I just wanted to give the world in general a heads up that Ana Voog’s music can now be found on Spotify! I think this is the first streaming service it’s been available on!

Ana’s solo album AnaVoog.com, and her single “Hollywood”, can be found here or by searching her name!

I particularly like “Telepathic You” and “Ask The Dragon”!

Ana said on Instagram that she’s working on getting music by her band The Blue Up? onto the platform as well, which I’m looking forward to because I haven’t personally heard a lot of that! I’ll let you know when she announces its availability!

The post Ana Voog On Spotify! appeared first on The Camgirl Museum Project.

Sunny’s Note: Right now I’m going through the Camgirl Museum’s paper archives, trying to read every single thing I saved to try and get a fuller picture of how things really were circa 2001-2005, when 320×240 camgirls were still at their height of popularity¹.

One of the things I forgot about and am sort of having fun remembering, even though it wasn’t super fun at the time, was how pissed off people were at camgirls for having wishlists! People had 0 qualms over calling teenage girls “whores”, “to their faces” in guestbook comments or blog posts! Maybe they still don’t, I dunno, but some of the negative stuff I printed out was pretty extreme, considering who these people were writing about and potentially affecting.

I came across something interesting I printed, about wishlists. It was webpage copy, that I copied and pasted into a Word document, and included the link to the page it was on at the bottom – thankfully – so I was able to look it up on the Wayback Machine today. Here it is in its entirety because the text on the original site is microscopic:

Wishlists

by Asa of AceEntrance.net, age 20
Circa 2003

This has been over done and beaten to death but I suppose a one more little ramble won’t hurt on the topic of wishlists …

A girl with a website flashes her assets on a little thing called a webcam and builds a site around her random ramblings of a blog. Is she an attention seeking whore? Or is she just your average 15-25 year old girl who is bored inside her house with nothing to do? Pair up the daily diary entries with a wishlist where people can buy them things in return for their, well…‘just being’, and we have an internet phenomenon that appears to be a glitch in popular media culture that’s found its way into new media art and cultural theory. There’s an argument that camgirls are taking control of the media and their own image and then exploiting them both, and I agree. I get quite a few who are still under the impression that the words “webcam site” are synonymous with ‘free porn’ and if you surf the net even for a minute, try google.com search word ‘teen’ and you will find a shitload of teenage girls involved in hardcore porn. Strangely nobody is interested in them, but someone buys me a gift from my wishlist and suddenly we have interest.

I admit I like to ‘pose’ on cam sometimes. In fact I find it fun, and its a great way to know that I have complete control over how the world becomes familiar with me whether it’s via my cam or my journal. It’s not a vanity thing as some may assume, but is a great tool for expression. … However, whether or not I entertain you, doesn’t really matter to me. I may be sitting in front of the computer broadcasting images of myself in my trackie-daks or even my sexiest swimsuit, but in the end it’s all entertainment to ME – The internet, my site and the hours I spend in my den and you get the watch (sparingly). From AE’s conception, all I’ve wanted is a space to call my own and mess with. All of this is a much needed creative outlet, diary and scrapbook which is still, and always a work in progress for me.

See I’ve had my wishlist for a longer time than I’ve this baby here. When I took notice of the other girls who also had webcams on their sites, I also made out that a lot of them had Amazon wishlists. Since I’m Australian, and already had an alternative one with wishlist.com.au, I added it to my site and thought: ‘Why not?’. I weighed out the pro’s and cons and figured out that the only ‘con’ was that I was concerned of what people would think of me for posting it. So I posted it – on the principle that aceEntrance is my place to play, design and document things. But despite the obvious material advantage, for me running a site has nothing to do with maintaining a wishlist. But seriously, so what if I recieve a few gifts year? I put amounts of effort into my posts and spend quite a lot of time on here, it’s very encouraging when I recieve a few tokens of appreciation. Most gifts arrive during the weeks around my birthday and Christmas to be honest. Very sparingly will I recieve a gift ‘just because’ or out-of-the-blue..

I do get the odd perve proposing ‘deals’ where he/she will buy me things in exchange for extra and sometimes ‘sexier’ pictures of me but I still decline every time. That’s just not my thing. I’m not up for any deals of the sort (so fuck off if that’s what you’re after hah). But hey I’m fully aware of the fact that I’m broadcasting myself over the net and that I have to put of with shit like that so I ignore it. In the end, I say do what you want on your cam, so long as you’re completely comfortable with the idea that anyone could be watching you. Be yourself and make your site a place that you are proud of and never lower your standards for any loser on the net.. even for a few measly gifts off your wishlist.

I guess it’s the media perception that a lot of girls who have the cam/wishlist combo have some sort of major self esteem issue, but I don’t need some old man to gawk at my naked breasts to tell me that I’m “pretty.” It just seems wrong. It’s not me. So I don’t need to do that for gifts either.

Should a girl have a wishlist? Her decision.
Should people buy her stuff? Their decision.
Should anyone buy a teenage girl stuff in the hope she would fall in love with them, take sexy pictures or give anything back? No.

It’s nice to get things for free, but if the only reason you are setting up a website is in hope to get presents… you are setting it up for the wrong reasons. I really don’t think every camgirl started out with the agenda to mooch off any random stranger that surfs by her site, but it’s just sorta happened this way and somehow became a trend. My 2 cents ..

