I’ve interviewed hundreds of porn stars and the main thing that struck me was their lack of ties. if they were bonded to family or place, they wouldn’t do porn, I think. How are porn stars and the rootless elite alike? They both depend upon moving without friction through anonymous worlds.
Anand Giridharadas writes in the New York Times:
Their loyalty, it appears, is less downward to people and communities than horizontal to fellow members of their borderless network. Back in 2016, Theresa May, then the prime minister of Britain, seemed to capture their essence: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” Epstein’s correspondents come alive far from home, freed from obligations, in the air, ready to connect.
And the payoff can be real. Maintain, as Mr. Epstein did, a grandmother-like radar of what a thousand people are doing tomorrow and where, and you can introduce a correspondent needing a lending partner to someone you’re seeing today. Or let Ehud Barak know a Rothschild has the flu. Or offer someone else a jet ride back to New York and reward the journalist who tipped you off by setting him up to meet a Saudi royal.
But the whereabouts missive is just the first flush of connection. Motion is the flirtation; actual information, the consummation.
How did Mr. Epstein manage to pull so many strangers close? The emails reveal a barter economy of nonpublic information that was a big draw. This is not a world where you bring a bottle of wine to dinner and that’s it. You bring what financiers call “edge” — proprietary insight, inside information, a unique takeaway from a conference, a counterintuitive prediction about A.I., a snippet of conversation with a lawmaker, a foretaste of tomorrow’s news.
What the Epstein class understands is that the more accessible information becomes, the more precious nonpublic information is. The more everybody insta-broadcasts opinions, the dearer is the closely held take. The emails are a private, bilateral social media for people who can’t or won’t post: an archipelago of single subscriber Substacks. And in the need to maintain relevance by offering edge, a reader detects thirst and swagger, desperateness and swanning…
Nomadic bat signals get things going, and edge keeps them flowing, while underneath a deeper exchange is at work. The smart need money; the rich want to seem smart; the staid seek adjacency to what Mr. Summers called “life among the lucrative and louche”; and Mr. Epstein needed to wash his name using blue-chip people who could be forgiving about infractions against the less powerful. Each has some form of capital and seeks to trade. The business is laundering capital — money into prestige, prestige into fun, fun into intel, intel into money.
For this modern elite, seeming smart is what inheriting land used to be: a guarantor of opened doors.
If you were an alien landing on Earth and the first thing you saw was the Epstein emails, you could gauge status by spelling, grammar, punctuation. Usage is inversely related to power in this network. The earnest scientists and scholars type neatly. The wealthy and powerful reply tersely, with misspellings, erratic spacing, stray commas.
The status games belie a truth, though: These people are on the same team. On air, they might clash. They tout opposite policies. Some in the network profess anguish over what others in the network are doing. But the emails depict a group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that decides things. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the network wins.
ChatGPT says: Porn performers and rootless elites look like opposite social types. One is on the bottom of the status hierarchy. The other sits at its top. But they share a deeper structural trait: detachment from stable ties. That’s the common root that lets both step outside ordinary constraints.
Here’s the simple through-line: when people don’t feel bound by family, place, community expectations or shared norms, they can enter worlds where the usual guardrails don’t exist. The worlds differ in prestige but run on the same fuel.
I’ll break this into a few clean points.
I. Weak ties free you from shame
Shame is social. It only works if you feel accountable to people who matter to you.
In porn, most performers come from fractured families or childhoods where nobody was monitoring them closely. That lack of tether removes the internal voice that says “I can’t do this to my parents, my siblings, my community.”
Rootless elites have the same immunity, but it comes from mobility and insulation rather than trauma. When you can always fly to Zurich tomorrow, and your real “community” is a global class of fellow nomads, local shame loses its sting.
II. Both live in social worlds where consequences don’t stick
Porn performers operate in a stigma economy. Once you cross the line, the normal world won’t take you back. So you double down. You drift into a peer network that normal people can’t enter, and that peer network becomes your only anchor.
Elites do the same but in reverse. Their network absorbs the fallout. Get caught in a scandal, you go quiet for a year, then resurface at Davos. Get embroiled with Epstein, you circle back through Harvard or a sovereign wealth fund.
Both systems reward internal loyalty and shrug off external consequences.
III. Both rely on horizontal solidarity instead of rooted loyalties
Porn people survive through peer networks: agents, performers, directors, fans. They build a micro-society that functions on shared marginalization and mutual need.
Elites, as Giridharadas notes, operate through a “borderless network” that travels from New York to Davos to Aspen to Dubai. Their loyalty is sideways to peers, not downward to citizens or upward to any moral authority.
In both worlds, your identity is defined more by “people like me” than by family or place.
IV. Both flourish in anonymous, liquid cities like LA
LA rewards the unrooted.
In porn, anonymity is oxygen. You can reinvent yourself. You can disappear into the churn of a city with millions of strangers. Nobody from your hometown sees you walk into Vivid or Kink or a model house in the Valley.
Elites use cities in the same way. New York, LA, London. Airports. Conferences. Hotel lobbies. The email dump captured that manic, geography-free existence: Where are you today? Can you meet before wheels up?
Cities allow both groups to behave without the drag of inherited expectations.
V. Both depend on constant motion
Porn performers survive by perpetual availability: scenes, conventions, collabs, travel shoots. Your status is tied to being in circulation.
Elites treat mobility as proof of importance. “Just landed. Boarding soon. In transit to Dubai.” It’s the pheromone of their class.
Motion means you never have to sit still long enough to face what you did. That’s the secret shared by both.
