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The government made sexual pornography illegal. It was, they said, "inimical to society’s moral evolution." It’s the most fun of all when they use terms like that, "evolution," shows they’ve still got a sense of humor. Hard copy photography porn still circulated, of course, but the video was effectively ended: each program required a copy-code to, for the stated purpose of that is to say, "protect the rights of the copyright-holders." Some porn was cleverly recoded with innocuous program numbers; perhaps "Bassmasters" instead of…well you get the idea. That was easily remedied by implanting continuous hidden pass codes, and for the first time ever it became unprofitable. The unemployment rate in the San Fernando Valley soared.

Some raconteurs were forced to evaluate what it was about porn that made it so popular, so as to duplicate the effect. It wasn’t the sex; that much was obvious. It wasn’t even, they found, the transgression or the violation of taboo. It was determined what gave pornography its special appeal was the despoliation of beauty; the irreversible ravaging and consumption of purity; death, in short, in bite-sized increments.

The consumers were forced to leave their basements, their attics, their sweaty dens, and become participant as much as observer, at least as much as Heisenberg hypothesized. These close quarters accelerated the "evolution" of our immoral society in direct correlation to external piety. Without a distancing medium the spectacle had to go live.

Once the essential element was defined, the pornographers found that its applications were not limited to the sexual. All manners of perversion could stand in. On the personal level there was disfigurement; for an excessive sum a connected and discerning consumer could scar or otherwise disfigure the Jane or John. On the other hand, consumers would now also gather to view the ravaging of many things: the most frequent and frequented pornographic display consisted of the ritualized destruction of those portable repositories of beauty, paintings.

For a very dear price those who, while unmasked, were anonymous by mutual consent would purchase a work of art. Then, gathered in an amphitheatre or, better still, a concert hall or theater, the work would be methodically despoiled until in the end, for the grand finale, the pornographer would set it afire. If the work of art was significant, the audience would insist upon consuming the ashes.

These consumers were small potatoes; just a microcosm, really. The same games were being played at a higher level and for higher stakes by those that instigated this evolutionary leap to begin with. This consumption, the opposite of art. This pornography.