Sunny Again: Asa was an Australian camgirl who was on the Stile Project “Portal 9” webcam portal before me (2001), but I can’t remember if she stuck around after the site became Camwhores/a pay site in 2002², or not. At the time she was “studying at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) doing an undergraduate degree in Science in Mathematics”, I wonder what she’s doing now? I didn’t really know her at all, but she started camming slightly before me and her site’s Wayback Machine archives go as far back as July 2001, if anyone felt like going on a trip through memory lane!

1. It wasn’t really until streaming became faster and more viable in 2004, when sites like MyFreeCams started popping up, that the popularity of still webcams that uploaded “live” photos every 30 seconds started to wane. ︎
2. Lots of original Portal 9 folks left when the site flipped over from a free, general interest portal, to a paid “GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!” portal with members only shows and eventually streaming. ︎

The post Wishlists by Asa of AceEntrance.net appeared first on The Camgirl Museum Project.

I’m so excited! I was digging around in some folders and files tonight, looking for a photo, when I came across a file named “Manifesto.html” in a folder buried deep on my hard drive, called “Archaic Shit Circa 2001-2003”.

Intrigued, because a lot of my cam pics have that HTML file’s URL on them, I opened it, and memories came flooding back from over 20 years ago, to a time that some folks may remember, where I was sort of tasked to write a book on camgirls, cam culture, and the community by an editor friend, who was an author and writer for Wired magazine at the time, who assured me that he could help me get such a book published. All I had to do was write it first.

No other books had been written about the subject, there was no research or any real or notable media coverage of what actually happened within our subculture. We were all so still underground, except for Jennifer Ringley and Ana Voog, who were both written about extensively and interviewed on late night American TV.

Also, what Jenni was on her way out of doing in 2003, and Ana still did at the time, “lifecasting” for lack of a better term, was completely different than what teen and young adult camgirls like me were doing only 4-5 years after they started. Where Jenni was documenting her life at home 24/7, as honestly as she could, like an exhibitionist documentarian, and Ana’s cams were also going 24/7, showing a stylized, often purposely distorted view with her “art + life cam”, camgirls of my era were selective about when we turned our cams on and engaged with our audiences. Our websites, aesthetics and webcam images were well-crafted and expertly-curated for the best impact, the way you see Instagram influencers do today. And almost none of us ran our cams 24/7.

Many inspired by Jenni and Ana, but also each other, we – girls in our teens and 20’s – were pioneering web design, cybersecurity, and online payment systems all on our own, in a time when that type of infrastructure online was still being built, as well as exploring image, self expression, sexuality, and feminism (whether we all liked or knew it or not) on our own terms, on our own little islands on the internet. Islands we taught ourselves – and each other – how to build, while navigating a quickly changing, post-9/11 political and cultural landscape that was increasingly threatening our cyber freedoms! Oh, and we all looked pretty cool doing it!

But, no one was writing this shit down.

I knew that the internet wasn’t forever, because nothing ever really is, and I knew that all of this material, this media built by girls and women, was only as permanent as the servers they were hosted on.

Most of us were hosted by geeky, pervy guys with servers in their basements or bedrooms, who were really only in it for a guaranteed, steady stream of cute, if not provocative, if not nude, live, daily photos, as well as our immense gratitude to them – our “heroes” – for giving us a platform. There were a few altruistic hosts, but most of us had to kiss a lot of frogs to find them. I knew that any of them backing up, keeping, and preserving or maintaining any kind of legacy for the work we were doing and the art we were making was slim to none, or at least not reliable, maybe as it should be. It’s our history after all, not theirs, so it was up to us to preserve it.

I was aware of the Wayback Machine and just sort of hoped it would do the work I couldn’t, and always continue to be the permanent internet archive it wanted to be, while I tried to print as many paper copies of blog posts, blog comments, news articles, and webpages as I could afford to buy paper and toner for my refurbished workhorse, black & white laser printer at the time. I was just grabbing things willy nilly for the most part, like a girl on a game show trying to snatch flying $100 bills in the air, and it’s still to be determined if what I grabbed has value, or is, or is not, still available online or on the Wayback Machine. The few things I checked in 2024, while I was making the archive more archival, had not been.

At the same time as I was trying to print the whole damn internet, I enlisted the help of the cam community that thought me writing a book and preserving our legacy was such a good idea. I created a page on my website entitled “The Camgirl Manifesto”, because that was the working title of the book I had in my head, and laid out my hopes for the project.

“The Camgirl Manifesto is the working title of a book I’m writing chronicling cam culture from its beginnings to present and predictions by people within the culture on its future. It’s about US,” I wrote, then I went on to explain who “us” was (the cam community – camgirls and viewers, lovers or haters), and what the book was not (“feminist bullshit” apparently, which was a loaded word on a predominantly white, male internet at the time, even among women). Then at the side it had a small area for a Twitter-length news update, obviously long before Twitter existed, and a handy little graphic I made for people to use to link to the page from their own websites.

I also had my host, Kevin, also the webmaster of CamwhoresDotCom, put up a forum for me, where I engaged with about 250 folks from within cam culture, from camgirls to cam viewers, from 2003-2005. At least, until it fell prey to spam bots in 2006 and became unusable.

