I think this is the most dystopian thing I have read recently.
It’s a judgment of Mr Justice Saini, a High Court judge, concerning an application for an interim injunction in a Commercial Court dispute between two providers of CRM (customer relations management) services, one of whom wants to stop the other from luring away its customers.
So far, so normal. Bread and butter commercial litigation. So why do I describe the judgment as dystopian?
The reason is that the CRM providers in question serve what the judge describes as a “specialised and niche market”, namely, the people whom the judge carefully describes as “content providers sometimes called OnlyFans "models" or "performers" in the papers before me”, and in order to explain the issues in the case, the judge has to explain, in great detail, precisely how OnlyFans works. It’s not a happy story.
I’m sure you have no idea what OnlyFans is, so I will have to explain, but I do not think I can improve on the introduction that the judge gives in paragraphs [21]-[22] of the judgment:
“OnlyFans is a subscription-based social media platform where creators share exclusive content (photos, videos, live streams), and use built-in messaging tools to have conversations with "fans". While used by some others in the entertainment world, OnlyFans is predominantly known for adult content, and serves as a direct income source for creators in the modern so-called "creator economy". Creators/models charge fans for their interaction/services in a number of different ways and OnlyFans generally takes 20% of the charges.
Creators set their own subscription price for fans, usually between about US$5.00 and US$50.00 per month. For pay-per-view content, creators charge a one-off fee for access to particular content and tips are sent by fans in amounts of their choosing. Creators are responsible for generating income on the platform by producing content that attracts and retains subscribers. OnlyFans does not itself create content. One can gain an idea of the scale of the enterprise from some figures in the evidence before me. In its most recent (2024) accounts, OnlyFans reported gross payments from fans of approximately US$ 7.22 billion (across hundreds of millions of registered users and several million creators worldwide) and pre-tax profits of US$ 683.6 million. Earnings for individual creators vary, but an article published by the Claimant in the evidence before me identifies a number of "middle ground" content creators who earn around US$ 3,000.00-5,000.00 per month, and higher earners making in the region of US$ 20,000.00 per month.”
Such is life, you may say, but it gets worse.
As the judge explains in paragraph [23]: “In order to keep fans engaged, successful content creators maintain personalised dialogues ("chats") with each fan. Messaging lies at the heart of the OnlyFans model and the evidence shows that the overwhelming majority of creator revenue is generated through this "direct messaging" and chats between fans and content creators.” Then the kicker: “As I describe below, the messaging is not in fact (in the case of successful creators) undertaken by them but by "chatters" employed by agencies.”
To my mind, it is the existence of these “chatters” that introduces the truly dystopian element to this (already rather depressing) world. What the CRM companies do is enable teams of people to pretend to be models and to “chat” to them. Back to Saini J: “These are people employed by the agencies to interact with thousands of fans on behalf of the creators, in sometimes an intimate and personal way. The fan believes that these are one-to-one chats, and they are having a personal dialogue with the creator. Fans may well believe that they are chatting to a model in real time but in fact an agency-employed chatter will be interacting with the fan on the pretence that they are the model.”
I think it’s worth considering the industrial scale of this “chatting”. The customers for the CRM software are agencies who manage multiple models. One example is given by the judge, Typa: “Typa manages 50 creators and each one has between 2,000 and 300,000 fans. So, it manages the interactions the creators are having with over 1 million fans on OnlyFans. Typa employs a number of chatters as well as copywriters. … Typa uses a team of five chatters working in shifts to provide 24/7 coverage, supervised by a quality control manager. … This structure is important because it allows Typa to maintain consistent engagement with the substantial fan base.”
All of that means that the really valuable information in this business (and what the companies are fighting about) is what it takes to allow these employed “chatters” successfully to keep up the pretence that “fans” are talking to “models”. This information comes in the form of “scripts”, i.e., the kinds of things that models might say, and “fan notes”, i.e., information about the fans that can be used to make it seem as if they are being remembered and valued.
I’m sure you can imagine how depressing the details of these “scripts” and “fan notes” are, but the judge does not spare us the details and neither will I.
For examples of scripts, he gives “"Hey Ryan, I saw you liked my gym pics yesterday. Want the full video tonight? If you say yes, I'll send for £25”, accompanied by the note “Use it only when: mentions gym pics”; and “Hey Brian, I saw you liked my bath video yesterday. want the full video tonight?...” with the note “Use it only when: replied 'I'm okay' and hasn't bought in 7 days.”
As for fan notes, well, I’ll just quote and let you use your own judgment as to what is going on: “… information which the agency has recorded and logged about Brian, in the course of the dialogue – he is from the Bay Area, California; 40 years old; single; lives with parents; etc. Another example of Fan Notes record that 'Bruno' is a veteran of the Navy SEALS, a jiu jitsu black belt, and that he is from Brazil with Italian parents.”
The judge explains how the fan notes get updated with a further example: “a change has been made to update David's salary to $2,000 USD per month, that he tips between $50-$100 and he get paid wages between 15th-17th.” As the judge coolly comments, “Fan Notes of this type are intended to enable a chatter to extract maximum financial benefits when they interact with David.”
What is the most depressing thing here?
- Is it the sheer scale of the vast transfers of money from men sitting around in their pants (or less) to women posing in their knickers (or less)?
- Is it the fact that those men think they are talking to women but are in fact talking to (I assume) men in India or the Philippines?
- Is it the bland corporate-speak employed: "To provide this consistent service at scale, they rely on CRM tools which allow for Scripts to be subject to layered controls and quality assurance ... 24/7 coverage, supervised by a quality control manager ... consistent engagement ... financial benefits ..."?
- Or it is just the little glimpses into people’s lives: Brian, who honestly tells a “chatter” that he is a single 40 year-old who lives with his parents, or Bruno who bigs himself up with his jiu jitsu black belt and Navy SEALS experience (seriously?), or David, who is circled by vultures waiting to pounce on payday?
I don’t know. I only know that something, somewhere, has gone badly wrong. Like a cuckoo exploiting the natural nurturing instincts of a bird, these businesses have successfully hacked the natural reproductive instincts of mankind.
On the whole, I think the saddest thing is that the real money – the “overwhelming majority of creator revenue”, as the judge put it – is not to be found in simply selling naughty photos, but in the “chatting”. Taking money in exchange for pornography is an old business and a fundamentally honest one: the customer gets what he pays for. But taking money in exchange for a pretended human connection? That’s dystopian.
