The world, or perhaps more narrowly, America, is uptight about sex. Well, at least most are. Paul Begala recently quipped, on Bill Maher's Real Time,
I'm a Catholic. We're taught that sex is a dirty, vile, disgusting act that you save for the one you truly love.
That sums things up pretty neatly for most folks. There is an extremely narrow set of behaviors that dignify sex, in general, and they revolve around love, marriage, and procreation. Outside of those dotted lines, sex is questionable and in some of its more elaborate or open manifestations is considered immoral, perhaps illegal, and certainly unsavory.
However, there is a growing acceptance among many people -- of all ages, backgrounds, and origins -- that sex is as basic to living as eating or sleeping, once religious mumbo jumbo is dispelled, and now that the social stigma associated with being unambiguously sexual is beginning to diminish. A more Scandivanian attitude, that seems to be slowly spreading in the US.
This mindset is increasingly being referred to as "sex positive". Personally, I wish people would call it 'Polynesian' since that is a prettier word, and less like Kinsey terminology.
Still, we are living in a world of extremes. An openly sex-positive bisexual woman in San Francisco might be fairly open about her sexual attitude within her circle of similarly open friends, but more discrete in her circle of business contacts, and much more reserved when visiting her grandparents back in Des Moines. The limitations of time, space, and social circles provides a significant degree of security.
Gabriel García Márquez once wrote "Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life." Times change, and what aspects of our lives we make public or keep secret may shift, but there needs to be a way to gradually let others in on what we keep private from most, and a way to keep some things secret from a judgmental world.
My good friend, Sam Lawrence and his co-founder, April Donato, have launched a new web service called Blackbox Republic (www.blackboxrepublic.com) which is aimed squarely at creating a social space online for sex-positive adults. My immediate reaction when I heard it was, well, positive. This is a community that is likely to have specific needs that will be underserved by other solutions, specifically the eHarmony and other dating services, geared toward the American dream of finding Mr or Ms Right, and promptly getting married. Similarly, "swinger" oriented websites that are oriented toward blatant sexual hookups are not really geared toward the sorts of privacy and interaction that sex positives might desire.
Gabriel García Márquez once wrote "Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life." Times change, and what aspects of our lives we make public or keep secret may shift, but there needs to be a way to gradually let others in on what we keep private from most, and a way to keep some things secret from a judgmental world.
And what do Lawrence and Donato plan for Blackbox Republic? First of all, a careful approach to letting folks become involved, and a graduated way for people to learn about each other and to slowly share more details of their identity and interests. As users join, they gain a limited access to the site, being able to see various public aspects of what is going on there. To gain access to more private information, users will have to be vouched for by other established users, and in some cases, invited to join a group: either people known outside of Blackbox Republic, or people that have become connected through the service. In a similar fashion, people who engage in behaviors that anger others can be unvouched for, leading to expulsion from the community. This approach seems to me to apply sensible social policies in an organic way to police the shared space.
Blackbox Republic is about living a sex positive life, so that means, as a general rule, that people would like to take their online activities offline into "meatspace". So, BR will be supporting a range of mechanisms to support that, including support for anonymity, so that people can meet without disclosing their complete identity and without having to share phone numbers, email addresses, or twitter accounts. In essence, BR will act as a trusted intermediary, brokering various sorts of communication -- between individuals or groups of people -- so that meetups and dates can take place in a safe way.
I have not used the service yet, so I can't speak to its UX. More on that to follow.
A final word or two: I have looked over various other posts regarding Blackbox, and I was happy to see that people are generally evenhanded. The tech community is somewhat less repressed than the greater world, I guess.
Except Ben Kepes, who writes at Cloud Ave:
As I said to the Twitterverse this afternoon, "Would anyone (especially peeps like @jeffnolan and @rww) be even mentioning Blackbox Republic if Sam Lawrence wasn't involved? I think not" – to his credit Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb replied saying that; "Niche social network raises $1m, charges $25/mo & hits privacy hard? Yes I'd cover that!" – an argument that despite my respect for both Marshall and ReadWriteWeb I'm not really buying seeing as how many well funded start-ups aren't being covered by the mainstream blogs – need an example? How about youcalc that, despite nearly $4 million in funding, is yet to be covered in depth anywhere than on CloudAve.
Um, why wouldn't someone cover it, Ben? Oh, it's about ***sex***.
Dennis Howlett says the obvious and then recants:
When I saw the pre-briefing links I kinda went: 'OK, so Sam's finally gone over the edge and is developing a sophisticated porn site dressed up to look cool.' Nothing could be further from the truth although the first community Sam and April are leading is something about which they're both passionate – which helps – and will get attention. What is this about and why should you care? [...]
Sam and April are definitely onto something here. The technology allows it but it would be darned hard to replicate the community element without having genuinely passionate people leading the charge. That's what makes this first iteration so compelling. Some will still take one look and shrug. But since our human connectedness is something that frequently drives our choices, would it not be better to make those somewhere that is safe rather than the bazaar that is Facebook? I think so.
