I went down another YouTube rabbit hole in the latter half of August (2023). They’re always interesting, if slightly sinister, scary and destined to make you despair for the human condition. As usual, the rabbit hole started innocuously, and then I kept poking at it to see where it would go.
I know. I can hear the advice now, but sometimes, when YouTube whispers at me, I am intrigued about where it will go.
It always starts innocently…
I had to think about how I started on this journey because I wasn’t sure, and it took a few hours to track it back to the likely cause. It came down to following the collaborations of a single individual. A person whose opinions on media I respected ceased to be a pundit on a show I used to watch. I stopped watching it when he left, and in August, I re-engaged with content on his channel.
All good.
He then started collaborating and appearing on live streams with people I tended not to engage with. Who they are doesn’t matter primarily because I can’t be arsed with the idea that anyone would discover this obscure post and kickstart some social media drama. There is a low chance, but it is best avoided.
That was the trigger, and as I kept poking at the content triggered by these live streams, it led further into specific types of media commentary. Then it made an extraordinary leap into different content, but we’ll return to that.
Content to DEFCON 1
You discover someone can make a lot of sense, but underneath that is a fetid pile of views and conspiracy mucus. In a way, we used to do this all the time, right? We’d have someone with specific opinions on things you could agree with, but you wouldn’t agree with others. The difference was the extremes weren’t as far apart, and fewer people seemed to believe in the outright crazy, tin foil hat shit.
What you discover when viewing certain content is your engagement with the content goes through something similar to the DEFCON rating system: –
You may even have experienced how this happens. Let’s use media sites as an example: –
- DEFCON5: Your views on media and how this particular TV show is written, constructed and acted make a lot of sense.
- DEFCON4: I’m afraid I have to disagree with you on replacing scripted media with YouTube. You also seem to apply some double standards regarding older and newer shows.
- DEFCON3: Hmm, your views on female characters, while I agree with you on the writing in some cases, are starting to be expressed in a misogynistic fashion.
- DEFCON2: Wait, did you hint you are anti-vax? What’s this Matrix you obliquely mentioned? Have you just said you like X (was Twitter) because you can now call people foul names and not be banned?
- DEFCON1: Trump is great, and it seems you’re all for storming the walls.
So, you start backing off somewhere within DEFCON3. How rapidly you get to that depends on the content and the individual channel.
You can’t be selective in the message.
It’s frustrating because, in the DEFCON1 and DEFCON2 zones, these channels have some valid things to say. I’ll even admit that some of their videos are amazingly well put together, professional and funny. They can also be very on point about the lack of quality in some shows and the reasons why.
You can’t touch them, though.
Listen to the sensible bits but ignore the abhorrent foundation? Well, that’s a challenge. It’s a challenge because of the extremes of it. While some of the outcomes may make sense, you feel their reasons for the conclusion are based on a rotten foundation, so ‘association’ becomes a problem in our social media world.
Association is a problem from both a people and algorithm perspective. It’s a people problem because people can associate you with these people’s underlying views. It’s an algorithm problem because it starts testing other content on you.
I’m unsure how the YouTube algorithm works, but some AI recommendation models do look alike modelling. You engage with a lot of stuff similar to Bob, so we’ll start recommending other content that Bob likes, and it does this at scale.
To be blunt, there are many other Bobs, and maybe enough of them engage with some crazy shit.
Welcome to the Manosphere
I’d never heard of the manosphere or the types of content associated with it. I’m not even sure how it entered my feed. Possibly I triggered it with some click I don’t remember, maybe my YouTube shorts obsession hit something suitably adjacent, or perhaps the algorithm decided that poking one area locked me in step with a 1001 Bob’s, and they were in the manosphere.
It shall remain a mystery.
