>>22950389
That was an awful lot of work to go through to basically conclude that incels hate women, society, and themselves, and reinforce this with imagery. Their bias towards gender performativity was pretty clear. Still an interesting read. It's not explicitly stated, but they seem to think that incels are actually unknowing victims of a patriarchal society, where the majority of their angst stems from their failure to live up to constructed gender norms that exclusively value men for a small number of qualities, such as physical attractiveness and dominance. A pretty ironic thought for a group that sees itself as rabidly anti-feminist.
I wish they'd speculated more about the relationship between doomerism and "right wing" ideology, but it was probably outside of their scope.
7/10 overall.
>>22950391
>the chapter
Very strong "screaming into the void" vibes with this one. It reads like Uncle Ted's manifesto if it were updated for 2025, with an inversion of the anti-left bias that document had. The part related to 4chan felt like a pretty hard digression from the overall point of the chapter, which is that technology is destroying the essence of what it means to be human. His wanted to illustrate the destructive effect that Internet-facilitated activism can have in the real world, but his personal fondness for the parts of that activism he personally agrees with undermined that message somewhat. I don't appreciate the characterization of Gaymergate as an organized harassment campaign against women and journalists specifically, since it ignores a lot of the underlying causes of the movement.
Still, he's ultimately correct. He did a very good job outlining the way that big tech corporations exploit/engineer human behavior for the sake of sheer profiteering. His illustration of how terribly this effects people in day-to-day life is persuasive. It's a bit alarmist, overall, but it's alarmism in the right direction.
8.5/10.
