The Anti-Porn Tech Bros
As I have mentioned often, I subscribe to The Free Press, an online ‘newspaper’ that I find more than a little interesting. It’s cheap, like $15/month, and it covers stories that I don’t see elsewhere, and has the wonderful habit of pointing out bullshit of all kinds, no matter its source.
I don’t love everything TFP prints, and this post is about a recent story in it that I do not like, titled ‘How to De-Addict Gen Z from Porn’, written by Sean Fischer, one of TFP’s regular writers.
The story is about two guys, who I will call M and S, who have developed an app that I will call Zap. I don’t wish to give these two guys or their app any extra publicity, for reasons that will emerge below. (I know, publicity on my little blog is not worth much, but it’s the principle, ok?)
According to the TFP article, M and S developed Zap precisely to help young men de-addict themselves from online porn. Why that might well be a good thing is important, so here is what I know about online porn, which is more than you might think. No, of course, I never look at it, heaven forbid, but the fact is the online porn industry became the subject of a small literature in my chosen discipline of Economics back when it was getting started, some 20 years ago. The key issue in that research was the proposition that the online porn industry had been very important in the overall development of the web. The reason for this is not hard to see. When some folks got the idea that they could put porn online (in the beginning it was only some feelthy peectures) it became instantly very popular.
Erotic photos that you didn’t have to go to a store in person to access? Sign me up, said much of the world. This meant that these online porn photo sites were the first to have to figure out how to acquire and service large (really large) numbers of subscribers, as well as reliably taking in their payments and giving them access to the site’s content. As the technology developed, this extended to maintaining an inventory of videos of increasingly high resolution, along with photos, and allowing subscribers to pay for, view and download them securely.
Getting all this to work in a way that didn’t scare away customers was a big deal, and as I said, some researchers at least thought these pioneering porn sites had been a key factor in expanding the www to what we now have.
So far as I can tell, the online porn industry has changed since then in at least one important way that is at the heart of the TFP story: the big players in online porn today are sites like Pornhub, where videos can be accessed for free, meaning that 12 year olds with no access to a credit card can view them. And, it seems, they do. The article references a report from Statista that throughout 2023, Pornhub got more than 10 billion visits every month. That’s a lot, and Pornhub is only one site.
So, free online porn is BIG. As a benchmark, Statista also reports that Youtube has 2.5 billion active users per month as of February of 2025. I don’t think those numbers are directly comparable, as the Pornhub number refers to visits, while Youtube ‘users’ likely ‘visit’ more than once per month.
Anyway, a lot of people are looking at Pornhub and (I presume) similar sites, and this is regarded by some as a problem. TFP ran a previous article (which in turn had previously run in a newsletter called ‘After Babel’ run by Jonathan Haidt) laying out author Freya India’s view of the harm being done, particularly to young people, by all this porn-watching.
It is to mitigate this harm that M and S’s Zap is said to be dedicated.
So, before we get to that, do I think watching porn online is bad? Well, if you are doing it for hours and hours, as some reports suggest some young (mostly) men are doing, it surely must be. As is playing online video games for hours and hours. As, perhaps, is playing bridge or solitaire online for hours and hours. This is, I suspect, one of the hard problems here: is it the hours-long obsession that is harmful, or just the content itself? I claim to have no good answer to that, but the Freya India article in TFP mentioned above is unequivocal; online porn is bad for people, period.
That is certainly what M and S think. Some quotes from them from the TFP article:
“The porn industry is just so destructive,” said [M]. “Their only motive is profit. They don’t give a shit about anything else.”
“It’s affecting them enough to be convinced by an ad to download a quitting-porn app at such a young age,” said [S]. “Isn’t that crazy?”
And, here’s a quote from the TFP article that includes another of their ideas.
“The [Zap] founders say that they have anti-porn ambitions far beyond the app. They have said they would “love to” one day buy the porn site OnlyFans (with an asking price of a cool $8 billion) so they can shut it down. Right now, they are simply in the first stage of what they see as a kind of fight for the future of civilization.”
