This piece is based on a shorter one that was written for an anthology I co-authored with Rob Walker, Benjamin Nangle, David S. Smith and Antje Joel, which was originally published by the Reactionary Politics Research Network in Red Lines. The piece draws on arguments from Chapter Seven of my forthcoming book, Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism.
Louis Theroux’s recent Netflix documentary ‘Inside the Manosphere’ was trailed as a rare glimpse into a strange new dystopia, though feminists have been researching this particular hellscape for well over a decade. The programme is a parade of supercars, Bitcoin wallets, ripped bodies and equally ripped hyperbole, platformed by Theroux with no input from any of the groups who have long been working to critique and counter digital misogyny. Theroux’s Xeroxed cast of characters includes influencers such as Harrison Sullivan (HS TikkyTokky), Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy (Sneako), Myron Gaines and Justin Waller, all of whom obtrusively sell the ‘cheat codes’ to success. Their various (rather than varied) Ponzi schemes approach ‘success’ in both financial and sexual terms – being a ‘proper’ man means exploitation and excess in all aspects of life.
The canon of feminist research on the manosphere includes ethnographic work on specific communities (incels, pick-up artists, red-pillers, ‘men going their own way’), analysis and theorisation of reactionary masculinities, and research with teachers on the growing influence of digital misogyny in classroom contexts, even amongst very young boys. Much of this research uses a cultural ‘backlash’ lens – backlash against the limited feminist gains in which a few (white, bourgeois) women have become neoliberal subjects par excellence. In manosphere-speak, such ‘nasty women’, ‘femoids’ and ‘Stacys’ have got the upper hand – to avoid complete societal collapse, women must stop screaming ‘time’s up!’ and be put back in their place. This is done through digital misogyny, which renders technological spaces intolerable for women and reasserts male supremacy.
The backlash lens is a useful and necessary one – and the manosphere should certainly be conceptualised as part of the broader ‘anti-gender‘ formations that coalesce online and off. However, this conception of the manosphere – as a ‘culture war’ artefact that re-imposes conservative gender roles – only gets us so far; there is a political economy here that must be understood. At the surface level, we all know what this is. Manosphere influencers tend to have a studied appreciation of their own grift – indeed, in Theroux’s documentary, Sullivan drops the academic term ‘attention economy’ as he explains how the head salesmen of digital misogyny clip-farm rather than working to advance any collective strategy or politic.
Theroux’s film is positioned within this same political economy. This creates the familiar paradox whereby a media artefact designed to expose a system merely feeds the system it was designed to expose. In ‘Inside the Manosphere’, however, we are treated to a display of this in explicit terms and in real time. The most unintentionally effective chapters of the documentary, which constitute a damning critique of the film itself, are those where Theroux’s usual approach of feigning ignorance while his subjects tell on themselves not only fails but becomes part of the system he is attempting to reveal. We watch, as Theroux’s main characters deploy their own clips of his mildly critical questioning and their deliberately outrageous and aggressive responses, for even more clout.
Beneath this attention economy, there is also a deeper political economy at work, related to late (or too-late) capitalist modes that have sometimes been called neofeudal. And in contrast to the rigid gender ideology of the manosphere, this political economy is reliant on fluid processes of ungendering, part of the relentless drive towards homogenisation in which we all become zeroes and ones. A proliferation of identities and positionalities characterises neoliberal publics; platform capitalism reduces these multitudes to nodes on the map of monetisable digital action.
As Jodi Dean writes, neofeudalism is characterised by a ‘re-parcellisation of sovereignty’ in which corporations can be more valuable than national economies, and governments relate to these economic entities as if they were sovereign states. Many of these parcellated sovereignties are based in what Bratton calls the Stack, the vertical edifice created by planetary-scale computation. The twenty-first century has been marked by the growth of widespread digital dependency: we now need platforms for consumption (of which they take a cut) and production (of which they take a cut); we also work for them for free under the guise of participation. This latter is what Varoufakis terms technofeudalism, which I understand as a mode of production growing within (or perhaps alongside) late capitalist systems.
In technofeudalism, we all own the means of production in the form of our own electronic devices; this does not liberate us but creates dependencies that facilitate the extraction of our personal data. Data is the ‘raw material’ sold to brokers and advertisers, which generates massive wealth for the owners of cloud capital. In other words, while ‘manfluencers’ such as Gaines, Sullivan and Andrew Tate could be seen as lords of their own cyber-culture fiefs, a much more powerful class owns the digital land. Every act of networked rage-baiting, and the hashtagged outrage that follows, is both monetised by manosphere edgelords and enables data colonial extraction at scale by cloud kings such as Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk.
