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.<\/p>\n
Anand Giridharadas writes in the New York Times<\/a>: <\/p>\n 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: \u201cIf you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.\u201d Epstein\u2019s correspondents come alive far from home, freed from obligations, in the air, ready to connect.<\/p>\n 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n But the whereabouts missive is just the first flush of connection. Motion is the flirtation; actual information, the consummation.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s it. You bring what financiers call \u201cedge\u201d \u2014 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\u2019s news.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t or won\u2019t 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…<\/p>\n 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 \u201clife among the lucrative and louche\u201d; 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 \u2014 money into prestige, prestige into fun, fun into intel, intel into money.<\/p>\n For this modern elite, seeming smart is what inheriting land used to be: a guarantor of opened doors. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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\u2019s the common root that lets both step outside ordinary constraints.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the simple through-line: when people don\u2019t feel bound by family, place, community expectations or shared norms, they can enter worlds where the usual guardrails don\u2019t exist. The worlds differ in prestige but run on the same fuel.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll break this into a few clean points.<\/p>\n I. Weak ties free you from shame II. Both live in social worlds where consequences don\u2019t stick III. Both rely on horizontal solidarity instead of rooted loyalties In both worlds, your identity is defined more by \u201cpeople like me\u201d than by family or place.<\/p>\n IV. Both flourish in anonymous, liquid cities like LA V. Both depend on constant motion VI. Both worlds encourage moral compartmentalization Among elites: If you feel no downward obligation to ordinary people, it becomes easy to rationalize anything.<\/p>\n VII. Both treat relationships as transactional VIII. Rootlessness is the soil in which extreme choices grow The world becomes a playground because nothing roots you.<\/p>\n You saw it interviewing performers. IX. The common diagnosis Rootlessness makes anything thinkable. The difference is simple: The piece shows three things with real clarity: why Trump rose, why populism has teeth, and how elite status games fuel both. Mobility is status Information is court currency Indifference is the glue Consequences are for other people IV. The deeper lesson: populism is a rebuke to elite detachment 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 … Continue reading
\nShame is social. It only works if you feel accountable to people who matter to you.
\nIn 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 \u201cI can\u2019t do this to my parents, my siblings, my community.\u201d
\nRootless 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 \u201ccommunity\u201d is a global class of fellow nomads, local shame loses its sting.<\/p>\n
\nPorn performers operate in a stigma economy. Once you cross the line, the normal world won\u2019t take you back. So you double down. You drift into a peer network that normal people can\u2019t enter, and that peer network becomes your only anchor.
\nElites 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.
\nBoth systems reward internal loyalty and shrug off external consequences.<\/p>\n
\nPorn people survive through peer networks: agents, performers, directors, fans. They build a micro-society that functions on shared marginalization and mutual need.
\nElites, as Giridharadas notes, operate through a \u201cborderless network\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\nLA rewards the unrooted.
\nIn 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.
\nElites 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?
\nCities allow both groups to behave without the drag of inherited expectations.<\/p>\n
\nPorn performers survive by perpetual availability: scenes, conventions, collabs, travel shoots. Your status is tied to being in circulation.
\nElites treat mobility as proof of importance. \u201cJust landed. Boarding soon. In transit to Dubai.\u201d It\u2019s the pheromone of their class.
\nMotion means you never have to sit still long enough to face what you did. That\u2019s the secret shared by both.<\/p>\n
\nIn porn:
\nYou split your life into on-camera and off-camera.
\nYou learn to ignore the long-term effects.
\nYou stay focused on the immediate need for money, validation, adrenaline.<\/p>\n
\nYou split your life into public virtue and private indulgence.
\nYou learn to ignore the fallout of your decisions.
\nYou move from Obama\u2019s West Wing to Goldman Sachs to Epstein\u2019s private list without blinking.<\/p>\n
\nPorn is built on short-term collaborations. Intimacy is faked, then forgotten.
