With the rise of mobile devices and platforms from the likes of Apple and Google, not to mention the proliferation of free videos on YouTube-like porn sites, the adult industry is in a bind. A colleague of mine calls this a meso-idea, an idea that has ceased to be true but that people continue to repeat, ad infinitum, as if it still was. Some of it may have been true in years past.
Later in the episode, when Hendricks turns up at an adult industry conference, we encounter an army of porn execs dressed like bankers. That's the stereotype Silicon Valley embraces. Or, if we've come to realize that the pinkie-ring caricature makes absolutely no sense in the age of the Internet, we see them as ruthlessly clever businesspeople with a sixth sense for where the big money lies. We picture these people as sleazy Southern Californians wearing pinkie rings and polyester. In the popular imagination, the eternal trope is that the porn industry drives the adoption of new technology that it accounts for some astronomically large portion of all Internet traffic and, yes, that it generates equally enormous sums of money for all the faceless people who run its operations. 'The thing about the adult industry today is that.
