In Musk’s view, both masculinity and whiteness are somehow under threat. After he took over Twitter in October 2022 and renamed it X, he turned the platform into a propaganda machine for white nationalism and endless grievance. He also turned Grok, his AI chatbot, into a “nudification” tool that lets X users create AI images that strip real people, usually women and girls, of their clothes—his contribution to the broader problem of deepfake sexualized images, including those created by schoolboys to persecute their female schoolmates. Musk’s SpaceXAI company recently filed an emergency petition to bar enforcement of a new Minnesota law against nudification. Like Zuckerberg, Musk increasingly seems to live in unreality, and maybe that’s another feedback loop: The Internet creates billionaires, and extreme wealth creates disconnection from their own and everyone else’s humanity and, as Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein argue in their new book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, from nature.

The language of porn and manosphere culture is also part of right-wing discourse; Musk frequently uses the term cuck (as in cuckold, a popular porn theme), and White House communications director Steven Cheung publicly called Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff one on August 17. Brandon Herrera, a gun nut running for Congress, said of Shannon Watts, the founder of the anti-gun-violence organization Moms Demand Action, and of mothers more broadly, “Just because you let somebody creampie you doesn’t mean I have to give a shit about your political opinions. The fact that you kept your cum trophy doesn’t make you any less wrong about the dumb shit that you say.” By “cum trophy,” the Texan apparently means “child.”

In August, a massive report appeared that addresses the impact of the Internet on young men with a kind of compassion and boldness that I haven’t seen before. Titled “The Grift Economy,” it was produced by Reset Tech and Equimundo, the latter an organization dedicated to “promoting caring manhood for the good of all of us.” They write, “There is a multi-billion-dollar industry built on the loneliness, economic anxiety, and identity of men. It does not call itself an industry. It calls itself a movement, a brotherhood, a path to success. It presents itself as the antidote to a society that has failed men—and in doing so, it sells them the very things that keep them isolated, financially drained, and psychologically dependent on the young men profiting from their struggle…. This is exploitation in plain sight. Likewise, the biggest platforms—YouTube, TikTok, X, Instagram and others—are not just passive participants in the grift economy. They carry out inconsistent and often after the fact accountability, sometimes taking down individual postings but leaving the revenue streams and ecosystem operating as it is.”

The authors reject the term manosphere, because “it frames a predatory commercial operation as a cultural movement,” and instead call it a “grievance industry.”

The odd thing, however, about almost all of the discourses about the loneliness pandemic and the impact of the Internet on young men, including “The Grift Economy,” is that they prudishly leave out one of its most harmful offerings: online porn. Porn has become de facto sex education for the young, and a lot of it, to put it mildly, does not encourage healthy habits. Years ago, I read a former pornographer’s account of his work in which he declared, “As a director of heterosexual porn, I came to learn that while my overt task was to make sure the girls got naked, my true responsibility was to make sure the girls got punished. Scenes that stuck out, and hence made more money, were those in which the female targets were verbally degraded and sometimes physically humiliated.”

A 2020 scholarly article confirms his account. The authors write, “Overall, 45% of Pornhub scenes included at least one act of physical aggression, while 35% of scenes from Xvideos contained aggression. Spanking, gagging, slapping, hair pulling, and choking were the five most common forms of physical aggression. Women were the target of the aggression in 97% of the scenes.” Dedicated porn users can become jaded and require more extreme content to stimulate themselves, and the Internet doesn’t just comply; it leads them to it. In 2025, a UK man arrested for consuming child pornography told The Guardian how, as he binged, standard porn became insufficiently stimulating: “Soon you are watching rape fantasies—there are loads of categories like this on mainstream sites. Then it’s teenagers. The algorithms keep showing you more extreme stuff.”

One of the few people who have spoken up about the pervasiveness and harmfulness of porn is Peggy Orenstein, who wrote Girls & Sex in 2016, followed by Boys & Sex in 2020, and then an utterly horrifying 2024 op-ed in The New York Times about the prevalence of strangulation during sex for teenagers and young adults. “Sexual strangulation, nearly always of women in heterosexual pornography, has long been a staple on free sites, those default sources of sex ed for teens,” she writes. “As with anything else, repeat exposure can render the once appalling appealing. It’s not uncommon for behaviors to be normalized in porn, move within a few years to mainstream media, and then, in what may become a feedback loop, be adopted in the bedroom or the dorm room.” Strangulation can result in emotional trauma, brain damage, or death, and in a plethora of homicide cases, men have claimed that their female partner was accidentally strangled during consensual “rough sex.” That’s a reminder that this version of sex is also a flirtation with murder. Andrew Tate and the Monetized Manosphere

Almost every aspect of this monetized manosphere unites in the person of Andrew Tate, who’s currently in a Florida jail along with his brother Tristan awaiting extradition to the United Kingdom to face criminal charges. For Andrew, they include “seven further counts of rape, three counts of arranging or facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation, three counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and 19 additional charges for offences relating to indecent images of a child and extreme pornography.” The charges for Tristan are “one further count of sexual assault, two counts of rape and three counts of arranging or facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation.” The bodily harm includes many instances of strangulation, reported by multiple victims of the brothers. After years of dithering, Romania has also indicted Andrew Tate, charging him with “trafficking minors, money laundering, sex with a minor and witness tampering.”

