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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.
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.
I think that for the journalists in question it's self-evident that this isn't a great path to pursue. It's also self-evident that there's a certain class of people who will be willing to do sex work regardless of the social stigma, and if there's some poor sap willing to pay them thousands of dollars, well, good for them I guess. I'm reminded of a conversation I had over a decade ago with a college girl who worked for me while I was with the Boy Scouts. A couple years later she was still in college and still working summers while I had left but come back for a week to help with training. I was on a canoe trip with just her and who would have been her boss. Someone had told me a couple weeks prior that she was dancing at a local strip club that the more senior staff had visited together a time or two in prior years, and we were discussing trying to go there while she was working just to see how she'd react. It never ended up happening, but on this trip she confirmed that she was working there, though our plan wouldn't have worked because she only worked afternoons.
Anyway, she said that the woman who handled the strippers or whatever told her how she could make even more money, because of course she could. The going rate was less than my salary at the time, but a lot for a broke college student, especially considering that it wasn't a 9 to 5. I told her that if you wanted to be a prostitute you couldn't be too selective about whom you slept with, since she seemed to be under the delusion that her clientele would be the same 30s office workers who stopped by the club after work. I asked her if she'd be willing to sleep with the big boss at the time, who looked like a younger, thinner version of Dr. Phil, and she was appalled at the idea. She told me that she was assured that they wouldn't pressure her into anything she was uncomfortable with, etc., etc., but I tried to explain to her that while that may be true, the ones who were overly selective weren't the ones who made the kind of money she was quoting. I have no idea who she ended up sleeping with or how much money she actually made, just that she was eventually canned from the Boy Scouts after she requested time off to work her "other job" and what must have been the worst kept secret was made abundantly clear to management. Needless to say, I didn't expect to spend that day trying to talk someone out of becoming a prostitute.
That being said, I think that the same thing applies to all of these "professions" that promise a lot of money for what looks like not a lot of work, or at least the kind of work one thinks they'd find fun. A friend on mine who teaches high school in a rural area says half the kids think they have a future as influencers and YouTubers. I'd be surprised if a single student she teaches over the course of her career is able to do it for a living, even for a brief period. Most of the people who blew up on YouTube started making videos for their own personal edification without any intention of quitting their day jobs.
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