# notes --- - [ ] https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998 # highlights --- > [!action]+ Sat Feb 03 2024 12:03:06 GMT-0500 > > wrote titled, “A New Global Gender Divide Is Emerging,” which shows > [!highlight]+ Sat Feb 03 2024 12:03:06 GMT-0500 > > thousands of other users have offered up their own diagnoses, as well: Smartphones, video games, economic inequality, lack of education, an over-correction post-#MeToo. > [!highlight]+ Sat Feb 03 2024 12:03:06 GMT-0500 > > Where do bad men here hangout online? Which has given me a near-encyclopedic directory in my head, unfortunately, of international 4chan knock-offs. In Spain, it’s a car forum that doxxes rape victims called ForoCoches. In France, it’s a gaming forum that organized rallies for Marine Le Pen called Jeux Video. In Japan, it’s 2channel. In Brazil, it’s Dogolachan. And most, if not all, of these spaces pre-date any sort of modern social movement like # MeToo — or even the invention of the smartphone. > [!highlight]+ Sat Feb 03 2024 12:03:06 GMT-0500 > > working in Europe, I came to understand that these sites and their culture war campaigns like Gamergate were a sort of ==emerging form of digital hooliganism==. Nothing they were doing was new, but their understanding how to network online was novel. ^ connect to [[{3.2} aesthetics are the new conceptual subculture]] thread – this is a type of subculture that we’re seeing emerge online? > [!highlight]+ Sat Feb 03 2024 12:03:06 GMT-0500 > > unlike the pre-internet age, unmoderated large social platforms give them an infinitely-scalable recruitment radius. They don’t have to hide in backrooms anymore. > [!note]+ Sat Feb 03 2024 12:03:06 GMT-0500 > > Much of the digital playbook fueling this recruitment for our new(ish) international masculinist movement was created by ISIS, the true early adopters for this sort of thing. > [!highlight]+ Sat Feb 03 2024 12:03:06 GMT-0500 > > The biggest similarity, though, is in what I call ==cultural encoding== > [!highlight]+ Sat Feb 03 2024 12:03:06 GMT-0500 > > Taylor Swift, an extremely affluent blonde, blue-eyed white woman who writes country-inflected pop music and is dating a football player headed for the Super Bowl. She should be a resounding victory for these guys. Doesn’t get more American than that. But due to an actually very funny glitch in how they see the world, she’s actually a huge threat. > [!highlight]+ Sat Feb 03 2024 12:03:06 GMT-0500 > > Pop culture, according to the right wing, should be frivolous. Because before the internet, it was something sold to girls by corporations run by powerful men. Famous pop stars through the ages, like Frank Sinatra, America’s first Justin Bieber, or The Beatles, the One Direction of their time, would be canonized as Great by Serious Men after history had forgotten they rocketed to success as their generation’s Tumblr Sexymen. But from the 2000s onward, thanks to an increasingly powerful digital public square, young women and people of color were able to have more influence in mainstream culture and also accumulate more financial power from it. And after Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was able to connect this new form of pop influence to both liberal progressive politics and, also, social media, well, conservatives realized they had to catch up and fast. And the fastest way to do that is to try and smash the whole thing by dismissing it as feminine > [!highlight]+ Sat Feb 03 2024 12:03:06 GMT-0500 > > Pop music? It’s for girls. Social media? It’s for girls. Democrats? Girls. Taylor Swift? Girls and also a government psyop. But this line of thinking has no limit. It poisons everything. If Swift manages to make it to the Super Bowl, well, that has to become feminine too. And at a certain point, the whole thing falls apart because, honestly, you just sound like an insane loser. > [!action]+ Sat Feb 03 2024 12:03:06 GMT-0500 > > Over the past few years, FWIW has become the go-to newsletter for journalists and political operatives tracking digital tactics and trends in American politics. From interviews with the White House to investigations of shady right-wing content farms on Facebook, subscribe to FWIW to monitor the online forces impacting our elections. > [!action]+ Sat Feb 03 2024 12:03:06 GMT-0500 > > After leaving Substack, I luckily happened to come across some documentation from Ghost and a great post by writer Molly White about how you have to personally ask Substack’s support team to remove their access to your Stripe account. If you don’t, they can still take their 10% cut from your subscriptions, even though you’re no longer using them as a host. Which is ridiculous and, frankly, predatory, considering Substack, itself, does not mention this anywhere. > [!highlight]+ Sat Feb 03 2024 12:03:06 GMT-0500 > > The real supposition behind all these theories is that the movie has a story that’s too big for just a movie. It probably isn’t, but since they spent $200 million on it, that’s exactly what they’re hoping. That’s why I say there’s no going back. The hypertext must be the text now. The story you’re watching has to go somewhere other than the screen or the page. > [!action]+ Sat Feb 03 2024 12:03:06 GMT-0500 > > And beyond that, what caught my eye about the theories is the best guesses people can come up with are the most SEO-friendly figures in the cultural conversation. Something W. David Marx recently called “Macro-taste Micro culture” in a very interesting essay. > [!action]+ Sat Feb 03 2024 12:03:06 GMT-0500 > > you want actual juicy gossip involving both fictional and real life spies, however, you should look up the director’s real name and why he goes by Matthew Vaughn instead. > [!highlight]+ Sat Feb 03 2024 12:03:06 GMT-0500 > > think it’s better to assume, at this point, that people just don’t want to consume any news at all, unless it’s being told to them by a young woman drinking flavored water out of a big lead-contaminated cup. > [!highlight]+ Sat Feb 03 2024 12:03:06 GMT-0500 > > The second assumption, that people want summaries of information when they receive it, is also a funny one. It seems to come around every four-to-eight years. Typically when Democrats are in the White House, I’ve noticed. This was the impetus behind Vox, for instance, with its big initial claims of inventing “explainer journalism,” which quickly just devolved into blogging, again. My own assumption here is that this is a byproduct of CEO brain. “I can’t possibly read all of the information I need to pretend to care about to run my company, so other people must treat information as a nuisance to be fixed, as well.” But, once again, that is not really the case. The internet has turned the consumption of information into its own form of entertainment — or in the context of conspiracy theories, madness.