The Tates went from kickboxing to running a webcam brothel whose women were confined and abused in various ways to becoming perhaps the most influential manosphere influencers of all. “The Grift Economy” estimates that their Real World University, which offers classes in how to be more like the Tates and rewards users for recruiting others, pyramid-scheme style, had a gross annual revenue of $184 million. In her long investigation of the Tates published in The New Yorker in June, Heidi Blake describes Andrew’s more expensive enterprise: his War Room, which “for a fee of about eight thousand dollars a year…promised to ‘free the modern man from socially induced incarceration.’ Members learned how to recruit women into ‘sexual slavery’ in a series of tutorials that Tate called his Ph.D., or ‘Pimping Hoes Degree.’” She also reports, “He has repeatedly advocated throttling women during sex as a way to assert masculine power.”

In other words, Tate, who made his initial fortune exploiting women to draw in money from men, turned to exploiting men directly, in part by teaching them to abuse and despise women. All this had a huge impact on boys, particularly in the UK. “The Grift Economy” notes that a lot of boys and young men set out to look for self-improvement and role models and find these destructive versions online: “‘Masculinity’ has become a commercial category that is constructed, curated, and financially incentivized online. Influencers, platforms, and third‑party vendors participate in a shared revenue infrastructure that transforms male insecurity into attention, attention into grievance, and grievance into profit.”

Grievance is a key word. While high-profile right-wing men on the Internet, including Tate, Musk, Trump, and JD Vance, and right-wing pundits like Tucker Carlson claim to have all the good things in life—gobs of money, lots of power and influence, luxury goods—they radiate misery, resentment, grievance, sourness, whininess. At least since Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the culture of the right has been driven by an emotional poverty, a stinginess and lack of empathy dressed up as a rational insistence that the rich and the state cannot afford to meet the needs of the poor, whose poverty is all their own fault anyway. Resentment is the recruitment bait; the manufacture of grievance is central to the marketing of all the rest of the package; the much-discussed crisis in masculinity is a for-profit operation, even if many of its operators sincerely believe in and embody its miseries.

In 2025, Elon Musk, on his way to becoming a trillionaire, destroyed the United States Agency for International Development on the apparent grounds that feeding starving children and preventing deaths from disease was not “efficient.” He declared (on Joe Rogan’s podcast, of course) that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” The medical journal The Lancet estimates that the termination of USAID will, by 2030, result in more than 14 million deaths, including 4.5 million children under the age of 5. It is perhaps relevant that Cards Against Humanity is fundraising to build a monument titled “Elon Musk Is a Sad Little Bitch With No Friends” on land next to SpaceX’s south Texas site. Bankrupting a Generation

Even while the Tate brothers’ alleged crimes (which they deny) were widely covered, Andrew was embraced by right-wing figures ranging from Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, and Candace Owens to Donald Trump Jr. and Barron Trump. Although Tate had been kicked off Twitter, Musk reinstated him when he bought the company. Tate reportedly connected with Barron Trump, who worked on recruiting young men to vote for his father by, among other things, hosting a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Justin Waller, an influencer who works closely with the Tates on their online courses and calls himself the “third brother.” Tate launched a meme coin and bet—and lost—tens of thousands of dollars on Donald Trump Jr.’s own crypto venture. (Reuters reports that as of April 2026, “the Trump family has made $2.3 billion from crypto with little-to-no downside risk, while other investors have lost $2.3 billion, including paper losses, as of the end of April.”)

Beyond the Tate empire and its uncertain future are endless grifts that men seem more susceptible to than women—young men in particular. As Alisha Grauso remarked on Bluesky in May, “Our entire economy is being artificially propped up by astrology for men: AI, crypto, sports betting, and prediction markets. It’s an economy shaped entirely by male insecurity and lack of impulse control, and we’ll all pay the price.”

The latest Young Men Research Project notes that American men between 18 and 29 are twice as likely to own crypto as their female peers. Gil Durán, the author of The Nerd Reich, a new takedown of Silicon Valley, says, “Crypto basically is a weapon of mass corruption. It’s a way that Silicon Valley can funnel massive amounts of money into the political system.” Likewise, there’s a lot of evidence that young men in particular are over-involved in sports betting, at levels sometimes described as addictive and often financially ruinous.

The prediction market lets anyone over 18 bet on almost anything, including clinical-trial results and FDA approval of new drugs—one father of a child with cancer described it as betting on cancer-mortality rates. In August, nine Democratic senators asked the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to crack down on betting on wildfires, which is an invitation to arson. There are also numerous stories about insider trading and athletes degrading their own performance so that someone will get a payoff. The Trump administration, for its part, has not only “embraced prediction markets, criticizing states that try to regulate the industry,” as the business reporter Daniel Munoz notes, but “the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., serves in an advisory role for both Polymarket and Kalshi.”

