Read this article and report back. It's now more than ten years old. Go ahead. I'll wait.

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kk. Back? Confused as to why I linked it? That's okay, hang with me for a minute.

This article was written before SomethingAwful came up with /r/ShitRedditSays. If you look at it, though, SRS was exactly the paradigm of Habbo Hotel, was exactly the paradigm of the Cult of Geno. It's not like SA came up with the paradigm: a small operation of insurgents with good propaganda infiltrating and infecting a vulnerable community. The basic play probably got into collective consciousness from William Gibson's Neuromancer, a book much loved by computer nerds. SomethingAwful owe a lot of their culture to the Panther Moderns. But then, the Panther Moderns owe a lot of their culture to the Nazis, a small group of disenfranchised militants able to take seed in a damaged culture. The Nazis owe their success to the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks owe their success to the Protestants. The Protestants owe their success to the Christians. Turtles all the way down.

The difference is that the Panther Moderns were the first insurgent force in fiction to do it "for the lulz" whereas SomethingAwful were the first insurgent force on the Internet to do it for for the lulz. And the whole goal is that if you can stand up a simulacrum of a real thing, it will become the real thing.

SRS existed for years after SA bailed. The initial Trump insurgents on Reddit were doing it for the lulz. Incels can trace a direct lineage from this guy:

This, really, is exactly what Dawkins meant when he coined the word "meme." It's a granular piece of an idea that reproduces and mutates. Culture is made up of these memes. If you can create and disseminate these memes successfully, they will self-perpetuate, self-correct and self-reinforce.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_Operations_(United_States)

/r/ForeverAlone started as a place to commiserate about being a loser through humor. However, it became a place to celebrate being a loser. When you get reinforcement points for debasing yourself, the greatest debasers become the greatest heroes. And when the basic thread is "I can't get laid because women hate me" there will be a mirror response of "so I hate women." Obviously this grows until it's "I hate anybody having sex (because I'm not)" until you're at "my identity is defined by not being allowed to have sex." When you have an entire "community" (nameless, faceless thoughts unanchored to individuals) reinforcing this worldview without any accountability, the individuals without any positive influences in their lives will accept that culture as their native and only.

Suicide cults are now a click away. That's something new under the sun. If you have no friends, no social support group, no purpose in life and no ambition, you can find belonging amongst a group whose principal affinity is self-destructive hatred.

And as SomethingAwful, the Panther Moderns, the Nazis, the Bolsheviks, the Protestants and the Christians will tell you, once you've got someone feeling oppressed they pull in. There's a reason the Mormons send their impressionable young adults out on Mission. It's not so they'll convert more people to the church... it's so those impressionable young adults can see that even if you spend half a year going door-to-door spreading the gospel, the outside world does not want you.

One of us.

One of us.

One of us.

SRS got "interviewed" by PBS. Once that happened it was all over. Trolls could get media coverage for trolling and a new high score was set. And here we are, with every major media outlet losing their shit over the fact that woman-hating psychopaths have a home on the Internet.

The real question is whether anything will change.

What in the Craig T. Fuck?

I say that because I watch amateur YouTube documentaries about serial killers for fun and watched some Elliott Rodgers videos and read his manifesto at some point after the shooting. I'd shoot his fucking mother in 1978 if I knew he'd be a hero and had a time machine.

https://media0.giphy.com/media/3o7aD4h0wC20QBySuA/giphy.gif

Bear with me. I have no thesis and my brain is sorta like a wikipedia made of sentence fragments that can still send you down a rabbit hole from Spider-Man to Johannes Gutenberg in two degrees of separation so this may become a rambling mess. Maybe it'll average out to coherence.

