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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.
Anyone consistently taking home 30k over a weekend should feel ZERO need to advertise that fact, trebly so if they're in a dubiously legal occupation. They should not want to invite competition, especially from potentially more attractive ladies.
Likewise, such a person would probably not want the attention this could bring to her clients, both for competitive reasons and for their own confidentiality. Its more accepted to do this kind of disclosure either anonymously or as a post-retirement memoir, no?
Conclusion: maybe ONE guy paid her 30k, ONCE, and maybe for some particularly lurid scenario or there were some other expenses involved or whatever. She's using that to set her price negotiations with any future Johns aggressively in her favor.
I'm skeptical of taking MUCH from this about the larger escort scene in SF, although I'm willing to believe, given the gender ratios (to say nothing of sexualities) I've heard predominate out there that any cishet guy with decent Testosterone and hundreds of thousands/millions of tech dollars in his pocket would try to find an outlet.
This article is likely an ad. Not even heavily disguised I'd say.
There's a valid read on this from the AI/Economic Anxiety perspective though, yes. Tech bros are an ascendant class purely on the backs of very new wealth and the appearance that they'll 'own' the future (maybe not literally) on current trajectories, so their status is likely to keep on rising if they don't get unceremoniously displaced by their own product.
And so the two broad sectors of Western economies that are 'thriving' are anything that directly caters to wealthy boomers (or not-so-wealthy, given how much the government spends on them too), or anything that is closely related to AI development. (Finance is doing fine too, but that's not so interesting).
The up-and-coming generation would not be wrong to notice they can trade in significant amounts of dignity and personal autonomy to siphon some of the wealth those particular beneficiaries without having to actually break through into such classes. But 10-15 years of doing so just for a shot at getting enough financial independence to never have to degrade yourself again is kind of bleak to contemplate from this side of it.
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