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Encoded Flak Jacket: Masculinity in the Internet Era
-- By JorgeRosario - 13 Oct 2024
Tick, tick, tick, boom! Another notification… and again the mouse returns to the spring trap he has fallen for a million times before. Whether it be romantically or socially, modern day social media applications such as Bumble and X produce a cocaine-like high on its users, creating a new male aura that makes men feel like Al Pacino’s Scarface when they truly are much more like Joaquin Phoenix’s Her. The algorithm behind these apps nullifies some of the most prominent male human insecurities: romantic loneliness and social rejection (Sherry Turkle).
The creation of these ‘smart’ machines and algorithms have reduced its users to a shell of their former selves, seeking gratification and validation from other users. The knowledge of whether they are bots or actual people is of no importance. So in the face of romantic detachment and algorithmic suggestion, where will resilience and diversity of thought go?
Love the way you lie
Lies are a common practice within human interaction. Research has shown that over the course of a week we deceive about 30 percent of people we have 1:1 interactions with.
I’m fine… I promise to be there on time… Of course, I love you.
These are all things most men can say they have lied about at some point or another. Good lies about unseeable and unprovable things are even more believable when they are said face-to-face. However, apps like Tinder and Bumble have opened a new and unprecedented space for men to appear as something they are not. Now, visible and physical aspects that could not be denied but only made up for with a “good personality” can be smudged and altered behind fictitious height measurements and carefully curated pictures that tell a story of a man’s wealth and altruism even if that is not the case. Men have started utilizing pictures where they appear with their cute pet or with a fancy car to paint this tale of economic stability, physical fortitude, and gentleness.
Not only are men incentivized on these apps to appear as something they are not, but they are also shielded from a large insecurity: rejection. The convenience of swiping through interminable slides of potential partners does not give the subject enough time to internalize the fact that none of these women are swiping to match with them. They are deprived from the feeling of sexual rejection by the female counterpart, distorting the Darwinist principle of male drive and self-actualization.
That feeling of rejection, so ingrained into our genetic code, is ultimately passed on to the machine that corrects its algorithm and continues spitting out more desirable matches for the carefully curated (and usually fabricated) profile the man has created. This ultimately leads to the inception of beta males and incels. With an inability to satisfy their sexual desires, they turn to blaming women for their misfortune instead of modifying their own behavior. What was once resilience to better oneself becomes compliance with the machine, and what was a lesson after a rejection turns into unhealable frustration.
Tell me who you are and I’ll tell you who you will be
While men are incentivized to appear as something they are not within the romantic sphere of the internet, they very much are encouraged to be themselves in other realms. And then the question becomes: what happens when you become too much of yourself?
X supposedly being an everything platform that “aims to promote freedom of speech” at any cost possible very much has become the pinnacle of the Parasite with the Mind of God alleviating the anxieties caused by feeling like a black sheep. The system metabolizes human attention, it digests the man’s input and spits out suggestions that appeals and captivates. Each time a person posts, interacts with a post, or shares someone else’s post, the Parasite suggests similar material for the feed. While the material is appealing at first, it will start teetering towards the extremes of the person’s point of view.
So the more the person interacts with the interface, the tighter the collar gets, slowly creating an echo chamber, where new ideas are barred and your same perspectives are just regurgitated and fed back to you. What was once a feed of Jewish sympathy towards October 7th victims turns into videos and videos of Hamas (and Palestinains) being dismembered and exploded by Israeli counterstrikes. I say this because this was my experience on X: interact with Israeli sympathy and the Parasite will push you towards more radical views, where sympathy becomes idolization. The machine then connects you with other men that are “masculine and strong enough” to watch videos of people getting decimated. Flooding comments of “I’ve seen worse” “They asked for it” and “Fuck ‘em” turns what could have been a middle ground between sympathy for victims and denouncement of war crimes into an impossibility. With diversity of thought eliminated, socio-political polarization and the pheromonal manipulation of the Parasite takes over.
Where do we go from here?
The road to restoring masculinity, resilience, and authenticity in the age of algorithmic manipulation begins with a conscious detachment from these curated realities. Some may say that there are ways of optimizing the experience through gaining knowledge of the algorithm's inner workings, but that is simply not possible. The machine was designed to surveille you, understand you, and cradle your deepest feelings and beliefs, stripping a man from the traits that made him strong and productive in human society. Reclaiming masculinity, not in the traditional sense, but in a self-assured, accountable, and vulnerable way is through taking more meaningful steps that most will not. Deleting accounts from capitalistic social media entities, creating a personalized and intimate software that does not surveil its users, or renouncing all surveillance clauses in the “Terms and Conditions” are all steps of varying difficulty that no one ever does or will do. This paints a depressing picture of the future where boys and men, not can, but will, become complacent, malleable, and beta males.
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