This event is sponsored by the Film and Digital Media Department.
Date: Tuesday, January 27th, 2026
Time: 5:00pm-6:30pm
Location: Communications Building Room 150 (Studio C)
This talk examines the early history of electronic payment processing, as told by the engineers who developed the technology in the 1980s. Struggling to find a suitable customer for the invention, they initially sold their technology to adult magazines through the telecommunications giant, MCI. Little has been written about the early history of electronic payment or its origins within the sex industries, despite the ubiquity of electronic commerce today. Yet the sex industries have long been early adopters of new technologies. With electronic payment, adult magazines expanded the burgeoning phone sex industry through 1-900 phone sex lines, affording clients the anonymity and confidentiality of paying for pleasure. Electronic payment develops within a history of cultural and legal efforts to regulate, contain, limit, or eradicate the sex industries. When U.S. legal precedent ultimately centers the right to sexual pleasure in the home, the sex industries embrace technologies that do the same, such as electronic payment and VHS. Threatened with U.S. Congressional regulation, by the end of the decade, those same engineers sold their technologies to the growing televangelist industry. As a result, their payment infrastructure funded both sides of the U.S. “culture war.”
Dr Patrick Keilty is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Professor Keilty’s research focuses on the politics of digital infrastructures in the sex industries, adult film, film and media archives, and the materiality of media. His writing and editorial work has appeared in Camera Obscura; Feminist Media Studies; Information Society; Archivaria; Porn Studies; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (2013); Uncertain Archives (2021); Queer Data Studies (2023); The Handbook of Adult Film and Media (2025); and elsewhere.