The above-linked YouTube video went viral shortly after its publication. It features an interview of an OnlyFans Manager conducted by Soft White Underbelly. If you haven’t seen it already, then I highly suggest viewing it.

The virality of this particular interview can be explained, I submit, primarily by two things:

1. Online dating discourse is extremely popular, as a consequence of the difficulties that young people are apparently experiencing today in courtship. Young people rightly sense there are structural, sociological, and historical forces (besides personal adequacies) which at least partly explain their difficulties. Hence, anything which appears to offer insight into the inside baseball of, say, OnlyFans modelling tends to pique interest.
2. The interview is palpably disturbing. In the age of True Crime and resurgence of Satanic Panic, dark online content that does not require sleuthing around the dark-web, blue-light districts, or occult clubs and organizations is like catnip; such content strips away the isolation and mundanity of average contemporary life and reveals to us how, indeed, there are still corners pregnant with happening. What makes the interview dark, according to viewer comments, is how the interview subject is conscious of how, according to him, most OnlyFans models have “mental health issues” and subscribers are “unfathomably lonely”. The interview subject is, in other words, a conscious and willing participant in exploiting vulnerable people: lonely, isolated men and desultory, depressed women.

It is the second point above which I intend to treat in this blog post. The psychology of the interviewee as a whole, however, is not what concerns me here; rather, what intersts me is a subtle theme which emerged many times throughout the interview yet, from reading user comments, appears to evade register by most viewers. Specifically, the interview subject’s stated intention to save as much money as necessary to extricate his family from the modern no-place, which I shall define later, and relocate somewhere “wholesome”.

I submit it is not merely the interview subject’s witting participation in exploitation of vulnerable people that is disturbing but his open acknowledgement there exists (and will always exist) places, akin to national parks, untouched by forces antagonistic to ritual, tradition, and eros – that is, human society. Like the Industrial Era which saw the destruction and displacement of ancient forests and wildlife, resulting in the establishment of national parks under the auspices of federal agencies, our period may someday be regarded as perversely antagonistic to human life in ways not seen before. Unlike the Industrial Era, however, it seems certain corners of our planet are informally becoming enclaves not for wildlife but rather wholesome society, reminiscent of so-called “Blue Zones” but from the perspective of ritual, tradition, and eros rather than age and physical health.

The Wilderness

In local legend, the wilderness of Spotsylvania, Virginia – a roughly twelve mile tract of dense forest colloquially referred to as “The Wilderness” – is said to have been one of the last remaining forests in Virginia during the mid-nineteenth century. The open, rolling hills of nearby Warrenton, Virginia, verdant but deceptively bare, are a testament to this period. What are now equestrian grounds and breathtaking views for passersby along Route 15 was once a forest stretching to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Whether or not the legend of The Wilderness is factually true matters less than what it intends to communicate. Legends and myths do not exist to be audited but rather to canonize shared human experience. The legend of The Wilderness does not literally claim that every last tree was cut down across Virginia, except for The Wilderness; rather, it preserves the sensation of deforestation and loss – the landscape littered with tree stumps and sawdust, whereby The Wilderness stood tall still.

Conservation efforts in the United States, beginning in the late nineteenth century, arose from a similar recognition: that deforestation imperiled not only habitats but human communities. New York City today maintains roughly 1.7K parks, many of them reclaimed from former tenements or squatter settlements. Central Park itself, before its creation, displaced shantytowns and Seneca Village. Where Virginians from the Piedmont region carry the legend of The Wilderness as a story of nature’s loss, New Yorkers recall the human costs embedded in their parks — daily existence crowded, precarious, and stripped of dignity. Both stories preserve a memory of dispossession — one of nature, the other of community, the two arguably interchangeable. It seems like no coincidence, albeit difficult to describe in exact terms, that economic protections (e.g. labor protections, housing reform, etc) for human beings arose alongside natural protections.

Places and No-Places

The characteristically liberal rhetoric that once rationalized deforestation never vanished; it merely transmogrified in order to meet new markets. Greed and conquest do not die; they are only slowed by legislation or sovereign exception. By the time natural conservation arrived, countless trees, animals, and landscapes had already been butchered. At one point it seemed the whole United States of America might be stripped bare.

If ritual, tradition, and eros are, as I have argued, the natural habitat of human beings, then we must ask whether anything can be done to protect them from today’s equivalent forms and forces of deforestation: the competition for attention, the exploitation of emotional vulnerability, and the profitable cultivation of isolation, among other forces.

Just as early industrialists reserved pockets of untouched beauty for their own exclusive indulgence, today’s elites carve out enclaves — Martha’s Vineyard, Georgetown, Jackson Hole, Hawaii (increasingly), and others — where society is preserved. Access to these enclaves is prohibitively expensive. Even for those who service these enclaves as employees and managers. Inside these sanctuaries, families are shielded from the egregore their industries export. Outside, the rest of us are pressured ceaselessly to indulge. We produce the pressure ourselves much of the time in a form of auto-exploitation. Although, within my social millieu, I have observed a growing tide of anti-social media sentiment, thankfully.

The divide is stark: a shrinking class of producers of the digital medium, and a swelling population altogether ensnared by it. Even the most intimate human encounters — a first date, for instance — typically require a corporate interloper or mediator (a dating application), wrapped in the rhetoric of safety, options, unparalleled access, and boundaries.

Thus there emerge places and no-places, as surely as The Wilderness once stood amid stumps and sawdust. A few enclaves preserve the conditions of human life; around them spreads a barren, boundariless terrain of attention markets, emotional exploitation, artificial “intelligence”, and parasocial consolation — the sawdust of society.

The Last Place

The interview subject is engaged in the modern equivalent of what early industrialists once did: plotting his escape from the conditions he has profited by creating. So long as there remains some place untouched, he believes, all is well. The no-place — the exploited terrain left behind — can go to hell. According to him, today’s issues are simply too complicated and fraught to be fixed. Might as well make a buck on the way down. In this sense, he is nothing new. He is like a strange new breed of colonialist.

More telling still is the silence that surrounded this confession. The interviewer let it pass without challenge or comment. I have yet to find any viewer who remarked on it in the comments. Perhaps they did not notice. Or perhaps they did — but envied him. Who among them, given the chance, would not also exploit their fellow man if it promised an eventual exit into a refuge, a place? What happens when there are no places left? And why are so many of us apt to point out there are still trees meanwhile whole forests disappear?

The answers to those questions, I suspect, are what actually makes this interview so disturbing.