“It started off fairly mild”
January 17, 2019 10:13 AM   Subscribe

“I was spending hours a day trying to get him to see other people’s views. But the more he would watch these videos, the more he reinforced his opinions. If I said something, he’d just send another video to ‘prove’ his point. He’d shut down conversations if I didn’t relent and agree with him. He wanted to debate things with me — but only up to a point. Eventually, he’d expect me to side with him.”
When YouTube Red-Pills The Love Of Your Life
posted by griphus (112 comments total) 38 users marked this as a favorite
 
After reading the article, I'd argue that it wasn't exactly the Red Pill, but instead there was something wrong or broken with this man all along. The YouTube videos merely provided a vocabulary, but he would have ended up behaving the same way anyway.

The Red Pill bullshit provides a vocabulary for a lot of men. On Facebook, I'm watching a former colleague, who is still quite young (under 25), gradually absorb Jordan Peterson talking points. He experiences depression, is unemployed and is socially isolated. (I'm making a note right now to reach out to him and see if he wants to go for a coffee).

I'd just like to know where this well of male rage comes from. I personally think it comes from a profound inability to make genuine connections with other people, including one's spouse or partner, and I think late adolescence is a critical time.

I myself was feeling pretty isolated around 18 or 19. The big change for me was attending university and getting exposed to a much larger circle of people. Instead of a military nerd (I was into camo) I became a indie pop nerd, and volunteered at the campus radio station (CFUV! The best!), which was transformative in so many ways.

But, as I said in another recent comment, I really hate how this Red Pill culture, a large part of which includes pseudo-scientific "evolutionary psychology", has some to dominate so much of our conversations today.
posted by JamesBay at 10:23 AM on January 17, 2019 [51 favorites]


Nor did Ellen pay much attention to Steven’s views when they first started dating in early 2017. At the time, she was a university student, and he was between jobs with aspirations to work in finance. “He was interested in conspiracy theories — the kind of thing that most guys are into[...]"

I always wonder whether there's not some kind of social circle aspect to this, because I do definitely recognize that there are social circles where "most guys" are into conspiracy theories, but it would be a bizarre, outlier interest everywhere I've ever spent time. Is it that there's social circles which rarely intersect, and in one type conspiracy theory hobbyism is the norm and in the other it isn't? Is it class-linked, where when you have less education and less control over the direction of your life, you're more vulnerable to conspiracy-mindedness because it is a comforting explanation?

I also wonder about the ability to manage boredom/entertain yourself - most of the people I've met who seem typical (that is, they don't start out with hateful views or habits and seek out matching online material) but get drawn into hate-filled online worlds (whether that's targeting people on facebook, hate groups or whatever) seem like people who don't have the inner resources to soothe or amuse themselves, and who are not capable of self-reflection, so they're constantly seeking intense, unmoored emotional stimulus online just because it takes them out of their own heads.

It frustrates me that women are expected to do so much work on this - women's loneliness, women's anger, women's exclusion don't matter but everyone has to spend so much time worrying about angry, lonely men. There is no way that Joe Straightguy would ever, ever spend a bunch of time and energy worrying about his girlfriend getting drawn into online hate groups and trying to love her out of it - he'd just dump her, or else he'd continue to use her for sex and cleaning while not caring.
posted by Frowner at 10:29 AM on January 17, 2019 [146 favorites]


James Bay: After reading the article, I'd argue that it wasn't exactly the Red Pill, but instead there was something wrong or broken with this man all along.

I disagree. Sometimes that may be true, but I don't see evidence of it in the article. Men like him (straight, white, likely some kind of Christian) in the current zeitgeist are desperate to feel righteous because suddenly they're not Default Human; they've been classified as just one more subsection of Everyone. It doesn't feel great, being Othered - especially because up until this point in history they're the only group of people never to have been Othered. What they'd been "promised," thanks to the usual suspects in current society, just isn't happening for them. Anger makes you feel righteous, and being surrounded by other angry, righteous men only confirms that righteousness.

There was nothing "wrong" with this guy. That's the scary part. That's the part I don't see society finding a solution for that doesn't involve a massive body count and then a Reckoning like the one Germany had with itself after WWII.
posted by tzikeh at 10:31 AM on January 17, 2019 [39 favorites]


For an ostensibly sympathetic article, that was pretty damn victim blamey? "Well, how much of this was actually the woman's fault, and just how sorry should we feel for her anyway?"
posted by Space Kitty at 10:35 AM on January 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


Given recent events, I continually wonder about the mysterious process by which peoples' opinions are formed and why it's often so hard to get people to change their minds or even entertain the validity of differing viewpoints, while at the same time certain ideas just take hold in their minds and instantly clamp themselves there forever like the face-hugger in Aliens.* In this case specifically, and many others generally, it seems like the face-hugging happens when they encounter an idea or opinion they already secretly held but now have intellectual and/or social "justification" for sharing openly, or things they were already inclined to believe and perhaps already did at some level of subconsciousness. Which is to say that I doubt that YouTube turned "Craig" into a racist, sexist asshole all by itself, it just provided the push he needed to go full Nazi. Also something something critical thinking skills media literacy.

* I want to note here that nobody, including myself, is completely immune to this sort of thing
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:36 AM on January 17, 2019 [18 favorites]


Also, on a more quotidian level...I'm at a loss to understand why millions of people apparently spend their precious free time endlessly devouring poorly-made YouTube videos that make them angry and unhappy. To paraphrase Roger Ebert, walk away from your computer and into the fresh air and look at the sky and buy an apple and do something good for our civilization, or at least yourself.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:41 AM on January 17, 2019 [33 favorites]


“He was interested in conspiracy theories — the kind of thing that most guys are into[...]"

yeah this is, uh. not a thing i know about or experience, i guess? like the kind of conspiracy theory any of the guys i know would be talking about is "how do my pets coordinate their plans to simultaneously distract me and snatch my sandwich" or "why am i unable to stop revealing my plans to buy more swords to my longsuffering wife".
posted by poffin boffin at 10:44 AM on January 17, 2019 [64 favorites]


A lot of people like this don't actually start out mega-sexist and mega-racist. But they do start out confused, overwhelmed, and out of touch with their emotions. Getting redpilled gives them an explanation for that confusion, and puts them in touch with their anger, fear, and doubt about the world around them.
posted by Jairus at 10:45 AM on January 17, 2019 [44 favorites]


Oooh, this is me and father, who's now retired and spends most of his time reading/watching things on the internet:
With few friends around him and Ellen at university, he spent the majority of his time online, learning how to trade foreign currency via obscure blogs and YouTube tutorials before wading into more political waters. “It started off fairly mild,” Ellen says, with a slight laugh. “He would WhatsApp me Jordan Peterson lectures about ‘social justice warriors’ on university campuses. Sometimes I’d just ignore them, or say that I didn’t agree with what they were saying. Eventually, he moved on to more extreme material. He would send me videos by Stefan Molyneux about the links between race and IQ, or how it was scientifically proven that Conservative women were more attractive and left-wing women like me were fat and ugly.”
We live on different continents so normally our communication is via email, which means it's been (somewhat) easy for me to just ignore a lot of the stuff he sends me. But when I visited over the holidays for the first time in years, it was really shocking to realize just how different we've become and that he expects me to think the same way -- laughing at SJW memes and agreeing with all things Jordan Peterson because *handwave* "science."

My dad is highly intelligent but we also think he must have some type of Asperger's (a fact he wields to excuse any of his behavior that isn't "socially acceptable"). I don't know how my mom handles it day-to-day (she's busy working and has craft-intensive hobbies, so that probably helps) -- I do my best but I've also had to put my foot down and insist that there are some subjects that he and I cannot discuss because we'll never agree and we'll just make each other angry. I feel like I do put a lot of effort in keeping the peace, though, just because, well, he's my father and I love him, and I only get to see him once or twice a year, and I'd like those visits to be as peaceful and focused on the good things as possible.

(He's also deeply offended that I'm a "feminist SJW" who has been "brainwashed" by the blogs/videos/news I read/watch -- thanks, metafilter! -- so I guess it goes both ways.)
posted by paisley sheep at 10:47 AM on January 17, 2019 [14 favorites]


I think Jairus expresses what I was trying to say far more succinctly.

In terms of conspiracy theories being "the kind of thing most guys are into", it's been my observation that whenever I talk about online memes and stuff that I, an Extremely Online person have encountered, there are many, many people that have no idea what I'm talking about.

The Internet is not real life, except in the case of the emotionally abused woman and others like her who is being profiled in this piece.
posted by JamesBay at 10:48 AM on January 17, 2019 [4 favorites]


Given recent events, I continually wonder about the mysterious process by which peoples' opinions are formed and why it's often so hard to get people to change their minds or even entertain the validity of differing viewpoints, while at the same time certain ideas just take hold in their minds and instantly clamp themselves there forever like the face-hugger in Aliens.*

I always figure that the facehugger ideas answer some deep and not always obvious need in the person, and answer it in a way that does not require them to do anything uncomfortable. The whole red pill bit is pretty obvious - your problems come from feminism, brown people and the fact that you are not the boss of everyone and everything, and you don't need to do anything except be violent to people. But someone else might hold tightly to a harmful or negative idea because it fulfills their "need" to feel the familiar feelings of being trapped and worthless.

And I really do think that a habit of introspection is an important defense against facehugger ideas - not a complete one, of course, but just understanding that your immediate response to things is not always correct and that your responses to things are not always rational is a great help in distancing yourself a bit from seductive ideas. A sense that you are a limited and partial being, rather than a being that can ever know everything and ever control itself totally.

