Antisocial, page 17
As a libertarian, Cernovich believed in taking cues from the free market. He kept expecting to express an idea so strange or depraved that his readers would recoil; but the more extreme his views became, the more traffic he seemed to get. When the Supreme Court heard a case about whether the New Haven Fire Department’s hiring policies were racially discriminatory against white people, his response was not a dry legal analysis of affirmative action, but a heated first-person essay about what it was like to grow up poor: “Fuck you and your Harvard-attending ass lecturing me about white privilege.” The comments section of his blog lit up. A few readers were offended, but most were gratified. “Those Harvard types that make the laws don’t know the real America,” one commenter wrote.
Cernovich took a jaundiced view of politics, high finance, academia, and celebrity culture. “Never trust a man who combs his hair so as to cover his shiny dome, and then flaunts a wife young enough to be his daughter,” he wrote in 2006, in a post called “Donald Chump?” He recommended a documentary version of Manufacturing Consent and an hour-long lecture by Elizabeth Warren on the collapse of the middle class. In other posts, lest his liberal readers get too comfortable, he’d express deep skepticism about gun control or climate change.* A slave took moral instruction from his superiors; a free man thought for himself.
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In 2010, Cernovich was six years out of law school, still living with his wife in San Francisco, still not admitted to the bar. In addition to his freelance legal work, he bought the URL Fit-Juice.com, where he blogged about health cleanses and hawked a series of self-published recipe books.* This brought in a modest amount of income, but the truth was that his wife, who was now a high-ranking employee at Facebook, earned more than enough to provide for them both. (In addition to her salary, she was paid in Facebook stock—nearly three hundred thousand shares, all told.)
Later, in a blog post, Cernovich bragged about having dined at Sheryl Sandberg’s house: “Mark Zuckerberg and his flunkie (forget his name—Chris Cox?) were insecure around me. That’s when I learned that money can’t buy what I have.” The post didn’t mention that he’d attended the dinner as his wife’s date. He seldom wrote about his domestic situation; when he did, he mentioned it obliquely, spinning it as a form of postfeminist empowerment. “How much money does a man need to make?” he wrote later. “Not much, actually, if you reject the social pressures associated with being what the slave masters call a ‘real man.’” In reality, though, he couldn’t ignore the gulf between the scale of his online bluster and the modesty of his real-life achievements.
The tone of his blog grew blunt and caustic. He explained obvious things in a condescending tone (“Almond milk is not cow’s milk”; “Most people misunderstand cocoa”). Because there was no absolute morality, he started arguing, any man who wanted power should simply take it. “In society, there are two sets of rules,” he wrote. “One for alphas and one for betas.” If readers were delicate enough to be offended by his words, or too stupid to understand them, then they were free to leave. And yet, the harsher his tone got, the more his readership grew. This no longer surprised him. People were drawn to brute displays of simian dominance, whether they admitted it or not. Maybe others wanted to live in a fantasy world where everything was cushy and altruistic and nice guys finished first, but Cernovich preferred to see reality for what it was. This didn’t come naturally to him. After all, he had been raised to turn the other cheek. But he still thought of his life as a hero’s journey—he hadn’t forgotten his aspiration to become too big to ignore—so he set about reconditioning himself.
Whenever he had a forbidden thought, the old half of him was tempted to suppress it, but the newer, more aggressive part of him chomped at the bit. He referred to women as “cuntnags” and “spinster-sluts.” One of his blog posts consisted of a single sentence—“What happens when you mount a hidden video camera to a hot chick’s ass?”—and a link to a YouTube video. This was crowd-pleasing content, but he hadn’t yet mastered the art of the curiosity gap. The post’s headline—“Everyone Stares at a Nice Ass”—served as its own inadvertent clickbait spoiler.
All of this was smutty by the standards of a criminal-jurisprudence blog, but it was tame compared to other blogs Cernovich had been reading. Return of Kings was a blog by Roosh V (short for Daryush Valizadeh), an Iranian-Armenian-American in his thirties. Valizadeh traveled the world writing self-published sexual-exploitation baedekers (Bang Colombia, Bang Estonia), but appeared to live in his mother’s basement in Maryland. Roissy in D.C. was a pseudonymous blog that seemed to be written by a forty-three-year-old white guy living in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of D.C. These blogs, and a small nexus of related discussion forums and message boards, comprised what was coming to be known as the manosphere, where disgruntled straight males shared their frustrations and desires—including, most commonly, their desire to meet women and have sex with them. Blogs giving advice on how to do this were called PUA sites, or “game” sites. PUA stood for “pickup artistry”; “running game on” women meant seducing them by capturing and manipulating their attention.
In the manosphere’s nascent ideology, feminism was considered not only an unjustified form of affirmative action but a perverse, destructive delusion. Cernovich linked to a 17,000-word blog post, written in a lordly tone and rife with charts and statistics, which claimed that “misandry is the new Jim Crow.” The most effective way to gain “immense personal power,” according to another influential manosphere post, was to exhibit the “dark triad” of personality traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.*
Cernovich was reading a lot of this stuff, and it was beginning to infect his thinking. He found it off-putting at first. Some ideas he didn’t dare discuss with casual acquaintances, or even with his wife. And yet, when he considered the underlying arguments with an open mind, he had to admit that he couldn’t always think of a way to refute them.
