Item — HN Reader

If one of America's main exports is culture, why would you ban factor inputs?

They're also not fungible and extremely mobile. People get attached to specific OF stars and the medium inherently requires remote work. So it's an inherently global labour force that protectionism won't help. American OF models won't magically make more money if you ban immigration unless you also ban cultural imports.

The government isn't displacing local talent by importing OF models and gets tax dollars for essentially doing nothing. Those tax dollars pay for schools/hospitals/etc.

OF also skews towards young, unmarried women, which balances the gender surplus of unmarried men that generally tries to immigrate. Since they're young, they also have more productivity before drawing on benefits like Medicare or Social Security.

By any objective standard OF models are the ideal migrant.

2 comments

This seems more like importing culture. These content creators aren't coming to work or American creators, they are coming to America to create their content for American audiences or using American resources.

...I get this is HN but come on. It is just modern day JasminCam for lonely men that are being exploited through parasocial relationships. It is the opposite of productive. You just have society feeding on itself.

> exploited

Isn’t that a derogatory stereotype? Aren’t those men (and women and other folks) as “exploited” as a reader of a book or a player of a game, who understands they’re about to be a part of a fantasy but willingly suspend the disbelief for a short while?

It’s only exploitation if this suspension of disbelief is artificially prolonged in nefarious way, with a self-reinforcing fantasy so the person loses touch with the reality and spends increasingly unhealthy amounts of time in a fantasy, or otherwise get conditioned and start to exhibit addiction-like behaviors that aren’t in their best long-term interests.

That happens (every entertainment industry has its whales), but saying it’s the norm (rather than a pathological extremity) is sort of stigmatizing.

It should be stigmatized.

Consent does not bless immoral acts or neutralize damage. A person who takes a drug voluntarily is still being harmed by it. It causes changes in the consumer whether he likes it or not. Causality does not care about your consent.

(And to address your analogy to books, the content of a work of fiction also matters. Reading bad books isn't good for your mind either. But literary fiction at least has the potential to be good. The genre isn't categorically bad.)

And porn is addictive. Porn addiction is extremely widespread and afflicts mostly young men. Porn's ubiquity and the easy with which it can be accessed has created a situation that did not exist before, and from a young age. And not only is it addictive, but it does real psychological damage to these consumers, creating what some call "porn brain". It is an excellent method for producing sexually-crippled creeps and incels unable - and even uninterested, given the nature of their "fantasy" - to have healthy relationships with real human beings, and the stats corroborate this.

It is an incredibly twisted and deranging vice. It destroys individuals and has a destructive impact on society as a whole.

> A person who takes a drug voluntarily is still being harmed by it. It causes changes in the consumer whether he likes it or not.

I’m afraid you’re oversimplifying it. If only things would be this simple. They just never are.

Every experience causes changes (it’s the whole point). And every stimulating experience has a potential to skew your behaviors towards having more of it. Some more, some less, of course, but anything can become a passion and get unhealthy so.

There’s this fine distinction between someone who does something now and then, without significant impairment to their decision-making abilities that cause over-favoring such actions, and those who fail to notice it in time and become overtly obsessed with something.

It’s not about what you do - you can be watching porn or going hiking (or whatever most people would naively deem “good”) - anything can become unhealthy.

I think I understand your point, though. Indeed, pornography consumption nature is intimate and that leaves less opportunities for feedback and self-introspection. That is, noticing the point it becomes more of an obsession. However, dismissing it under a simple “porn is bad” (a tempting idea) is short-sighted by dismissing any nuances, and also harmful - just in different ways (through stigmatization).

Parasocial relationships are inherently exploitive.

I am going to push back here. I follow a variety of YouTubers, and I'm pretty sure that I have a parasocial relationship with most of them. I never heard the term before I watched a Tom Scott video about it. It made perfect sense me, and I saw it in myself. Literally, sometimes I talk to the screen, like we're in the room together. But it's only entertainment, and it's a fun way to "escape" after a long day at the office. I don't take it too seriously. Am I being exploited by a channel of funny people in their 20/30s who fix cars, or lift weights, or talk about relationship problems? I don't think so.

Are all transactions on OF inherently a parasocial relationship? If a dude wants to jerk his schmeat to somebody he thinks is attractive, and pays for access to the media without otherwise engaging, is that parasocial?

You could do that for free. Most are obviously looking for more.

It kind of sounds like you are trying to justify whatever it is you are doing, in which case you do you. I don't actually care what you do and neither should you care what I think.

> You could do that for free. Most are obviously looking for more.

And everyone can use Pornhub for free, yet Pornhub still makes money on their premium subscriptions. Are those also parasocial relationships?

> It kind of sounds like you are trying to justify whatever it is you are doing, in which case you do you.

You know I thought about putting the obligatory "I don't use OF" in my first comment, but felt it wouldn't be necessary. I see that it was; by the way have you stopped beating your wife?

There is a reason why "the oldest profession" is a polite idiom for prostitution.

Calling it "parasocial", doesn't change what it is, but the technology as a mediator does. And society has been feeding on itself since we moved past hunter gatherers.

>There is a reason why "the oldest profession" is a polite idiom for prostitution.

The term only gained popularity at the start of the 1900s, it's a proto-meme

>It is just modern day JasminCam for lonely men that are being exploited through parasocial relationships. It is the opposite of productive.

You can make all the moral judgments you like, but the fact is: They're making money either way, and then spending that money in their local communities. They can spend that money (and pay taxes on it) in the US or not.

It's no different economically than a musician or an actor doing the same.

It was not a moral judgement.