It's really the ideas of mastery and rationality which render straight white men more than others vulnerable to this type of thinking - they're brought up to believe that they're rational, that if they know enough they can control everything, that there's one correct way to do things and you just need to lifehack yourself until you're there, etc. Literally everyone else understands, because they're constantly forced up against "straight white men are normal and rational and if you're not like them then you're irrational and abnormal", that the world is polyvocal and "rationality" isn't rational. Literally everyone else is brought up to know that "if you try hard enough, you can Bezos-Thiel-soylent-lifehack yourself into perfect rationality, total power and near immortality" is a lie, while straight white men are generally brought up to think that it's true and if they haven't done it, either they're failures or someone has done them wrong.
posted by Frowner at 10:50 AM on January 17, 2019 [76 favorites]


Wrt conspiracy theories specifically I think part of it is people correctly intuit that they are so powerless that the content of their beliefs about the world doesn't matter. They can think the Earth is flat or run by lizard people or whatever and it won't make much of a difference in their lives, this is empirically true.

I think it's human nature to believe whatever is instrumentally useful, and for a lot of people it's no longer useful to tether their beliefs back to reality. So it becomes whatever is entertaining or emotionally reassuring or lets you be part of a community.

Wrt hate groups, we should not forget that they've been consciously trying to recruit alienated young men in online spaces for a long time, and have apparently gotten pretty good at it. The article seems to treat it like some kind of natural disaster, but actually these groups have gone to great lengths to make material that appeals to guys like this and deliberately build pathways to make them more and more radical.
posted by vogon_poet at 10:50 AM on January 17, 2019 [25 favorites]


Youtube really is aggressively pushing this stuff. I watched one video of Noam Chomsky trash-talking Derrida, which turned out to be from some "rationalist" type channel with lots of videos raging against what the guy takes to be post-modernism, and I endured weeks of YT recommending Jordan Peterson type stuff at me.
posted by thelonius at 10:54 AM on January 17, 2019 [32 favorites]


I read a book on hypnosis that hypothesized that all human experience is hypnosis to some degree or other. It also made the claim that most people will simply believe or do whatever they're told. The book literally suggested just walking up to someone and suggesting they feel cold or hot or whatever. Hey, put your hand on your head. Now you're going to find it's glued there and you can't move it.

We're especially vulnerable to repeated, non-stop messaging. It will simply wear you down. There are a lot of brute force sales techniques based on this idea, whether it be infomercials or getting a free trip in exchange to listening to a sales pitch to buy a time-share. People are more vulnerable to these techniques than they think.

I don't have cable news, but I see it when I visit my Dad. Whether it's CNN or FOX the full on, no holds barred sales pitch I witness is always a jarring reminder of what most Americans experience as news. The TV is designed to put someone under a spell, and the news outlets today are like fire hoses aimed directly at viewers heads.
posted by xammerboy at 10:57 AM on January 17, 2019 [17 favorites]


The railing against "postmodernism", as if it were some sort of centrally controlled, formal movement is so bizarre and deeply ironic.
posted by JamesBay at 10:59 AM on January 17, 2019 [30 favorites]


Anger makes you feel righteous, and being surrounded by other angry, righteous men only confirms that righteousness.

Also there is a huge amount of cultural reinforcement for the idea that anger is the only or nearly the only emotion that men have, or need, to express.
posted by gauche at 10:59 AM on January 17, 2019 [42 favorites]


"It turns out she can't seem to escape them either."

She can. She just needs to get rid of her cookies like she got rid of her nasty ex.

Flippancy aside, seeing my dad get wrapped up in this shit is heartbreaking. He accused me of violating his first amendment rights when debating him, which is an intellectual step down for sure. Quoth Justin McElroy, "the first amendment protects you from the government not the justin."
posted by snerson at 11:01 AM on January 17, 2019 [10 favorites]


Jairus nearly summed it up: the people I know like this seem to have been looking for a reason which explains the problems in their lives which also avoids any need to change. The reason they’re not a Big Deal is definitely due to feminism, etc. and not unreasonable expectations or poor decisions.
posted by adamsc at 11:03 AM on January 17, 2019 [20 favorites]


The YouTube videos merely provided a vocabulary, but he would have ended up behaving the same way anyway.

I mean, but the way he's acting is almost exclusively the vocabulary. That's the thing about this. It's not just somebody saying "go thou and be a dick to women" and their followers all do it; the specific kind of manifestation we're talking about is tightly involved with this thing where they then go out and try to use the exact arguments they got on the internet on all these people they know in the real world. Not, frequently, new arguments synthesized from the ideas they got from Youtube, even. Just repeating the talking points. It's all kind of like a grosser version of Snow Crash, at this point.

I think this minimizes how different this sort of thing is from the kind of behavior I would have expected from an asshole boyfriend when I was in my early twenties. It's not just the bigotry they're getting this way; it's also this bizarre form of human interaction where they just shout the same things at people as "debate". Where they feel it's necessary to engage in that for a substantial portion of literally every day, including while those people are working? The anger has been normalized not just towards strangers in "other" groups, but also towards one's own family/friends/partner if they're insufficiently impressed with the thing you're sharing with them. It seems to me like this is a whole different sort of aggression that has cropped up using the same old bigoted ideas.
posted by Sequence at 11:08 AM on January 17, 2019 [21 favorites]


Maybe what we're talking about is radicalization, and radicalism appeals to a distinct sort of abusive personality compared to other abusive personalities, where there is less need to engage use convoluted verbal constructs.

In short, the Red Pill crowd likes to feel "smart".
posted by JamesBay at 11:14 AM on January 17, 2019 [11 favorites]


The Card Cheat: Given recent events, I continually wonder about the mysterious process by which peoples' opinions are formed and why it's often so hard to get people to change their minds or even entertain the validity of differing viewpoints, while at the same time certain ideas just take hold in their minds and instantly clamp themselves there forever like the face-hugger in Aliens.

There are books and studies on this very topic. I've drummed this link a number of times, but I'll repost again as it's relevant to the topic:

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds -- New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason. (Elizabeth Kolbert for The New Yorker, February 27, 2017 Issue)
In “Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us” (Oxford), Jack Gorman, a psychiatrist, and his daughter, Sara Gorman, a public-health specialist, probe the gap between what science tells us and what we tell ourselves. Their concern is with those persistent beliefs which are not just demonstrably false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that vaccines are hazardous. Of course, what’s hazardous is not being vaccinated; that’s why vaccines were created in the first place. “Immunization is one of the triumphs of modern medicine,” the Gormans note. But no matter how many scientific studies conclude that vaccines are safe, and that there’s no link between immunizations and autism, anti-vaxxers remain unmoved. (They can now count on their side—sort of—Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.)

The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. And they, too, dedicate many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological component. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” they observe.

The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they’d like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”
Italics original; bolded emphasis mine.

And then there's this ... trickery: How Political Opinions Change -- A clever experiment shows it's surprisingly easy to change someone’s political views, revealing how flexible we are (Philip Pärnamets and Jay Van Bavel for Scientific American, November 20, 2018)
A powerful shaping factor about our social and political worlds is how they are structured by group belonging and identities. For instance, researchers have found that moral and emotion messages on contentious political topics, such as gun-control and climate change, spread more rapidly within rather than between ideologically like-minded networks. This echo-chamber problem seems to be made worse by the algorithms of social media companies who send us increasingly extreme content to fit our political preferences.

We are also far more motivated to reason and argue to protect our own or our group’s views. Indeed, some researchers argue that our reasoning capabilities evolved to serve that very function. A recent study illustrates this very well: participants who were assigned to follow Twitter accounts that retweeted information containing opposing political views to their own with the hope of exposing them to new political views. But the exposure backfired—increased polarization in the participants. Simply tuning Republicans into MSNBC, or Democrats into Fox News, might only amplify conflict. What can we do to make people open their minds?

The trick, as strange as it may sound, is to make people believe the opposite opinion was their own to begin with.

The experiment relies on a phenomenon known as choice blindness. Choice blindness was discovered in 2005 by a team of Swedish researchers. They presented participants with two photos of faces and asked participants to choose the photo they thought was more attractive, and then handed participants that photo. Using a clever trick inspired by stage magic, when participants received the photo it had been switched to the person not chosen by the participant—the less attractive photo. Remarkably, most participants accepted this card as their own choice and then proceeded to give arguments for why they had chosen that face in the first place. This revealed a striking mismatch between our choices and our ability to rationalize outcomes. This same finding has since been replicated in various domains including taste for jam, financial decisions, and eye-witness testimony.
Links to relevant research in the linked article, including the primary research: Strandberg, T., Sivén, D., Hall, L., Johansson, P., & Pärnamets, P. (2018). False beliefs and confabulation can lead to lasting changes in political attitudes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(9), 1382-1399.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000489

Emphasis mine -- people are weirdly susceptible to trickery, yet resistant to facts. Yeah, we might be fucked here.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:15 AM on January 17, 2019 [28 favorites]


.
posted by xammerboy at 11:18 AM on January 17, 2019


Youtube really is aggressively pushing this stuff.

It's so weird too, how quickly it happens. When Roy Clark died, I pulled up an old "Hee-Haw" clip of him playing banjo with the fiddler kid. I don't know if it was bouncing off the uploader's account, or if it was because it's internally tagged "country", or what, but the algorithm started sidebarring all these right wing videos and conspiracy things about the wall and apparently thinly-veiled screeds on people of color, feminists and left politics, as well as video where the thumbnails had scantily-clad white women.

I had to click on "Not Interested" rather a lot to make those videos stop showing up. It's such an aggressive algorithm they have and one has to wonder why. It doesn't seem to be set up to filter the sidebar based on your past viewing, because I've never looked at anything remotely right wing in the past.
posted by droplet at 11:20 AM on January 17, 2019 [41 favorites]


Noting, as I often do, that there are few circumstances more ironic than those which have led to a bunch of angry cis men taking a metaphor invented by two trans women to describe their own experiences of dysphoria and then hoisting it as a flag of embattled, spittle-flecked masculinity.
posted by octobersurprise at 11:21 AM on January 17, 2019 [34 favorites]


Youtube really is aggressively pushing this stuff. I watched one video of Noam Chomsky trash-talking Derrida, which turned out to be from some "rationalist" type channel with lots of videos raging against what the guy takes to be post-modernism, and I endured weeks of YT recommending Jordan Peterson type stuff at me.

