Economist Writing Every Day

First, read this story from the NYT about the biggest producer of content on OnlyFans. TLDR; a couple have a compound in Florida and a full stable of employees (writers, editors, accountants, cooks, etc.) all being coordinated around the gigabytes of data generated by the supply and demand of their sexy content. If they were selling in a less stigmatized market, whis would be taught as a case study at business schools.

What I found interesting is how it simultaneously validated and assuaged all my fears about the opportunity to emotionally manipulate large numbers of people by using highly granular data. Don’t get me wrong, that’s arguably the story of every information-deficient marketing campaign ever, but I’m not talking about coarse, subliminal manipulation (“Look at this fully self-actualized person drive a car that signals their worth to strangers and their father”). I mean direct, interpersonal maninipulation through the fabrication of intimate parasocial bonds. The ability to allow customers to create their own, bespoke, false narrative in which they have a relationship with a beautiful stranger. At scale.

It’s that list bit that matters. What this couple have deconstructed is a formula for producing intimate parasocial relationships worth thousands of dollars to customer at scale.

The exploitation of fabricated relationships for income is the story behind the worlds oldest profession, not to mention most scams, for a very long time. The ability to produce them at any real scale, however, has been far more elusive. When someone pulls it off they’ve usually created a cult, whether it’s a new religion or a political cult of personality, and it’s worth taking note of. So have these Onlyfans creators laid out the blue print for future politicians, social entrepreneurs, and general power seekers? Are we at the beginning of an industrial revolution for social movements?

Actually, I kind of think they do have a blue print, but it’s going to be a minute before it crosses the chasm to other sectors because most fields that rely on parasocial relationships to grow don’t have the luxury of immediate profitability that sex work does. You might start your social movement with the ambition of analyzing every bit of data so your stable of employees in your Smithian pin factory of communications and content can rapidly grow your follower base, but you’re not going to have any money to pay them. What people tend to forget about sex work industries is that they generate revenue from minute one (that’s exactly what lures people into making what have historically been less than optimal long term personal decisions). By comparison, religious and political aspirants are a bunch of broke boys.

Religion and politics look like they have a lot of money until you consider size of the customer base (most people) and the sectors they influence (nearly all of them).  $14 billion was spent on federal election campaigns in the United States in 2020, the most ever. That sounds like a lot until you realize that a) it’s 2 and 4 year cycles and b) the federal government spends $6 trillion per year. By comparison, $5.5 billion poured through just OnlyFans, just last year. (Do I even need to convince you that new religious and social movements are notoriously short on cash?)

The story of each stage of the internet is the same thing over and over: a group of people couldn’t benefit from scale before but now they can. Social minorities looking to date couldn’t find each other before, now they can. People buying and selling pez dispensors can’t find each other, now they can. People with extreme beliefs were socially ostracized now they can find and reaffirm each other. People selling content to niche audiences used to have to find their customers through large media companies now they can do it directly. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both had disproportionate impact on American politics in part because they leverage the internet to disintermediate their ostenisble political parties. That’s the internet bringing scale to parts of the American electorate previously too distant from the median voter.

Power and ambition be damned, however, aspirant leaders are still not going to be able to build what two people selling naughty pictures in Florida were able to do because most people don’t want to pay for politics. Just ask every newspaper in the country struggling to stay afloat. We’re entering a new age of scale in the fake relationships being sold to us, but it will only be for the kinds of relationships we actually want. That doesn’t mean those will be emotionally nutritious relationships, but choice will remain intact. Portfolios of relationships for a lot of people are going to change, but I suspect its going to look less like Evita Peron and Jim Jones, and a lot more like Taylor Swift and Frito Lay.

Marketing will become more granular, more personal, more intrusive, and more effective. If this fills you with anxiety, I hope you can take some solace knowing its mostly going to happen for the stuff you are willing to pay for, like love, family, and your sense of self-worth. Data-enabled relationship fabrication will grow in market share as artificial intelligence crowds out the classically information driven side of marketing. The uncanny of valley of cringe is a customer relations disaster, a trap whose lines are invisible and always moving. For AI to learn where the boundaries lie is to move them. Which means this decidedly human labor market will grow all the faster. And a blue print for selling naughty content from a Florida couple will find its way to selling you damn near everything else.