How the online smut king built porn into an addiction machine

He didn’t just build a business. He rewired a culture.

Fabian Thylmann, a German tech bro with a knack for algorithms and a nose for profit, quietly stitched together the Franken-monster we now call mainstream porn. Through sites like Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube, he industrialized arousal, stripped sex of intimacy, and flooded the internet with content so extreme it would once have sparked criminal trials — not subscriptions.

Zuckerberg rewired friendship. Thylmann rewired arousal. Same operating logic. Different limbic system.

And he didn’t need to lobby Congress or march in the streets to do it. He just made it seamless, instant, and free. In doing so, he planted the seeds of a crisis that most still refuse to name: spiritual, psychological, and deeply human.

Porn used to be something you paid for. You had to seek it out, sneak around, find a booth, a VHS, a magazine. Shame was built into the transaction. And that shame — though mocked today — acted as a kind of firewall. A crude one, maybe, but it kept excess in check.

What Thylmann did was blow that firewall to pieces.

He made porn frictionless. No age checks. No barriers. No cost. Just one click, and a bottomless stream of fantasy opened up. This wasn’t the first major shift, of course. The sexual revolution of the 1960s had already begun loosening the cultural restraints around sex. Playboy glamorized it. VHS commercialized it.

But the internet weaponized it. And when broadband arrived, everything changed. Suddenly, porn wasn’t just available — it was in your pocket, in your home, on demand. What was once scarce became infinite. What was once taboo became trend.

But this wasn’t just some sleazy revolution. It was digital engineering. Thylmann didn’t create porn. He optimized it. Aggregated it. SEOed it. Data-mined it. His genius was in realizing that porn wasn’t about quality, but quantity, velocity, and accessibility. He gamified libido. Every refresh brought novelty. Every novelty promised more. Your brain lit up. Your dopamine spiked. Then it crashed. So you clicked again.

Sound familiar?

In social media circles, Mark Zuckerberg is the man who flattened privacy and turned connection into a data stream. If Zuckerberg digitized the social graph, Thylmann did the same to human desire. He made sex transactional, algorithmic, on demand. Zuckerberg rewired friendship. Thylmann rewired arousal. Same operating logic. Different limbic system.

Pornhub became the Facebook of adult content, driven by likes, shares, autoplay, endless scroll. But instead of poking your crush, you watched her digitally morph to perform acts she never consented to. Instead of a timeline, you got a torrent. A ceaseless glut of extreme material that, over time, pushed boundaries farther and farther from anything resembling love or connection.

The results are showing. More people are shunning relationships altogether. Birth rates are collapsing across the developed world. Marriage is seen by many as outdated, even oppressive. Loneliness has quietly become an epidemic.

And yet we’re consuming more porn than ever before. This isn’t coincidence. It’s correlation, maybe even causation. Because once you normalize stimulation without intimacy, the real thing starts to feel like too much effort. Or worse, irrelevant.

And here’s the part I find most concerning.

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Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

The average users aren’t just bored teenagers or lonely office workers. They’re addicts. Casualties of an attention war they never volunteered for. Brains flooded with stimulus, bodies disconnected from meaning. It’s not just that they can’t feel pleasure without porn. It’s that they don’t even know what they’re looking for any more.

Because Thylmann didn’t just give people porn. He changed what porn meant. He shifted the baseline. What was once hard-core became soft-core. What was once shocking became normal. What was once illegal became monetized. And in the process, he helped raise a generation that sees intimacy as cringe.

And yet — unlike Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos — Thylmann is far from a household name. He’s not invited to testify before Congress. He isn’t asked about ethics, mental health, or the bodies left in the wreckage. He made hundreds of millions, sold off MindGeek, and vanished into obscurity. No lawsuits. No reckonings. No Netflix docudrama. Just silence.

Meanwhile, the machine he built keeps running. Now with AI. Now with deepfakes. Now with models who don’t exist but still get millions of views. The line between fantasy and reality isn’t blurred any more. It’s erased.

The next frontier? Porn that responds to your face. To your eye movements. To your breath. Porn that learns from you in real time, as any good algorithm does. And before long, porn that no longer needs human performers at all. Just prompts. Just code. Just you and the machine. Alone, but overstimulated. No wonder Thylmann slipped away.

Don’t kid yourself: This isn’t a sideshow. This is the main event. Porn is one of the internet’s biggest industries. Bigger than Netflix. Bigger than Twitter. It’s more embedded in the culture than anyone wants to admit. And it runs on the same logic as every other platform: Feed the algorithm, numb the user, profit off the wreckage.

And in a culture where people are increasingly skeptical of connection — where ghosting is easier than loving and self-gratification more efficient than vulnerability — this model isn’t just profitable. It’s invincible. You don’t need to destroy intimacy. Just replace it with something faster, cheaper, and easier to control.

The irony is as obvious as it is alarming. In a world that’s never been more “connected,” people are starving for connection. Drenched in sex, but untouched by intimacy. Constantly stimulated, but rarely satisfied.

And if you trace that back to a single point of failure — to the moment when arousal became automated and sex became content — it leads to a quiet little office in Germany and a man named Fabian Thylmann.