VI. Both worlds encourage moral compartmentalization
In porn:
You split your life into on-camera and off-camera.
You learn to ignore the long-term effects.
You stay focused on the immediate need for money, validation, adrenaline.
Among elites:
You split your life into public virtue and private indulgence.
You learn to ignore the fallout of your decisions.
You move from Obama’s West Wing to Goldman Sachs to Epstein’s private list without blinking.
If you feel no downward obligation to ordinary people, it becomes easy to rationalize anything.
VII. Both treat relationships as transactional
Porn is built on short-term collaborations. Intimacy is faked, then forgotten.
Elite networks operate the same way. Connections are edge. Edge is tradeable. What can I get from you today? Who can you introduce me to? The minute you can’t provide edge, the relationship decays.
VIII. Rootlessness is the soil in which extreme choices grow
Most people don’t make drastic life choices because they fear disappointing the people who care about them.
People with weak bonds don’t face that constraint.
That doesn’t mean they are bad. It means they are unprotected. Without ties, your risk calculus becomes strange. You’ll do porn. You’ll join a cult. You’ll chase Epstein’s jet-set world. You’ll jump from administration to bank to private island.
The world becomes a playground because nothing roots you.
You saw it interviewing performers.
Giridharadas saw it in the emails.
Two sides of the same coin.
IX. The common diagnosis
Porn performers and rootless elites aren’t comparable in power. But they are comparable in the structure of their lives.
Both live outside normal guardrails because they lack what most people depend on: thick ties, grounded expectations, a sense that their choices reflect back on people they love.
Rootlessness makes anything thinkable.
With elites it leads to moral drift.
With performers it leads to vulnerability.
The difference is simple:
Porn stars break themselves.
Elites break societies.
The piece shows three things with real clarity: why Trump rose, why populism has teeth, and how elite status games fuel both.
I. Why Trump rose
The emails make one thing obvious. Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. He rose out of a vacuum created by an elite class that insulated itself from ordinary life. The message voters absorbed was simple. The people running America weren’t looking out for them.
They saw the indifference. They saw the revolving doors. They saw Goldman lawyers, Obama staffers, professors, bankers, philanthropists and media people all talking to Epstein as if he were a harmless eccentric. They saw “none” when asked what team someone was on.
Populism needs only one spark. The sense that the powerful live in their own world, with their own rules. The article shows that this intuition is accurate. The elite class wasn’t evil. It was self-sealed. That’s all populism needs.
II. Why populism has staying power
Populism thrives on perceived betrayal. The article demonstrates that the people at the top operate horizontally, not downward. Loyalty flows across the global network, never down to citizens.
When voters see this, they don’t need a conspiracy theory. They need only an emotional charge:
They’re not thinking about us.
Trump harnessed that. He slapped a crude name onto an accurate feeling. He styled himself as the man who disrupted the “Epstein class” even though he moved within it. His genius was sensing what the public sensed. He didn’t need to be clean. He needed to be angry in the right direction.
Populism lasts because elites still haven’t adjusted. They keep operating in closed networks, assuming people won’t notice. But the public sees the indifference in every detail.
III. How elite status games really work
The emails show a class running on symbols of mobility, insider information, and mutual absolution. The currency is not money alone. It’s edge. It’s access. It’s being needed.
A few patterns stand out.
Mobility is status
“Just landed.”
“Heading to Davos.”
“Swinging through New York.”
Movement signals that you’re important enough not to be anchored anywhere. Among elites, rootedness is a mark of smallness. That’s the deepest insult Theresa May accidentally captured. “Citizen of nowhere.” In this world, being from somewhere signals constraint.
Information is court currency
Elites trade in little bits of private intel. A rumor. A draft regulation. A conversation at a dinner. It’s the modern equivalent of aristocrats trading court gossip.
This is how the network polices membership. If you don’t bring edge, you don’t belong.
Indifference is the glue
The emails show people who can work with anyone. Trump evangelists. Obama lawyers. Billionaires. Activists. Scientists. People with opposite views treat each other as peers because the real loyalty is horizontal across class.
Ideology is a costume.
The network is the real tribe.
Consequences are for other people
One reason Trump’s scandals never broke him is that elites themselves live in a scandal-tolerant ecosystem. They rehabilitate each other. They hedge their alliances. They forgive infractions as long as someone remains useful.
Voters eventually realized this.
If everyone at the top gets infinite second chances, why shouldn’t they give Trump infinite second chances? Ironically, elite norms protected Trump.
IV. The deeper lesson: populism is a rebuke to elite detachment
When the public says “the system is rigged,” they’re not wrong. The article shows a class with the power to glide between jobs, launder reputations, swap access, and protect each other from the fallout of decisions that harm millions.
Populism is what happens when a country sees that and has no other mechanism to restrain it. Trump offered the feeling of a middle finger to the Epstein class.
That’s the emotional engine of modern populism:
If the game is rigged for them, burn the game.
V. Why the elite still don’t understand it
Elites think populism is about ignorance or conspiracy thinking. In reality, it’s about recognition. People feel ignored, bypassed, talked over, priced out, and morally judged by a class that treats them as scenery.
What the emails show is that the elite’s core sin isn’t decadence or cruelty. It’s indifference.
And Trump is the payoff for that.
The irony is sharp:
The same elite networks that enabled Epstein, soothed Summers, promoted Bannon, and shaped two administrations created the vacuum that Trump walked into.
The emails are a case study in why populism isn’t going away. It has a real target. And that target keeps behaving the same way.