I understand these latter men, amongst the world’s richest, as avatars of what Sylvia Wynter might call a nascent Man3. They articulate a new hegemonic masculinity that blends colonial, neoliberal, and neofeudal personae; it is profligate and predatorial in economic and sexual terms. Like Mediaeval kingdoms, tech sovereignty has largely been bestowed, from the initial funding of the Internet through taxpayer dollars to the cash injection of quantitative easing. Cloud kingdoms have also been conferred on men who see themselves as born to rule, not by virtue of royal blood but due to their supernatural-computational brains.
Technofeudalism’s marauding monarchs are the apogee of contemporary toxic masculinity. In 2022, when sexual harassment cases were brought by seven women working at Tesla, one complainant told the press: ‘there are people in that factory who see Elon Musk as a god. If he talks like that, they know they can, too.’ Cloud billionaires also represent the apogee of the world economic system birthed by the ‘colonial event’ of 1492, characterised by dynamics of hoarding and wasting which are planetary in scale. This merger of exploitation and expropriation, business-as-usual for the Global South, has now reached the Global North. Obscene wealth is amassed for the price of debt, precarity, violence (both slow and quick) and organised abandonment.
In wired societies, the frustration, bitterness, and despair this system produces finds expression online as well as off, travelling through conspiracy theory networks, ethnonationalist and white supremacist forums, and the various enclaves of the manosphere. In the manosphere, ‘cheat codes’ are sold that might yield small gains in gender supremacy – but while some men can afford them (both literally and figuratively), others cannot get in on the deal. Then, completing the circuit (and notwithstanding the ‘escape the Matrix’ chat and triangular hand signs littered through Theroux’s documentary), the ressentiment of those who can never, ever measure up is channelled through far-right discourse away from elites and towards marginalised groups.
This political economy underpins the backlash against feminism, alongside other reactionary social movements. It also sits uneasily alongside a different political economy, described in accounts of digital misogyny that theorise it as a new strategy of enclosure preventing women from accessing and controlling the technological means of production. Digital misogyny has been compared to the earlier enclosure of women performed by the Early Modern witch hunts – a sexual pogrom that excluded women from productive relations and produced the patriarchal bargain granting proletarian men domestic power to manufacture their consent to racial capitalism.
The male dominance of platform capitalism, at every possible level, is beyond reasonable doubt. But the technofeudal thesis posits a different relation to the means of production that must also be taken into account. Many of us, of all genders, own the platform capitalist means – what we do not own, however, is the digital land. This land is the property of the billionaire class that also holds sway over both the economic conditions and cultural discourses that fuel digital misogyny. I argue that this produces a new technofeudal covenant: downwardly mobile men are offered the opportunity to abuse women and other marginalised people with impunity (‘free speech’), which feeds the algorithm, which increases the value of the digital real estate.
An extreme example of this is the incel, who may turn to self-harm and suicidal ideation as well as violence against women, in response to what he sees as a congenital failure to get the girl. And although a majority of incels are straight, white, Western men, ‘ethnicels’ are a growing subset of the community, and incel-related movements and discourses are on the rise across Asia. The incel refuses the neoliberal contract implicit in manosphere self-improvement narratives, and this produces the shift from red pill to black – backlash is futile, because our fates are decided in advance. Incels starkly illustrate how the manosphere’s digital wares are proffered in the absence of tenable social futures, and when the new hegemonic masculinities cannot be hacked and the ‘cheat codes’ to prosperity turn out to be defunct, the online feedback loop is still there for men who need to act out.
This political economy is not exclusionary but requires us all to be as online as possible, as much as possible. And it fits an understanding of the manosphere as less an anti-feminist movement than a swarm of ressentiment. This is an an anger that cannot be sated, a unifying, obscene cruelty that needs targets to be in constant supply. Indeed, if all the marginalised people went offline, the manosphere would have nothing to do. In other words, the exclusionary discourse of digital misogyny paradoxically requires women to be platformed so they can be demeaned; in Theroux’s documentary, this is betrayed when Myron Gaines’ followers pay to abuse a group of female guests on his ‘Fresh & Fit’ podcast. But the significance of this is lost in the film, which ultimately ignores the bottom line: despite who wins the digital ‘gender wars’, the cloud kings will still want us all to bend the knee.
Alison Phipps 