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In propping up the “Philippine Information Society” project, the official state discourse promotes service-based ICT skills of Filipinos while condemning other “offensive” activities such as cybersex. This dichotomy fails to capture the complex nature of the cybersex phenomenon, and accordingly, the varied lived experiences of individuals in the context of an emergent Information Society. Working our way through and around this binary, the authors tease out the cybersex phenomenon by adopting the affective labor perspective to allow us to see a broader spectrum of narratives fluidly traversing themes of exploitation, negotiation, resistance, and agency through the use of ICT. In two case studies, we outline the life histories of those who engage in cybersex by describing illicit practices surrounding ICTs and how such practices are organized, mediated, and made meaningful. In broadening the discourse on cybersex, we show how the lived experiences of cybersex laborers, interspersed with state measures to control and criminalize cybersex, produce new forms of bio-politics which also draw on existing structures. However, as laborers are inscribed in mechanisms of imposition, control, and surveillance, they also develop counter-measures to compromise, challenge or take advantage of these mechanisms. Cybersex laborers create value, not just in monetizing their labor, but also in pursuing individual autonomy, personal development and kinship-oriented care. The cybersex phenomenon attests to the false dichotomy propagated by State-sponsored ICT discourse. On one hand, laborers embody the forceful impositions made upon service-based labor by the global ICT economy: rudimentary technological skills, the ability to speak the English language, the ability to provide customer care and service. On the other, their exclusion indicates a refusal to be subjected to the standards and prerequisites of the legitimate, “formal” economy. Cybersex’s anomalous position, we contend, is a by-product of the neoliberal digital economy that puts premium less on ICT for development, and more on labor that serves, foremost, ICT for capital.
