The Tragedy of Nick and Aella
When must we block them?
Nick Decker is a bright young man, an economics PhD student at George Mason University. He’s also self-admittedly autistic, and this much is obvious from his writing. As of late he's gotten himself tangled up in a whole grand tawdry affair.
Like many autistic people, Nick Decker has difficulty seeing the subtext in what people say. Of course, a focus on the textual is not necessarily a bad thing. For some applications it’s actually quite optimal. Autistic people thrive in many different fields. In the case of Nick Decker, it may well give him an idiosyncratic advantage in his arena of political philosophy. It also makes him vulnerable to a certain breed of bad-faith interaction.
Nick writes a blog called Homo Economicus, which he just recently started. He’s clearly well read, and his essays engage at the technical or broader philosophical level, putting aside cultural and emotional baggage. He's astute and prolific, and in my mind has all the necessary makings of a respectable future philosopher.
Unfortunately, Nick Decker is also online, and is subject to a number of perverse incentives that have clearly been very, very bad for him. He blew up in April on X and Substack with an essay called “When Must We Kill Them?” and it's not hard to see why. The piece is a short, punchy, impassioned argument that there is a point at which the administration may become tyrannical enough that it’s moral to take up arms and engage in bloodshed to stop them.
On the literal and philosophical level, this line of thinking is very much in the tradition of American identity. It's why we have the Second Amendment. Thomas Jefferson would surely agree. On the subtextual level, though, raising this question at all is inherently harmful to social cohesion. It expands the Overton window into a place where the egregore of revolutionary violence is given dangerous strength. The essay itself is imbued with a potent psychic damage.
I don’t think Nick Decker is trying to actively foment armed revolution in the United States with his essay. I think, if a neurotypical person had written what he wrote, there would be a pretty clear argument that this person secretly lusts for rebellion. Nick Decker, though, is probably just earnestly evaluating what he sees as a potential difficult situation political philosophy might need to address in the near future. He's operating on the textual level. He's calling it as he sees it.
Nick’s essay blew up because people both loved and hated it. Love and hate look pretty much the same to the engagement algorithm. They look like attention, and the algorithm loves when something gets attention. The Secret Service was called. Salon covered the whole thing. Nick Decker was famous.
It’s a very brutal, difficult thing to become famous at a young age. Just ask any movie star who was denied a normal young adulthood. Most of them never got to experience college in the regular way, if at all. Something irrecoverable is lost.
The thing about traditional kinds of fame, though, is there are gatekeepers. You have a manager and agent exercising good judgment, or at least running some sort of distributed consensus system for choosing what to do next.
If you’re a breakout musician and you have a terrible, drug-addled concept for your sophomore album, someone’s going to stop you from releasing it, at least in ideal circumstances. There’s no such thing with internet fame. It's you and your keyboard. It’s woefully easy to get addicted to attention, and that is exactly what seems to have happened to Nick.
In the aftermath of his blow-up essay, Nick continued to be himself. But, very subtly, the internet was training and grooming him. His reasonable takes fell flat, and his bad ones caught fire, and in his own social blindness he could not tell good attention from bad. He started posting more and more ludicrous opinions, chasing the high of engagement into depraved zoophilia and beyond as he doubled down on public intellectual embarrassment.
Most tragically, there was no one to pull him back from the edge. Quite the opposite, everyone was egging him on. He became an object of derision, a fool for the public’s enjoyment, a Kanye posting through it with an obvious mental illness ripe for exploitation. He became a lolcow.
Lolcows are products of an earlier, crueler interest. They are people deluded enough to keep posting and posting despite horrific mockery, allowing them to be ‘milked’ for lols. We may all have degrees and careers now, but make no mistake. That sociopathic bent of the online mob still lurks.
If we think of the zoophilia diatribe as Nick’s sophomore fifteen minutes, his second claim to fame, it’s easy to see the unique tragedy created by Substack and X. In an academic environment, his paper on resisting tyranny might have gotten top marks from his professor, but it certainly wouldn’t have catapulted him to the upper echelons of fame on the campus quad. If he had tried to follow it up with a long essay about why we should have sex with animals, his professor or the dean or any number of people would have steered him back to better sense. On social media, though, it’s the exact opposite. The bigger a fool of himself he’s making, the more people love it—and, amid it all, there are wolves.