This is so enraging. It happens to me too. God forbid I look up any pop psych or pop intellectual figure... the Youtube recommendations turn immediately to Jordan Peterson and fucking Joe Rogan BLECH. NOT INTERESTED.
posted by Dressed to Kill at 11:22 AM on January 17, 2019 [17 favorites]


Noting, as I often do, that there are few circumstances more ironic than those which have led to a bunch of angry cis men taking a metaphor invented by two trans women to describe their own experiences of dysphoria and then hoisting it as a flag of embattled, spittle-flecked masculinity.

It's kind of like when Skrewdriver covered Tomorrow Belongs To Me.
posted by Jairus at 11:23 AM on January 17, 2019 [9 favorites]


> either they're failures or someone has done them wrong.

Dingdingdingding. I think this is the crux of it right here.

The common thread among dudes who fall down the Red Pill rabbithole is, as the article discusses, a certain feeling of being "hard done by" the world in general.

It's the same stuff you find when you scratch the surface of your average Trump voter: they feel they were cheated out of something that should have been theirs by birthright, and they're out to either reclaim it, or if they can't do that, spoil it for others.

Nobody likes realizing that they're just a garden-variety failure, one more chump who's gambled and lost in life's casino, and it's even worse when you know, deep down, that you came to the table with a lot of advantages and still managed to fuck it all up. It's easier to put the blame for your loser-dom on others. Easier still if you don't even have to do the intellectual heavy lifting of explaining how it's Somebody Else's Fault that you're such a loser; there are lots of people right there with canned explanations ready to go.

I'm at a loss to understand why millions of people apparently spend their precious free time endlessly devouring poorly-made YouTube videos that make them angry and unhappy.

Because they are, in a way, soothing. The anger and rage is cathartic; it's refocusing what might otherwise be inwardly focused, on an external target, and thereby giving it an escape route. If they're angry at someone else, they don't have to be angry at themselves. Plus, righteous anger feels good—so good that I think people basically get addicted to it.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:24 AM on January 17, 2019 [20 favorites]


As I understand it (remember reading an interview with François Chollet, high up in AI at Google, can't find source), their algorithm wants to maximize time spent watching YouTube. If you watch a few videos a week, you're worth very little compared to somebody who incessantly watches for hours.

Who watches YouTube for hours and hours on end? Small children, and alt-right weirdos, and conspiracy people (big overlap between the last two). So the system is incentivized to recommend videos that appeal to those groups because the reward for getting them to watch will be much greater.
posted by vogon_poet at 11:24 AM on January 17, 2019 [25 favorites]


Youtube recommendations turn immediately to Jordan Peterson and fucking Joe Rogan BLECH. NOT INTERESTED.

Here's a depressing factoid for today: Joe Rogan's podcast is now is listened to 1.5+ billion times per year at around $50-100M/year revenue.

But also a reminder that Jordan Peterson et al are interested in creating monetizable entertainment. YouTube is a great channel for that.
posted by JamesBay at 11:29 AM on January 17, 2019 [9 favorites]


In terms of youtube algorithms, I've been seeing red-pill bullshit in my side feed. Despite repeatedly telling youtube I am not interested and blocking each and every one of those people that I see. I haven't watched anything political in over a year and even before then it was things like Tropes vs. Women. My guess is that, it's either entertaining science/engineering or video game stuff. Someone can be exposed to this shit incredibly easily through any sort of stereotypically nerdy videos. I don't know if it's just that there are that many of these videos that they will just show up or if it's the white male frustrated psuedo-nerd connection (watch chemistry explosions and stuff about video games, but not actually going out and becoming educated in the classical nerd way). I suspect the second.

At times, I kind of wonder if this is a "there but for the grace of god and some wonderful friends go I." I remember, even being incredibly liberal, trying to understand things like gender and being at an incredibly liberal college (Reed), I still ended up talking to an incredibly patient friend about how the SCUM manifesto was offensive. She sent me to read radfem blogs (which generally had feminism 101/white men start here posts), which eventually snapped me out of it. But there was that core, even in someone who considered himself feminist. It's so built into society that it's almost more surprising that this doesn't happen more often.

That said, it's not the responsibility of these women or the friends of these men to save them. What both of the guys were doing sounds like persistent sealioning to their girlfriends. The language they were using is a red-flag for abuse (and it sounds like they were starting into emotional/verbal abuse).
posted by Hactar at 11:35 AM on January 17, 2019 [6 favorites]


As I understand it (remember reading an interview with François Chollet, high up in AI at Google, can't find source), their algorithm wants to maximize time spent watching YouTube. If you watch a few videos a week, you're worth very little compared to somebody who incessantly watches for hours.

The YouTube algorithm used to optimize for time watched, but it currently values engagement, satisfaction, and frequency very highly. Videos that get people fired up get more comments. Videos that "demolish feminists" or whatever get more likes from their audience. People who get a lot of views for posting their "demolish feminist" rants are rewarded for making more videos. Put all this together, and it means that toxic content gets preferential treatment.
posted by Jairus at 11:35 AM on January 17, 2019 [9 favorites]


I think (and have often thought) that a lot of this radicalization ties to the death of the American dream or toxic masculinity or the lie of capitalism or whatever you want to call it.

A lot of these guys aren’t rebels in any real sense. They’re rule followers. They do well in school, get STEM degrees, go into engineering or something “practical”. They check off all the boxes you’re supposed to check off. And our culture inculcates the idea that if you’re smart and do well in school and get a STEM degree and get a “real job”, then you are entitled to The Good Life, which I’ll broadly define as A Hot Babe and a big house and lots of toys to play with.

I mean, how many mediocre sitcoms have a couple at the center that’s a mediocre schlub and a model-gorgeous babe?

But reality kicks in eventually and the hot babe doesn’t like you because you’re a weirdo with no social skills or you can’t buy a house or you can buy a house and all the toys you want but it’s not satisfying at all. Here I’m thinking of Notch from minecraft who lived the dream: sold the thing he made, got like a billion dollars, and now...sits at home by himself bitching on Twitter and complaining about feminism because (while I’ve never met him it sure seems like) he’s an asshole.

So I think it’s that soured male entitlement that’s responsible for the anger. Look at some of the more extreme incels that think hot women should be issued to them the way, I dunno, the army issues backpacks and rifles. But instead of rebelling against capitalism or the American Dream or culture at large, or blaming themselves and doing some self-examination, they blame women or the libs or postmodernism or whatever. And now there’s tidy business to be done as a YouTube intellectual or podcaster or politician saying “it’s not your fault.”

Because for all their big egos and swinging dig edgelord personas, any real examination of themselves would reveal they are desperately unhappy. That enormous ego is balloon thin and just as fragile. But when you puncture it. You get an explosion.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 11:40 AM on January 17, 2019 [51 favorites]


Youtube really is aggressively pushing this stuff.

It really is, and you don't even have to watch something relevant or that indicates you're interested. You just have to watch something that someone else who was interested also watched. Whenever I watch a video having to do with gaming, there is an uptick in the number of recommended videos from alt-right sources.

That recent thread on "tribal" identity and politics was messy, but I do think that it plays a role for a lot of young men. Being a good gamer, or a good nerd, depends on having a certain set of beliefs. Misogyny and racism tell us a lot about what those beliefs are. If this is your community, then you're even more susceptible.

I don't know. I just feel like the media needs to stop ignoring the elephant in the room: YouTube, the most popular entertainment platform in the world, is actively recruiting young men into these ideologies. It's not baffling that these movements are growing.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 11:45 AM on January 17, 2019 [28 favorites]


Videos that "demolish feminists" or whatever get more likes from their audience

I'd love to be able to click one button that would block every channel that has even one video title containing a variant of X owning, destroying, demolishing (etc.) Y
posted by thelonius at 11:54 AM on January 17, 2019 [21 favorites]


It really is, and you don't even have to watch something relevant or that indicates you're interested.

I also don't understand that bc I never get this kind of shit in my sidebar? I don't watch anything logged in, though, so maybe that makes a difference? My most recent yt views are the john wick 3 trailer, some overwatch videos, a general search for cover versions of country roads, and the life of boris video about his kitten, artyom; the sidebars for all of them have various other videos related to the ones I've already seen.

I don't know how youtube knows that I would literally do murders in order to not see shitty right wing/mra videos but I guess it does bc I never see them, and I wish I knew how it happens so I could help other people never see them as well.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:56 AM on January 17, 2019 [5 favorites]


that "debate until I want you to agree with me" thing seems like an embedded feature of boy mode. I've been trying to unlearn that programmed thing for a damn minute now.
posted by nikaspark at 11:58 AM on January 17, 2019 [12 favorites]


Would you like to play a game:
Choose A or B
A) would you like to be special and hear a secret
B) be one of those dumb sheeple
Do you agree that
A) Me and mine are losers, the bad people
B) me and mine are the heros and victims of the bad people

Would you like to
A) practice and vicariously defeat rhetorical and tribal enemies in a safe space online by watching, retweeting and meme-ing

B) have real life encounters with people who are not impresssed with your arguments and your skills
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 11:58 AM on January 17, 2019 [24 favorites]


Has anyone seen any articles depicting the 'recovery' of people that have come back out of this ugly hole and have looked back and reflected on it?

I've lost one long time friend to the 'red pill' we ended up just cutting him out of our lives, it wasn't worth the frustration, sadness and futility of fighting against it, but it took a long, long time for us to actually make the decision.

Whatever conversation would be going on, he would always find a way to slip in some bullshit to bring it back to some conspiracy or another. Any argument would always lead to him proclaiming that we didn't know enough-- followed by links to 3 hour YouTube videos.