The forum was obviously not PC, if you look at it on the Wayback Machine, as very few of us from the E/N scene were, (“E/N” was internet shorthand for “Everything/News” or “Everything/Nothing”, which was the umbrella category all our personal sites fell under), especially by today’s standards, but we discussed everything about cam culture from favourite camgirls, why the people hosted or watched them, what the girls’ motivations were, how much money they made, what kinds of gifts they got and if they were requested to do anything in exchange, their weirdest or most endearing fans and gifts, scariest incidents, and so much more. I also ran completely unscientific polls asking about demographics and psychographics, which I had just learned about in ad school.

Unfortunately, I no longer have access to the Camgirl Manifesto forum, or a backup, because I wasn’t technologically advanced enough to have known how to save or back that up. I was not hosting my own website at the time and would have been too afraid to fuck with anything outside of ftping HTML files to update my site. I do have some printed threads and posts from the forum, however.

Kevin, my former host, could have a backup of it somewhere, but we’re both really busy and I haven’t had a chance to talk to him about it yet.

In the meantime, there are enough keywords gleaned from the forum on all of the Wayback Machine’s saves to jog my memory a bit, to know what to further search for on the Wayback Machine and within my pink Camgirl Museum archive of printouts, for when I decide to write the book everyone wanted me to write in 2003. The one that my editor friend from back then still says he can help me get published, and not just self-published on Amazon like my previous two books. All I have to do is write it. And not even the whole thing, the first 50 pages is enough to get a book deal, he said.

The reason I ended up not doing it back then, and why I haven’t done it in all this time despite having all the material and a brain full of memories and knowledge, is that in 2004 streaming video cam sites started popping up, which quickly changed the landscape of cam culture and what a camgirl was or could be – and I simply couldn’t keep up, both the energy and time required to do interviews and research a book, as well as “finding the story” while the story was still ongoing and changing. Not to mention sitting down and physically concentrating long enough to write 50,000-80,000 words, which is about the length of a novel, in a tiny house with two kids, two crazy dogs, the worst cat ever, and…a husband who killed my self-esteem and sucked the motivation to succeed – or even exist – right out of me.

I officially apologize to the cam community for not writing the book I said I’d try to write in 2003.

I’m sorry that I couldn’t write this book 20 years ago, but simultaneously, I believe things happen when they’re supposed to, and that it wasn’t time to write that book in 2003, or even 2005, or even 5 years ago. The time could be now, if I shuffled around most of my priorities and focus – like I said, I have an editor on board who can still help me get it published, we had a phone call about a year & a half ago about it – but at the same time, I’ve always been torn on how to write it.

Do I write it from an “expert” perspective? By someone who’s watched what’s now a whole ass billion dollar industry, closely and from the inside, from 2001-present? Or do I write about my own journey through the cam world and how I fit in? How do I do both and do justice to myself, and everyone else?

I think about the book almost every second of every day, my brain trying to work out all the problems and finding holes, which is why I created this site in the meantime, figuring shorter blog posts would be a happy medium, and then we could move onto the metaverse and have actual “exhibits”, then maybe a book could be made from that material. Like, when I’m 65 and retired and life slows down! Unfortunately, I haven’t even had the resources to dedicate to creating original content here “in the meantime” because my priorities have laid elsewhere.

Working on a book would mean putting my art business on hold, after trying to build it this past year with 0 success, for a completely different set of reasons, that I’m still trying to work out.

Maybe that in itself is a sign from the Universe that now is time to shift priorities, that maybe now is the time for the book, and later is the time for SunnyGrrrl. I know for a fact I can’t make SunnyGrrrl successful while also putting everything I have – which is what it would take, with my current mental limitations and lifestyle working against me every second – into finishing a book.

And if that’s not a sign, perhaps the fact that there’s a new French-German documentary in the works and they want to interview me for it, both about my experiences as a camgirl and about the Camgirl Museum idea/concept of preserving our legacies, is one.

Plus, like I said, my editor friend, who now works for Carnegie Mellon University publishing all kinds of techie things, is still on board to help me get a book published if all I would do is finally write the damn thing.

So here’s what I’m thinking:

• I can reach out to my partner, friends, family, and patrons on Discord, for support and helping me stay focused and accountable.
• I can start going through my box of printed material and the Wayback Machine immediately because I need to for the documentary interview next week anyway.
• I can ask Kevin if he has a backup of the Camgirl Manifesto forum and if he miraculously does (), bring it back online or locally, so I can lock it down, delete the spam threads, and go through the interviews, polls, and discussions. This is such a long shot, I don’t even know how to do that, but maybe ChatGPT can explain it to me like I’m 5.
• Once I’m through most/all of at least the paper archive and have re-verified what I can via the Wayback Machine, I can start writing and I just won’t stop or stray from that subject until the book is finished and the story’s been told. No making art, no running my online shop or sticker club, no wasting time making “content” for billionaires’ social media platforms, only writing. Or writing about the writing.
• Burnout will be dealt with by playing video games and going out in nature, hopefully between writing milestones, as opposed to more “output” like making art and “content”.

I feel like participating in this new documentary, and being asked to think about the cam culture of the past again, has ignited a newfound interest in me in completing a book, and could possibly bring clarity as to how this story starts and flows. I also feel like over 20 years of hindsight and knowing, more or less, how the story “ends” makes it a much different situation than in 2003. What a camgirl is and does in 2025 is pretty well established and fine-tuned, I work for them every day.

Before I do anything, I have to get this documentary interview under my belt, which means getting into “cramming for a test” mode with my archive, aaaaaand cleaning my house…it’s February 5th and my Christmas tree is still up! Oh and getting enough rest that I don’t get any new zits.

