🔒 How Geeks Ate the World: The Red Pill Factory

How Geeks Ate the World is the working title of a book that I’m writing, exploring the development of reactionary movements in geek culture (media, tech, and hobbies) since the internet era, and how these movements have come to dominate real world politics in pretty horrifying ways.

I will be publishing chapters and essays related to this project for paying subscribers around once a month. Unlike my regular newsletter, these essays will remain paywalled.

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Episode 1 - How Geeks Ate the World
Episode 2 - Demons of Suspicion
Episode 3 - Backward Male
Episode 4 - The Californian Ideology
Episode 5 - Something Old, Something New, Something Rotten, & Something Awful
Episode 6: The Bomb that Japan Dropped on America
Episode 7: The Masculinity Medicine Show
👉Episode 8: The Red Pill Factory

 In 1999, the year Magnolia introduced Pickup Artistry to mainstream audiences, another two films were also released that would both become foundational to the men’s movements as they entered the 21^st century—the films that would be the uniting catalyst that brought PUA together with the Men’s Rights Movement under the umbrella of the “manosphere.”

 Ironically, the usage of these films as a basis for a reactionary masculine identity is rooted entirely in a misreading of the films, which both, in their intent, reject and attempt to subvert the surface reading that these movements have nevertheless adopted. The films I’m referring to are Fight Club and The Matrix.

 These are very different movies in terms of genre, tone, and style, but they share an important key theme: The emasculating and demoralizing effect of middle-class Generation X office drudgery, the Western version of a culture that had already driven Japanese men to near breaking point by this time.

 The 90s, winding down from the end of the Cold War, featured this theme heavily in its fiction, and 1999 in particular was its flashpoint. This was the year of not only Fight Club and The Matrix, but also Office Space, American Beauty, and Being John Malkovich.

 Each of these five movies centers on a male main character who is drowning in disdain for his boring, absurd, Kafkaesque office job. With the sole exception of The Matrix, each film explicitly presents the main character as being emasculated by this work. Office Space, Being John Malkovich, and American Beauty share a theme in which the character is suffering an unhappy relationship with an overbearing partner while he pines for another woman.

 In three of the five films—The Matrix, Fight Club, and Being John Malkovich—the main character attempts to escape his job and his life by adopting a more attractive, confident, and powerful alter ego. In Being John Malkovich, a comedy drama, Craig Schwartz  (John Cusack) finds a supernatural portal in his office that enables him to inhabit, and later possess, the body of the real-life actor, John Malkovich. In Fight Club, the unnamed main character played by Edward Norton lives a double life, unbeknownst to even himself, as the hypermasculine Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who he believes to be another separate person. In The Matrix it is the office worker Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) who is living the false life. In reality he is Neo, the prophesized messiah of a post-apocalyptic future world in which a tyrannical artificial intelligence has trapped him inside a simulation of 1999 cubicle monotony. He is not merely trapped here; he is literally enslaved.

 It was the deeply philosophical nature of those latter two films that spoke to socially and sexually frustrated young male geeks the most (Being John Malkovich may have resonated more if it had been Being Jason Statham) at the end of a decade that had begun with Robert Bly’s Iron John, which Fight Club satirizes.

 Notable as well is the following year’s American Psycho, which, although set in the 1980s and satirizing yuppie culture, hits many of the same beats. The film, based on a 1991 Bret Easton Ellis novel, centers on Patrick Bateman (played with chilling ease by Christian Bale), a corporate executive  who is obsessed with performative masculinity and so desperate for attention in a world of forced conformity that he commits a series of increasingly ultraviolent murders (or doesn’t—how much of the story is a figment of his imagination is left deliberately vague.)

 In 1992, political philosopher Frances Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, which outlined his thesis that the fall of the Soviet Union had represented humanity’s last great failed political experiment. Free-market liberal democracy, he proposed, was essentially the final resting state of human politics. Major ideological wars were over; what was left of war was Balkan-style regional ethnic disputes. Politics had largely wound down to a relatively stable state of American-style capitalist status quo that globalization was dutifully carrying to the remaining corners of the world that had not yet embraced it.

 The title of Fukuyama’s book is frequently truncated to “The End of History,” which refers to this resting state. Less commonly mentioned is the last half of the title, “and the Last Man,” a concept that Fukuyama borrows from Nietzsche, and discusses what becomes of us when the struggles are over; When the slave class, in Nietzsche’s terminology, overcome the masters. When your society establishes a rule of law and grants that every individual has the same rights as every other, do we become satisfied in our victory, or do we stagnate, and rebel?

 Fukuyama illustrated a paradox in which the downtrodden fight for equality to overthrow the oppressor, but equality is not what anybody legitimately wants, including historical egalitarian figures such as Lenin who, despite his philosophy, necessarily considered himself above equal.

