biggest barriers to success.

Jackie Rotman’s Center for Intimacy Justice with backing from United States Senators Warren, Klobuchar, Hirono and Congressman Schiff is calling for the FTC to force Meta to investigate algorithmic bias in its ads review process.

• ✏️ Sign: the Center for Intimacy Justice’s petition to urge the FTC to take action changing Meta’s practices.

• 📰 Read: The Washington Post’s updates ‘Meta rejected scores of women’s health ads. Democrats want answers.’

3. Fully AI-Generated Influencers are Breaking Hearts 💔 

Milla Sofia is going viral and blowing up social media timelines. The AI influencer’s images are generated with Stable Diffusion Artificial Intelligence image generator. What’s an AI influencer, you ask?

• 🤖 Explore: Learn more about the phenomenon of AI Influencers and take a look through the library of digital humans over at VirtualHumans.org 

• 📰 Read: More about Milla in this article from Futurism 👇️ 

4. Could the Non-Player Character (NPC) play into the future of sex work?

Humans pretending to be machines pretending to be humans.

Inspired by non-playable characters in video games and their robotic movements, people are pretending to be non-playable characters on social media… and supposedly earning a lot of money doing so.

Hijacking the Tik Tok live feature, NPC aim to keep people entralled for as long as possible with their uncanny repetitive movements.

This new trend veers somewhat into fetish, and online erotic work, while staying under the radar of censorship on these mainstream platforms. Read more on The Conversation about how TikTok’s transactional approach to intimacy is nothing new.

🎪 Events

August 2: Bangkok, Let’s talk about consent and boundaries, Soho House. Contact for guestlist.

August 5: New York, No Shame In This Game, documentary opening

August 13: SexTech Connect Virtual Happy Hour & Brunch ‘Sextech and Safeguarding against payment fraud’

October 1-3: Reimagine Sexuality Summit

October 13-15: Denver, Sexual Health Alliance Sexological conference

October 18, New York: Sextech Mixer NYC Tech Week

💼 Jobs

How did you like this week’s newsletter? 

Reply to this email and let me know what you’d like to see more of.

And a big thank you for making it to this point.

Until next week,

Bryony