So, I’m gonna go start doing all of that. Feel free to wish me luck, give me anecdotes, or cheer me on in the Camgirl Museum subreddit, on Bluesky, or on my Discord/Patreon, once I start everything! I could really use the support and will be updating in any, or all, of those places! I may also write posts here about things that come up as I’m inspired going through the archive!

Thank you for reading such a long post with no photos!

The post The Camgirl Manifesto (2003-2005) appeared first on The Camgirl Museum Project.

I just came across an old html file I’d saved of StileProjectDotCom’s front page circa 2003, where Stile wrote a short blog post essentially trying to give all the camwhores a pep talk, and advice to ignore the haters because haters are meaningless. Behold our benevolent overlord dispensing wisdom:

I’m honestly way too busy these days to really write any kind of in-depth analysis of Stile’s blog post, because there’s a lot going on there, or how Stile Project fits into cam culture history, but I thought seeing this post might be a trip down memory lane for certain folks so I decided to post it here.

If you want to discuss this post, or have something to add to a future post on Stile, StileProjectDotCom, Portal 9, or CamwhoresDotCom, please hit up the Camgirl Museum subreddit!

The post Stile’s Pep Talk appeared first on The Camgirl Museum Project.

Salon.com was traditionally kind to cam culture when it reported on us. When I was going through old files, I came across this Salon.com article I printed out from Ana Voog’s website in 2003 about homecam operators. It no longer appears in Salon’s archives, but they do make mention of it in this “Best Of Salon: 1998” post, and Ana Voog’s transcription of the article is still up on her site.

Here’s the article in full, without its original hyperlinks, for posterity’s sake:

Live! From My Bedroom

Homecam operators broadcast their daily lives to web voyeurs. Why? For the art or fame, love or money  or reasons they can’t quite explain.

By Simon Firth
Salon.com, January 1998

[EDITORS’ NOTE: Some of the sites this article links to contain sexual images or nudity, so if those disturb or offend you, don’t click on them.]

Surely you know Jenni? Or Ana, or Kimi, or Questiongirl? If you don’t, some of your friends most likely do — certainly your male friends. They just might have failed to mention it. But tell these friends you’re writing about personal webcams — Web sites where people are living their lives in front of a camera hooked up to the Internet — and it’s extraordinary how many of them will admit that, yes, they’ve checked one or two of these sites out. Just out of curiosity, of course. It’s old news that there are now thousands of cameras attached to the Internet. Most are still simple, cheap devices that capture a regularly updated single image of a remote place — a scenic view, a coffee pot down the hall, a tank of fish, the local traffic or surfing conditions. But more recently an entire sub-genre of these cameras has emerged — personal cameras or “homecams,” located in people’s most intimate spaces, offering the viewer apparently unmediated insights into their owners’ ordinary waking (and sleeping) lives. Some of these camera sites are immensely boring, and some are really just out to make a buck. Some aspire to performance art without ever really achieving it, and others are just very sad to visit. What they all share is a fidelity to the moment: Every two minutes or so you get a new picture of the owner not just at work or lounging around, but dressing and undressing, snoozing and showering, eating and talking, flirting and, yes, fucking. Not surprisingly, it’s the promise (however remote) of the more fleshly of these activities that’s made some of these sites the sort your friends bookmark surreptitiously — and won them phenomenal popularity.

Earlier last year, the page presenting pictures from the life of a 21-year-old then-college-student named Jennifer Ringley was getting, by her own count, over 100 million hits a week. Ringley says that people who go to her Jennicam site looking for sex, or even flesh, will soon get bored: Faced with repeated images of her sitting fully dressed at her computer, visitors either “get it or get out.” And there are certainly thousands of other places on the Internet that will freely and instantly offer you images far more explicit than any you might eventually see snapped by her camera.

So how then to explain the enormous popularity of sites like hers? And given that most people on most cameras are simply sitting, fully clothed, in front of a computer monitor all day, why does a disreputable air persist around them? Perhaps our unease has less to do with prurience than with novelty: In their banality, these sites are offering us a new and unfamiliar aesthetic — one that is, like all interesting art, visually fascinating, disconcertingly erotic and a provocative reflection of ourselves. If you’ve only seen one personal webcam it’s likely to have been the Jennicam. The widely acknowledged pioneer of living publicly on the Web, Ringley has been doing so now for over two years — first via a camera in her college dorm room (until the volume of traffic got her thrown off the college network) and more recently via a camera in her Washington, D.C., apartment. She has stuck to her self-imposed rules: Never turn off the camera; carry on with whatever she’s doing as if no one were watching. If that means being seen changing, or sleeping, or fooling around with a boyfriend on her bed, then so be it. But while her site is the oldest and the most famous homecam, in the last six months an entire second generation of camera owners, many citing Ringley as their inspiration, has emerged. It didn’t take long for people to realize there was money to be made out of the popularity of sites like Ringley’s.

So part of the second wave has been a whole slew of pay sites (“Ho” sites to some) charging a fee for a regularly updated image of (almost without exception) a woman sitting at home, generally in front of a computer and minimally dressed. Some of these sites are clearly presenting professional sex workers masquerading as amateurs, or are fronts for conventional X-rated businesses. But many are apparently owned by women who have welcomed cameras into their lives as a convenient way of earning hard cash at home to help support a baby or to put them through college. There are also an intriguing number of sites run by husband-and-wife teams — he runs the server and she sits at the computer and smiles. All these sites need to deliver remarkably little to justify their fees. While some offer regular shows, many explicitly promise nothing at all — not even to be in front of the camera for any length or at any particular time. Yet many have reached vast audiences with no marketing.