I'm incredibly liberal and consider myself an LGBT ally and a feminist. The latter being somewhere between radioactive and a terrorist organization right now for morons. And as a man (ignoring a buncha shit from squawking online morons) is somehwat problematic because, well, I'm not a woman so I have a limited voice in the thing and I feel a little hypocritical. Women wanted to vote and society was like, "Fine ladies, just don't vote for the handsome one. HAHA." Little later society is like, "Well, I suppose you pretty little things can get an easy little job if it makes you feel good. <...you might get raped at work... also that's your fault for wearing lipstick and heels...>" Stupid oversimplifications done, and we're at a point where the conversation can't seem to go anywhere but to the accusatorial in my opinion. Which is why I feel like a hypocrite. I'm not perfect and I'm a man and in order to be supportive I can really only be empathetic which means I have to reflect and the shitty things I've done. None ya damn business honestly, I gotta live with it, but the worst part for me is that as awful as I feel anything I've ever done to a woman is, I know what I've done that I deeply regret is not so bad that it wouldn't bother basically 100% of men who aren't interested in listening and being reflective, self-critical and introspective. The conversation is maybe like, "Knock this shit off!," with the reply of, "Shut up cunts, I'm a good guy and I didn't do anything." Not exactly but I don't know that there is a collective conversation to be simplified for rhetorical purposes for a variety of reasons. We are at the very hard part of change if you ask me where the institutionally powerful are starting to feel heat that can't be ignored or tossed off with meager effort. So you get the sober, benign-seeming academic Jordan Peterson saying essentially that, well, I don't know. Look him up. I think he's awful and I cribbed the thing about lipstick from him. You also get Richard Spencer who is a Nazi.

Not quite apropos of nothing, but my recent roommate was "opening up" about how bad it felt that his recent ex girlfriend wouldn't have sex with him sometimes when he was in the mood and that was fucked up "because guys always wanna fuck." And I just gotta sit there, not look at him and be like, "Uh yeah. Life's rough." I've been around a bunch of bros for about a year and he's comparatively not so bad to the worst I've seen and heard. FFS.

I feel that current feminists, cultural progressives, people who I generally agree with have something of a messaging or branding problem. Compared to some alt-right leaked strategy they're almost a bunch of five year olds running around with scissors or a class lecture with forty professors speaking at once. Depending on my mood. My oldest reddit account is over ten years old. I was on /b/ until I (quickly) got bored. No word is off limits in my vocabulary, I'm abrasive and down-right rude in person sometimes and I do not give any shit's about offending anyone and if I massaged and edited that some it'd be safe to assume I may be an MRA or something awful (LOL, I'm so clever). Like, Lena Dunham (who I do enjoy with caveats but needs to STFU sometimes) is arguably one of the most prominent, if not vocal, feminist voices you may have a problem. Gloria Allred she is not. (I'm losing steam, here. Sorry.) But fuck, fight about what you care about like you give a shit and don't worry about triggering someone to go off to the safe space. We need more vocal, tough ladies like _refugee_ and maybe Emma Gonzales than Dunham's faux intellectualism and what I hear about is going on on campuses. Fairly or unfairly it's based on something. I don't know because I'm 35 but umm, fuck your safe space.

I'm reading this:

And drinking the Kool Aid.

Hari seems to have a point that a lot of our problems are due to a lack of meaningful connection. We're clever apes who figured out how to work together to help each other to survive which led to civilizations which led to simulations of civilizations where like minded toxic people can use that instinct to become worse. Isolation is absolutely a huge problem. Not because some losers can't sack the fuck up and realize they are the reasons that they can't get a girlfriend and are not entitled to a quick fuck. (Well, maybe in the instance of the van attack it is.) We are collectively doing nothing to combat isolation and are encouraging it with any number of reasons ranging from the grinding and meaningless tedium of the service economy to placing the value of a matching Askvoll chest over meaningful connections that I'd wager have always been rare and are now down to an average of 0.

I tap out. I gotta go watch cats fall off counters on Youtube or something.

I knew vaguely about incels thanks to reddit, and I think the article does a reasonable job (or at least is consistent with what I observed and the conventional wisdom on reddit). Before it was banned, /r/incels was a horrific place. And now it's all just on /r/braincels, since reddit doesn't actually give a shit about terrible communities (just the publicity). Braincels also has added Hitler.

To me, it seems like an odd case of pareidolia. Guys have this idea of how they "should" be viz. sexual exploits, but they aren't that (and almost no one actually is). But rather than accept it, or change themselves, some take the easy way out: blame everyone else. And it becomes self-perpetuating: the more into the incel idea someone becomes, the more warning signs they're going to send off to someone else. This just reinforces the idea that women are all shrews or whatever.