To the extent that mainstream journalists covered the manosphere at all, they tended to reduce it to the pursuit of sex. (A long piece in The Weekly Standard, in 2010, ran under the headline “The New Dating Game.”) Cernovich thought that sex was important, but he also thought the manosphere was also getting at something deeper. On his blog, he’d been lambasting “feminism’s war against men”; now even that descriptor was coming to seem pale, almost polite. He started to wonder whether the problem was actually more elemental than that—a brainwashing so pervasive that even to notice it was to become a pariah, to go voluntarily into a madhouse.
In the sci-fi movie The Matrix, a gnomic figure called Morpheus sits across from Neo, a computer hacker. “You’re here because you know something,” Morpheus says. “You’ve felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world.” This is because the world Neo perceives is not the real world; he actually lives inside the Matrix, a simulation designed “to blind you from the truth.”
“What truth?” Neo asks.
“That you are a slave,” Morpheus says. He leans forward and holds out a capsule in each palm. “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe,” he says. “You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
Neo takes the red pill, and the hero’s journey begins.
In 2011, Mike wrote a Crime & Federalism post called “The Rise of the New Independent Male.” “Men are natural information seekers, but for most of our lives, we were denied access to information,” he wrote. “Then came the Internet.” Something was stirring, some kind of “political-culture movement”; he was a part of it, but even he couldn’t yet name it or fully understand it. “We know that both The Wall Street Journal and New York Times are scam publications,” he continued. “We know that Democrats and Republicans are scoundrels and thieves, and do not speak for us. What are the implications of this new reality?”
Below the post, a commenter wrote, “I don’t know that nihilism itself can actually build anything.”
“It’s not that we know nothing,” Cernovich responded in the comments. “It’s that everything we know is a lie. Now what?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A Filter for Quality
The internet was full of red pills if you knew where to look for them, or even if you didn’t. It wasn’t just gender—it could be race, or GMOs, or the history of the Federal Reserve. You never knew when you might bump into Morpheus. Sometimes, it seemed, you could be minding your own business and Morpheus would find you.
Obama ran for president, and the pundits on cable news often praised his campaign for its sophisticated social-networking tools. But much of what the campaign did with those tools—canvassing, phone-banking, fund-raising—was just the normal business of electoral politics, made more efficient by computers. There was a deeper technological shift happening, but it was still inchoate and hard to describe. In 2008, at a rally in Lakeville, Minnesota, Obama’s opponent, John McCain, took unvetted questions from the audience. “I can’t trust Obama,” one woman said. “I have read about him, and he’s not—he’s not—he’s an Arab.” McCain took the cordless microphone out of the woman’s hand and corrected her while backing away. The moment was recapped on cable news, where it was treated as proof of McCain’s Buckleyan willingness to rebuke the fringes of his party, and on Saturday Night Live, where it was treated as a joke. Few people thought to wonder exactly what the woman had been reading, or which content-distribution algorithm had served it to her.
Obama won the election. “We gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord,” he said in his inaugural address. This seemed true, or at least plausible, to those Americans who were still getting their information from USA Today and the CBS Evening News. But in the backwaters of the internet, the conspiratorial hum continued to grow louder.
Two days after the 2008 election, at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, there was a tech conference called the Web 2.0 Summit. It featured keynote speeches by several BSBs, including Mark Zuckerberg. “I would expect that, next year, people will share twice as much information as they are this year, and then the year after that they’ll share twice as much,” he said. This became known as Zuckerberg’s Law, and it turned out to be basically correct. More and more people were contributing news to, and getting news from, their social feeds; meanwhile, the very definition of “news” was being transformed. A few years earlier, Zuckerberg had said, “A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” This wasn’t meant to be a public-facing adage like Zuckerberg’s Law. Rather, it was an internal directive to the engineers who would build Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, instructing them to show whatever a particular user was likely to find most relevant—i.e., most clickable—at any given moment.
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In the age of social media, anyone could be an influencer. Money, credentials, cleverness, personal connections—all were helpful, of course, but you could make do without them. You didn’t have to know how to code, or even how to write; you didn’t have to show your face or use your name. All you needed was a meme with momentum.*
The conference in San Francisco was called Web 2.0 because its organizers believed that the internet was in the midst of a momentous transition: the shift from the open web to the social web. Web 1.0 was dominated by big institutions, but Web 2.0 would give the power to the people. The paradigmatic Web 2.0 innovation was the social network. If the open web was a vast landscape dotted with isolated viruses, then social networks would be like the advent of air travel, enabling a virus to conquer the world in a day.
Paul Graham, a renowned computer engineer and venture capitalist, wrote a post on his personal blog about what Web 2.0 meant to him. One of the things it meant was online “democracy,” in the form of freedom from informational gatekeepers. “Amateurs can surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to channel their efforts,” Graham wrote. The social web, he hoped, would be this kind of system.