There ended a twenty year friendship, and I don't for one second regret it.
posted by Static Vagabond at 12:00 PM on January 17, 2019 [10 favorites]


So the system is incentivized to recommend videos that appeal to those groups because the reward for getting them to watch will be much greater.

The YouTube algorithm used to optimize for time watched, but it currently values engagement, satisfaction, and frequency very highly.

Not to discount either of these factors, but...

Surely, people/groups are just paying for exposure and then getting it. That's Google's whole business model, right? Their customers pay Google money with the promise that Google will deliver eyeballs. The algorithm is just how Google keeps up its end of the bargain.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:06 PM on January 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


I don't watch anything logged in, though, so maybe that makes a difference?

I think so, yes
posted by thelonius at 12:10 PM on January 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


So I wouldn't want to spend time with these guys. But I don't think we should simply write them off as "garden-variety failures."

There are simply too many guys out there like the ones described in the story: unemployed or inconsistently employed, not well socially connected, driving away even those connections that they do have. We have had other discussions about loneliness growing among men, and I can think of one example in my own extended family -- I bet many of you can too. It's no shock that when people are unhappy and isolated they seek some explanation for their situation, and online red pill discussions solve that need.

When so many people are experiencing a similar situation, I don't think you can reasonably hold each of them responsible for their situation and call them 'failures.' Rather, something is wrong with the society that produces so many such men.
posted by crazy with stars at 12:10 PM on January 17, 2019 [9 favorites]


Re: youtube, i assume peterson rogan, etc pay to have their videos promoted. We should not assume the software is accidentally biased though it will do that too.

The believer in conspiracies may or may not be acting in their self interest, the promoters of conspiracy are. "Who benefits and who is harmed if a bunch of people come to believe [x] " is a nice way to make guesses about who is hacking our culture.

The moon landing was faked? Doubt the US government, and remember who really won the space race.

Vaccines are bad for you? Doubt the doctors and buy these magic detox beans.

No jewish people died in 911? direct blame away from saudi arabia and to israel.

Science says men don't cry, raise children or have anything to apologize for? Vote republican.

Airplane trails are the government poisoning you? Doubt your government, weaken its support compared to rivals.

Illuminati rig everything? Shift blame from corporations and governments that could be regulated and changed to shadow cabal that you can only fight by buying gold, guns and gear.
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 12:10 PM on January 17, 2019 [8 favorites]


Has anyone seen any articles depicting the 'recovery' of people that have come back out of this ugly hole and have looked back and reflected on it?

I know this sounds grim, but there are a lot of relevant documentaries and feature articles on former neo-nazis and gangbangers who are trying to reintegrate into society. I don't think there are any good "I was a /pol/ shitposter at Charlottesville" features yet, but when they inevitably happen, I don't expect much of a difference between those and the features about people who left the Hammerskins.

As far as promoted vs organic content on YouTube, the radical content is highly visible in organic results and recommendations. Pay to play isn't the problem.
posted by Jairus at 12:11 PM on January 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


Youtube really is aggressively pushing this stuff.

I watch very little on YouTube that isn't somehow related to music—old videos, performances, documentaries—and I still have Peterson or Shapiro videos recommended to me. Some of these guys are almost certainly paying for promotion. I often leave YouTube on in the background while I work—so maybe some of them are recommended whenever YouTube runs at length?

If anything, tho, the process of getting radicalized by YouTube conspiracy theories should be called being "blue-pilled," because YouTube is definitely the nearest thing there is to the Matrix right now and these dudes are definitely lying in their own beds believing whatever they want to believe.
posted by octobersurprise at 12:30 PM on January 17, 2019 [4 favorites]


Yeah, it's not just a logged in thing and there's definitely an algorithm element - I'm never logged in when I look at YouTube and even watching a couple of lefty/Anti-Trump "politics" videos will result in at least a few of the sidebar recommendations being bizarre FlyingEaglePatriotHillaryIsTheDevil suggestions. On the rare occasions I've watched bits of Jordan Peterson or suchlike just to see WTF is going on I'm deluged with bullshit.
posted by soundguy99 at 12:32 PM on January 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


I log in to watch YT and I do (alas) watch quite a bit of YT (5 minute videos help me break up my I have one million projects on the hoof but have a hard time transitioning between them days at work). My YT recommends right now are 90% delightful because almost all I watch are cooking videos. If you want to make a delicious dinner, my YT recommends have got your back.

I'll tell you about a time that I did start getting shitty recommends, though. I watched a video of a guy debunking an overhyped-and-likely-entirely-fictitious tech product. Sounds pretty innocuous. The debunking was more or less on point, but contained a bit too much "oh ho ho can you believe how stupid these people are???" for my liking. Like, I could basically hear the fedora. I wasn't paying attention at the end of the video and it autoplayed to another video by the same person..."destroying feminism." Noped out real fast, but my recommends were garbage for several days afterwards.

Anyway, man, these dudes need a hobby or two, stat. Like, the part of the article that pointed out that the guy worked nights so he'd spend all day at home watching videos and text-harassing his girlfriend with them? If you work nights and are home all day a) why aren't you sleeping? and b) you've got free time in the middle of the damn day! You are living the dream! I have turned down countless opportunities to engage in fun-ass hobbies because I have to work during the day and have all these other responsibilities and shit. Free time is apparently wasted on the freely timed.
posted by soren_lorensen at 12:49 PM on January 17, 2019 [4 favorites]


This guy sounds like my mum.
posted by acb at 12:50 PM on January 17, 2019


I narrowly avoided getting involved with a man like this. It's sheer luck that he showed just enough of his true colors early enough on.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:52 PM on January 17, 2019 [5 favorites]


in his better moments, Jordan Peterson appeals so much to these lost men because he encourages them to face themselves, get off their asses, and do the hard work on their own self to not be such useless schlubs. and it's a very bitter direct truth, which is something most men actually resonate with.

His political inanity aside, that core message to men really does click. I had never heard of him other than his being mentioned here as some paragon of evil, and after watching some of his content, I can really see how it appeals to this particular problem of modern-day masculinity.

And the criticism of "now you know what it's like to be an Other" is absolutely correct; but also the language and culture of manhood, at least here in the west, does not give men the constructs to use to even engage with or evaluate this situation. There's a lot broken with it, and it's not something you really want to leave unfixed... millions of disaffected and angry young men tend to cause a lot of problems if someone steers them in the wrong direction.

The red pill people are pretty nuts but they tap into this deep need for direction and guidance, and that's why they are so effective... and so scary.
posted by EricGjerde at 12:55 PM on January 17, 2019 [10 favorites]


And speaking of sheer luck, YouTube has never recommended one of those videos to me. #countmyblessings
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:06 PM on January 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


Echoing the chorus - I used to get piles of these videos recommended to me for watching anything D&D related, and it always grossed me out that YouTube thought those were two overlapping interests. If he's just paying to advertise, that makes me feel slightly better about people. (Thankfully, I think I finally trained the algorithm that I wasn't going to take it up on that particular line of nonsense and it resumed sidebarring things that were actually relevant.)
posted by tautological at 1:13 PM on January 17, 2019


derail-ish: b) you've got free time in the middle of the damn day! You are living the dream!

Meh. As someone who works a pretty fair number of afternoons & nights, it can be surprisingly difficult to motivate yourself to Do Things when you know you're going to have to stop in a couple few hours whether you want to or not.

I mean, I'm here commenting on MetaFilter when there's a guitar amp sitting disassembled on my kitchen table . . . .

/derail
posted by soundguy99 at 1:15 PM on January 17, 2019 [5 favorites]


God, I am so fucking tired of these conversations where we rend our garments about how we can keep these young men from choosing to formalize their commitment to being abusive.

Which, btw, is what these groups offer, what these ideologies represent, and what these gurus are preaching: a worldview and a way of life that elevates and enshrines abuse. Everything is about power, and the only power they recognize is the power to make someone else submit. It's even embedded in the language: all those videos about wrecking, demolishing, destroying -- dominating.

And you know what? I don't care why. They're unhappy? alienated? disappointed? fucking congratulations, so is everyone else. What's different about you is that you think your bad feelings are other people's problems.

You do not cure abusers of being abusive by catering to their emotional needs. These men are not some special category of abuser. They are just abusers who needed a leader.

We should deal with them like abusers.
posted by schadenfrau at 1:16 PM on January 17, 2019 [94 favorites]


Oh, related: I don't think they've announced who's on the House Committee on Homeland Security yet, but I know I'm going to want them to look into YouTube's role in radicalizing right wing terrorists.

That should be a fun phone call.
posted by schadenfrau at 1:17 PM on January 17, 2019 [5 favorites]


Quite frankly, I think MRA ideologies appeal to young men because a hell of a lot of them don't have much sympathy for women to start with.
posted by noxperpetua at 1:23 PM on January 17, 2019 [31 favorites]


I have a different perspective on this than I used to, because I experienced a series of outright delusions for a period of three or four days in the wake of treatment for severe pernicious anemia (I had a hematocrit of 10 -- and an LDL of 4330).

I was in the ICU for less than 24 hours, and after a transfusion and a night's sleep, I basically felt OK, though I was weak from losing 70 lbs. of mostly muscle the previous two months, and I was determined to go home, but my hematologist would not agree to let me go without a scan for occult bleeding in the bowel, which I refused at first, but my partner and my most recent ex who was and is my best friend took his side. My will was weak as the rest of me, and I gave in.

I had my first delusion within half an hour of drinking the contrast liquid. A nurse with a cart came in to update my records, and the cart carried two blue metal cubes, the smaller on top of the larger, which I assumed were isolating a computer to keep it from being contaminated or spreading infection. But simultaneously, I knew the cubes contained the nurse's disabled child that the hospital administration compassionately allowed her to tow around as she worked throughout the day. I also knew that was impossible, completely crazy, and wrong in every possible way, but I absolutely believed it despite all that.

