Delusions of Adequacy

I’m a bit over this new masculinity. It stinks of Eau-de-flop-sweat, and there’s no escaping the reek. This whiffy motherfucker is everywhere, like one of Godzilla’s room fillers, and notwithstanding the endless loop of victory laps these guys have been taking recently, it doesn’t smell like victory to me. More like the sour stench of fear, marinated in the ass dampness of a whole bunch of dudes who thought plugging Joe Rogan directly into the brain stem would finally get the hot ladies to pick them, only to realise… hmmaybe not.

For a philosophy built on the worship of dominance, the new masculinity—“Fuck Your Feelings, Men Built This Civilization”—maps eerily well onto a Cluster C disorder in the DSM-5, specifically as it relates to feelings of profound personal inadequacy.

You can sense this anxiety in men who, on the face of it, should have no reason for insecurity. Billionaires, tech barons, culture heroes. Maximum dudebros with the power to shake the whole world like a fucking Etch-A-Sketch.

And yet, catch them at the wrong moment, and you find them quietly whimpering like tiny dogs tied up outside the supermarket, fearful they’ve been abandoned by… what… surely not their masters? Possibly the culture? Even though their victory in the Culture Wars seems, if not complete, then at least somewhat comprehensive?

But what sort of win leaves you convinced you’re still so threatened that you can’t get out of your defensive crouch? Perhaps the best example these last few deeply absurd weeks was the anonymous quote from a ‘top banker’ in London’s Financial Times.

Cred to Ginny Hogan

Ah, yes, but soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is a fine piece of pussy. Yet the light of freedom has not spread so far that this alpha male felt liberated enough to put his name to such a usable pull quote.

Such, I suppose, is the "masculine energy” that Mark Zuckerberg assured us via Joe Rogan is, er, “good” actually. Although to be fair to Zuck, as a lizard person forever straining against the confines of his human skin suit, any sort of energy that maps as even obliquely human adjacent is, er, good, actually.

This is, after all, a man who owns half the internet, which is to say, the modern world, stalked by a fear of inadequacy so debilitating as to need in compensation not just a vintage Burt Reynolds perm but also Nick Fury’s leather jacket, and a gold chain thick enough to safely anchor a superyacht in his favourite tax haven.

And yet, none of it can silence the gnawing rustle of his AI subroutines as they churn and burn to reconcile Zucks’s new persona as the undisputed king of the jungle with Zuck’s daily obeisance to the bigger, badder jungle kings.

As Garret Bucks, a dude whose name is tougher than most of these hapless twinkies, explains:

That’s the thing about the masculinity game. It doesn’t matter how hard you play it. It doesn’t matter if you have literally all the money in the world. The house always wins. Somebody with bigger biceps and an equally low sense of inherent self-worth will always be there to put you in your place, lest there be any risk to their own spot in the imaginary pecking order. 

I think it’s that idea of a comprehensible pecking order, a power structure, whatever you want to call it, that sits at the heart of the new masculinity that whispers so loudly to these guys. Both those at the top of the food chain and the millions who would love to join them up there. A return to Hobbesian hierarchies of simple dominance, in which every social exchange is just another skirmish in the war of all against all, which, naturally, they will win.

Because, surely, they’ll win. Right?

But Zuck already won the game—he owns the algorithms that determine our reality. Apparently, that’s not enough, however, because, deep down, he doesn’t just want power. He craves approval. The guy who ruined everything by putting a Like button on it has been enslaved by his need for a Like from the even bigger chuds.

It’s a whole thing.

One of those chuds could tell you all about it if he wasn't so busy hijacking the machinery of government in what we still think of (wrongly, I suspect) as the United States. Elon Musk, the richest 12-year-old boy ever to have a midlife crisis, could, if he wanted, spend his days drinking thousand-year-old whiskey in a space station entirely run by gynecologically perfect robot Playboy Bunnies—but instead spends his nights picking fights with Twitch streamers. (His days are reserved for speeding running the collapse of democracy) Why? Because the streamers don’t love him.

Let us consider The Path of Exile, a saga so humiliating that it should be heralded by an entire symphony of sad trombone sound effects.

Max Read has the receipts:

The reckoning between Musk and gamers has been a long time coming. For years now Musk has claimed, dubiously, to have been among the best players in the world at a variety of time-consuming games--Quake, Elden Ring, and Diablo IV--despite the fact that he is also running multiple businesses, raising multiple children, impregnating multiple employees, tweeting “looking into it” at multiple guys complaining that Twitter has too many Jews on it, etc. It’s been obvious that Musk isn’t actually playing, e.g., Diablo IV himself, and instead has hired professionals to grind on “his” accounts so he looks good, but streamers and gamers and other types of people whom you might assume would care about this stuff have extended him the benefit of the doubt, presumably out of some sense of annoying-nerd solidarity.

Not so anymore. Before setting up camp in the basement where the US Government keeps its six trillion dollar piggy bank, Musk was so very needful of being seen as an elite gamer that he beclowned himself by live-streaming his embarrassing sleep-deprived dad-level run-through of The Path. He was hilariously shit. And when the internet laughed at him? He did what any hard-bitten alpha male would do when cornered—lashed out and leaked some DMs that made him look even sadder.

This is peak performance of the new masculinity: powerful men playing dress-up, hoping the right costume will make them feel better. Zuckerberg, Rogan, and Musk—the billionaires and Meme Gods of this strange era—are all still awkward teenage boys staring into the mirror, flexing, hoping one day their reflection will flex back. And they are the fucking alphas of this weird org chart. Their army of epsilon semi-morons is standing in front of their own cracked and spotted mirrors in the basement, aping their idols, contorting themselves in grotesque mimicry of what is already a perverse parody of strength, never realising that the men they worship are just as lost.

The "vibe shift" these guys are so sure is happening, the idea that the world has turned back in their favour, that the future is all steak tartare smoothies and “Your body, my choice” - it’s an illusion. It isn’t about being strong. It’s about looking strong to other weaklings and giving them a model on which to base their own performative excesses. But real strength doesn’t need to be performed.

The "high-value man" bullshit—it’s all triage for a mass panic attack disguised as a revolution. Cunningly disguised, I’ll admit, because the actual revolution happening right now is a radical transfer of power away from elected officials and democratic institutions into the hands of a few hyper-wealthy, extremist oligarchs who, having taken power, will never, ever cede it. And to secure that hold, they will need an army of minions and willing enforcers.

I wonder where they’ll find them?

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Publishing note. ASB will be back as usual on Friday this week, but the following week I’m travelling, so that is a good time to do another Book Club, I reckon. I’ll be reading Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time and Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before The Coffee Gets Cold. A couple of literary time travel jaunts. You, of course, can read whatever you want and tell us all about it in the comments. Or you can read along with me. Bradley’s book is a beautifully written romance, that takes a weird jag through the spacetime continuum. And I haven’t read Kawaguchi yet. But it looks nice. Nicer than contemplating reality, at any rate. So that’s Bookclub set for Friday 21 Feb.