The End Point Of Viral Content

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MrBeast Of OnlyFans

@alanachoofficial

We helped hurrican survivors @vvptoria @jenfoxxuwu

This video has blown up on multiple platforms this week, particularly X, where users seem to be really struggling with it psychologically. In the video, three young women go to Asheville, North Carolina, and buy tens of thousands of dollars worth of supplies for the victims of Hurricane Helene. And the reason the video is causing such a stir is that the three women in it are OnlyFans models.

The video was created by Alana Cho, who has a million followers on TikTok, half a million on Instagram, and another quarter million on X. And Cho has found a very interesting niche amid our current collision of porn and viral content. She’s positioning herself as the MrBeast of OnlyFans. She literally paid to fix someone’s eyesight last year. She also does fake podcasts. Though, hers are more skits than active bait like the ones I spotted last year. But more than any sort of statement about the mainstreaming of sex work, I think Cho’s virality actually tells a different story.

I’m sure most people are semi-familiar with the argument that pornography dictates technology. The theory goes like this: Every major technological shift has been determined, in some way, by how useful it is for making porn. VHS over Betamax, DVD over laser disk, the internet over, well, everything else, etc. And while your mileage may vary about how much credit you want to give porn and smut as the guiding hand of the future, I do think another one of those shifts is happening again now. Which is platform to creator.

In the mid-2010s, effectively one company, Mindgeek, monopolized almost all of the mainstream porn distributed online. They created and also bought up competing “tube” sites, along with a handful of the biggest surviving production companies. And, for the better part of the decade, pornography as an industry stagnated.

This is not dissimilar from what happened to other forms of digital media. Large tech companies like Meta and Google launched platforms meant to distribute user-generated content and then continued to tighten their distribution algorithmically until there was no real way to use them for referral traffic anymore. Ask any newsletter writer or podcaster. And just like with Meta and Google, so too has Mindgeek revealed that you simply cannot moderate platforms this big at a scale that matters. In 2020, Pornhub had to remove an estimated 10 million videos due to both copyright and also abuse material.

But sites like OnlyFans have begun to loosen Mindgeek’s stranglehold. “Normal” people — as in, anyone that feels like it — can open their camera app, take some photos or videos, put them behind a paywall, and make some money very quickly. And this breakdown between porn world and not-porn world is having strange side effects on culture. I don’t think it’s an accident that the majority of zoomer slang — glazing, bouncing on it, simp, gyatt — have some connection to the world of porn. And because it’s not just porn that’s going through this transition from top-down platform to bottom-up creator, it also means that a lot of viral content is beginning to feel a little porny. It’s all swirling together now.

OnlyFans doesn’t show public subscriber counts, but Cho has around five million likes on her page. Which, taken with the amount of money she’s spending on her public content, I think it’s reasonable to assume she’s converting a lot of users into paying customers. Which makes sense. On an internet without hyperlinks, where every post must be completely digestible in someone’s feed within microseconds of a user seeing it, your face, your physical body, is the last thing left that can connect across platforms. And creators like Cho have figured out that that’s one of the last reliable ways to keep their personas consistent across every platform they have to post on. It just so happens to turn out that the only impulse strong enough to still reliably motivate someone to figure out how to find your website is horniness.

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HOW IT WORKS

We’ve Got A Real Spooky Panic World For You This Week

Guys, I love all of my podcast guests equally, but I truly fanboyed while recording this episode. David Sims, film critic at The Atlantic and the “David” from my favorite podcast, Blank Check with Griffin & David, was nice enough to come on for a Halloween-themed episode all about The Blair Witch Project, the viral hoax that basically set the standard for viral stunts going forward.

You can listen to the episode here!

A Truly Cursed TikTok Account

@foodmake2022

Susan B 18 marshube swirl and 12 sugar I hope Susan returns someday.

Coach Walz Is Back

More than a few Garbage Day readers have emailed me over the last few weeks, feeling a little grumpy when I start to complain about the direction that the Harris/Walz campaign has gone in during the final weeks before the election. I have not been exactly thrilled with the campaign’s obsession with Republican outreach. Nor was I impressed with Gov. Tim Walz’s Mr. Nice Guy act at the vice presidential debate.

This isn’t because I don’t think it’s important to court the 100 guys in Pennsylvania that decide all of modern American politics or whatever. I just think an extremely crucial part of fully separating ourselves from the Trump era is firmly reminding American voters that being Hilter-idolizing fascists is, to put it lightly, weird. But, hey, if the Dems win in two weeks, I’ll shut up forever (I won’t).

Anyways, I was very happy to see Walz back in fiery form this week, calling Elon Musk a dipshit at a rally and implying Trump thinks JD Vance is an embarrassing loser. Even if Democrats don’t think this kind of thing moves the needle, it makes me feel good. And that’s what American elections are all about.

In other election-ish news, Tim Pool won’t be regularly hosting his horrible show Timcast anymore so he can focus on his “family,” even though he doesn’t appear to have one? Fascinating stuff. He also reiterated several times in the announcement that he’s not doing this because the show is doing bad financially. I’m sure the timing of this has nothing to do with the fact his paychecks allegedly from the Kremlin dried up.

The UK’s NHS Hears From The Public

The UK’s National Health Service launched a campaign crowdsourcing ideas from the British public about how they can improve their services and, luckily for us, they decided to post everyone’s suggestions on a public archive. Here’s a good thread of the best ones.

As the BBC points out, British people really can’t resist a Boaty McBoatface or “Killing In The Name Of” Christmas song opportunity and, at this point, that should probably be factored into any form of civic engagement.

Sonic Fans Are Mad About Bat Cleavage

Sonic fans are having a weird week. A new game, Sonic X Shadow Generations, dropped and it’s getting actually good reviews. Not “this is fine, but could be better,” but legitimately rave reviews. Which probably hasn’t happened with a Sonic game since the Dreamcast.

But, of course, Sonic fans are not exactly normal. And some are mad at a few changes that were made to some character designs in the new game. Specifically, Rouge the Bat.

Look, I’ve watched the video in this post several times and I cannot actually see a difference. But I’m also solidly in the camp of “the anthropomorphic bat in a kids’ game doesn’t need visible cleavage.”

Bernie Sanders Met A VTuber

“Bernie Sanders zoomed with a VTuber” is like the 21st century equivalent of that line that goes around that “there was a 22-year window in which a samurai could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln."

The VTuber in the video is named Sykkuno and he doesn’t always appear online with the avatar, but, as he explains in the video, he has a skin condition and decided to interview Sanders as a virtual cat boy. Sure, why not. It was part of a virtual event with streamer Pokimane and Hank Green. You can watch the whole thing here.

Moaning Nub

Some Stray Links

• “How elderly dementia patients are unwittingly fueling political campaigns”

• “Can A.I. Be Blamed for a Teen’s Suicide?”

• Nicole Shanahan allegedly tried to bribe Washington Post reporters into not investigating her

P.S. here’s a good post.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***