One such wolf is Aella. Aella has been around for a very long time. She was raised in an extremely conservative religious family and has now made a career for herself as a high-end philosophy-themed influencer prostitute, purportedly charging the men of the tech world as much as $4,000 an hour for her services.
Aella, like Nick, is also autistic, but she has no innocence to speak of. Quite the opposite. She has built a huge and deliberate marketing machine designed to funnel people into her client base of johns. Some parts of this machine are particularly unsavory, like the use of other subordinate women in a way that makes her seem like a madam at the least, if not worse. Other parts are more innocuous and even delightful, like her commitment to quirky amateur statistics work and camping retreats and pop sexology.
The through line in every Aella stunt is controversy, envelope-pushing, and rage bait. She brags about not taking showers. She tries to act repulsive while also playing the smol bean. She is deliberately divisive, courting outrage and sympathy in turn. She puts on this whole enormous discourse-driving act to funnel people into her fan base and ultimately into her appointment book. It seems to work.
I’m not going to psychoanalyze Aella here. I won't guess as to whether she's gleeful or tortured or honest or a sociopathic liar. I’m also not here to condemn prostitution itself. What is clear, though, is that there is at least a part of Aella that is a wolf, that is opportunistic, that consumes. She actively looks for valuable individuals and tries to figure out how she can use them to advance her personal brand.
Usually, these people are other woman prostitutes, but in the case of Nick Decker she decided he was just such a mark. In the aftermath of the Trump-killing essay, Aella publicly floated the idea of offering orgies as rewards for ‘good tweets,’ with Nick in her sights. The idea was out there. The stage was set.
It’s impossible for us to know what occurred in private. Maybe there was actual sex, maybe not. That's not the point. But some weeks later, young Nick again made a huge splash with a third and even more degrading fifteen minutes of fame. He had posted an image of himself with Aella, the butt of the joke, the fodder of the internet and the lolcow of X. What good could this possibly do for his career?
For Aella, the advantage is obvious. This is just another in her long line of marketing stunts. For Nick, the benefit is less clear. It evokes a Mayli-esque indiscretion that's hard to come back from. If he didn't know better, one can imagine Aella did. But Aella probably doesn't really care what happens to one Nick Decker of George Mason University, if he gets a professorship, if he gets a job. To Aella, it's just another stunt funneling onlookers into her DMs. Her job is done. She's gotten her engagement.
If we’re trying to be optimistic, we can hope perhaps that Nick, like Aella, is a wolf. Perhaps he’s aware of just how much mockery and derision he’s receiving for all this, how much he’s making a fool of himself, and that it’s all calculated for some inscrutable higher purpose. I really don’t think that’s the case though. He doesn't seem to want to be a clown or shock jock. His public vacillations and constant changes in temperament suggest that he, like all of us at that age, is still at the very beginning of figuring it out.
Most of us had the privilege of doing that ‘figuring out’ somewhat in private. Our embarrassing early sexual missteps are kept for the most part as secrets with our partners. Most of us, however, did not have X as a sadistic parasocial advisor or Aella as an older and much more famous wolf.
My main concern in all this, and why I call it a tragedy, is that there is massive potential in someone like Nick Decker that I worry, in the eyes of the public, will be smothered in the cradle from all these distasteful stunts. One could say he is in an abusive relationship with the algorithm, being trained through likes and engagement to become a more and more absurd version of himself, minimizing the reasonable parts and emphasizing the most deranged ones with no mentor to guide him in a respectable direction. He is closer to Chris Chan than Voltaire right now, and I don’t think he knows it.
It’s possible he could pull out of this, somehow even thrive with the compromised persona he has created. Stranger things are possible, stranger things have happened, and it’s true that we are in a more debasement-tolerant and decadent age than before. Still, I feel like I understand Nick. I was once a college-aged man myself, armed like most with foolishness and dreams of public notoriety. I thank God there was no Aella in my life to embarrass me in front of the world.
Tearing down the gatekeepers of fame has its advantages. In the most positive sense, it’s democratizing. It also creates an information environment where the cruelty of the mob can exist unfettered, rubbing elbows with the credulous and naïve. I would love to see an online intellectual ecosystem develop that allows people to become public figures as exemplars of human reason, not purveyors of norm-shredding rage bait and cringe. Nick Decker’s past three months, though, seem to me to embody the latter.