Something Other than Fascism

There is a war on boys, and it is fought in infinitesimal spaces, tiny periods in between, before the clock ticks anew once it has struck the last millisecond. Its current shape resembles fascism in many aspects (politics, imagery and paraphernalia) but it differs in its causes, its goals, and its future evolution. However, the fact remains that there is a concerted effort by dark actors to destabilize as many boys as possible through the use of social media to shape global discourse and in turn, society, into their own profitable chaos.

Gambling companies, traditional brands underperforming in the market, alpha myth influencers, men’s rights activists, and many other self-pitying carrion scavengers stalk the battlefield from the outskirts looking to make a killing from the rupture of social structures brought forth by their victims: young boys who are too naive to realize they are being recruited into a campaign of self-destruction simply because their wounds bleed money.

It started a decade ago with the discovery of niche antifeminist crowds coordinating harassment crusades against women who made video games with unorthodox themes, which negatively changed the way game development companies related to players, as well as having a terrible impact on the real lives of many women in that industry who had to change residence and seek legal counsel to protect themselves from hordes of anonymous criminals who pledged to hurt them. But also, importantly, it changed the way big money was made: developers could either spend years committed to furthering their crafts and creating complex logical playthings with elevated quality that withstood the passage of time, or they could quickly churn out the umpteenth clone of the same games that had been recently successful with the misogynistic mob, and pander to the hateful players with an increasingly cartoonish masculine ethos that ensured they would get wallets thrown their way.

Soon other industries decided they wanted a piece of the retrograde pie, and thus the advent of the caveman marketing era arrived. Corporate teams devised creative ways to glorify the carelessness and destructive moral associated with the misanthropic persona of the caricature macho gamer, equal parts couch potato and frantic voice-chat agitateur, tailoring energy drinks, cheese puffs, chocolate, and sometimes deodorant, to fit the newly minted personality of the angry nerd that resents the world for failing to cater to their childish needs long after they stopped being children. This would later become the cultural fertilizer for the current push to turn boys into mindless minions.

At the same time, consumer-grade computer science took gigantic leaps and went from the still somewhat analogic experience of the early 2010s to the fully digital, augmented reality most of us live in now. There is no more need for uncertainty regarding how most things work, and thus there is no more room for the curiosity that would lead children to develop cumbersome theories of the world that would last until they were told otherwise in school; considerable amounts of magic were lost in that replacement of occasional curiosity for ubiquitous precision. But there is also a limit for how much complexity we can handle. The refresh rate of our screens is superior to what we can process, that is, we can see up to several hundred hertz, yet how much of that can we actually perceive and interpret? And how much of it simply gets discarded by our brains? Most of the bright, fast light we expose children to is excessive for their ability to make sense of, and it has a stimulating effect that raises the threshold to what they feel as the baseline for excitement or just contentment. That’s the second element of this zeitgeist trifecta of worsening perspectives for boyhood.

And the last leg of this problem is the neverending laboriousness we adults are immersed in. The amount of time we can be available for young people to build relationships with is slim. Kids are dealing with a world that is much more convoluted than it used to be, and they have to do it on their own. Sometimes it is because the technology is so new that it is hard for us adults to relate to it, but mostly it is due to the extreme levels of busy we have to be in order to stay afloat. And that is when the lack of structure, the vacuum left by our unavoidable absence, is filled by the allure of fascism: the anachronic search of order and tradition by becoming a subservient underling to a Duce or Caudillo that will tell you what to think, how to act, who to hate, and who gets to live or die. Many boys who find solace in the obscurity of alt-right forums are looking for some form of order, any order, that will keep the world at bay and let them feel peace. And most of them lack the constitutional scumbaggery that it takes to be a legitimate racist or woman hater. As soon as they get the structure they need in the real world, they start to heal and forget the hatred taught by the cyber fascist peddlers.

There are, however, a few solutions to this growing problem:

1. If you're a man, be a positive, active influence in that young boy's life. Talk to him, listen to what he has to say. Take him on every day errands and let him watch you following societal rules and expectations. Be nice to the women in your life, uplift them, celebrate them and whenever you get a chance, let them know how important they are in your life, just because. What you do and say around women will affect you personally, and it will also affect everything you do later on around the boys you're trying to protect from misogynistic echo chambers, and only if you're genuinely positive will you be able to cast sufficient gravitational pull to protect them from inceldom and similar propaganda.

2. If you're a parent or a teacher, watch the content they consume with them, ask them questions, and keep an eye out for positive, prosocial streamers and influencers you can recommend for them to see and follow.

3. As for the technological facet of the problem, I have my hope set on projectors, which would make it easy to let them enjoy games and streaming content without getting their eyes bombarded with images at an unmanageable speed, but maybe there could be another solution, in the form of a middleware pipeline that limits the refresh rate to slower, healthier figures to prevent the overwhelming effect of contemporary screens.

4. An old Spanish maxim, attributed at times to Pio Baroja and others to Miguel de Unamuno, states that the antidote to fascism is reading, and the antidote to racism is travelling (“El fascismo se cura leyendo, y el racismo se cura viajando”). Maybe they were right. The future is worth trying.