The delusions subsided after the three or four most physically miserable days I can remember out of my entire life, but I happened to eat a ham and cheese omelet that morning in the hospital, and on the way home in the car I happened to hear an NPR program on the recent Super Bowl ads, focusing particularly on an ad for Cheetos, and I became obsessed -- for an entire year -- with ham and cheese omelets and Cheetos. During that year I never had less than one and more likely two or three ham and cheese omelets a day, or less than one 6 oz. bag of Cheetos. My craving for Cheetos was so bad that my partner resorted to keeping them in her car to keep me from eating a weeks supply all at once.

For years now I've thought my delusions resulted from the fact that I have celiac disease, and that two of the three dominant brands of contrast liquid contained gluten at the time of my hospitalization, but I've recently become aware of a recognized clinical entity called ICU delirium which matches what I experienced pretty closely, though I continue to think the contrast liquid was responsible in my case, and that celiac disease was at least an intensifier.

But I do recall a couple of other much briefer periods when I was also highly suggestible, one from childhood and one from young adulthood long before I developed celiac disease, and both of those happened to take place during episodes of food poisoning. And I had terrible GI problems when I came home from the hospital.

And recently
Genetic and environmental studies implicate immune pathologies in schizophrenia. The body’s largest immune organ is the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. Historical associations of GI conditions with mental illnesses predate the introduction of antipsychotics. Current studies of antipsychotic-naïve patients support that gut dysfunction may be inherent to the schizophrenia disease process. Risk factors for schizophrenia (inflammation, food intolerances, Toxoplasma gondii exposure, cellular barrier defects) are part of biological pathways that intersect those operant in the gut. Central to GI function is a homeostatic microbial community that early reports show is disrupted in schizophrenia. Bioactive and toxic products derived from digestion and microbial dysbiosis activate adaptive and innate immunity. Complement C1q, a brain-active systemic immune component, interacts with gut-related schizophrenia risk factors in clinical and experimental animal models. With accumulating evidence supporting newly discovered gut-brain physiological pathways, treatments to ameliorate brain symptoms of schizophrenia should be supplemented with therapies to correct GI dysfunction.
So I think we should be looking at these men for GI problems, and maybe take the apparently increasing incidence of irritable bowel syndrome a little more seriously than we have so far.
posted by jamjam at 1:27 PM on January 17, 2019 [14 favorites]


We should deal with them like abusers.

I'm not sure ignoring them until they kill someone is a good plan.
posted by Sangermaine at 1:28 PM on January 17, 2019 [12 favorites]


That's a...weird takeaway.
posted by schadenfrau at 1:33 PM on January 17, 2019 [7 favorites]


So I think we should be looking at these men for GI problems, and maybe take the apparently increasing incidence of irritable bowel syndrome a little more seriously than we have so far.

I'm also ok with classifying it as a public health problem, so long as we are first concerned with protecting people from the abuser disease, and then curing the abusers
posted by schadenfrau at 1:35 PM on January 17, 2019 [18 favorites]


I don't care why. They're unhappy? alienated? disappointed? fucking congratulations, so is everyone else. What's different about you is that you think your bad feelings are other people's problems.

You do not cure abusers of being abusive by catering to their emotional needs.


There isn't just one single type of abuser, or one single motivation for abuse. We have spent decades researching this and studying this in the fight against domestic violence. Some abusers are anti-social. Some are emotionally dependent. Some do not see abuse as an issue of control or power, but see abuse as a rational end-game escalation of an argument or a debate. The Duluth Model of abuse is old and does not map well onto every situation.

You're not obligated to care about anyone, especially an abuser. But if what you want is for them to stop abusing people, then yes, sometimes you need to think about the emotional needs of the people you are trying to change.
posted by Jairus at 1:35 PM on January 17, 2019 [21 favorites]


if what you want is for them to stop abusing people, then yes, sometimes you need to think about the emotional needs of the people you are trying to change.

I mean, that's true, but first they have to ask for help and that's something these men seem rarely willing to do. In light of that, the kinds of discussions about men who fall down these rabbit holes of misery do often seem to get centered on their misery rather than the misery they inflict on the people that live with them.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:43 PM on January 17, 2019 [14 favorites]


I do think there's a personality type that gets drawn to this stuff in the first place: socially isolated, vulnerable, shy or awkward, feels like they're not achieving their potential. There usually are some seeds of this kind of thinking--the person I know who got pulled into the GamerGate nonsense definitely espoused a lot of opinions that were concerning to me in the past, but at the time he was surrounded by a group of people who were calmly pushing back rather than reinforcing it.

Anyway this should sound like a familiar profile, because this is the prototypical cult victim and the Red Pill community is very much using cult recruitment tactics. The reason it's easy to get into this stuff and hard to get out of it is because a) I think deprogramming is always harder, and b) the manosphere is incredibly well-organized, well-networked, and has ties to established political entities that know how to play the game, from the KKK to I guess the Russian government apparently? None of this stuff is just incidentally happening, it's being done very deliberately and the "left" (inasmuch as we now need to call believing in common sense and basic human rights "leftism" and "SJW") has largely failed to mobilize a successful response in deradicalizing people. I would be thrilled to live in a world with 50% less back-patting over Trump memes and 50% more aggressive plastering the internet with the same level of well-coordinated deradicalizing materials, I just have no idea where to start personally and have zero training or expertise on how to deprogram cult victims.

Anyway, I'm also really pleased the YouTube algorithm just wants to show me rare musical instruments and that one ASMR cooking channel.
posted by capricorn at 1:44 PM on January 17, 2019 [13 favorites]


There is no doubt in my mind that these guys were already abusers who were just in a honeymoon period initially and then started receiving messages from groups they were already predisposed to agree with that it's cool for that honeymoon period to be over now.
posted by soren_lorensen at 1:45 PM on January 17, 2019 [7 favorites]


Hey, I have a better idea! Let's empower women, queers and people of color through anti-discrimination work and a stronger social safety net. This will have some knock-on benefit to whiny, violent white men (since it will entail access to medical care, better wages, retirement security, etc) and the ones who aren't actually terrible can start behaving better once their needs are met. And of course, these social programs will mean that it's easier for women to leave their abusers, harder for violent men to get guns, harder for violent white men to get away with threats and abuse, etc.

Special programs to make things nicer for white men because they commit hate crimes if they aren't the boss really seem like a waste of time compared to broad social reform.
posted by Frowner at 1:46 PM on January 17, 2019 [86 favorites]


I mean, that's true, but first they have to ask for help and that's something these men seem rarely willing to do.

When it comes to DV, a lot of intervention therapy happens at the hands of a court order. The abuser isn't asking for help, they're told they need to participate in the program or they're going to jail. Obviously judicial coercion comes with its own set of problems, but there is a lot of room in our legal and social system to identify men like this and intervene in a way that can reduce abuse.
posted by Jairus at 1:47 PM on January 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


Let's empower women, queers and people of color through anti-discrimination work and a stronger social safety net. This will have some knock-on benefit to whiny, violent white men (since it will entail access to medical care, better wages, retirement security, etc)

Ooh, you weren't responding to my comment but this is also a really good point--the other way to deradicalize people is to remove the conditions where they were radicalized in the first place. (This would also help with the horrifyingly well-resourced, scary/abusive cults currently targeting vulnerable and isolated women, otherwise known as MLMs.)
posted by capricorn at 1:50 PM on January 17, 2019 [18 favorites]


like my god in 2019 if you think i'm going to spend even a millisecond handwringing about the emotional needs of men who think they should be allowed by law to rape women if they're too repulsive to get laid otherwise

no seems like such a small word to express the full extent of my loathing, disgust, and refusal
posted by poffin boffin at 1:50 PM on January 17, 2019 [43 favorites]


No one has to care about abusers. But if you want them to stop abusing, you do have to spend more than a millisecond studying the problem. Dismissing that vital work as being hand wringing or catering to abusers isn't any different than dismissing prison therapies as hug-a-thug programs.

I don't think abusers should be centered in this process. I think we can stop a lot more abuse tomorrow by changing the way FB/Google/etc prioritize content than we can by lobbying for new laws or therapy. But it is possible to care about the abused and to try to reduce recidivism of abusers at the same time.
posted by Jairus at 1:56 PM on January 17, 2019 [14 favorites]


To the extent that spending time figuring out why abusers abuse results in actual reductions to women getting abused by their partners/families, I'm for it. Obviously, nobody should feel any obligation to participate in this work or to change the way they deal with abusive men in their own lives.
posted by prize bull octorok at 2:01 PM on January 17, 2019 [8 favorites]


I'm all for trying to understand what motivates abusers, but we as a society or a culture don't even understand or acknowledge what abuse is. And, too often, we tolerate it.

More energy should be spent first on fixing that problem, helping people, like the woman in this story, have the ability to say "stop, this is not okay", and know that she'll be supported.
posted by JamesBay at 2:13 PM on January 17, 2019 [6 favorites]


With regard to YouTube ...
“YouTube is something that looks like reality, but it is distorted to make you spend more time online"
“The question before us is the ethics of leading people down hateful rabbit holes full of misinformation and lies at scale just because it works to increase the time people spend on the site – and it does work.”
"Fiction is Outperforming Reality" The Guardian, February 2018.

As with established news outlets, political influencers are competing in an “attention economy” in which “the most valued content is that which is most likely to attract attention.” As a result, many influencers seek to gain attention by capitalizing on controversy. For example, Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has strategically relayed a moment of controversy into high levels of influence (as well as monetary reward). In 2016, Peterson was at the center of a controversy because of his outspoken opposition to Canada’s proposed Bill C-16, which sought to add gender expression and gender identity as protected identities
under the Canadian Human Rights Act. Peterson claimed it would force him to use certain gender pronouns and would thus infringe on his freedom of speech. (Others have said his claims fundamentally misrepresent the nature of the bill.)