But visit the Homecam catalog Web site run by Ur-webcam fan The Nose (George Buce) and it becomes clear that these pay sites occupy just a small part of the personal webcam world. If it has its prostitutes, it also has its regular Joes and Janes, its couples, families and babies. Just like the real world, this one is populated by innocents as well as teases, by beauties and brutes, gossips and bores. Buce (the man who coined the term “homecam”) currently lists nearly 200 homecams on his site — and those are only what he calls the “primary sites of interest.”

And an entire online culture has now grown up around the camera sites. Along with the catalogs there are numerous archives, discussion sites, even meta-sites that show you the latest live picture from the 20 or so most popular cameras. Many of the second generation of homecams are run by male fans of women’s sites who, in the words of one, have felt moved “to take the next step” and offer the world images of themselves.

As diverse as the subjects of the cameras are the rationales their owners offer for presenting them to us on the Web. For Ringley it started as a “project” but has grown into a commitment that she can see lasting her lifetime. For musician and artist Ana Voog of Anacam, it’s a fun, surreal experiment in (often naked) performance and play. But not all are as brave (or perhaps as foolhardy) as Jennifer or Ana. For some — the lonely or the vain — the fact that just a smile can bring them mountains of e-mail is reason enough to do it.

For Liz Dillard, who shares her camera with her husband and two kids, the camera is a fun way to show the in-laws back in Texas “how the family is doing.” And for a lot of people the camera is really just an extension of the spirit of online chat. “It’s a way of making myself accountable,” says Chip of the San Francisco-based Chipcam. A veteran of online communities, Chip feels the camera authenticates his online persona. And like Chip, many cam owners stay determinedly clothed and terminal-bound, only turning their camera on when they feel like communicating with the outside world or when they are home. But the majority of homecam operators who offer justifications in their “about me” or FAQ pages confess to not knowing quite why they are doing it — they just needed to try it. For many it will be a transitory stage in self-development or self-exploration (webcams have a high burnout rate). Certainly, if you’re a relatively young woman, leading your life publicly on the Internet can be an intoxicating, indeed overwhelming experience. With no publicity and doing little more than looking prettily wistful, a British woman who had an occasional camera on a friend’s site that became known as Dreamycam was soon getting tens of thousands of hits and several hundred e-mails a day, many asking her to do much more than look wistful.

The costs, just in terms of bandwidth, can be huge: Ringley has had to go to a membership format because no-one would host such a popular site for free. Voog is now selling Anacam mugs and T-shirts. And Ringley has had a nasty run-in with hackers, who broke into her site and replaced her image with mutilated bodies. Whatever got these women started, to keep their cameras going requires considerable perseverance and ingenuity.

What really struck me about this article, and what I highlighted in my notes, is that it says, in 1998, that on his website that catalogued “homecams”, this George Buce only listed ~200 cams as “primary sites of interest”. Jennifer Ringley only started her own homecam, the first of its kind, barely two years prior, so in the two years Jenni ran and pioneered her cam, she inspired an entire “second wave” of homecams, at least 200 other people, primarily women, to code and maintain their own cams, at a time when there were only millions of people on the internet total, not billions. That’s a pretty big impact!

Contrast 200 silent, still homecams with the tens of thousands of camgirls who broadcast on a streaming cam site, in a single night, in 2023, you can see how far we’ve come, and Jenni’s impact becomes even more significant!

Another thing that struck me as interesting about this article, is where it says, “For Ringley, [her cam] started as a “project” but has grown into a commitment that she can see lasting her lifetime.” As we now know, Jennicam only lasted 7 years.

And finally, the last thing that struck me as significant about this article, is the last paragraph, where it talks about the costs involved, both financially, in terms of bandwidth, and emotionally, in terms of Jenni being hacked and her site vandalized with photos of mutilated bodies. It ends in typical Salon.com fashion, with acknowledging camgirl perseverance and ingenuity, which I think we can all appreciate!

The post Salon.com Article On Homecam Operators, January 1998 appeared first on The Camgirl Museum Project.

In crypto, “FUD” stands for “Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt” and my FUD for the Southside City metaverse began in 2023, when they seemed more focused on selling yet more real estate that didn’t exist, and making game trailers, than actually delivering anything.

Today I took a look at their Discord, and the last update from devs was in July of 2023, with yet more promises, but delivering nothing, not even hype. Their Discord’s general chat is generally dead, so I think it’s safe to assume this project promised way more than it could ever deliver and is now dead.

I guess if Southside City ever gets legs again, I own “property” in it, that I paid for with magic internet money I earned from selling Camwhore NFTs, but until that happens, The Camgirl Museum is still looking for a home in a metaverse somewhere.

I’m not interested in renting or using someone else’s property, but if anyone has property in Voxels or Decentraland, or ETH to buy property in either of these metaverses, to donate to the project, please let me know.

The post Southside City Is Likely Dead appeared first on The Camgirl Museum Project.

