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PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   1823 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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An article is making the rounds on rat-adjacent twitter entitled "The Nerdy Escorts Cashing In On Silicon Valley’s AI Boom."

I can't bypass the paywall, but someone posted on X:

Five years ago, it was rare for escorts to charge more than $1K per hour. Now, a handful of women charge much, much more: $3k, $5k an hour. $23k a day. $30k a weekend. Inside the shifting economics of intimacy in Silicon Valley...

I know that aella, the famous rationalist whorelord, popularized this niche of pseudo-intellectual prostitutes appealing to rationalists and other tech nerds for extreme amounts of money. It's obvious that aella has become obscenely wealthy and gained a ton of social status from her pursuits, but I'm still somewhat shocked at the sheer amount these women are making.

I work a pretty boring, standard corporate marketing job, and apparently these prostitutes are taking home almost my entire after-tax yearly income in one weekend.

Even regardless of the moral aspect of the situation, the fact that a prostitute can make so much money is a huge slap in the face to people working hard for a living. That, combined with the fact that close to 18% of the economy is now in healthcare, has got me a bit depressed on the economy.

Also, Tyler Cowen had a bit of a viral moment yesterday saying he wouldn't be surprised if 15 to 20% of all jobs in the near future are elder care. This of course sandwiched in a talk where he insists AI is great and making jobs not losing them!

Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week. I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!

Either way, the optimism from the pundit class around AI and the economy is feeling more and more hollow to me by the day. If the numbers keep going up but everyone is employed wiping the asses of boomers and sexually pleasuring tech AI millionaires, have we really improved society? How will things go otherwise without some sort of relatively radical disruption? I try not to be a 'doomer' about AI, but I'm increasingly finding it hard to be optimistic on the impact of it on society.

Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week. I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!

I have known one of the women this article is describing. (I don't know if she's actually named in the article, I couldn't get past the paywall at my office. But she's aella's set, so the exact sort being described.)

You do not want the lives of these women. In one sense it's sexy to be a porn star or an escort, especially today when people pay you lots of money, you go to parties all over the world, the food is nice and the views are beautiful, etc. But it's not really worth it. As someone who's been blessed to travel a lot after enough of it the locations all blur together and the food is overrated anyways. (Nobody cooks as well as my mother, or my aunts for that matter. My father grilled a better steak than any I've ever had out.) What you're left with at the end of the day is yourself. Wherever you blow, there you are.

The woman I'm thinking of had a lot of problems. She had unnecessary plastic surgery and nose jobs to make herself more beautiful, when she was quite beautiful already. She fucked men for favors and started fights and then found herself without friends. She felt powerful being taken out by powerful and wealthy men who strung her along with fantasies of marriage or introductions that never came. And she didn't need the money because she came from money already. The people who knew her best talked of overwhelming loneliness. Whoever you know, there they are.

If you met her you would think she was beautiful and smart and funny and kind. Maybe this is cope, maybe it's straightforwardly good to be beautiful and wear beautiful clothes and eat beautiful things. Maybe I didn't really know her in any meaningful sense and it's rude to even profile her in the third person. I think she had a lot of fun having sex. I think she did a lot of nice things for a friend one time at some social expense to her own reputation.

I think she hated me because I was gay. I think she was the type of woman who loves exercising power over men, and there was nothing she could exercise over me. I think I saw a glimpse of something that made me feel profoundly sad. I think she would say that she doesn't think about me at all.

I think it all ended rather badly for everyone involved.

I've known lots of other successful and interesting people and I would say generally that the ones who are happiest are extremely productive or extremely devoted to their families.

Thinking some more, I've known some guys who do OnlyFans. One of them is a real sweetheart, pure soul, I have nothing bad to say about him. I think, though, if you wanted to fantasize about the life, at least with respect to professional sex, you would have to really, really enjoy having lots of sex with strangers.

Maybe we're underestimating how sexy sex work has yet to get. Maybe AI and social media have only just begun. Maybe it's like bitcoin when it was $100, and you think, this thing has peaked, we missed our chance, it's too late to buy in. And it still had a few orders of magnitude to go. Sex is after all the oldest profession. Porn stars are famous now, they have a lot of status, it might probably become even more popular. Laid-off email job guys are going to have more time to jerk off right? But I can't think of anybody who got into porn and aged out and is enthusiastically promoting how good it was and how they have no regrets about anything they did. Mostly the opposite.

Wherever you blow, there you are.

Nominating for AAQC solely on the strength of this line.

Reminds me of The Sun Also Rises.

“Hello, Robert,” I said. “Did you come in to cheer me up?”

“Would you like to go to South America, Jake?” he asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I never wanted to go. Too expensive. You can see all the South Americans you want in Paris anyway.”

“They’re not the real South Americans.”

“They look awfully real to me.”

I had a boat train to catch with a week’s mail stories, and only half of them written.

“Do you know any dirt?” I asked.

“No.”

“None of your exalted connections getting divorces?”

“No; listen, Jake. If I handled both our expenses, would you go to South America with me?”

“Why me?”

“You can talk Spanish. And it would be more fun with two of us.”

“No,” I said, “I like this town and I go to Spain in the summer-time.”

“All my life I’ve wanted to go on a trip like that,” Cohn said. He sat down. “I’ll be too old before I can ever do it.”

“Don’t be a fool,” I said. “You can go anywhere you want. You’ve got plenty of money.”

“I know. But I can’t get started.”

“Cheer up,” I said. “All countries look just like the moving pictures.”

But I felt sorry for him. He had it badly.

“I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”

“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.”

“I’m not interested in bull-fighters. That’s an abnormal life. I want to go back in the country in South America. We could have a great trip.”

“Did you ever think about going to British East Africa to shoot?”

“No, I wouldn’t like that.”

“I’d go there with you.”

“No; that doesn’t interest me.”

“That’s because you never read a book about it. Go on and read a book all full of love affairs with the beautiful shiny black princesses.”

“I want to go to South America.”

He had a hard, Jewish, stubborn streak.

“Come on down-stairs and have a drink.”

“Aren’t you working?”

“No,” I said. We went down the stairs to the café on the ground floor. I had discovered that was the best way to get rid of friends. Once you had a drink all you had to say was: “Well, I’ve got to get back and get off some cables,” and it was done. It is very important to discover graceful exits like that in the newspaper business, where it is such an important part of the ethics that you should never seem to be working. Anyway, we went down-stairs to the bar and had a whiskey and soda. Cohn looked at the bottles in bins around the wall. “This is a good place,” he said.

“There’s a lot of liquor,” I agreed.

“Listen, Jake,” he leaned forward on the bar. “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”

“Yes, every once in a while.”

“Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we’ll be dead?”

“What the hell, Robert,” I said. “What the hell.”

“I’m serious.”

“It’s one thing I don’t worry about,” I said.

“You ought to.”

“I’ve had plenty to worry about one time or other. I’m through worrying.”

“Well, I want to go to South America.”

“Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”

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