By strategically taking a public stance on a hot-button issue, Peterson was able to use the backlash to his advantage on YouTube, where his channel now has over one million subscribers.
Rebecca Lewis Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube, Data & Society, September 2018.

It seems to be a combination of an algorithm that rewards sensationalism aimed at people who will stick around and watch it and people who know how to use the algorithm for profit. It's noxious, and according to a fairly recent Pew study is the most popular social media platform among teens, especially boys.
posted by zenzenobia at 2:18 PM on January 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


This past Christmas was a watershed for me. For many, many years I have dreaded it because inevitably I am verbally abused by a sibling. This year was no different. The rest of my family seems to think "it's an issue between the two of you", but what I think I was finally able to explain was that, no, I am being yelled and sweared at, and it's not okay. It's not a huge deal, since I've learned how to predict and manage the interactions, but it's really frustrating to hear that I somehow did something to deserve the abuse.
posted by JamesBay at 2:19 PM on January 17, 2019 [10 favorites]


A lot of the dismissals of the emotional pain of the men who get drawn to these videos sounds very similar to US conservative dismissals of “soft” criminal justice systems/social programmes in places like northern Europe, in lieu of a moralistic hard line: “root causes and rehabilitation are for liberals; if you break the law, the law will break you”. Consequently, the US has much higher recidivism rates, but at least get to feel more morally upright.

Don't get me wrong: abusers are abusers, and neutralising their ability to cause harm takes priority. Though if we don't want there to be more abusers, we need to start looking at root causes, how to divert those who might go down that path, and how to rehabilitate those who can be rehabilitated.
posted by acb at 2:32 PM on January 17, 2019 [11 favorites]


Okay, I'll bite. I do move in circles where it's totally normal for guys to just be into conspiracy theories and shit. Mostly these are guys who are smart, but lack formal education, or have education only within a narrow field of interest. A lot of them tend to be self-appointed "skeptics," which they take to mean that anything commonly accepted is likely to be untrue because it's commonly accepted, and they consider themselves sort of countercultural for doubting certain widespread ideas. They don't engage in a lot of activities that use real critical thinking, so they confuse sophism and logical fallacies for real critiques, which is why these terrible videos work so well on them. These are the type of people who are great at pointing out things that are wrong with movies, despite most of the "flaws" they list being just their highly idiosyncratic and subjective opinions. In my experience, dudes like this sometimes read books, but not widely or critically. They confuse agreement with a message with the logical soundness of that message.

The sad thing is that a lot of the time, these men do want quality intellectual content, but they don't really know where to go to find it, or necessarily have the background context to make sense of it. That's why stuff that (to them) feels like revelation holds such a strong grip. I remember having several discussions with a friend who was trending down this road. He had been reading some kind of conspiracy website was beginning to repeat the idea that feminist academics were making "the system" hostile to men. I had to remind him who makes the laws, who runs the jails, who are most of the bosses, who owns the corporations, who makes more money, etc. . . That when it came down to it, the academics he was concerned about barely have power over their own classrooms. Luckily he wasn't in too deep and had the advantage of knowing people who could personally debunk those beliefs. He is able to laugh at the idea now.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 2:33 PM on January 17, 2019 [32 favorites]


I think that avoiding this kind of radicalization requires improving their material conditions.

I am all for improving everyone's material conditions, but in my experience, plenty of well-off [or at least not struggling] dudes fall into this hole. I think there's a starvation of the mind that is in play here as well.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 2:44 PM on January 17, 2019 [29 favorites]


Recently I shared in the fucking fuck thread about a guy from high school (for those following along at home, that was 14 years ago) who's weirdly obsessed with me. After that I did a little retaliatory stalking and found out, among other things, he was alone on Thanksgiving. It crossed my mind that if he did decide to come murder me or something, the media narrative would be about the poor lonely lamb who didn't have any luck with women (because they all blocked him on AIM in 2006 after he made rape apologist comments).

As a society, we do need to understand and do something about these men. But people are pushing back because we've asked women to pour incalculable time, energy, and resources into fixing these men, to no avail. That's why people are reacting strongly. I think there are ways of dealing with them that aren't "women sacrifice their emotional energy forever," but I also think that people advocating understanding would do well to be very specific so that it's clear that that's not what they're asking.
posted by sunset in snow country at 2:54 PM on January 17, 2019 [48 favorites]


sunset in snow country is absolutely correct. That's why I'd like to propose a strike team of Woke Chads who will do the work of re-educating these guys. What's Chris Evans doing these days?
posted by Kitty Stardust at 2:58 PM on January 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


Critical thinking can produce all sorts of nonsense when it starts out from a bad premise.

Most of the guys I personally know who've gotten sucked into stuff like this have been either book smart or well-off or both.
posted by prize bull octorok at 3:00 PM on January 17, 2019 [7 favorites]


A lot of the dismissals of the emotional pain of the men who get drawn to these videos sounds very similar to US conservative dismissals of “soft” criminal justice systems/social programmes in places like northern Europe, in lieu of a moralistic hard line: “root causes and rehabilitation are for liberals; if you break the law, the law will break you”. Consequently, the US has much higher recidivism rates, but at least get to feel more morally upright.

Don't get me wrong: abusers are abusers, and neutralising their ability to cause harm takes priority. Though if we don't want there to be more abusers, we need to start looking at root causes, how to divert those who might go down that path, and how to rehabilitate those who can be rehabilitated.


I actually had a similar thought an hour ago thinking about the discourse around radicalized Muslims since around 2003; the right disdaining the left's interest in thinking about their motives.

Then I realized why that was wrong.

In Europe, criminals go to jail, and then they get rehabilitation programs, where in the US, criminals go to jail, then they stay in jail for longer. And that doesn't work as well, because there's not a lot of good that year 2 of jail will do to someone that year 1 of jail won't.

On the other hand, if you're a misogynist abuser in the US, there's virtually no penalty right now. If you commit violent abuse against a partner, you have a chance of legal trouble depending on the cop. If you are in a high profile position, and your victim(s) go to the media, and the stars align, you might have to spend a little while out of the limelight. If you run a tech service encouraging misogynist abuse like YouTube, when your stock options vest, you're a millionaire (see also the new thread on Twitter). If you are a misogynist abuser, you can get elected President over literally the most qualified woman to ever run.

Consequences and rehab is better than consequences alone, but right now there's no consequences.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 3:03 PM on January 17, 2019 [20 favorites]


Consequences and rehab is better than consequences alone, but right now there's no consequences.

I mean, if the current state of the manosphere is any indication, the consequences for being a misogynist abuser is a well-padded Patreon.
posted by Jairus at 3:06 PM on January 17, 2019 [10 favorites]


The answer is absolutely not women volunteering (or being volunteered) to sacrifice themselves as helpmates to broken, abusive men and try to nurture them back into human society. It doesn't look like it's about material deprivation either.

Ultimately the root causes look to be cultural. There are tropes ingrained in our society which lead to alt-right/MRA failure modes. One is the idea that men can only feel anger/rage and should dominate or be a cuck, of course, but that is not the only one. For example, the idea that a man without a woman (or not just any one, but The One) is broken, aching from terrible existential pain that can only be salved by her love, is one that permeates popular culture, from film plots to numerous sad-boner ballads (to choose one completely at random: Michael Bolton's “How Am I Supposed To Live Without You”). Each ballad of a lovesick swain is not in itself a red-pill Horst Wessel Lied, but just one of millions of tiny grains of microtoxicity in the environment, absorbed from birth by children who expect that, some day, they will too be men. Romantic comedies are their own problems, with the anguish of lovesickness excusing all sorts of abusive behaviours, which ultimately end up being the solution. (Indeed, the privileging of romantic love and/or sex above other forms of relations probably leads to a lot of this harm.) Or the idea that men are one way, women are another way, and the ways of each are ineffable to each other except through stereotypes. The idea that one can't have friends from the other side without wanting to bone them unless there's some obvious extenuating factor for why this is not the case. And so on.
posted by acb at 3:11 PM on January 17, 2019 [18 favorites]


Given this is a grim topic, if anyone needs a reverse pilling of sorts involving shrimp (warning: does contain some slurs, this isn't some grand progressive awakening, just a step back from the precipice), a friend linked me to this one recently.
posted by foxfirefey at 3:47 PM on January 17, 2019 [6 favorites]


There are many people who are alienated, there are many people who are suffering the effects of trauma, there are many people who were socialized to externalize their emotional regulation needs. The difference is that these men have an abusive set of beliefs. They make an affirmative commitment to being abusive. And they do it because they like it better than the alternative. There is nothing else that sets them apart from all the other people experiencing the same difficulties (assuming they actually are experiencing difficulties). It’s the beliefs. It’s that they want to. It’s that they like it.

The only way to deal with that is to make it uncomfortable and difficult to choose abuse. To make it less desirable. To make it less fun, less satisfying. So, as someone mentioned upthread, there need to be consequences. For the first time in apparent fucking history, there need to be social consequences for misogyny.

No idea what’s gonna be. But if we don’t do something soon shit is going to be REALLY FUCKING SCARY in about 10-15 years.
posted by schadenfrau at 4:00 PM on January 17, 2019 [15 favorites]


one of the big difficulties is that a lot of these guys get inculcated into this stuff when they are young teenagers when literally the only social consequences they care about are the ones coming from the peers they look up to, who are often the ones feeding it to them in the first place.
posted by prize bull octorok at 4:17 PM on January 17, 2019 [1 favorite]




Has anyone seen any articles depicting the 'recovery' of people that have come back out of this ugly hole and have looked back and reflected on it?

