The difference is that, unlike craigslist, OnlyFans takes a massive 20% cut of all revenue. For comparison, Patreon takes a little more than 5%. Purely from a labor perspective, that’s outrageous, so I do think that it’s fair to demand that they at least do more to justify it, which ought to include protecting the people that actually do the work.

There’s also what’s to me the bigger problem: OnlyFans obviously didn’t invent online sex work, but it did radically reshape it. They are responsible for mainstreaming this patreon-style, girl-next-door porn actress that people expect to interact with on a parasocial level. Those are features that OnlyFans purposefully put in to maximize their own profit, but they seem particularly ripe for the kind of nauseating small-scale abuse that the article discusses in depth. Suddenly, if an abusive partner wants to trap and control someone, there’s a mainstream, streamlined path to making that profitable. Again, OnlyFans didn’t create that, in the same way that Uber didn’t create paying some random person with a car for a ride to the airport, but they did reshape it, systematize it, mainstream it, and profit handsomely off it. Craigslist was just a place to put classifieds, but OnlyFans is a platform that governs every detail of these relationships between creators and fans, down to the font of their DMs. If the way that they’ve built the platform makes this kind of abuse easier, that’s a huge problem.

I agree with you that this article doesn’t do a good job articulating any of this, though.

Same, and thanks! We’re probably a similar age. My own political awakening was occupy, and I got interested in theory as I participated in more and more protest movements that just sorta fizzled.

I 100% agree re:Twitter. I am so tired of people pointing out that it has lost 80% of its value or whatever. Once you have a few billion, there’s nothing that more money can do to your material circumstances. Don’t get me wrong, Musk is a dumbass, but, in this specific case, I actually think that he came out on top. That says more about what you can do with infinite money than anything about his tactical genius, because it doesn’t exactly take the biggest brain to decide that you should buy something that seems important.

I actually also reviewed that one, except my review of it was extremely favorable. I’m so glad that you read it and I’d welcome your thoughts on my very friendly amendment to his analysis if you end up reading that post.

Very well could be. At this point, I’m so suspicious of all these reports. It feels like trying to figure out what’s happening inside a company while relying only on their ads and PR communications: The only thing that I do know for sure is that everyone involved wants more money and is full of shit.

US Leads World in Credulous Reports of ‘Lagging Behind’ Russia. The American military, its allies, and the various think-tanks it funds, either directly or indirectly, generate these reports to justify forever increasing the military budget.

It’s not a solution, but as a mitigation, I’m trying to push the idea of an internet right of way into the public consciousness. Here’s the thesis statement from my write-up:

I propose that if a company wants to grow by allowing open access to its services to the public, then that access should create a legal right of way. Any features that were open to users cannot then be closed off so long as the company remains operational. We need an Internet Rights of Way Act, which enforces digital footpaths. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to create little paths into their sites, only to delete them, forcing guests to pay if they wish to maintain access to the networks that they built, the posts that they wrote, or whatever else it is that they were doing there.

As I explain in the link, rights of way already exist for the physical world, so it’s easily explained to even the less technically inclined, and give us a useful lef framework for how they should work.