Oliver Marks hits this one right on the head, as usual:
If you're 'textually active' online looking for relationships on social networking and dating sites, finally you have a new option. Despite all the hoopla around the brave new world of Facebook, match.com et al, it's actually the same old industrial scale meat market for most people. As the chart above and the brief video below show, online dating isn't performing for people. Sam Lawrence, the brilliant marketer who did so much to raise Jive Software's profile during the launch and growth of their Clearspace (now 'Social Business 3.0′) software as their CMO is launching an exciting new venture today, this time as CEO.
'Black Box Republic' is a new consumer oriented company 'focused on reinventing the online relationship market' which is emerging from stealth mode today and which also appears to have particularly good timing.
The word SEX is immensely complex and personal but the reality is we are all seeking intimacy at various stages of our lives, either overtly through dating services or socially, or covertly by hoping that meeting friends of our friends will turn up someone with whom sparks will fly - with whom 'sex will happen' to use Black Box Republic's line.
Marshall Kirkpatrick is ambivalent:
Blackbox Republic argues that the transaction-focused dating site market is unfulfilling for millions of people around the world. He and co-founder April Donato just completed a 50 city tour around the US and have stories to tell about waitresses at roadside cafes crying out that a site like Blackbox is just what they've been looking for. If you're familiar, and comfortable with, the phrase "sex positive" then Blackbox might be the site for you, too. I have very mixed feelings about the service, but it sure is interesting.
[...]
If this sounds like over-privileged, care-free, irresponsible promiscuity to you - then you're probably not in the target market. (I'm not.) Many people will likely appreciate some of the site's features, like the fact that new users are unable to view profiles of anyone but other new users until they are "vouched for" by an established user.
By which I take it that Marshall thinks it is over-privileged, care-free, irresponsible promiscuity, or maybe my logical parsing is flawed. Remember, sex is "dirty, vile, and disgusting" after all, folks, unless sanctified by marriage or monogamy.
Jeff Nolan seems to get it:
I will admit that when Sam first pinged me about this I thought it was an elaborate prank… "a social network for the ' sex positive' community?" what my first reaction followed quickly by "is it a porn thing?" and then "okay this must be a prank and I'd better play along so as not to give him the satisfaction of punking me". It is, it's not, and it definitely isn't a prank and the reason why I am telling this story is to get it out in the open because I am sure that I was not alone in my reaction nor will Sam not have to answer those questions going forward. There are two independent threads that recently converged for me that explain why I am so intrigued by what Sam is doing. I joined the board of SpectrumDNA largely because of my belief in the white label social network for affinity groups, PlanetTagger. Jim Banister, the CEO and inspirational founder, and I had a bunch of conversations about the concept of social nicheworking as a compliment to what Facebook, Myspace and the other generalized network are doing. Let me be clear, social nicheworking is not the opposite of social networking, it's just a more specialized variant that offers tremendous value to affinity groups, and this is what Sam is doing with Blackbox Republic. Facebook Connect comes to mind as legitimate evidence supporting the notion that these two ends of the spectrum compliment each other rather than compete.
[…]
Where message boards stop social networks begin, not because of the much talked about social graph but because, very simply, we want to connect not just with people but people like us. Community sponsors, whether in the form of actual economic sponsors like media entities or organizers like the folks who put on Burning Man, want to have a community that enriches the experience rather than tries to shoehorn it into a grab bag of features with limited branding opportunity and no content programming capabilities.
This gets to the second epiphany that I had recently, a conversation with Kevin Marks about overlapping public spaces. Who we are in our woodworking community is the same person we are in the Indian motorcycle community and that is the same person we are in our kindergarten parents community, yet the experience in each of these communities is fundamentally different even if some of the participants overlap. At it's core, we want to belong to publics of our peers but in each community instance we define our peers differently while defining ourselves the same.
Social nicheworking is at it's core about overlapping public spaces and a rich community experience as a function of the community participants having a lot of control over how the community behaves, both technically and socially. While you may disregard Blackbox as some kooky sex community thing, the underlying concepts that Sam is tapping are exceptionally powerful and will define the next generation of social networking experiences that emerge more broadly across the industry of providers doing this stuff and more importantly among the communities embracing them. The community platforms will be at the core of go to market strategies for brand advertisers and service providers who want to tap into the economic potential that every affinity group possesses, and technology providers are going to have to provide services that are intrinsically connected with content, whether syndicated or user generated.
I love the idea of multiple "publics" that comprise our various worlds in the world, and the nicheworking angle of Blackbox Republic: social tools fail if they lose the natural controls that come from organic social scale. Facebook and Twitter involve an unfettered public space, like traipsing along in a gigantic plaza. But for many social interactions, a living room or the back room at a bar is a better scale.
For deep social interactions, small is the new big, and Blackbox Republic seems rooted on that reality.
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