[Side note: OnlyFans is a newish porn site, about which I know something because it came up in one of the last classes I taught before retirement. (Ya never know…..) A student mentioned it, and I asked the class to ‘educate the old guy’ about it. The students were very enthusiastic, characterizing it as a pornsite on which the performers had more control over what they did and what they earned. Students tend to be idealistic, and they should be at their age. Cynical me suspects that some old guy(s) in a badly-fitting suit is still making a lot of money from OnlyFans. I didn’t say that to my students.]
I think S’s quote above comes close to saying something useful about the potential for porn to be harmful. If you are spending any significant amount of time doing something of which you are ashamed, or, put differently, if you are spending time doing something you don’t want people knowing about, then – yea, what you are doing might very well be bad for you. A harder question is whether the porn-watching is itself the problem, or merely a manifestation of something deeper that is wrong. That is a question for which I have no expertise.
Leaving that aside for now, back to the bros.
What does their app actually do? And….does it work?
As to the first question, I can only report what is in the article – I did not pay to download Zap.
One quote from the TFP article:
“Let’s start by finding out if you have a problem with porn,” says the first prompt on [Zap], before presenting you with an intake form with questions like “How often do you typically view pornography? Have you noticed a shift toward more extreme or graphic material?” You’re then presented with a list of reasons why you should quit porn—it’s a drug, it destroys relationships, it shatters sex drives—before being asked to input your motivations for downloading the app.
[Zap], which costs $30 a year, then makes you a kind of promise.
“Grow stronger, healthier, and happier,” the screen reads.
It would be very enlightening to know if the app ever looks at the responses on a new user’s ‘intake form’ and spits out – ‘Hey, no worries, you don’t have a problem’.
Here’s another descriptive segment from the TFP article:
[Zap] claims to be built around “science-backed exercises”—like guided meditation and breathing rituals—that “rewire your brain” and “rebuild your dopamine receptors.” The app features daily checkups, content blockers to prohibit accessing certain websites, an AI chatbot therapist, and a community forum where users can turn for support and encouragement.
Their most-used feature is the “panic button,” meant to be pressed in moments of corporeal weakness. Activating it vibrates your phone and turns the front-facing camera on, holding up a mirror to users right before they relapse.
“The big thing is shame, like, look at how stupid you look,” [M] said. “That was the thought behind the camera.”
[Zap] then displays the reasons you had for downloading the app in the first place.
Oh, yea – and there’s this:
The app also encourages users to recommend it to other men in their life, prompting you to share a discount code: “Every day you wait, your boy sinks deeper into the pit of shame and self-hatred. The choice is on you to save him from this nightmare. Pull him out.”
Yea. Pull him out – and don’t forget the discount code.
So, then, does all this work? No testimonials from satisfied users are included in the article. Credibly answering that question would require, at minimum, a long-term Random Controlled Trial. Needless to say, nothing like that is cited, nor on the horizon.
However, there is some indication that [Zap] works well for its originators. According to the TFP article –
Now, almost a year later, [M] told me the app has almost a million downloads and around 100,000 paid users. Having bootstrapped the launch of the app with only $3,000 of [M]’s money—[Zap] has no external investors—they’re set to earn almost $3 million in total revenue this year.
As I wrote above, if you are inclined to download [Zap], that in itself suggests to me that just maybe you do have an online porn problem. Do I think that M and S have devised something helpful for such folks? I am doubtful. Very doubtful…..
Some other quotes from the article about M and S themselves –
[S], a 19-year-old self-taught coder and influencer from London, also likes to put his masculinity front and center. His X feed is filled with photos of exotic muscle cars, soccer jerseys, steak, and jet skis, and it is replete with dictums like “I wasn’t born to be average. I will never settle for less.”
Elsewhere in the piece we are told:
As if to prove how good a life without porn can be, [S] posts YouTube videos with titles such as “living the dream as a 19 year old ceo making $300K/mo” and wonders aloud on X if buying a Lamborghini is a good idea. He brushed aside my question of whether he’s only building [Zap] for the money. “I actually really enjoy helping people,” he said over the phone, while driving through the streets of London in a convertible.
[M], for his part, reminds his followers [on X] that “Being rich isn’t enough. You must be rich, jacked, and popular.”
It is, in my opinion, a 21st century malady that people so often look to 20-somethings for help and wisdom. One could wonder, as a parent, whether you should be worried more about your son watching online porn or about them espousing the philosophy of life captured in that last quote from M.