There is currently no nudity on this site, and I’ve never said either way if there ever will be any. I haven’t decided yet and figured I’d deal with that decision when the content deemed it necessary. Should the Camgirl Museum be SFW to attract & be accepted by a wider audience? Or does that do a disservice to us naked folk whose literal skin is in the game?

I linked The Camgirl Museum in my YouTube channel’s profile and got the following warning:

I mean, it’s pretty clear cut. They, or their AI, saw the word “camgirl” and automatically banned the URL. That is literally discrimination. Discrimination based on one word, a word for a very broad job description, that may, or may not, involve nudity.

DEAR YOUTUBE,

Not all camgirls do sex work.

Not all camgirls get naked.

Not all camgirls are even camgirls anymore.

They are also social media influencers and content creators.
Even YouTubers themselves.

Without camgirls pioneering streaming video technology on the internet via cam portals, YouTube wouldn’t even exist.

So kindly go learn and acknowledge your own history, you ignorant asshats, and cut it out with lazy blanket censorship.

I had the option to appeal the warning, but honestly, when I got it, I was on my last spoon that day, and they wouldn’t let me use my account until I cleared it, so I didn’t. I just accepted it, did their little YouTube content training thing to remove the warning, and moved on.

If you’re surprised that YouTube would ban a URL without even looking at it, based on the word “camgirl”, you really shouldn’t be. This is the internet we live on, and really, have always lived on.

Morality will be the death of the internet.

In 2004, I e-mailed Kevin Day, the webmaster of CamwhoresDotCom, and asked him what the biggest future dangers for cam culture were. He said that Visa and Mastercard’s “sudden morality” was a big deal, and that even back then, they were making it “nearly impossible for ANYONE to have a merchant account”. He also said this:

“The biggest future problems are, in my opinion…”internet Decency Laws” that turn everything 100% kid safe, people caring less and less about still images when they can have video on their high speed connections now, the oversaturation of the market (too many girls, too many sites now, etc), and sites that love to rip people off (ifriends).“
– Kevin Day, webmaster, CamwhoresDotCom
July 24th, 2004

And look where we are now, 20 years later!

Mastercard IS the morality police on the internet right now, they hold ALL the cards!

You can’t post artistic/cartoon nudity (or clothed shibari without fear of your account being deleted) on Instagram.

You can get timed-out on Threads for posting a raunchy sex joke.

A mother can’t post a photo of herself breastfeeding her new baby on Facebook.

You can get banned from Facebook for saying “men are trash”.

You still can’t post a photo of a bloody tampon literally anywhere, no matter how artistic.

Pornhub got shut down pretty swiftly in 2020 by a new US decency law and Visa & Mastercard. Despite being back online, they still can’t accept credit cards.

Despite being one of the 1st adult platforms to become a household name and a punchline on late night talk shows, and despite the fact most of their content creators are NSFW, due to a threat by Mastercard, in August 2021 OnlyFans decided to stop allowing adult content – pretty much overnight. Then they inexplicably overturned that decision just as quickly, completely destabilizing the platform. The site never fully recovered because camgirls never fully trusted them again.

“Camgirl” is a banned word when writing prompts in Midjourney. “Rapist” and “uterus” are on OnlyFans’ infamous, and lengthy, banned words list.

Archive.org doesn’t archive adult sites, and has deleted almost all of the ones it did before they made that decision.

I could give more examples of how morality, Meta, and Mastercard are bad for the internet, but I assume if you’re here, I’m preaching to the choir, and really, all of these things deserve their own posts.

But now you also apparently can’t post a vanilla URL with the word “camgirl” in it on YouTube, and that super sucks.

One day, when I have more time and energy to dedicate for the fight that will be sure to follow, I’ll make the Camgirl Museum its own YouTube channel, to post and highlight videos about cam culture history, and when they inevitably shut it down, I will start the appeals process and make my case. I apologize for not being able to do it now.

The post Camgirl Museum Discriminated Against appeared first on The Camgirl Museum Project.

The founder of Omegle’s full post for the shutdown:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” — C.S. Lewis

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” — Douglas Adams

Dear strangers,

From the moment I discovered the Internet at a young age, it has been a magical place to me. Growing up in a small town, relatively isolated from the larger world, it was a revelation how much more there was to discover – how many interesting people and ideas the world had to offer.

As a young teenager, I couldn’t just waltz onto a college campus and tell a student: “Let’s debate moral philosophy!” I couldn’t walk up to a professor and say: “Tell me something interesting about microeconomics!” But online, I was able to meet those people, and have those conversations. I was also an avid Wikipedia editor; I contributed to open source software projects; and I often helped answer computer programming questions posed by people many years older than me.

In short, the Internet opened the door to a much larger, more diverse, and more vibrant world than I would have otherwise been able to experience; and enabled me to be an active participant in, and contributor to, that world. All of this helped me to learn, and to grow into a more well-rounded person.

Moreover, as a survivor of childhood rape, I was acutely aware that any time I interacted with someone in the physical world, I was risking my physical body. The Internet gave me a refuge from that fear. I was under no illusion that only good people used the Internet; but I knew that, if I said “no” to someone online, they couldn’t physically reach through the screen and hold a weapon to my head, or worse. I saw the miles of copper wires and fiber-optic cables between me and other people as a kind of shield – one that empowered me to be less isolated than my trauma and fear would have otherwise allowed.

