The porn industry is withering.

Long time reader Augustine recently provided this interesting link with the comment, "I don't think that there's a more significant bellwether of the leaning towards conservatism than the most notorious milestone of the turn towards liberalism itself turning towards conservatism. Is this going to be remembered as the milestone of the turn of the worm?"

I can only assume he was agreeing with and providing today's proof point for my view that the new conservatism is turning the herd away from those things which rose during the liberal tsunami of the past 40-50 years (with exponential rise in the last 15 - 20 years).  By "my view" I refer to this post wherein I wrote, "And so we see the first vestiges of the contraction of the online sex industry, in direct keeping with a new conservative wave that is sweeping the land.  I strongly suspect that men by the 1000's are rushing to their paid porno sites to cancel in order to get their names off the books right now.  Online porn is never going to go away but the once "obvious" concept that "the Internet is for porn" is going to become less and less obvious in the coming years.  We'll know that wave 3 up for conservatism is in play when the online website "Youporn" takes some kind of major hit.  Maybe it will become no longer free, etc.  But something is likely going to happen to it that dramatically removes it from society."

Well, Playboy is to porn as IBM is to tech: they are a thought leader.  IBM always knew when to move on.  When too many players had swarmed its high margin profit grounds in mainframes it created the PC industry.  When that became a commodity market, IBM pushed into global services.   Now that too is getting crowded and IBM has been making a real push into artificial intelligence for 2-3 years now.  By that I mean it has moved Watson from being a research project into a P+L business unit.

Playboy isn't changing because it wants to.  It's changing because it sees the writing on the wall.  The herding signals are getting back to it.  The conservative wave is likely slamming its subscription services.  There were probably a lot of men who took the magazine but never even had time to read it.  They liked the idea of being a playa' even though they didn't really have time for it.  When it goes out of vogue to have those kinds of magazines laying about then lots of subscriptions will be reviewed and not renewed.  Perhaps a magazine with pretty women who are dressed scantily instead of being nude someday turns into a magazine that just contains well dressed attractive women under the new conservative forces.

In any case, so many things are happening now for a reason.  You have to admit, this is too much change in too short a time to be just random.  Something's going on here and it is going to have significant impact on society in the coming years.