Brendan Koerner has a long, storied career reporting on stories and characters who feel almost too vivid to be true. For his latest at Wired, though, he turns that formula inside out—and becomes one of the army of hidden support workers who assume the identity of an OnlyFans creator in order to maintain chats with paying subscribers. Hilarious and deeply depressing in nearly equal measure, but never without the empathy that Koerner brings to all his work.
I found it quite easy at first to write the sort of run-of-the-mill smut the Serbs expected. (I’ll spare you the gory details, except to say I cribbed some color from Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 sci-fi film Strange Days.) For the less explicit chats, I imagined Miko offering to cook the subscriber a pasta dinner and feigning appreciation for his TV recommendations. I did make one glaring error that could have led to an entire chat being voided as unusable: Due to my hasty misreading of Miko’s bio, I characterized her as a fan of spicy ramen when she actually prefers her food mild. “I have to ask you to pay attention to these little facts,” Daniel wrote in his assessment. “In this case, these lines mentioning the food could have been rejected, and that could have led to the dialog’s rejection.”
But despite that mistake and a few other hiccups—my punctuation seemed unnatural because it was too accurate—Daniel offered me the job. I was to be paid 7 cents per line of dialog, with each dialog running for a minimum of 40 lines. For my first assignment, I had to compose 20 dialogs involving sex in public places—10 at the beach, five inside a car, and five in a forest or garden. There was a list of particular sex acts I had to include, as well as a stricture that I refrain from using emoji in more than 30 percent of lines. I had only 48 hours to complete the task.
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