My relationship with the first-person voice gets a little deeper in the latest issue of Wired, which features my account of going full gonzo in the world of OnlyFans chat specialists. This is probably the most immersive assignment I’ve tackled since my 2010 foray into the culture and science of Alcoholics Anonymous; it also required a lot of emotionally harrowing (albeit darkly comic) reporting about an industry that traffics in the illusion of genuine affection.
The nutshell version of the story is that I got a job impersonating an OnlyFans creator, and thus spent much of my 2024 trying to convince subscribers that I’m a 21-year-old computer-science student who enjoys sushi, Pink Floyd, and masturbating outdoors. It was a bewildering experience at times, to say the least:
I had to wade into several prosaic fantasies about babysitters and office blowjobs, some of which included laughably florid professions of love for me. I couldn’t help but ponder how disappointed these men would be if they could somehow see me sitting in my home office, sipping hibiscus tea as I typed out commands for them to manipulate their genitalia or deposit their semen on certain parts of my body. The most surreal moment came as I noticed the faint sounds of my daughter and her puppy watching Bluey together down the hall, right as a subscriber was waxing poetic about how much he wanted to eat a macaron from between my ass cheeks; the juxtaposition made me question the entire course of my life.
Being something of a Type A weirdo, of course I wanted to be the best at chatting once I started. But as you’ll hopefully see in the piece, I didn’t have the killer instinct necessary to excel. I went in thinking that the job was literary in nature, but really it was all about sales—about establishing emotional connections for the sole purpose of pushing outrageously priced content. My reluctance to embrace that game is why I wouldn’t get far enough with the Glengarry leads.
(Incredible story art by Emily López)
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