No but I can say that I used to be into Bush era political conspiracies when I was in high school, back when 9/11 truthers weren't explicitly right-wing, and alex jones was ranting against a republican administration that was already criminal, so it seemed okay. in hindsight all the jewish banking satan worshipping illuminati conspiracies were obviously antisemitic and completely unoriginal to the point where they have their roots in nazism. believing in that shit is legitimately distressing, and at some point while i was still a teenager i had to accept that the things i was seeing on the internet did not represent any beliefs or principles that i could act on or be held accountable to. like, imagine trying to start a revolution based on some yt videos of blurry planes with spooky music. it also helped that i had a real political education of some kind, behind the conspiracy theories, so that i could fall back on a world that still kind of made sense. there was a lot of misogynistic crap that i was exposed to on the internet too, growing up, that would now be considered part of the redpill altright package, but luckily only a few bad ideas ever stuck, and they went away with time.

maybe the reason these ideas get their hooks into young men is because they are absolutely terrified of being wrong, and they want to protect themselves. being tricked or embarrassed or otherwise taken advantage of is the worst thing can happen to one's sense of pride and (traditional) masculinity, and everything in the redpill category feels like getting out in front of it, putting yourself on the defensive so that nothing can hurt you. and you can justify it by saying that you're educating yourself. so, fear i guess. so much fear and powerlessness, and no proper outlet for it. and, i dunno, it's definitely a boys club thing, so I've probably avoided a lot of bad ideas just by... being friends with women? that's probably helped a lot.
posted by mammal at 4:28 PM on January 17, 2019 [3 favorites]



Given this is a grim topic, if anyone needs a reverse pilling of sorts involving shrimp


See? Hobbies! There's a sort of locally famous hobby shop near me--a really old timey one focused on model trains and the like, and the reason it's known is because of its hand painted sign that says in big, friendly letters "Relax! With a hobby!" Like, dudes, that is some really great advice right there. (If there is one thing I and my husband are very effectively modeling for our son, it's how to get totally obsessed with a hobby long enough to become mediocre at it before moving on to a new one.)
posted by soren_lorensen at 5:30 PM on January 17, 2019 [7 favorites]


Hobbies like videogames?
posted by Autumnheart at 5:37 PM on January 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


Maybe it's because I have adblock but I've never had a right wing or alt-right video recommended to me in Youtube. It's mostly videos related to content I like, such as PBS Digital Studios or the Slo-Mo Guys, or UK farmers with drones.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 5:50 PM on January 17, 2019


"It frustrates me that women are expected to do so much work on this - women's loneliness, women's anger, women's exclusion don't matter but everyone has to spend so much time worrying about angry, lonely men."

Yeah, but it seems like if we're not concerned with this, they may escalate to hurting and killing women. (Disclaimer: I'm still a bit upset over the murder we had in town last week.)

I honestly think it all boils down to this:
(a) Dude feels shitty about his life.
(b) Dude realizes that if he puts other people down and puts himself up/"it's not my fault, it's the fault of ____", he feels much better about himself.

If dudes were feeling better about themselves, maybe they wouldn't take it out on women or whoever else they want to target, and maybe they wouldn't be attracted to doing that shit. But do we want to do the emotional labor/spread our legs for terrible dudes who may not be safe so they don't go shoot people? Uh...I don't want to bite that bullet either.

Optimally, we find some other way for these dudes to feel better so they don't feel better from indulging in this crap, abuse, etc. but hell if I know how to do that.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:56 PM on January 17, 2019


I don't know if it's a meaningful distinction to make in this situation, but there's a difference between being into conspiracy theories and being into conspiracy theories to the extent of taking those theories to be true. As someone who grew up reading the Illuminatus Trilogy and Foucalt's Pendulum, I found them fascinating, but was pretty immunized from taking them seriously.
posted by juv3nal at 6:05 PM on January 17, 2019 [9 favorites]


There's video games as a hobby and then just as passive entertainment. If you are really into a game to the extent that you are researching in your spare time and practicing and interacting with others to discuss your enjoyment of it, then that can serve as your lifeline in the manner of the shrimp, at least in part. If you are just screwing around and playing whatever is newest until you get bored, then it's basically just television with more expensive hardware.

Plus gaming culture is just a trashfire for a lot of semi-related reasons, which means that people who aren't actively resisting it get pulled into a lot of bad habits of thought and action just by peer pressure and cultural osmosis, and which in turn limits its utility as a life-purpose hobby.
posted by Scattercat at 6:54 PM on January 17, 2019


Radicalizing is the word indeed. I’ve known people involved on the fringe of this, who suddenly adopted an entirely new worldview from consuming video after video, yet managed to keep their common sense and humanity despite all the programming. And I’ve witnessed (thankfully not in person) people who, for whatever reason, got sucked more deeply into it and allowed their new worldview to give them permission to dehumanize others and speak to them pretty terribly. I didn’t know any of them in person so I don’t know how they treated people in the real world, but from what I understand it was pretty common for them to start picking a lot of fights with loved ones, while casting the blame entirely on the loved ones.

So my assessment is that you have to already have leanings in the radical direction in order for the videos to have their maximum impact. But assuming there is a certain % of people out there with radical leanings, and considering that the vast majority of them have access to the internet, we can conclude that 99% of them will eventually find their way to the content and become radicalized. And once they’ve given themselves permission to dehumanize others, who know what limit there is to how low they would stoop for their cause.

I suggest that the bad actors of the world (states, groups, etc) are aware of this inevitability and are producing content to radicalize them towards particular agendas. We need to be recognizing this as a form of warfare, and figuring out ways to prevent and counter this process.
posted by mantecol at 7:01 PM on January 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


Maybe it's because I have adblock but I've never had a right wing or alt-right video recommended to me in Youtube. It's mostly videos related to content I like, such as PBS Digital Studios or the Slo-Mo Guys, or UK farmers with drones.

I constantly get recommendations for extremely stupid shit on YouTube, including Jordan Peterson videos or videos made by people who think Star Wars is "too SJW". Plus antisemitic videos.

It must be because I love to watch YT videos about trains (I only recently discovered that one of the characters on the reprehensible show Big Bang Theory is a train nerd), and videos about military hardware.

I like to watch train videos as I work. Sometimes copywriting or marketing management can be very tedious, so having the train video to look at provides a brief respite and prevents me from needing to get a dopamine hit from Twitter.

The military hardware videos are for work. For one gig, I write about Japan and NE Asia, and I'm trying to learn more about defense and national security.

So I guess that combo of videos has me pegged as an incel.
posted by JamesBay at 7:02 PM on January 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


I’ve been trying to reduce my YouTube viewing for a long time now. Not because I’m watching any red pill videos or the like, but just because I think YouTube is just a big time suck. It’s hard, since YT is everywhere and nearly everyone links to it.

But all this discussion of red pill vids has kind of made me feel I’ve made the right decision and should stick it out.
posted by FJT at 7:14 PM on January 17, 2019


I was reading a bunch of stuff about the history of human and primate violence (it started with horse domestication and I went down a bit rabbit hole), and it was talking about how great apes in general are pretty freaking violent against one another (except bonobos), but humans have had violence declining pretty steadily for 100,000 years, and the authors (anthropologists, primatologists, etc.) proposed that it was because beginning about 100,000 years ago when human language could begin to express more abstract thoughts, humans began to say to each other, "Hey, that one super-alpha guy is a major asshole and bully and creates a lot of social problems for us, we should kill and/or exile him," and then they'd use their abstract language skills to make a plan and do that. And that as far as we can tell, across human cultures throughout most of history, human societies killed the most violent 10% of young males. (Which provides a fairly strong selection pressure against violence.)

So basically all these MRAs/red pill guys would be not the alphas who are in charge of society if they achieved their alpha goals, but the 10% of dudes who got killed because they were too violent for society.

I cannot get this theory out of my mind.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:42 PM on January 17, 2019 [23 favorites]


great apes in general are pretty freaking violent against one another

I agree with the general point you're making Eyebrows but I'd point out while violent behavior has been documented in gorillas and orangutans its fairly low level stuff- the real violent actors are the Chimps and gorillas in particular are pretty calm. They're not having constant sex parties like bonobos of course, but in violence terms I'd say us and the chimps are the outliers among the great apes. (fucking baboons on the other hand...)
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 9:57 PM on January 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


So my assessment is that you have to already have leanings in the radical direction in order for the videos to have their maximum impact.

The problem is that the worst 10% or whatever aren't the only problem. They're just the tip of the spear. But the rest of the spear is the mushy middle / white moderate / good German types who passively support these beliefs, allowing them to take over institutions like, say, the military, or the presidency. Stuff like that.

acts of war

I'm so terrified that I agree, but...yeah.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:46 AM on January 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


Conspiracy theories are soap operas for men.

Well that and Breaking Bad
posted by thelonius at 7:55 AM on January 18, 2019 [4 favorites]


I honestly can't decide if the unnecessary gender-coding and gatekeeping associated with most hobbies is an accident or if that's the point of their largely unnecessary post-industrial existence. I'm unconvinced that "get a hobby" is necessarily a good practice given how often they are just socially acceptable spaces to do the Mars/Venus thing.

There's an extremely strong argument that the original "red pill" metaphor was for Maya (wikipedia) and a slight bit less strong, for queer views of dominant culture. So yes, there is a conspiracy out there but it isn't some secret thing that feminism is doing to men, it's what men are doing to themselves.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 7:57 AM on January 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


I get how it definitely shouldn't be womens' job to fix this - some of the frighteningly mainstream rhetoric around appeasement of lone wolf domestic terrorists sounds a lot like "how could we as a society have turned this national massacre into one of the murder/suicide dv incidents that we hear about on the local news on a weekly basis by sacrificing some lady", but the only real answer our society seems to have for abusers at the moment is various types of quarantine. If a larger percentage of the population requires a quarantine to reduce their harm to the rest of us as a result of the spread of these attitudes, it's a problem that deserves some handwringing over, not necessarily for their sake.

"Well that and Breaking Bad"

Also, wrassling.
posted by Selena777 at 9:32 AM on January 18, 2019 [4 favorites]


When your kitchen is flooding the first thing you do is cut off the water. Nothing else you do will help until you cut off the water.

