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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:
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.
K-Shaped economy plus I'm surprised a lot of the twitter takes are of the 'these guys could get a 11/10 Russian who could suck a golf ball through a straw for cheaper' thing. Maybe I'm overly stereotyping but I'd imagine there's a lot of nerdy types who've been massive beneficiaries of tech money who'd prefer a 7.5/10 who can converse enthusiastically about rationalist stuff over Svetlana.
Hell, I'm not into escorts (I don't mind the act of selling sex I just find that I am totally turned off by the act of buying it) and I'd probably prefer the Aella escort experience to the Svetlana escort experience and those numbers are largely a rounding number at that end of the economy. Also signalling and weird findom/whale-flexing things with substantial rebates or negotiated lower prices are rife in these kinda things. Sophie Rain's purported numbers are baffling to me but the only real possible explanation I can think of would be some sort of whale flexoff.
One thing I’ve learned through history has been just how much sexual attitudes have been culturally conditioned. Napoleon made an observation once (I know I’m butchering it to some degree) about just how much beauty or sexual attraction is environmentally derived. I thought it was a foolish notion at the time but maybe he was onto something. In medieval Scandinavia, it wasn’t uncommon for a group of people to actively observe a newlywed couple having sex in the bridal chamber, right at their damn bedside, on the night of. Loose sexual mores among the women also weren’t considered shameful provided it was kept within the same genetic community and they weren’t racially exogamous. Homosexual butt sex was every bit as disgusting then as it is now. It wasn’t until Christianity spread through the region that modern notions of “privacy” became a thing to the region.
This makes a surprising amount of sense when you think about it. At its core, what a marriage is is a public announcement that these two specific people are having sex, and that the community is okay with it. There is no better representation of these values than for the community to literally watch the consummation of the marriage.
I understand the logic fully. My comment was more to the point about how Napoleon’s observation now seems startlingly correct, because my instincts revolt against that kind of sexual norm as a Catholic (that’s a cultural difference, which is to his point). The reason they often did that back then was because it constituted “proof,” as a way to cement relations between family clans and noble estates. It wasn’t just a tool of the societal elite though, it was more common than originally believed, but most documented cases focused on the upper crust of society. Often times they’d also station someone outside the room for the morning after, so when the clothing and linen was all collected, there were bloodstains of proof that the woman was a virgin when it happened. Nowadays though if someone propositioned me with something like that I’d tell them hell no.
This was all from Walter Darre’s book, particularly in the last couple chapters. Book had me scratching the back of my head throughout, but was certainly interesting.
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