Patricia Nilsson for Guilty Pleasure: The Pornification of the Internet, the Economy, and Everything Else

This is the story of one of the most influential - and least examined - industries on earth.

Worth billions of dollars, and commanding a tenth of global internet traffic at peak times, it has quietly reshaped our world: it has transformed technology, work, culture, love and relationships, and even our sense of self.

Most industries of this scale make daily headlines.

This one rarely does.In _Guilty Pleasure_, investigative journalist and _FT_ reporter Patricia Nilsson turns her attention to an industry few have dared to confront, and tells the story of pornography in the online age.

Drawing on more than five years of reporting, Nilsson reveals how the internet turned the business of erotic art into something else entirely: a vast, secretive industry dominated by obscure owners, platform logic and profit at almost any cost.

She traces how porn helped to shape the online world, and then spilled far beyond it - restructuring everyday life and saturating society with its logic of stimulation, self-soothing and craving.Whether we consume it or not, Nilsson argues, we are living in the world pornography made: one in which our desires and anxieties are relentlessly monitored and manipulated by unaccountable forces.

And because this industry has escaped meaningful scrutiny for so long, the power to regulate it has increasingly fallen to political extremists and payment companies.

The result is a system that has quietly revolutionized everything, while remaining - until now - hidden from view.PATRICIA NILSSON is a reporter with the _Financial Times_, where she has covered a broad range of industries such as retail, media, tobacco, cannabis and pornography.

Her discovery that the world's biggest adult company had a secret owner led to a year-long investigation into the business of porn, which culminated in the _FT_'s first narrative podcast series, _Hot Money_.

Patricia grew up in Sweden but was raised Polish.

She has lived and worked in Shanghai, Istanbul and London and now resides in Frankfurt. _Guilty Pleasure_ is her first bookThis event will be chaired by SARAH MANAVIS.

She is an American writer at The Observer and author of the forthcoming _Tell Me About Myself: How pop culture swallowed psychotherapy_.