 They will want to be citizens rather than bourgeois, finding the life of masterless slavery—the life of rational consumption—in the end, boring. They will want to have ideals by which to live and die, even if the largest ideals have been substantively realized here on earth, and they will want to risk their lives even if the international state system has succeeded in abolishing the possibility of war. This is the “contradiction” that liberal democracy has not yet solved.¹

 According to Fukuyama, the last man is he whose fight for equality has essentially ended in a Pyrrhic and banal victory.

 Of course, the experience of all the struggles being over for you in a western liberal democracy does not, in current practice, apply to every class of people, as it does in theory. This is a non-impoverished white and male condition.

 The last man is Kevin Spacey’s Lester Burnham in American Beauty, who reports to his supervisor that “My job consists of basically masking my contempt for the assholes in charge and, at least once a day, retiring to the men’s room so I can jerk off while I fantasize about a life that doesn’t so closely resemble Hell.”

 It’s Being John Malkovich’s Craig Schwartz, who needs to literally crouch all day as he works as a filing clerk on the seventh-and-a-half floor of his office building, its low ceiling and thus low rents being attractive to “businesses which, for one reason or another, have been forced to cut corners.”

 It’s software engineer Peter Gibbons in Office Space, whose job at the software company Initech ostensibly involves preparing its systems for the Y2K bug. In actuality, he does next to no real work all day besides filling out pointless reports, and tells a coworker, “We don’t have a lot of time on this Earth, we weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles, staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.”

 It’s The Matrix’s Thomas Anderson, also a software engineer for the company Metacortex, whose boss summons him to his high-rise office to tell him, “You have a problem with authority, Mr. Anderson. You believe that you are special; that, somehow, the rules do not apply to you. Obviously, you are mistaken. This company is one of the top software companies in the world because every single employee understands that they are part of a whole.”

 It’s the unnamed protagonist of Fight Club, whose alter ego mocks as “the all-singing, all-dancing, crap of the world.”

 It is probably the latter that most clearly captured the common sentiment of men as otherwise disparate as Paul Elam and Neil Strauss at the end of history. Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden monologues a number of times on the topic, at one point stating “We’re the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war, our Great Depression is our lives.”

 The manosphere is inseparable from its origins in white collar marketing and sales, coaching, self-help, quack psychotherapy, and the medicine shows that preceded them, and these themes permeate through the Last Men films of 1999, but in Fight Club most prominently. Norton’s character, “the Narrator,” who travels extensively for his job as an insurance investigator, suffers perpetually from crippling jetlag and insomnia, a condition that he can only alleviate by attending group therapy sessions for afflictions he does not suffer from, like substance abuse, tuberculosis, and cancer. He becomes addicted to the therapy itself.

 In the hours that he believes he is asleep, his split-personality, Tyler Durden, lives as a charismatic salesman—a medicine show quack, you might well say—who manufactures soap in the basement of a derelict mansion and sells it to high-end department stores. The soap is made from rendered human fat stolen from a liposuction clinic. Durden was “selling rich women their own fat asses back to them.”

 When the Narrator “meets” his alter ego, they embark on a new type of therapy—an underground club in which men physically beat each other senseless to recapture their lost masculinity. This plot device channels an unusual fusion of both Fukuyama and Robert Bly, who both discussed the phenomenon of the office drone, what the Japanese had already termed the salaryman; the absentee father, married to, enslaved, and emasculated by his job, the warrior spirit coursing through his veins and desperate to be released. Warrior energy, Bly argued in Iron John, must be channeled, or else it will release itself in some evil form, like domestic physical or sexual violence. Men, Bly argued, whether on the battlefield, the sports field, or the barroom floor, must bleed.²

 Fight Club, neither David Fincher’s film, nor the 1996 Chuck Palahniuk novel on which it was based, was meant to serve as the Bible of the Men’s Rights Movement. That the story, in the third act, clearly presents Tyler Durden as the villain to be defeated—a man whose philosophy is not just evil but, more importantly, incorrect and contradictory—appears to be lost on those who are attracted to his message. It is the unfortunate bane of the storyteller that you cannot tell a realistic story about a charismatic and attractive thought leader without making him charismatic and attractive to your audience.

 There is nothing hinting at the concept of Pickup Artistry, and very little of heterosexual relations at all, in Fight Club—there is only a single female character—but its impact on the PUA community is powerful and uncontroversial. To disavow any illusions of subtlety, Owen Cook, one of the main characters in Neil Strauss’ The Game, chose “Tyler Durden” as his PUA nickname.

 Cook was a different type of monster to the other personalities living in Mystery’s PUA “game house” that they called “Project Hollywood” (Another nod, possibly, to Fight Club, the titular club being named “Project Mayhem.”) It soon became clear to the other Pickup Artists that something about him was very off. Ross Jeffries himself said “There’s something creepy about his lack of ordinary human warmth.”³

 The typical PUA of Project Hollywood was a geek attempting to reverse engineer the code that came seemingly naturally to jocks, but they could not be jocks. They could be jerks when it suited what they thought was a winning strategy, but most, including Strauss and Mystery themselves, would admit to true love and monogamous marriage being their long-term goals. For them, the game had an ultimate win condition that involved hanging up the fedora once it was met.

