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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   25026 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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As a little bit of a palate cleanser for the Annunciation shooting and Scotland All Female Braveheart Remake children-with-knives fracas, I thought we could talk about the financial state of internet whoredom:

Matthew Ball Xwitter Thread on OnlyFans Financials

(Mod question: If linking to a Xwitter thread, are there any standard operating procedures considering some people don't have it?)

Big 3 Takeaways:

  • Subscription revenue is down, but transactional revenue is up 95%. This means that OF "creators" are making their money, now, on actually bartering pseduo-social-sexual relationships with buyers. You can't just blast out nudes and collect rent, you have to engage with the audience. This, to me, seems like an actually defensible moat vis-a-vis AI OF alternatives.
  • Gross creator revenue surpasses the total league payroll of ALL SPORTS LEAGUES EXCEPT THE NFL. Culture War angle: The market value of female sexuality is greater than everything except the most intensively financialized male performance sport.
  • One creator (read: one single internet girl) has certified gross earnings in 2024 of $82 million. This puts her at the same level as the highest paid pro athletes, the managers of the largest hedge funds, banks, and private equity firms. The only people out earning her are founder-shareholders of giant public behemoths (Zuckerburg etc.) and this is through wealth appreciation rather than "straight cash homie!" income.

What actually got me to take the time to write this up was seeing this article on sports betting.

Sports betting, OnlyFans (etc.), and addiction level of marijuana use are, to me, the three horsemen of tolerated social degeneration. That these all disproportionately impact (there, I said it!) young males is all the more revealing -- society is still okay with disposing the disposables and is now more than happy to turn it into a multi-billion dollar industry.

One creator (read: one single internet girl) has certified gross earnings in 2024 of $82 million. This puts her at the same level as...

Within five years, virtually all of that money will be going to companies building AI models, generating AI videos, and scripting AI interactions. They will also be monetizing sexual desire much more efficiently: instead of having an LLM or Filipino contractor write formulaic responses as they do now, they will use push messages, track interaction history, include advertising, and write personalities customized to the consumer. There may be a split market, one marketed as AI-driven and dominated by AI, and the other marketed as AI-free and dominated by AI.

A few years after that, I'm guessing we will all be hooked up to neural stimulators that simply give direct electrical impulses to the dopaminergic pathways in our brain a'la Olds and Milner. That's all that's left, really.

If the final stage of human civilization is uninterrupted lifelong AI-supervised dopamine maximization, then I hope there's a ruthless paperclip maximizer out there somewhere that will put us out of our misery. Better clippy than wirehead.

I can't empathise with this at all. I would rather see everyone happy (even in less that dignified circumstances) than dead. Obviously neither of these are my preferred outcomes.

It's not something I can recognize as happiness. Maximum dopamine at all times is like a black and white photograph that's all white - useless.

I don't disagree, but why do you think so?

Aesthetic preference. I find the idea of a wirehead more disgusting than the idea of human extinction (which seems inevitable anyways, given a long enough time frame.).

*Everyone except me. I refuse to wirehead on principle. My Skinner box must be painted and well decorated to distract me.

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