Screenshot of video

I’m officially middle-aged, so have given up trying to understand under-40s culture. However, it’s still worth studying, especially when it’s essentially algorithmically-determined.

In this article, Ryan Broderick gives the example of Ashton Hall, a fitness influencer:

Hall’s video, which was originally shared to his Instagram page back in February, is essentially a checklist of weird Instagram shit. A dizzying mix of products and behaviors that make no sense and that no normal person would ever actually use or try, either because Hall figured out that they’re good for engagement on his page or because he saw them in other videos because they were good for those creators’ engagement.

And so we have things that people do, and are watched doing, because an inscrutable algorithm has decided that this is what people want to watch. So this is what is served, what people consume, and therefore the content which influencers make more of. And so it goes.

Culture shifts, and not always in good ways. As the Netflix series Adolescence shows, there is a sinister underbelly to all of this. But then that is, in itself weaponised to suggest that some way to fix or solve things is to ban digital devices. Instead of, you know, digital and media literacies.

In terms of physical safety, one of the most dangerous things you can do is laugh at someone who considers themselves hyper-masculine. But this is also the correct response to all of this stuff. It’s ridiculous. So the key is to point out how ridiculous it is to boys and young men, not in a way that condemns other (unless it’s someone like Andrew Tate) but rather just how it doesn’t make any sense.

“Fifteen years ago this routine would get you called gay (or ‘metrosexual’) but is now considered peak alpha male behavior. Something weird has shifted,” influencer and commentator Matt Bernstein wrote of Hall’s video. And, yes, something has shifted. Which is that these people know that there are a lot of very sad men that are going to get served their videos, and they’re fully leaning into it.

Guys like Hall are everywhere, with vast libraries of masculinity porn meant to soothe your sad man brain. Nonsexual (usually) gender-based content, like the trad wives of TikTok, targets your desires the same way normal porn does. Unrealistic and temporarily fulfilling facsimiles of facsimiles that come in different flavors depending on what you’re into. There’s a guy who soaks his feet in coke. A guy who claims he goes to a gun range at six in the morning. A guy who brings a physical book into his home sauna. A guy who’s really into those infrared sleep masks and appears to have some kind of slave woman who has to bow to him every morning before he takes it off. A guy who does the face dunk with San Pellegrino, rather than Saratoga. An infinitely expanding universe of musclemen who want to convince you that everything in your life can be fixed if you start waking up at 4 AM to journal, buy those puffy running shoes, live in a barely furnished Miami penthouse, have no real connections in your life — especially with women — and, of course, as Hall tells his followers often on Instagram, buy their course or ebook or seminar or whatever to learn the real secrets to success.

And I’ve been surprised that this hasn’t come up more amid our current national conversation about men. Because this is the heart of it. There are a lot of very large, very dumb men who want you to sleep three hours a night and invest in vending machines and do turmeric cleanses and they all know that every man in the country is one personal crisis away from being being algorithmically inundated by their videos. And as long as that’s the case, there’s really nothing we can do to fix things.

Source: Garbage Day

Image: Screenshot of video from Ashton Hall, fitness influencer