Access is a illusion. Or, really, what I mean is: access, filtered through social media, is an illusion. In 2016, no one understood better than Timothy Stokely, who launched a subscription site for adults called Onlyfans that summer. He knew that access – the sale of it and what buyers thought it opened – could be quite lucrative.
I interviewed Stokely in 2019. His history was in Camming with a sweet heart; He ran, with a slight success, the Customs4u and Glamworkship sites. But Stokely wanted the only fans to be different. He thought that if he could bring people to buy in the promise of the platform, he could bear to earn a lot of money. At the time, he explained his utopian vision to me in frank terms. “The way Uber has enabled anyone to monetize his own car, Onlyfans allows anyone to monetize his own content and follow,” he said. “Influencers are the new celebrities.”
Like the generation of technological industrialists before him, Stokely was motivated by questions of volume, ambition and impact. What is the one size of fans?
Almost a decade later, we have an answer: really big.
The impact is More than numbersOf course. The central influence of only fans is perhaps better measured by what it has moved culturally. This is one of the platforms that has changed, in part, how we think of social media. What only fans reaffirmed, more than anything, was an increasingly built and dependent culture of the Fandom.
Onlyfans sold “access”. He made users in the middle of the dwarf in influencers. This suspended the micro-family and easy silver carrot. Like Clockwork, many people – millions per month – have embarked on the illusion.
“What suppliers sell largely is not sex mechanics but an authentic connection,” explains Kurt Fowler, assistant professor at Penn State Abington and author of The rise in digital sex work. “The idea of ensuring that customers feel unique and special have always been part of the equation.”
Photographer: Yana Van Nuffel; Model: Nassia Matsa @nassia_
In the United States, We like to say that American culture is the culture of celebrities. And, of course, part of that East TRUE. We are renowned fucking. But, really, what American society is built more than everything is the culture of fans. The Fandom infects everything we do.