My theory is that it's this weird offshoot of, ironically, women's lib. Let me preface by saying that I don't blame feminism, or think that at least some of it shouldn't have happened (which isn't to say they don't have their share of crazies too, i.e. half of tumblr). Anyway, a lot of guys around my age, i.e. born in the early-to-mid '80s, were taught to be much more conscious of how we approach women. On the other hand, popular culture still generally showed us portrayals of men being pursed by women and being shot down. So on the one hand, we're told to be wary or suspicious of our own sexuality, and then on the other, to expect harsh rejection (that this portrayal isn't really accurate isn't the point, since it's perceived to be). Meanwhile, guys who for whatever reason have the courage to pursue someone anyway are more successful. Our proto-incel is left confused: he did everything he was taught, but was unsuccessful, while the guys who do the very things he was told were wrong is able to get dates all the time.

As with anything else, this becomes a crossroads. It can lead to self-reflection and refinement of one's models, as it were. Or it can lead to anger, frustration, and rejection of the whole thing. The latter, it seems to me, likely will often have some cofounders, i.e. people who tend to be less well-adjusted for whatever reason anyway.

Are we as societies, both big and small, really doing our best to combat isolation?

Absolutely not. To an extent, societies are at their core about dividing ourselves into groups. The problem is that it's become so much easier to do, and once you are in a group, you have far less contact with others.

That said, I do wonder to what extent things are in some way "worse" than at a previous point. Groups of terrible people have always been a thing, and I wonder to what extent we're just hearing about them more. After all, murder in the U.S. is at its lowest levels in generations, but at least as of a couple years ago, surveys showed people consistently thought the murder rate was going up. So I think we have to be careful not to conflate "hearing about it" with "it being prevalent," since God knows the media likes an exciting story.

Knowing this, are forums like the ones described in this article an example of free speech and anonymity going to far? Can anything really be done about it while still respecting the rights of individuals?

No to both. Principles aren't principles if we only adhere to them when they're convenient. And we can always rationalize away something that's hard, even if it's ultimately perilous to do so. Today incels, tomorrow socialists. Or whomever.

The internet has produced an interesting cause-and-effect echo chamber.

Step 1: One person makes fun of someone else, by claiming to be similar. (Photo of pimply 15-year old boy, complaining about not being able to "get" a girl.)

Step 2: Other goofballs jump on the bandwagon, iterating on the meme with new images and new descriptions of failure to woo the opposite sex, using random images sourced off the internet.

Step 3: Actual 15-year olds with pimples and the (absolutely normal) frustrated libido of a teen, don't get the joke, and believe they have found their "community".

Step 4: The existing (joke) content reinforces the "Actual's" belief that they are being Wronged By Women.

Step 5: More "Actuals" show up and complain about their woman-wooing failures... unwittingly and ironically creating a toxic support group for self-identified "losers".

Step 6: The original trolls leave, because it's all just too pathetic to bear.

Step 7: The group of "Actuals" now spiral around each other creating a Tornado of Loathing, rather than, ya know, actually growing up and buying Clearasil and realizing that women are humans and not trophies to be won.

This pattern repeats over and over and over on the Internet. And, sadly, generally starts on Reddit, due to the low cost of trolling. (If you had to pay $10 to create a sub-Reddit, this trend would basically stop.)

Wash, rinse, repeat.

It seems to me that humor and memes, when used in a hateful manner, have a toxic effect. They often blur the lines of morality and in effect normalize and seemingly validate dangerous thoughts and ideas. Words lead to thoughts, thoughts lead to behaviors, and what people read often have an impact on them whether they realize it or not.

Certain groups have been weaponizing this, and it's amazingly effective. A while back, people on reddit realized people on stormfront were organizing and coordinating to manipulate the voting to push their racist agenda. It mostly wasn't through overtly white-supremacist content though, it was primarily anti-PC offensive humor. Memes. BASICALLY the shit that litters tons of subreddits now. That was several years ago IIRC. You don't have to dig very deep into those comment sections before you find some beyond-questionable sentiments being thrown around.

There's a big push by white supremacists to normalize offensive humor of a certain breed: make something considered funny solely because it's really racist. In the Vice Charlottesville video one of the neo-nazis brags that their support is growing because people are "sharing their memes". I see this type of humor popping up a lot with my younger friends. It's not a clever punchline about a taboo subject, it's just really offensive. It works great as a recruiting tool because it A) steers people with latent prejudices into the arms of hate groups B) normalizes the ideas and rhetoric used by these hate groups so that impressionable people will be more receptive to it when the real pitch comes. It is definitely inviting people into a tribe.

this is me putting a virtual pin in this to come back to tomorrow or sometime (soon on the time horizon) when i have the appropriate vigor