\nElite 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\u2019t provide edge, the relationship decays.<\/p>\n
\nMost people don\u2019t make drastic life choices because they fear disappointing the people who care about them.
\nPeople with weak bonds don\u2019t face that constraint.
\nThat doesn\u2019t mean they are bad. It means they are unprotected. Without ties, your risk calculus becomes strange. You\u2019ll do porn. You\u2019ll join a cult. You\u2019ll chase Epstein\u2019s jet-set world. You\u2019ll jump from administration to bank to private island.<\/p>\n
\nGiridharadas saw it in the emails.
\nTwo sides of the same coin.<\/p>\n
\nPorn performers and rootless elites aren\u2019t comparable in power. But they are comparable in the structure of their lives.
\nBoth 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.<\/p>\n
\nWith elites it leads to moral drift.
\nWith performers it leads to vulnerability.<\/p>\n
\nPorn stars break themselves.
\nElites break societies.<\/p>\n
\nI. Why Trump rose
\nThe emails make one thing obvious. Trump didn\u2019t 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\u2019t looking out for them.
\nThey 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 \u201cnone\u201d when asked what team someone was on.
\nPopulism 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\u2019t evil. It was self-sealed. That\u2019s all populism needs.
\nII. Why populism has staying power
\nPopulism 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.
\nWhen voters see this, they don\u2019t need a conspiracy theory. They need only an emotional charge:
\nThey\u2019re not thinking about us.
\nTrump harnessed that. He slapped a crude name onto an accurate feeling. He styled himself as the man who disrupted the \u201cEpstein class\u201d even though he moved within it. His genius was sensing what the public sensed. He didn\u2019t need to be clean. He needed to be angry in the right direction.
\nPopulism lasts because elites still haven\u2019t adjusted. They keep operating in closed networks, assuming people won\u2019t notice. But the public sees the indifference in every detail.
\nIII. How elite status games really work
\nThe emails show a class running on symbols of mobility, insider information, and mutual absolution. The currency is not money alone. It\u2019s edge. It\u2019s access. It\u2019s being needed.
\nA few patterns stand out.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cJust landed.\u201d
\n\u201cHeading to Davos.\u201d
\n\u201cSwinging through New York.\u201d
\nMovement signals that you\u2019re important enough not to be anchored anywhere. Among elites, rootedness is a mark of smallness. That\u2019s the deepest insult Theresa May accidentally captured. \u201cCitizen of nowhere.\u201d In this world, being from somewhere signals constraint.<\/p>\n
\nElites trade in little bits of private intel. A rumor. A draft regulation. A conversation at a dinner. It\u2019s the modern equivalent of aristocrats trading court gossip.
\nThis is how the network polices membership. If you don\u2019t bring edge, you don\u2019t belong.<\/p>\n
\nThe 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.
\nIdeology is a costume.
\nThe network is the real tribe.<\/p>\n
\nOne reason Trump\u2019s 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.
\nVoters eventually realized this.
\nIf everyone at the top gets infinite second chances, why shouldn\u2019t they give Trump infinite second chances? Ironically, elite norms protected Trump.<\/p>\n
\nWhen the public says \u201cthe system is rigged,\u201d they\u2019re 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.
\nPopulism 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.
\nThat\u2019s the emotional engine of modern populism:
\nIf the game is rigged for them, burn the game.
\nV. Why the elite still don\u2019t understand it
\nElites think populism is about ignorance or conspiracy thinking. In reality, it\u2019s about recognition. People feel ignored, bypassed, talked over, priced out, and morally judged by a class that treats them as scenery.
\nWhat the emails show is that the elite\u2019s core sin isn\u2019t decadence or cruelty. It\u2019s indifference.
\nAnd Trump is the payoff for that.
\nThe irony is sharp:
\nThe same elite networks that enabled Epstein, soothed Summers, promoted Bannon, and shaped two administrations created the vacuum that Trump walked into.
\nThe emails are a case study in why populism isn\u2019t going away. It has a real target. And that target keeps behaving the same way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"