In 1998, before the tech bubble burst, Graham sold his first software company to Yahoo for $49 million. After that, he often showed up at tech conferences around the Valley, looking the part of the semiretired Mountain View millionaire (polo shirt, khaki shorts, Birkenstocks). “Like a lot of guys who got rich from technology, I’ve been meaning to give seed money to new start-ups,” he wrote. In 2005, he finally got around to it: he cofounded Y Combinator, a boot camp for aspiring entrepreneurs.
Within a few years, thousands of young coders, some of them still in college, had applied to Y Combinator. The three percent who were accepted moved to the Bay Area, where, for three months, Graham and his team provided mentorship, technical advice, and access to their personal network of rich investors. Graham did all this, he wrote, because “start-ups are on balance a good thing. . . . Focus on helping founders, and everything else will follow.” More tangibly, Y Combinator took a 7 percent stake in every company that completed its program, an investment portfolio that would soon be worth tens of billions of dollars.
Graham wasn’t a household name in the rest of the country, but within Silicon Valley he was widely revered—a BSB’s BSB.* Aspiring entrepreneurs read Graham’s blog religiously; they quoted it, from memory, in casual conversation. He wrote essays about Lisp programming and Bayesian filtering, but he also took on more far-ranging subjects: “Why Nerds are Unpopular,” “Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas,” “How to Make Wealth.”
Graham’s essayistic voice exemplified the BSB attitude—blithely dismissive of received wisdom, self-assured to the point of hubris.* He approached most topics with the pragmatic swagger of an engineer. When you’re writing code, or getting a business off the ground, you can solve problems by applying time-tested axioms, or you can solve them by flouting convention and reinventing the wheel. All that matters is whether your solution works, or seems to work.
Graham instructed the young entrepreneurs in Y Combinator to take business advice from people who had successful track records in business. Yet he encouraged everyone to take his advice on a wide range of topics, far more than it was possible for one person to be an expert in. What gave him this confidence? The democratic spirit of the internet. “Anyone can publish an essay on the Web,” Graham noted. “Who are you to write about x? You are whatever you wrote.” He put his trust in quantifiable metrics. In his official bio, he mentioned how many pageviews his essays had received. It was a large number. What better credential could anyone ask for?
In March 2005, Graham gave a talk at Harvard called “How to Start a Start-up.” In the audience were Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, two undergrads from the University of Virginia. It was spring break of their senior year. Huffman, a computer science major with chipmunk teeth, a thatch of blond hair, and an alpha-nerd blend of introversion and self-assurance, had been coding since he was eight years old. His favorite programming language was Lisp, and, as he put it later, “If you’re a fan of Lisp, you inevitably become a fan of Paul Graham.” They approached Graham after the lecture, and Huffman asked for his autograph.
A week later, when Graham started accepting applications for the inaugural class of Y Combinator, he encouraged Huffman and Ohanian to apply. Ohanian—dark-haired and tall, with a goofy kind of charisma—was not a coder, but he was a techno-optimist who believed that start-ups could “make the world suck less.” He and Huffman proposed a company that would let people order food on their cell phones.
Graham rejected the food-ordering idea, but he liked Huffman and Ohanian, so he accepted them on the condition that they think of something else. What they came up with was a simple link aggregator—a site for sorting and surfacing the best stuff on the web. Anyone could post a link to anything. Next to each link would be two voting buttons, an up arrow and a down arrow. That was pretty much it. The site was called Reddit. They referred to it, aspirationally, as “the front page of the internet.”
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The text was small blue Verdana on a white background. People posted links to funny news stories (“Public Schools Begin to Offer Gym Classes Online”), baubles from the far corners of the web (a grad student blogging his way through Wittgenstein’s On Certainty), and midnight dorm-style conjecture (“Why the Probability That You Are Living in a Matrix Is Quite High”). Ohanian—using his Reddit handle, kn0thing—posted a news story called “Researchers Map the Sexual Network of an Entire High School.” Huffman—using his handle, spez—posted “The 86 Rules of Boozing,” from Modern Drunkard Magazine. Both links were big hits on Reddit, which wasn’t a surprise. The cofounders understood the site’s vibe implicitly, because the vibe was being formed, in real time, around their personalities.
Reddit’s sorting algorithm was purely democratic, which is to say anarchic. The links with the most “upvotes” rose to the top of the page. There was no economic incentive for people to click or share; Huffman and Ohanian hoped that other basic human motives, such as curiosity and vanity, would be enough of a draw. They turned out to be right.
Every time a link was upvoted, the user who’d submitted it would get one “karma” point added to his or her profile; a downvote would take a point away. Business consultants would soon start referring to such online design tactics as “gamification”—but Huffman, coding Reddit alone in his bedroom, was proceeding less by strategy than by instinct, trying to build the kind of site that someone like him would find irresistible. The site’s frequent users—redditors—started visiting multiple times a day, or multiple times an hour, or multiple times a minute. They mocked the site’s built-in enticements, referring to the karma system as “meaningless internet points.” This was basically true. Still, there was no evidence that those who noticed the futility of the game were any less likely to play it.
