What happens to people’s morality when tech doesn’t have any.
LEFT TO RIGHT — VELAZQUEZ, Diego: Excerpt from “Pope Innocent X”, circa 1650 © Galleria Doria-Pamphilj; BACON, Francis: Excerpt from “Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953” © Des Moines Art Center
The Water Trade
In an awesome piece of Wired investigative journalism, Brendan Koerner breaks down the mathematical improbability of each of the ~2.1M OnlyFans “content creators” responding personally to ~190M subscribers DM’s whilst exposing the third-world exploitation of a low paid ($1–2 per hour) global workforce masquerading as the content creators whose job it is to cajole the “ballers” to spend big and to ignore the “brokies”.
While the West may have a superficial morality problem with this that means such matters get swept up under the rug, in the East the Japanese have a word for this kind of content, they call it the “Water Trade”.
Trading in things and emotions that are not permanent, experiences that run like water through one’s hands; as is the output of a platform that is selling a product that is perhaps to ~190M people entertaining, illicit and ephemeral.
With the emergence of OnlyFans, is it simply the case that creators and “ballers” and “brokies” are fixing a market price on the “water”, and the OnlyFans platform owner Fenix International Limited are taxing the flow of water at a rate of 20%, earning revenues of $4.8B+ (in 2021) in the process? Is it simply the case that they are justifiably trafficking digital experiences of this impermanent nature?
An inauthentic and watery self
Without spelling it out, we all know what the OnlyFans content is. When YouTube altered the algorithm to reflect corporate morality because it cut into their ad revenue, they penalised not only adult content but also content related to misinformation, weapons and all sorts of “advertiser unfriendly” stuff. Irrespective of that, there are creators who tread the algorithms line and use that as the entree to their OnlyFans or Patreon channels, with the promise of abnormally high earnings.
Is the I as a content creator who is imprinting data permanently to the platform the I of ten years from now? Of course not. Are the digital images I am committing to the platform in a storage sense, a digitally permanent sense, are they a permanent record of who the authentic content creator is? Again, highly unlikely to not be the case. And, are the experiences I am consuming from the content creator defining of my authentic self, or is it all just fluff and a dopamine rush?
Any way you look at it, the content creators would probably not consider themselves pornographers. And any way you look at it, the consumers, facilitated by the platform, would likely not see themselves as purveyors of smut. In their “regular” lives, both platform participants in all probability, go about their everyday tasks being law-abiding people with some sense of right and wrong.
Is what has happened here a form of digital entrapment? With motive and opportunity, large cohorts of people have seen the chance to make a buck or engage in voyeurism “at a distance” — anonymously and discretely, through the platform. And is this in some substantial manner the same as Facebook or Instagram?
When we look onto other people’s lives through the invisible digital curtain are they representing their authentic self? Maybe, maybe not. Are the observers being authentic when they thumbs up or positively comment? We may seethe with jealousy but that “negative” emotion is frowned upon so do we have a blancmange of inauthentic content intermixed with inauthentic responses? Could anyone actually say that what Mr. Beast produces is remotely authentic? And who said it needs to be? [1]
Motive and opportunity
Assuming then no participant is authentically engaging within the OnlyFans platform, I believe this paves the way for what could be considered a digitally facilitated amoral experience.
Here the platform has created the motive and opportunity for a curating experiences where creators can:
assert the right to take the money from their acts-as-image (not acts-as-me);reserve the right to dupe the ballers out of their coin without this being considered duplicitous;accept accolades as a top earner irrespective of the acts; andreserve the right to wear the mask, to hide behind the invisible curtain, to not attach authentic acts to me, since they are but “digital water”, not of me, just puff and smoke.
While through this digital platform creators have justifiably turned their “water into wine” due to the economics of supply and demand for remote observers for my content; what has also happened is that they have used the platform economics to abrogate responsibility for any harm (economic, psychological or otherwise) because the digital experience happens at a distance, behind the platforms digital curtain [2].
Without the digital platform participants would be in physical proximity and the morality or otherwise of the situation at least would occur in the same room. This digital platform has created the unusual situation of putting the moral and the amoral into seperate rooms, a compartmentalising of morals, where nothing committed to the platform actually impinges upon the creators morality because it is not-of-them; where the participants observations occur in silence, and indeed the acts-as-image becomes laudatory where the relation between the valuable monetary gain and the consequences are so loose as to be invisible.
A distant morality
The more monetarily motivated of us can see this simply as skewed income distribution curve resulting from a zero sum game happening in a place where morality is weak and money becomes the imperative, much like a game or Monopoly. Except with real money and real consequences to the hapless “fools” who traded their own wine for water.
But the ephemeral digital flux joining the ballers and brokies to the content creators is more than just money. Excepting any judgement of what the acts-as-image are, it is also the distancing of any moral imperative, from both cohorts, or any responsibility towards each other due to the mediation of the digital platform.
It therefore seems to me that a technological experience has been put to the purpose of legitimising setting morals at a distance, setting morals aside, cloaked behind a curtain, and this is potentially a bad thing for all of us.
It is a bad thing because exactly the same moral distance seems to be applied to AI “solutions” and automated warfare. It is a bad thing because the essence of a progressive society is to support each other, not just stereotype anonymous personas as ballers and brokies. It is a bad thing because a purpose of a progressive society should be to design out zero sum games; and in this light this specific use of this digital platform has, again, surfaced the worst of us.
And there it is, in our face, literally.
Footnotes
[1] In rare cases personality dissociation may occur, but I hope that most of the participants are holding the duality together. [2] And I am legally not liable for any harm because of the user terms and conditions.OnlyFans and the “distant morality” was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
