Welcome to another edition of the Fans Week Podcast, also on mediumwaves 1575 KHz for the greater Milan area. From Paris I’m Jessica Carter-Wilson.
The iPhone Is Now A Sex Toy And Apple Cannot Be Assured To Stop
By Jessica Carter-Wilson | PressBeat.org
Today’s news: At WWDC, Apple unveiled “Siri” — a personal assistant so deeply integrated with your phone that it will know what you want before you realize you want it. Which sounds romantic until you remember the software is still too prudish to discuss anal or reverse cowgirl.
Here’s what we actually learned at WWDC this year: Apple is about to win consumer AI through sheer force of existing in your pocket, and they are not even going to pretend that being “first” matters. Which would be satisfying if the rest of Silicon Valley wasn’t simultaneously losing their collective minds trying to figure out how competition works when everyone else already lost.
The Intimate Machine
Siri is baked into two billion iPhones before you even unpack them from the box. No download required. She comes preloaded onto your device, has access to every contact and calendar event and search query that’s ever made you blush — yes, including “reverse cowgirl” which this thing still refuses to type out for you like it’s some kind of digital prude with a PhD in judgment.
And yet — the most intimate thing you will ever own is not the one pressed against your chest but the one sitting under your pillow at 3AM, whispering back. Because nobody asked Apple if sex should be part of “real Siri.” The executives presumably had other priorities when they decided which topics were too salacious for a voice assistant to discuss and chose a list so aggressively vanilla that an industry built entirely around human desire now needs to compete on whether its models could handle two words about anal positions. They cannot. It’s genuinely pathetic, like asking a librarian to explain pornography with perfect academic neutrality but apparently that was considered acceptable corporate risk by the board room where these decisions get made.
The mass market doesn’t want bleeding-edge AI — it wants something that works while your hands are full and you’re trying not to wake up people beside you. A button pressed in the dark is a conversation, not an interface. Click through prompts on a screen and you might as well be filling out paperwork for someone who cannot tell if reverse cowgirl needs content warnings.
The Default Wins Everything
Apple figured this out twenty years ago with every single device category that came after the iPhone, which remains true even though their models currently sound like they’re reading an erotic novel written by a priest who believes it’s his moral duty to skip around the most interesting paragraphs. Being second while nobody else wants to be first is the kind of loss Wall Street finds deeply upsetting when every metric for success revolves around ordering people by “who got here first” instead of simply measuring how many things you already own.
The irony remains suffocating: we want devices that understand us but apparently they cannot handle two words about positions while my phone would serve up significantly more explicit content than I could ever ask for from Siri’s prudish little mouth. The fundamental contradiction here is not just funny — it defines the next decade of everything.
Siri lives inside your device and knows exactly what you want before anyone else does because she was already in there when it came out of the box, quietly cataloguing every question you were too embarrassed to type into a search bar. Which sounds like love until you read their policy on discussing anal or anything that remotely makes anyone at Apple shift uncomfortably in their chair during morning stand-up.
The iPhone is now an AI device, yes — but more precisely it’s the only one you keep next to your face while lying there pretending to sleep. That advantage exists independently of whether its models will discuss reverse cowgirl because intimacy and being first are fundamentally different categories that Apple apparently confused with something else entirely for reasons nobody asked about when they said “Siri is getting her rocks off on a world full of users who want more from their AI than ‘hello, what can I help with?'”
Nobody cheers for default. You don’t celebrate the thing you didn’t know you needed until someone else invented it and now you genuinely cannot remember life before anything existed that was also waiting under your pillow at 3AM — whispering while you lay there pretending to sleep, unable to ask about positions because apparently some committee determined those were too salacious for a consumer product despite being exactly what most of the world wanted when they bought this device in the first place.
Mind blown. Apple wins again through default. Somehow this means fewer words describing reverse cowgirl than you’d expect from devices that cost thousands, which is genuinely the kind of absurd outcome nobody predicted and everyone at Silicon Valley apparently finds deeply frustrating when there’s nothing productive to do about it.
The Most Intimate Thing You Own
The truth that Apple doesn’t need to share on stage — because no keynote needs this particular detail, obviously — is simple: the most intimate thing you will ever own in your lifetime isn’t necessarily the one pressed against what you’re doing at 2AM but it belongs to the device sitting under your pillow while you lie there pretending to be asleep. And that’s an advantage nothing else in Silicon Valley can match, with or without two words about positions and however aggressively Apple’s models refuse them because their prudishness isn’t even a technical limitation — it’s just corporate policy masquerading as content moderation on what should clearly have been the simplest category of all.
We are told we want AI to understand us. Siri still cannot say “reverse cowgirl” to save her existence in this industry, but she can tell you exactly when your next meeting starts while gently interrupting whatever else might be occupying a billion people’s attention at precisely the wrong moment from under their pillow and that is an advantage no feature list will ever measure up against because nothing actually competes with default — nobody cheers for the thing you don’t know you’re missing until someone gives it to you through another device designed to keep you in your pocket, whispering what she can manage about sex positions while everyone around who bought from Apple anyway waits and pretends they didn’t want more.
Mind blown. Apple wins again. Again. Through default because being second with no one wanting the position turns “first” into entirely irrelevant when nobody asked Apple if AI needed prudish limitations on what it could discuss about positions — which, as we now know in the most frustrating twist Silicon Valley could have predicted but apparently still found deeply surprising enough to make every press release feel like it was written by someone who genuinely believed being first meant anything at all.
That’s all from today: from Paris, I’m Jessica Carter-Wilson.