'It's Highly Profitable to Be a Dick on the Internet'

[Nevilledog]

https://www.wired.com/story/louis-theroux-on-the-manosphere-its-highly-profitable-to-be-a-dick-on-the-internet/

No paywall link
https://archive.ph/SB0Zy

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Why is the manosphere so successful?

I sometimes make the metaphor that everything's become pornography. Extreme content feels like political pornography, and a lot of Instagram feels to me like emotional pornography. It's this feeling that whatever is going to drive your most basic, most primal emotional responses, that's what will get engagement. And once you notice that, and you see how, OK, so that's going to actually become pervasive, and this extreme and toxic and lowest-common-denominator indoctrination will just be rampant across people's social media feeds. That part of our brain, the amygdala, that is responsible for decisionmaking—it feels like that most primitive part of our thinking has been hooked up with the most powerful, most high-tech forms of content dissemination. And in concert, we created a nonstop Las Vegas–style media feed that's actually now bleeding into the power centers in Washington and elsewhere.

Throughout the documentary, your subjects are also filming you, sharing clips online to their followers. What challenges did that present?

I definitely went into it knowing and expecting they would be streaming me, but I saw that as an opportunity. Not to say it wasn't awkward, because it was. It was embarrassing at times, in sort of anodyne ways, like seeing how hard I could punch a punching bag and failing miserably. And then later, when there were these kinds of political gotchas, where just because I happened to pause, it was characterized as in some way weak or dishonest. If I can spin that as a positive, though, that's really educational for me personally but also as a sort of exercise in understanding how media works in this world where everyone's streaming all the time.

What shines through in most of your interactions in the documentary is how important money is to many of these influencers.

The most revealing interview [HSTikkyTokky] gave was probably the one where I visited him a second time and he wasn't streaming. He's having breakfast, and we're filming, so he is, in a sense, performing, but his manner is quite different. And he gives these considered answers to questions about why he does what he does. I ask him why doesn't he just try and do the right thing, why not consider the moral outcome of your decisions and how they affect people. And he says ‘No, I'm just about money.’ I ask again wouldn't he like to, sometimes, be the better person? And he goes: ‘It's a good question, but truthfully, if I'd been the better person, I wouldn't have blown up. I’d just be anonymously working somewhere. I wouldn't have all this fame on the internet.’ So, in other words, it served him very well. It's highly profitable to be a dick on the internet.

It’s all pretty depressing isn’t it?

There were definitely times when you say, ‘wow, we are living in the end of days’, like this is horrific. But there's a paradox, which is that many of them are performing their horrificness. You see someone like Myron Gaines, and he says horrific, abhorrent things about women, and then you see him with his girlfriend, and you're like, OK, so it's not really real, he's actually relatively tender with his girlfriend, or she seems quite nice, and it feels like, oh, you're just performing your alphaness, you know? And that's kind of, in a weird way, quite heartening, not altogether surprising, either.

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