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Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.

technoporn en · NOUN

Etymology

From techno- + porn.

Meanings

  1. (uncountable) A pornographic subgenre of science fiction.
    • Prospero's Books is part of an extensive discursive shift that includes aspects of cyberpunk, "technoporn," extreme versions of artificial intelligence and virtual reality theory, and other attempts to reconfigure desire and sexuality in terms of human/machine interaction. 2005, Lynda E. Boose, Richard Burt, Shakespeare, The Movie, page 176:
    • The Toronto-based queer fanzine is devoted to campy, technoporn burlesques of Star Trek: The Next Generation's “Borg” episodes. 2012, Mark Dery, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, page 151:
    • In his Author's Introduction to the French edition of his technoporn masterpiece, Crash (1975), he describes what it was like to write fiction in the cultural context of the late 1950s: “a world where the call sign of Sputnik I could be heard on one's radio like the advance beacon of a new universe". 2010, P. Youngquist, Cyberfiction: After the Future, page 45:
  2. (uncountable) Technology that is presented or viewed with fetishistic fascination.
    • Colin Powell prostituted himself at the UN with technoporn including CIA satellite photos of supposed Iraqi WMD facilities. 2005, Jordan Crandall, Under Fire: The Organization and Representation of Violence, page 58:
    • If we are to survive, we mest exorcize the demons of our haunted childhood, and grow out of our fascination with "technoporn" — gleaming weaponry and beautiful explosions . 2011, Arthur C. Clarke, Astounding Days:
    • In addition to the ways in which gear-as-fetish indexes the obsessions that studio workers have with gear (Meintjes 2012) or the 'technoporn' framing of studio gear within magazines and advertising (Bennett 2012), we should understand gear fetishes with regards to ways in which 'they mystify unequal relations of exchange by being attributed autonomous agency or productivity' (Hornborg 2014: 121). 2020, Simon Zagorski-Thomas, Andrew Bourbon, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production, page 130:
    • Buried amongst all the technoporn and science-as-psychedelia were a few shots worth salvaging. 2010, Greg Egan, Distress:
  3. (uncountable) Erotic materials that rely on technology (e.g. pornography available on the internet, artificially constructed body parts, etc.)
    • This includes research that examines the role that adolescent "tinkering" plays in developing mechanical interests and aptitudes; male and female patterns of participation in Internet-based communications; the prevalence of masculinist "search and destroy" narratives in video and computer games; the masculine subcultures of computing, including the close links between technophilia and technoporn; and the cultivation of gendered differences in consumer desire in technomarketing. 2002, Sue Curry Jansen, Critical Communication Theory, page 84:
    • Technology itself is sometimes eroticized within the subcultures of elite science, creating a kind of technoporn "that rouses prurient interest, demeans the powerless, eroticizes domination," and sets up boundaries that signal they are off-limits to women and other outsiders. 2022, Sue Curry Jansen, What Was Artificial Intelligence?, page 20:
    • Desire and difference are organ-ized and hermetically sealed in a closed circuit of technoporn. 1991, Constance Penley, Andrew Ross, Technoculture, page 190: