Pandemic life can be lonely. A lot of us are feeling starved for touch, attention, and sex. But humans are innovative about designing new ways to connect with each other. An electronics engineer in Berlin, who goes by the Twitter handle Space Buck, created a butt plug that can be controlled by his Twitter followers. Well, at least one person is getting his intimate needs satisfied right now — even if it’s very publicly intimate.
Space Buck created a wifi-enabled battery called the “Double-Oh,” that allows anything that takes AA batteries to be controlled by the internet, reported Dazed. He decided to test it out in real time on Twitter by linking it with his feed. Every time someone liked his tweet, the butt plug vibrated for 10 seconds, and every time someone shared it, it vibrated for 30 seconds.
As of this writing, Space Buck’s post has been liked 333 times and retweeted 115 times, so it would have been good to go for 113 minutes if he hadn’t set it to shut off after about an hour. An hour is a lot of crowdsourced pleasure, and honestly more sexual attention than I’ve gotten from the equivalent wasted on Tinder.
But Space Buck’s butt plug is about more than just getting off. “I’m interested in exploring the paradoxical combination of intimacy and distance,” Space Buck told Dazed. “This is an extremely intimate project — one that involves me telling people about my personal butt activities,” he said, adding that this project allows him to be publicly open about his sexual proclivities and social in how he pursues satisfaction, but he also gets to have the safety of using an anonymous persona.
I’m not sure whether this is performance art, a sales pitch, or just a rightfully horny guy getting off by any means necessary, but whatever the motivation behind the invention, it’s a pretty cool use of technology. Space Buck calls this kind of sexual technology, “teledildonics.” “Teledildonics is all about being intimate and remote at the same time,” he told Dazed. “And it’s fun.” I don’t know about you, but if this is the future of masturbation, I’m here for it.
