Zahra Stardust is, in her own words, ‘a sex worker in the academy’ who champions the ‘epistemology of whores’, a term she coined to describe the ‘unique lens through which sex workers know about the world’. As she impressively models in her first book, Indie Porn: Revolution, regulation and resistance, published in Duke University Press’s innovative Camera Obscura series, this epistemology is multifaceted and multi-purpose. Stardust, a research fellow at Queensland University of Technology, takes us behind the scenes, while expanding what a book about pornography can be. Against enduring ‘whore stigma’, which functions to keep sex workers at society’s margins and ‘sex’ within heteronormative bounds, Stardust flips the script. Sex workers, and in particular porn performers like herself and the many others whom she interviews and cites, have much to tell the rest of us about the algorithmic, gig economy world we all live in.