Doomscroll: Aella

Welcome to Doomscroll. My guest is Aella and episode #26 is out today. We explore the emergence of AI, transhumanism and the sex industry (online and offline).

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This week, my guest is Aella, a writer, blogger and sex worker. You may know her from her outrageous survey’s on X.com or her many viral posts. She writes the highly popular blog Knowingless. She is a member of the Rationalist online community LessWrong. We discuss:

• The overlap of niche online politics and sexual fetishes. Today’s media environment has allowed fringe politics to flourish, but it seems unlikely that you can “deradicalize” someone from liking feet.

• The early days of online debate culture, from New Atheism to the Woke Wars. Towards the end of this episode, we discuss the many rifts happening within these factions today.

• Eugenics, gene modification, and morphological freedom. The ethics around embryo selection open up new possibilities for a transhumanist future.

• Aella’s deeply religious upbringing, her job working in a factory and how she learned to navigate the secular world. We discuss the conflict between gov regulation and freedom of expression within the sex industry.

In 2021, Aella published an infamous survey that mapped sexual fetishes to various coordinates of the Political Compass. Since that time, I have followed her work closely. Aella is undisputedly one of the greatest posters in the history of social media. (To this day, she holds the record for the #1 ranked post on r/gonewild, a subreddit of over 5 million users.) No history of 2020’s internet culture will be complete without several of her posts from X, Substack and more.

In the past few years, it has become clear that among certain techno-libertarian circles there are people who privately hold far right ideals. In some cases, they will use the rhetoric of free speech and property rights to conceal their true beliefs. (We discuss this topic further in this week’s bonus episode.)

Aella is a truly curious individual who engages sincerely and earnestly. So earnestly that it at times took me by surprise. The following conversation is a lot of fun and it has since become one of my favorite episodes.

There is literally no one better suited to debate the liberty and self-ownership of AI robot girlfriends. This episode accomplishes much of what I’d like to do with the show. If you enjoy this style, I encourage you to leave on a comment on the YouTube video today. This helps the show reach a new audience and lets me know how people feel about this format that falls a bit outside our more familiar commentary zone. You can watch the full video here:

Aella: Sex and Ideology in the 21st Century | Doomscroll

On this week’s bonus episode, Aella and I discuss the psychological and social origins of sexual fetishes, the dark side of internet pornography, and we bring clarity to the online debates around race and IQ. Due to TOS, some of these topics can’t be included on the YouTube episode. Other topics are better kept off of public channels. After social media, mainstream institutions no longer have a monopoly on political narratives. But as political actors, we can make better decisions about how to navigate the current discourse.

Doomscroll: Aella II

If you’ve made it all the way down here, you should probably become a paid subscriber. Honestly, where else are you going to get this line up:

Doomscroll: Francis Fukuyama II

Doomscroll: Hasan Piker II

Doomscroll: Catherine Liu 2 II

Doomscroll: Jen Pan II