 In situations where the game was in play, at parties or in bars and clubs, PUAs would typically avoid true jocks, and had techniques for doing so. In a sense, in the food chain of seduction, PUAs acted more like scavengers who could wear the stripes of a predator to mislead or Mesmerize their prey but would cede territory to any actual jocks who entered the arena. As explained by Strauss, “There’s nothing more humiliating than having a lumbering high school quarterback who reeks of alcohol pick you up from behind and make fun of your peacocking gear in front of the girls you’re trying to game. It’s a constant reminder that you are not one of the popular kids, that you’re just a closet nerd faking it.”³

 Owen Cook had the ambition of a true predator. Not content to scavenge in the undergrowth behind the backs of the jocks, his method, like the Fight Club antagonist he styled himself after, was proactive. He confronted and competed with the jocks directly—an escalation of their community mission that Strauss considered dangerous. Cook’s game technique was to be a true “alpha male.”

 While most of the PUAs in Strauss’ book used this term to refer to themselves, in contrast with the submissive “beta males,” Cook would take the concept to its more logical conclusion; a key component of the culture was that PUAs work together and help each other score, but this is not the behavior of a true alpha male, of which there can be only one in a group. As such, Cook would often break the honor system and “cockblock” other PUAs.

 But he was still, in true form, a geek. A retail drone at the end of history who adopted a more attractive and charismatic alter ego and named it after a movie character who had done the same. According to Neil Strauss, he was “the biggest closet nerd of us all.”³ He would meticulously analyze social interactions and break them into their constituent parts in the laboratory of his mind. No social interaction was casual. It was anthropology. It was, all of it, science.

 We don’t know exactly when the practice of ranking men by a hierarchy of Greek letters entered the manosphere, but it was not widely heard in mainstream parlance before The Game. The concept is borrowed from zoology and is used in that field to describe masculine hierarchies in social animal groups.

 Much mockery has been generated from the idea that the manosphere got this concept from wolf packs, which are frequently depicted in the media as living by this strict hierarchy (notably in the 2011 film The Grey, in which Liam Neeson, Hollywood’s truest alpha, fistfights a bunch of them.) The reason this is funny is because wolf hierarchies have been scientifically debunked, as the origin of this idea, from the 1981 book The Wolf by biologist L. David Mech, was based on flawed studies.⁴

 To be a killjoy, there’s little evidence that wolf packs were the inspiration for the application of this term to the behavior of humans. It was much more likely to have been borrowed from primatology—in particular, Frans de Waal’s 1982 bestseller Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes. Contemporary media at the time of the book’s release commented often about the similarities between de Waal’s studies of chimp behavior and the carrying on of human men.⁵

 In any case, this is one of many key manosphere concepts to have emerged from scientific literature—the geek mimicry of jock archetypes via a type of research-based theory.

 Owen Cook, the PUA world’s own Tyler Durden, had ambitions greater than simply picking women up in bars. Alongside Nikky Kho, whose PUA name was “Papa,” (and who is now a Silicon Valley business coach), they saw the potential to bring sexual seduction to the next level. Not an underground culture, but an industry. Together they founded the company “Real Social Dynamics.”

 The Game left its impact crater on the world in 2005 with the kind of instant popularity that lands books in the “recommended” sections of airport bookstores, which is where I first encountered it around that time. But by then the nature of PUA was already evolving into something darker, more collective, more corporate, and more ideological. The World Wide Web was bringing more socially and sexually awkward geeks together than ever before in online communities. The culture of the internet, still overwhelmingly male, white, and geeky, now smelted in the pop culture forge of 1999, was being shaped into something obscene.

 The office drone masculinity crisis of the 90s, especially among geeky and nerdy men working in male dominated fields, created an ideal environment for Pickup Artistry to flourish in the mainstream. According to Sarah Martin, a Texas-based sociologist and private sex coach who works specifically with software developers:

 Men in STEM often work in all-male environments and so they don’t have close contact with women daily. Most of them are influenced by pickup artists to some extent. As a result of this influence, they’ve often developed a negative view of male sexuality, in which a man must be a certain way to ‘get’ women, even when that’s not in integrity with their values. They also have problems with expressing their needs. They often suffer from self-esteem problems and have a history of bullying.⁶

 Real Social Dynamics (RSD) did to the Pickup Artistry culture what McDonald’s did to independent burger restaurants. Cook and Kho made Pickup into an industrial franchise. They opened an internet forum that soon attracted thousands of members—thousands of awkward geeks who yearned for a cheat code to women and relationships rooted in hard science and tested hypothesis, and who were willing to pay good money for these secrets. But community coalesced into echo chamber and began to absorb concepts from the greater manosphere. They started to become more cynical, more reactionary, and more definitively antifeminist.⁷

This is a preview. Continued after the paywall: How failed Pickup Artists such as Rollo Tomassi, Roosh V, and Mike Cernovich misused The Matrix to establish an online misogyny empire.

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