The manosphere is a network of online men’s communities against the empowerment of women and who promote anti-feminist and sexist beliefs. They blame women and feminists for all sorts of problems in society. Many of these communities encourage resentment, or even hatred, towards women and girls.
internetmatters.org, https://www.internetmatters.org/hub/news-blogs/what-is-the-manosphere-and-why-is-it-a-concern/
That about sums it up. They have a bizarre content format as well. It usually involves a presenter or two, often male, and then a bunch of women. The whole show then seems to be based on pointing out the crazy views of the women. The women are often in their early twenties. The whole thing is often a cluster fuck of craziness on both sides, but the set-up is meant to demonstrate the whole become a high-value man concept and how ‘crazy’ women are.
One of the leading women in this field even believes women shouldn’t be allowed to vote!
That content is obviously ‘what the hell’ and opens up all guns blazing at DEFCON3. The interesting stuff is always the more friendly-presented content that orbits it. There is content that, like the media commentary, presents some ideas you can see making sense to people. I found some of it made sense to me in an abstract intellectual and life experience sense—nothing extreme.
Then you realise that this content, no matter how innocuously it was initially constructed, clearly descends to DEFCON1.
The romance of a flat earth
I remember when there was a sort of romance, quaintness, and harmless affability about conspiracy theories—the days of believing in a flat earth or the fact we didn’t land on the moon. While some might argue these conspiracy theories were gateway drugs, I’m unconvinced. They seemed very similar to media fandom, primarily about finding like-minded souls, declaring ‘one of us’, having a sense of purpose and a connection, and coming together.
The coming together might have been to devise nonsensical experiments to prove the Earth is flat, but it wasn’t vastly different from obsessively discussing Starship designs that didn’t exist. Whenever there were documentaries on it, the people involved seemed very similar to those in media fandoms of the first half of the 90’s. I guess those media fandoms aren’t the same anymore, either!
I know the romanticised view isn’t accurate, as we’ve had the craziness of the Salem Witch Trials and the Satanic Panic in the past. Still, it’s not delusional to suggest in recent times, we seem to have gone from the quaint to the downright nuts.
Welcome to The Matrix
What was true is that both strands of this YouTube rabbit hole effectively ended in conspiracy theories. They are not mentioned regularly; they are not the focus of the content. However, they occasionally appear through the cracks or get mentioned in specific circumstances in the context of particular guests.
There may well be a cross-over, but for the media commentary, it ultimately landed at Trump and all that surrounds him and for the manosphere stuff, it always ended up at Andrew Tate and the concept of The Matrix and how people need to see beyond The Matrix we live and know the truth about how our lives are controlled by almost anything they care to throw into the conspiracy mix: big pharma, 15-minute cities, anti-vax and I am sure Jews, they try to never directly mention that one.
When did all this crazy shit kick in? Experts have done more research than I will have to answer, but I can’t help but think 9/11 was an uplift, and then it got an adrenaline shot with COVID.
It ended with Andrew Tate.
Since these channels’ tin foil hat conspiracy elements started mentioning Andrew Tate, I ended my rabbit hole by watching Andrew Tate: The Man Who Groomed The World. I’m not even sure where to begin. Let’s start by acknowledging that he has a legion of supporters who wouldn’t believe he was guilty of any crime unless he admitted it himself.
He’s organised a cult with its mad monk focused on using women to generate cash through sex work, and yet some people believe anything that comes out of his mouth. The weird thing is the fact that someone set up such a cult isn’t what shocks or surprises me. Cults have existed across human history. What surprises me is why people are drawn to this stuff. I can’t help but think that while we shouldn’t be given the content credence, we maybe should be considering the factors that make people seek solace and identify in it.
And, Finally…
The ‘do not recommend channel’ clicking begins to reverse the algorithm. At least that’s one thing about YouTube you can let it do its crazy ass doubling down shit safe in the knowledge once the true horror has been revealed, you can train it back again with around a handful of do not recommend clicks.
The manosphere is a growing network that deserves attention from the homeland security community as an emerging threat, which if unchecked, may continue to escalate.
– Homeland Security, https://www.hsaj.org/articles/16835
The Baldur’s Gate 3 videos have rapidly replaced the minefield I’d triggered. This is great for the strong-minded; the weak-minded might instead consider getting the assault rifle out of the closet or attempting to monetise any women they know through webcams.
Even Homeland Security has some of this stuff on watch.