Which means deplatforming across the board and a public examination of exactly how this all came about (including whatever billionaire / Russian fuckery was involved, even though I can't freaking believe I'm writing that), and what the effects were. Truth and consequences.

And deplatforming. Very much the deplatforming.
posted by schadenfrau at 9:40 AM on January 18, 2019 [8 favorites]


filthy light thief: people are weirdly susceptible to trickery, yet resistant to facts.

Cross-posting from the latest U.S. Politics megathread: To fight climate misinformation, point to the man behind the curtain -- Point not just to the lies, but who's behind them, researchers suggest. (Cathleen O'Grady for Ars Technica, Jan. 18, 2019)
“It is not enough simply to communicate to the public over and again the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change,” write Justin Farrell, Kathryn McConnell, and Robert Brulle in their paper, because “individuals’ preexisting ideologies [Ars Technica] and values systems can play a significant role in whether they accept or reject scientific consensus.”

Something called “attitudinal inoculation” [Ars Technica] does show some promise as a strategy—essentially informing people of the facts while also providing a warning of the existence of misinformation campaigns and the arguments and strategies they might use. This “vaccine” strategy can create resistance by using a small dose of the virus, and it seems to work across the political spectrum.
Emphasis mine, because this sounds like a less emotional, and fact-based way to counter lies. Problem for redpill-ers: unlike climate change disinformation, there aren't industries behind the MRA, just more assholes who are eloquent enough to change the minds of angry/ lonely/ selfish dudes.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:35 AM on January 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


I was reading This article today and while I don’t agree with all his lenses or points, there is a powerful idea in there that could be further explored.

That’s the idea that there was a social contract that said “okay, white male, check off the following boxes and we will take care of you. Also women won’t be allowed to make money (or much money) in this system so you can have your pick. All you have to do is hit these benchmarks and you’ll be set.”

Only due to everything from societal progression to rampant unchecked capitalism, the bargain has been broken. Which is where the entitlement attitude comes from. That plan doesn’t work anymore but men keep relentlessly hearing it does and are furious (one of the few emotions a man is allowed under traditional masculinity) when it turns out to not be true.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 12:13 PM on January 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


I do think there's a personality type that gets drawn to this stuff in the first place: socially isolated, vulnerable, shy or awkward, feels like they're not achieving their potential.

One of the first people I ever knew who got "red-pilled" (only before they used that term-- it was in the age of PUAs) was the exact opposite of this. He was well-off, well-educated, he had a beautiful and fashionable girlfriend who treated him like the center of her world, he had a great job, he had an extensive group of friends who hung out all the time and took cool trips, and he was "on track" to get married and have cute kids and probably end up owning a riding mower.

And then he self-radicalized and snapped-- became obsessed with PUA talking points, dumped his girlfriend, ditched his entire social circle, almost overnight.

Some of these dudes turn to these theories because they aren't getting anything they want. But a lot of them seem to turn to these theories precisely because they DO have everything they thought they wanted, and it turns out those things are not enough for them, and instead of interrogating the source of that dissatisfaction, they decide to get angry about having a bad feeling. And how do you get angry about having everything you want handed to you? Who do you blame? In a lot of cases, the nearest person is a girlfriend or wife, and turning her in to a scapegoat for your malaise is a perfect entry point into redpill culture. Because if only she was more grateful. If only she was more compliant. If only she was more willing. If only her body was untouched by time or childbirth. If only she could be what he DESERVED. And if she isn't, then probably it is feminism's fault (even though many of these women are largely uninterested in feminism as a cultural movement).

I think pinning the blame on "losers" is a little too convenient, and a little too narratively tempting, and doesn't really capture the scope of what is happening. It's nice to think that a safety net would help (and we should have one anyway because safety nets are good), but the reality is that a ton of these guys come from bastions of privilege and material plenty.

Have you seen that meme of a child whose face is being crushed by a boot in closeup, but in the wide shot the child is holding the boot and shoving it into his own face? That reminds me of these men, who have everything, and claim they are bereft and beset. Who insist that the normal and sometimes fraught existential experience of being a human person is somehow the fault of "SJWs".

(I have my own hobbyhorse that the devaluation of the humanities is a big piece of this puzzle-- if you skip all the classes where you learn that those feelings are a normal and healthy part of being a person throughout all of recorded human history, you are more likely to think "this is unique to this time and place and must be fixed!!!" instead of "I am beginning to experience and understand an eons-old dilemma". The way that redpillers talk about the humanities is not incidental to their dysfunction. It is central. And not that there isn't plenty of garden variety misogyny in every industry, but I think it is telling that this terminal version is so endemic in finance/tech/gaming, the industries that devalue the humanities the most gladly.)
posted by a fiendish thingy at 1:22 PM on January 18, 2019 [29 favorites]


I cleared out all my Youtube history (viewing/searching). After watching a small number of neutrally-themed videos I started getting MRA recommendations such as Jordan Peterson videos. None of the videos I watched were remotely related to those topics. Obviously Youtube's algorithm is heavily biased towards recommending red-pill propaganda. I read an article saying that they use a neural network algorithm, so apparently it thinks that people who watch some neutral topic also tend to watch Peterson and the like. I added subscriptions to channels for Democracy Now, Black Lives Matter and other progressive topics, and that seemed to help a little. But this situation is really problematic and YT has practically become a propaganda arm of the right, at this point.
posted by TreeHugger at 3:29 PM on January 19, 2019 [7 favorites]


Can anyone have a look at this and figure out the part where it makes irrelevant recommendations? PDF
posted by TreeHugger at 4:09 PM on January 19, 2019


That article mentions at the end that they care about expected watch time. But also weird things like this are sort of par for the course when you're using deep learning. There may not be a clear reason for this phenomenon.
posted by vogon_poet at 5:09 PM on January 19, 2019


We're especially vulnerable to repeated, non-stop messaging. It will simply wear you down. There are a lot of brute force sales techniques based on this idea, whether it be infomercials or getting a free trip in exchange to listening to a sales pitch to buy a time-share. People are more vulnerable to these techniques than they think.

I remember reading the Power of Habit that marketers found out that people are much more likely to change behavior (and thus purchases and brands) during a major life change or event. Like you go to college and start needing furniture, so you start going to Ikea; or you have kids and want a reliable car, so you buy Toyota Prius instead of a sports car. So, if someone experiences a personal crisis (like losing your job) their mind is more susceptible to change. And if red pill/manosphere ideas or adjacent ideas are already maybe one of the dozen things they regularly watch on YouTube anyways, then it's possible that already planted 'seed' can grow under the fertile soil of crisis.

If you work nights and are home all day a) why aren't you sleeping?

Yes, I noticed this in the article about Craig too. Fully admit that I'm being a bit of an armchair doctor right now, but being possibly sleep deprived might have exacerbated the issue and made him more susceptible to believing the stuff he was watching. And to clarify, I don't think this gets him off the hook, it's still his own responsibility to be an adult and get his 7-9 hours each day.
posted by FJT at 2:46 PM on January 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


Critical thinking can produce all sorts of nonsense when it starts out from a bad premise.

Most of the guys I personally know who've gotten sucked into stuff like this have been either book smart or well-off or both.


I think a lot of this comes from a "winning at knowing" kind of motivation. Conspiracy Theorists pride themselves on being the one or ones who can see clearly what other people miss. It is a form of edge-lordism - positioning yourself at the far end of a distribution (you think it is the positive end but ...). It's not quite a Dunning-Kruger but it's close.

Pre-internet I used to eat this shit up. Read The Nation, Z-Magazine, Chomsky, the Co-intelpro books and any other radical lefty stuff I could find. I think it was just the luck of being a Gen-X'er that I didn't fall down any seriously dangerous rabbit holes because those holes were rare, not very deep and hard to actually find back then. Now none of that is true.

One of my guilty pleasures is reading Jack Reacher novels (and formerly Tom Clancy before he became a factory) and you can really see how there is this belief in a special ability to see things other people miss. It's like a form of super power the reader can believe they actually posses.

It also probably doesn't help that there are so many real active conspiracies right now (or are there?)
posted by srboisvert at 6:49 AM on January 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


The way that redpillers talk about the humanities is not incidental to their dysfunction. It is central.

But...Jordan Peterson? And every other dude in the humanities who's prime take away appears to be just enough of a command of the language used to describe concepts they never bothered to engage with (or are incapable of understanding) to present twisted versions of those concepts in service of their own ideologies? Which are...misogyny. And then white supremacy.

I think a lot of this comes from a "winning at knowing" kind of motivation.

I think this is just another manifestation of a dominance hierarchy, tbh. It's the same one you see on HN and reddit. The culture is all about being right by proving the other person wrong, often using the language of contempt, like these weird continuous little dominance challenges.

I guess my point is that it's the misogyny. That's the only common factor. Or maybe a better way to think about it is male supremacy.

I do agree that these men don't have access to the full variety of human emotion and experience, for a variety of reasons, and then they externalize the discomfort caused by those deficits. But where and how they externalize them are determined by their beliefs.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:11 AM on January 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


But...Jordan Peterson?

Social sciences=/=humanities. Jordan Peterson is a professor of Psychology, and most psychologists would be VERY UPSET to be considered part of the humanities (which they frequently disdain). Plus, there are still wings of psychology that are heavily eugenics/white supremacy/"Western culture is unassailable" based, which is why Peterson is so invested in "myth", by which he means "I refuse to learn how to read or understand metaphors or history".

I mean, I'm not saying the humanities are inherently the cure, or that dudes in them don't fall down this hole. I just think it is interesting that most of the celebrities of the manosphere spend so much time giving "seminars" where they ask "groundbreaking" deep questions that would have been covered as basic building blocks of inquiry in the Freshman English classes they all skipped.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 10:45 AM on January 22, 2019 [4 favorites]


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