I'm sitting in a hotel where Billy Idol once slept. Mick Jagger. Arnold Schwarzenegger. A place with history, with character, with the pleasant scent of lived-in freedom in its hallways. Welcoming down to the last corner. I open my laptop, pull up my own website, simonbolz.com, my calling card as a photographer, and get blocked.
Category: Pornography.
I've been a Playboy photographer since 2012. I photograph women, not acts. And for once this isn't a matter of feeling but something you can actually verify. The filter comes from a Silicon Valley company called Fortinet, and Fortinet keeps a public list of its categories. There's "Nudity and Risque," explicitly defined as bare skin with no intent to arouse. There's "Pornography," defined as sexual acts intended to arouse. And a few lines down there's "Arts and Culture": fine art, paintings, museums. Three doors. I'm standing behind the one whose definition demonstrably doesn't apply to my work.
So far, the kind of mistake you forgive a machine. Machines see a lot of skin and grab the top label. Fine, no harm done. It only gets interesting when you push back.
So I pushed back. FortiGuard has a form for exactly these cases. I filled it out, matter-of-fact, polite, in complete sentences: I'm a Playboy photographer, I don't produce pornography, there's nothing on my site that could harm minors, the category is wrong, please change it. Thank you.
Less than six hours later, the answer came back. Updated category: Pornography. Date updated: today. Someone had looked. And left everything exactly as it was.
That's the moment the story tips over. A dead form I could have forgiven; a request that vanishes into the void is the stuff of everyday bureaucracy. But this wasn't silence. Someone, or something, processed my explicit objection in under six hours and upheld the verdict. Either a human read "I don't produce pornography" and shrugged, or a machine "reviewed" it without a single human ever seeing a word. I honestly don't know which version I dislike less.
Because the other doors were standing open. "Nudity and Risque" would have been correct, "Arts and Culture" generous but defensible. Both categories exist, both were on the table. And again the harshest one was chosen. If you're going to be wrong, be wrong emphatically.
I can live without one particular hotel's Wi-Fi. What I have a harder time with is the self-assurance. Here's a system sorting hundreds of millions of addresses, and in my case it holds a firm opinion about the difference between art and pornography.
Billy Idol would probably have thrown the router out the window. Not a sustainable solution, but one with attitude. I go for something less dramatic. I switch to mobile data, and suddenly I'm allowed to see my own pictures again. Same internet, same site, just without the filter in between. So much for the question of what it's actually protecting anyone from.