Earlier this month, notorious looksmaxxer Clavicular hosted a speed-dating stream on Kick featuring Alice Rosenblum — a nineteen-year-old influencer purportedly earning half a million dollars per month on OnlyFans — that cast one of her top OF spenders as a suitor.

This was, however, more than just another clownish broadcast in the neverending scum-circus of the internet (though it was also that). This interaction, and others like it, offers a porthole into one of the most fascinating online cultural dynamics shaping our reality.

They sat across from each other, the abstracting layer of the internet removed. Alice was no longer just a young, nude body on the screen; the superfan was no longer a formless digital paypig.

She was a girl barely out of high school wearing some kind of one-piece lingerie bodysuit. He was a man with an extreme, lascivious infatuation with her naked body, one that he had paid an unbelievable amount of money to feed (on-stream claims ranged from $100k to $2m).

A wincingly uncomfortable interaction ensued, pointing to something important about the digital disconnect between creator and consumer inherent in online superfandom and certain “whale”-driven entertainment business models. This is a modern phenomenon which is increasingly severe in an era, as writer Ken Baumann put it, “whose centralizing economic product is addiction itself.”