I launched Omegle when I was 18 years old, and still living with my parents. It was meant to build on the things I loved about the Internet, while introducing a form of social spontaneity that I felt didn’t exist elsewhere. If the Internet is a manifestation of the “global village”, Omegle was meant to be a way of strolling down a street in that village, striking up conversations with the people you ran into along the way.

The premise was rather straightforward: when you used Omegle, it would randomly place you in a chat with someone else. These chats could be as long or as short as you chose. If you didn’t want to talk to a particular person, for whatever reason, you could simply end the chat and – if desired – move onto another chat with someone else. It was the idea of “meeting new people” distilled down to almost its platonic ideal.

Building on what I saw as the intrinsic safety benefits of the Internet, users were anonymous to each other by default. This made chats more self-contained, and made it less likely that a malicious person would be able to track someone else down off-site after their chat ended.

I didn’t really know what to expect when I launched Omegle. Would anyone even care about some Web site that an 18 year old kid made in his bedroom in his parents’ house in Vermont, with no marketing budget? But it became popular almost instantly after launch, and grew organically from there, reaching millions of daily users. I believe this had something to do with meeting new people being a basic human need, and with Omegle being among the best ways to fulfill that need. As the saying goes: “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.”

Over the years, people have used Omegle to explore foreign cultures; to get advice about their lives from impartial third parties; and to help alleviate feelings of loneliness and isolation. I’ve even heard stories of soulmates meeting on Omegle, and getting married. Those are only some of the highlights.

Unfortunately, there are also lowlights. Virtually every tool can be used for good or for evil, and that is especially true of communication tools, due to their innate flexibility. The telephone can be used to wish your grandmother “happy birthday”, but it can also be used to call in a bomb threat. There can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes.

I believe in a responsibility to be a “good Samaritan”, and to implement reasonable measures to fight crime and other misuse. That is exactly what Omegle did. In addition to the basic safety feature of anonymity, there was a great deal of moderation behind the scenes, including state-of-the-art AI operating in concert with a wonderful team of human moderators. Omegle punched above its weight in content moderation, and I’m proud of what we accomplished.

Omegle’s moderation even had a positive impact beyond the site. Omegle worked with law enforcement agencies, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to help put evildoers in prison where they belong. There are “people” rotting behind bars right now thanks in part to evidence that Omegle proactively collected against them, and tipped the authorities off to.

All that said, the fight against crime isn’t one that can ever truly be won. It’s a never-ending battle that must be fought and re-fought every day; and even if you do the very best job it is possible for you to do, you may make a sizable dent, but you won’t “win” in any absolute sense of that word. That’s heartbreaking, but it’s also a basic lesson of criminology, and one that I think the vast majority of people understand on some level. Even superheroes, the fictional characters that our culture imbues with special powers as a form of wish fulfillment in the fight against crime, don’t succeed at eliminating crime altogether.

In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users.

To an extent, it is reasonable to question the policies and practices of any place where crime has occurred. I have always welcomed constructive feedback; and indeed, Omegle implemented a number of improvements based on such feedback over the years. However, the recent attacks have felt anything but constructive. The only way to please these people is to stop offering the service. Sometimes they say so, explicitly and avowedly; other times, it can be inferred from their act of setting standards that are not humanly achievable. Either way, the net result is the same.

Omegle is the direct target of these attacks, but their ultimate victim is you: all of you out there who have used, or would have used, Omegle to improve your lives, and the lives of others. When they say Omegle shouldn’t exist, they are really saying that you shouldn’t be allowed to use it; that you shouldn’t be allowed to meet random new people online. That idea is anathema to the ideals I cherish – specifically, to the bedrock principle of a free society that, when restrictions are imposed to prevent crime, the burden of those restrictions must not be targeted at innocent victims or potential victims of crime.

Consider the idea that society ought to force women to dress modestly in order to prevent rape. One counter-argument is that rapists don’t really target women based on their clothing; but a more powerful counter-argument is that, irrespective of what rapists do, women’s rights should remain intact. If society robs women of their rights to bodily autonomy and self-expression based on the actions of rapists – even if it does so with the best intentions in the world – then society is practically doing the work of rapists for them.

Fear can be a valuable tool, guiding us away from danger. However, fear can also be a mental cage that keeps us from all of the things that make life worth living. Individuals and families must be allowed to strike the right balance for themselves, based on their own unique circumstances and needs. A world of mandatory fear is a world ruled by fear – a dark place indeed.

I’ve done my best to weather the attacks, with the interests of Omegle’s users – and the broader principle – in mind. If something as simple as meeting random new people is forbidden, what’s next? That is far and away removed from anything that could be considered a reasonable compromise of the principle I outlined. Analogies are a limited tool, but a physical-world analogy might be shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there – or perhaps more provocatively, destroying the universe because it contains evil. A healthy, free society cannot endure when we are collectively afraid of each other to this extent.

Unfortunately, what is right doesn’t always prevail. As much as I wish circumstances were different, the stress and expense of this fight – coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse – are simply too much. Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically. Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s.

The battle for Omegle has been lost, but the war against the Internet rages on. Virtually every online communication service has been subject to the same kinds of attack as Omegle; and while some of them are much larger companies with much greater resources, they all have their breaking point somewhere. I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection. If that sounds like a bad idea to you, please consider donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that fights for your rights online.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who used Omegle for positive purposes, and to everyone who contributed to the site’s success in any way. I’m so sorry I couldn’t keep fighting for you.

