For over six years, Hacking//Hustling has worked to build the capacity of sex workers and survivors to create new technologies and interventions that increase safety. Through programming, research, and convenings, we worked to explode the definition of technology to include harm reduction strategies, mutual aid, organizing, art, and any/all tools sex workers and survivors develop to mitigate state, workplace, and interpersonal violence. Through our interventions in the academy, hustling institutions, moving resources, and creating space to lean deeply into community care, Hacking//Hustling has leveraged its connection to tech spaces to support the safety and survival of people who trade sex.
Hacking//Hustling formed in 2018 as a community response to FOSTA-SESTA and the shuttering of Backpage. We grew into a network of sex workers, survivors, and accomplices working to redefine technologies toward uplifting survival strategies that build safety without prisons or policing. Born out of crisis organizing, we have spent the past few years learning to value slowing down and prioritizing care. We have prioritized rest, and recovery –and finding out, continuously, what these words look like in practice. With this space, we have continued to show up as our full selves, focus on healing and made the intentional and thoughtful decision that the time has come to sunset Hacking//Hustling.
This is a difficult letter to compose, not only because when chapters come to a close there’s a grieving and sadness that can come with that, but because there’s been so much work and struggle by us and our extended communities over these years that it is overwhelming to try and hold. So we won’t try that here. Instead, we want to express our gratitude, collective love and rage.
We have, like so many sex worker-led and radical organizations, struggled amidst criminalization and crisis. We already know about mutual aid and care, but we had to significantly pivot when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Six years after forming, our core collective members are graduating from PhD programs, pursuing new careers, fellowships, and acclimating to increased disability. Life moves, and capacity changes. Our goal with Hacking//Hustling was always to disrupt institutions, and part of that is knowing when to sunset, allow the work to take other forms, and support each other in new life pursuits.
It would not be possible to fully reflect here on all of the labor, the principles we moved with, the strategy and tactics we’ve experimented with, and the ways we’ve held each other. Instead, we hope our many communities will help us do this, in comments, in messages, in conversation with each other, in the ways you all may continue to call upon zines, toolkits, recorded workshops, art we’ve shared, and all the ways we will continue to carry lessons learned forward.
We have seen and felt major changes. From shifts in popular media such as sex work and photos of sex workers protesting accompanying news articles more often than the word “prostitute” and diembodied leg photos, more sex worker research getting funded, fellowships, community-made media, new survivor-led mental health efforts, platforms reaching out for sex worker compentent consultancy, sex worker art and theoretical writing, new tech workarounds– a chorus of hopes and vision – and so much was learned together. so much work we admire at the intersection of sex work and tech is being held and brought into being by these (and of course more) comrades!
As we reflect on our years of work, we produced some of the first research on the impact of FOSTA-SESTA, hosted a sex worker led convening at Harvard, a seven day conference, Sex Workers Organizing Against Barriers at Cornell, piloted a Formerly Incarcerated Sex Worker Tech Support program, hosted community calls and digital and legal literacy workshops to break down shitty tech policy, produced programming on the history of sex work and technology, and most importantly, do our best to get sex workers paid…in cash. But what we are most proud of is how we consistently have shown up for each other, prioritized community care, and moved at the speed of trust and capacity.
A community organization should not be a capitalist formation that is always seeking expansion in the name of expansion, and at the expense and exploitation of its members. Hacking//Hustling has created community, a body of work, and a space for disparate projects to be housed. We can create these spaces while remembering that ultimately those spaces exist for and are made up of people, and that there will come a time for that work to transform and iterate. The act of sunsetting prioritizes people over institutions and organizations. Sunsetting is a reminder of the values of our non-productive labor time, and ultimately our health, our joy, our value without titles. Sunsetting is a reminder that we cannot work without rest.
But we know that work never ends when an organization sunsets. It ripples outward, with people taking lessons learned into other formations and projects. We encourage everyone to follow Data 4 Black Lives, Digital Defense Fund, T4Tech, Decoding Stigma, Kink Out, Safer Movements Collective, the Support Ho(s)e Collective, and Veil Machine and continue making space for cross-movement conversations, and skill sharing across causes for bodily autonomy. Our Struggles are interconnected and our freedom is bound up in one another’s.
Our website (as well as our Instagram and Twitter) will remain a living archive of resources, research and creative projects. We hope it will continue to be useful, and support ongoing sex worker-led liberatory work. You may even see a few in-progress efforts shared out over the next year or so.
We wish to extend immense gratitude to our many communities–our fierce abortionists, our trans tech hacker family, sex working/trading/hustling co-conspirators, our incarcerated comrade-teachers, and so so many more.
This work would not have been possible without, and in spite of, the sex trades. Our labor, community labor, whore labor, moves mountains. And while a major accomplishment for us was securing modest funding from two endowments that have never before funded US sex worker organizing, the majority of our funding has come from our own labor in the sex trades.
Donna|Dante, an organizer with the Support Ho(s)e Collective, shared these words during a reflection and visioning session we held last year, about a pilot program we co-created: “I collaborated in SxHx with the Formerly Incarcerated Worker Support Program, doing that work around several other jobs, alongside others who believed in supporting people transition from prison. An entire group of people saw to compensation for my skill sets, saw my skills as valuable, my dream of being valued for my carework wasn’t just a dream, it really helped with my mental health at that time. It was really special to me, given my experiences with incarceration, this was pivotal and helpful for me. I was part of something bigger than myself.”
Our longtime collaborator, Lorelei Lee shared, “A place where my work is taken seriously, and that I’m taken seriously. It’s like, I always got angry at being called stupid & having that be assumed – that stigma that all sex workers are stupid. And the affirmation of being seen as smart, capable, serious – my whole life I was waiting to get that affirmation from civilians, but of course that never felt like a real part of my identity until whores reflected that back to me. We are essentially a school. If you ever take an art class, they talk about the new york school— it’s just group of people who get together and do work they feel is important, citation to each other, sex worker writing, data, created research, organizations, it is intentional. We have done that intentionally, built this collective way of imagining, creating out of imagining, elevating each other all together.”
One of our founders, Blunt, has said, “Community is the technology we need to invest in.” As our work evolves into other forms, we remain consistent in our call for abolition, in the here, in the now of us.