Production Reproduction

My favourite humanities professor, who taught me cultural anthropology, used to say this often. He said that the history of Man, is entirely about production and reproduction. If you look at the way we often look at history, his statement is rather true. History was essentially about lineage and what great people did. Hence, the two words. This random memory popped into my head when I read this article in the Beebs.

A local council employee in Japan has been punished after it was discovered he had accessed porn websites at work more than 780,000 times in nine months.

Shock! Horror! How could anyone possibly surf for porn at the rate of 20 pages per minute?! The dude must have been neither productive at work, nor reproductive at home. Granted, I’ve recently learnt of how progressive the Japanese are at sex but this is just a bit too much. I cannot even begin to put my shock and horror into words. The fact that he was 57 years old, shocked me even more.

He only got discovered after he caught an infection from a visit to a porn site. His computer caught a virus, which alerted the tech people in his office, who then investigated the source of the infection and discovered his habits. If you read this paragraph again, it’s kind of funny how, someone can catch something by visiting a porn site. It’s kind of ironic.

Well, I know that some people do regularly surf porn in the office, cause of the high speed connections that companies usually have. I’ve personally seen it happen at a place that I’ve worked at before. Some companies institute certain policies on what their networks can and cannot be used for. Most companies aren’t tech savvy enough to have such policies on paper. Regardless, it’s not always easy to police these policies.

The only way to do it would be to adopt a “default deny” security policy, which means denying access to every website unless it’s on an approved whitelist. But this will hamper the productivity of workers who are surfing genuinely work related websites. As a result, most companies adopt a “default allow” security policy, and only block access to certain time wasters like facebook and youtube. But it’s obviously impossible to catch everything like this.

What’s actually needed are Artificial Intelligence based network monitoring systems. Systems that can decide But these are still in their infancy and unfortunately, there has not been much progress in the field of AI for decades. But I digress.

So, in conclusion, I do think that there’s some truth in the belief that the adult industry is the largest one on the Internet. There’s just not been any conclusive study done on this matter. Maybe some economist should study this.