Sincerely,

Leif K-Brooks Founder, http://Omegle.com LLC

Omegle was shut down as part of mediation in a $22 million child sexual abuse lawsuit.

The post RIP Omegle appeared first on The Camgirl Museum Project.

Hey Cyberpals!

I made a subreddit for the Camgirl Museum the other day, so the community can network and help gather resources, artifacts, and stories for this website! Please consider joining!

The kinds of things I’m looking for are:

• 320×240 or 640×480 pixel webcam images, preferably from OG camgirls themselves so I can post them with permission, but other sources are okay too
• Screenshots of old websites, chat, cam programs, or other relevant vintage software
• Relevant IRC/ICQ/AIM/MSN/Yahoo chat logs or screenshots from chat logs
• Photos from any camgirl, LiveJournal, Stile Project Forum, etc IRL meetups
• Video clips of camgirls in the media (Charisma on Good Morning America, specifically! but I’m sure there’s more!)
• Articles on pre-streaming or current cam culture
• Personal stories and anecdotes from “back in the day”, memories of things that happened or we did (eg. Survivorcam, Plastic Wrap Pr0n, FetishDoll’s giant juggalo tattoo, Trisha Campbell’s weird topless wave, Sandrine’s large facial mole, Jacquie’s 4 tongue piercings, etc)
• “Where Are They Now?” updates from OG camgirls & prominent people, especially if camming was an advantage in your current life somehow
• Examples of camgirl ingenuity, past and present (Ana Voog’s random word generator and mobile cams, Steph The Geek geotagging herself on her website so you could follow where she was IRL at all times, AmberCutie streaming in “mixed reality” on MyFreeCams circa 2015, etc)
• Examples of extreme vulnerability in camming (stories & links to specific public LiveJournal or blog posts, stories or images of specific cam pics/shows/events, stories of fan interactions, etc)
• Stories of fame (meeting camgirls IRL and being starstruck, fan letters written or received, saved screenshots of poignant blog post comments, links or screenshots to/of media coverage, etc)
• Stories of entrepreneurship (eg. camgirls running businesses or selling weird things on their sites/eBay, side hustles as a result of camming, etc)

Anything in this vein, I want to see or hear about, so either e-mail me, or put it in the subreddit for community comment! Thank you so much, this could be so awesome!

The post There’s Now A Camgirl Museum Subreddit! appeared first on The Camgirl Museum Project.

This site uses images I create using text prompts and the AI text-to-image generator, Midjourney. Admittedly, I’m not a wiz at it like some of my crypto artist friends, but I’m okay enough to get the kinds of images I’m mostly looking for, which is camgirls who don’t exist.

I don’t need permission to post a camgirl who doesn’t exist here, and I’m not going to be stepping on anyone’s toes by using them as graphics, profile pictures, or advertisements. Also, posting camgirls who don’t exist means not playing favourites among, and “using”, camgirls who DO exist. Camgirls who don’t exist also do not require any kind of consent, compensation, or record keeping compliance.

This website and idea faced an ethical quandary when it came to posting content and using AI was the lesser of the two evils between using AI and using living camgirls without their knowledge or permission. I’m still going to do the latter where it’s culturally relevant and makes sense to do so, but when it doesn’t, or when I just really need a placeholder image to hold this website’s content together, I’m gonna be using these AI images and I hope everyone reading this understands why.

Now onto camgirl business…

Early-2000’s Camgirls Had No Legs!

When I was generating images with Midjourney this afternoon, gathering images to build out the framework for a links page, this image of a camgirl with no legs below the knees popped out, so I upscaled it to see it bigger, and when I did, I started having feelings of nostalgia, and a weird love almost compersion.

You see, most camgirls in the late-90’s-early 2000’s did their camming at their desks, usually using desktop computers, which were expensive enough as it was, so laptops of course were unattainable to most of us. This meant our cams sat on top of our clunky monitors while we sat in computer chairs, so our cams only took photos of us from the tits up – perfect for those of us who had tits. (Camgirls didn’t move to the floor until around 2004, when streaming sites started popping up.)

The thing was, that because of where all our cams were, and the angle most of us were taking our photos at, the audience never saw our legs, and the joke became that camgirls just didn’t have any. I even remember a webcam caption – a strip of text like the CNN ticker at the bottom of a webcam photo – that’s famous to me, by a camgirl named Perfekt, that simply said in all caps, “I HAVE LEGS!” and if I’m not mistaken, she was fully clothed, with her computer chair pushed back to reveal her putting her legs behind her head, taken with a self-timer. I could be completely making that up, and maybe this is an ability she doesn’t and never had, but in my mind that’s what the pic was and until she herself tells me otherwise or someone produces evidence that I’m wrong, it’s my head cannon five-everrrrr.

What’s also great about this AI-generated image, is that it makes the concept of a disabled camgirl visible, something we don’t, and have never, traditionally seen, despite the fact there are many disabled, and mentally or chronically ill among us. I’ve even hypothesized before that this could be the very reason why some of us had such unconventional jobs, with unconventionally flexible business hours, in the first place because it’s so common in our industry.

Camgirls with major disabilities like missing limbs are few and far between that I’ve seen, but I love this image because it says that any girl can be a camgirl, no matter what her personal limitations and struggles may be.

Okay, better go get ready for this party I’m attending before I make myself late waxing poetic about camgirls again!

Peace out, girl scouts!

The post Why This Site Uses AI Images appeared first on The Camgirl Museum Project.