I love the XXI century. When I was a child we were sure that “in the year 2000” we’d have colonies on Mars, butler androids and jetpacks… It turned out you can’t even board a plane without being bullied by TSA, robotic’s finest is an ass, and everyone’s still commuting by car.
On the other hand, however, we are surrounded by other wonderful objects nobody could even dream of, science is going strong and even the sex world can boast technologies that would make even Spider Jerusalem go crazy. Case in point: did you know there is an international community of vibrator hackers?

I am not referring to the creators of handcrafted fucking machines, who are so mainstream they got their own (wonderful) book. Fact is, recent sex toys are based on very advanced technology: in the past to build a vibrator you only needed a switch and a slightly off-center motor, but today we have strange wireless toys, with accelerometers and teledildonic features. And the more components there are, the easier it is that someone will feel like customizing them.

My geekiest readers have probably heard of Arduino, a low-cost and highly customizable hardware platform used by electronics enthusiasts to build every sort of techno-wonder. Well, the engineers from Slashdong went a step further, and used it for the heart of a “sex toy programmer” with which you can modify your favorite vibrator’s behavior. But what is an open source dildo actually for?

The mad scientists from the Milovana forum can offer hundreds of different answers. They go from biofeedback-enhanced objects that generate the perfect rhythm and intensity to more evil ones that get their users on the brink of orgasm and never let them through, to prolong the arousal indefinitely. There is who invents erotic telecontrol tools and who codes training software to gain a better libido control.
As a matter of fact, the world of extreme eroticism-oriented apps is especially large. The simplest ones are based on subliminal induction: words and pictures that appear on your screen for a fraction of a second with the purpose of predisposing to specific sexual practices or behaviors. The most complex involve some form of physical interaction. Female domination lovers can buy the electrified chastity cage of theDreamlover ‘male management system’ («now with proximity sensors to keep your slave in its place!» says their site). BoundAnna users trade custom self-bondage programs: if you want to get out of special electronic lockets you have to let your computer judge your performance – and mercifully I won’t discuss which kind of – using a webcam trained to recognize specific movements or other parameters.
Now just think of what will happen when somebody will manage to build a sexbot better than the current monstruous ones…