Business Insider reported in April, “Consumer bankruptcy attorneys told [us] that over the past year or so, they’ve seen a surge of young clients—mostly men in their 20s and 30s—running into financial trouble largely due to online gambling…. Online betting apps are designed to make spending fast and frictionless, in some cases allowing users to fund bets with credit cards—a dynamic that can lead to debt piling up quickly.” The Deseret News notes, “The biggest prediction market businesses are donating millions to political campaigns to influence the outcomes of races, and voters themselves may be swayed simply by looking at the prediction odds posted online.”

We are at a crossroads in our relationship to the digital offerings of Silicon Valley. The AI corporations plan to further invade our personal and professional lives, relationships, creativity, employment, and everything else. The tech overlords are becoming ever more fascism-friendly—and AI promises to extend their capacity for disinformation and manipulation. But more and more of the public is in revolt. There’s deep scorn and suspicion about AI and the ways it’s being pushed on us by its profiteers. Communities are fighting against AI data centers across the United States and other countries, using multiple tactics to establish limits on the use of superintelligent AI, computers in the classroom, and phones in public schools and private life. As the resentment builds toward surveillance technologies like Meta’s “pervert glasses” and Flock cameras—which are increasingly being sabotaged as reports of abuse of the technology by police officers, some of whom were stalking their exes, continue to proliferate—the spreading user revolt has received an unintended boost from what the journalist Cory Doctorow calls the “enshittification” of social media, search engines, and other sites on the Internet. The Male Role Model We Actually Need: Zohran Mamdani

At one pole of the high-profile young men of our time is Andrew Tate. At the other is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. One of the remarkable things about Mamdani is that he always radiates joy, the very opposite of the grievance and misery offered by those right-wing men—and by the accused serial sexual abuser whom Mamdani soundly defeated, Andrew Cuomo (who in 2021 was forced to resign in disgrace as New York’s governor). Both in his campaign and in how he governs (as well as in his brilliant videos), Mamdani has shown us how we can set out to get good things for everyone. Perhaps joy, empathy, and generosity arise from the same source. And yet despite his power, success, good looks, and political talent (on full display when he went to the White House and, as one might speculate, charmed Trump into backing down on launching a Minneapolis-scale ICE invasion in his city), no one seems to be holding up this happy newlywed as a role model for young men—perhaps because he’s Muslim.

Jackson Katz, a gender scholar and advocate for men engaging with women’s rights, recently wrote about a fictional character whose “emotional illiteracy virtually guarantees that he isn’t capable of sustaining an intimate relationship with a woman, unless he can find one that is emotionally undemanding and adequately compliant. Feminist progress has made this increasingly difficult, because too many women have been taught to expect more. This is one of the underlying causes of the relationship crisis roiling heterosexual couples in the West—and a main source of right-wing resentment toward feminists.” The right and much of the manosphere/grievance economy aspire to force women to regress to that state of compliance by returning them to social, economic, legal, and political subordination. And they conspire to create the emotional illiteracy that Katz describes, which damages men as well as women.

The alternative would be for men to become capable of sustaining flourishing relationships with women. I have waited for much of my adult life for (straight) men to start a liberation movement akin to feminism, one that would publicly reject the conformity, repression, and aggression that define the kind of masculinity the manosphere is selling. In another sense, it’s been all around me: I live in San Francisco, where I’ve known lots of gay men who were fully aware that the patriarchy rejected them and who rejected it in return. Many I’ve known have been far more amusing (and amused), expressive, free, and affectionate than most straight men. Then too, they are accustomed to having romantic and sexual relationships with equals. They’ve made it clear that the problem isn’t men; it’s patriarchy.

However, gay men, like Muslims, are not likely to be held up as role models by mainstream society. On the other hand, a lot of men have over the past half-century gradually adapted to a world in which women are in positions of power, men are expected to participate in domestic life, and casual sexism is no longer reflexively glossed over. In a sense, the manosphere is a backlash against a mainstream in which other men have undramatically and often unconsciously adjusted to a more egalitarian world (and white people to a world of more racial equality). And while a lot of young men seem to have been ensnared by the right-wing ideologies I’ve outlined, many other young people have become more progressive about almost everything, including gender identity and gender roles.

Nevertheless, any effort to offer boys and young men better role models will have to go up against an immensely profitable online industry. Maybe the question for boys, for young men, and for everyone else is how to get offline, how to come back to that world where we meet face-to-face instead of performing for strangers.

“The Grift Economy” argues that the “tools needed to act on this industry are already on the books—consumer-protection law, platform-accountability frameworks, and a track record of enforcement against the same playbook aimed elsewhere. The barrier was never authority; it was framing, and naming this as fraud rather than culture war puts the existing tools within reach.” There are, in other words, legal and financial ways to go after this industry. But the transformation must also be cultural.

Let me end where I began. The Internet was made by men for men, and that has conveyed enormous advantages to them. At the same time, it has become a malevolent force that has caused enormous harm, first to those it has seduced and captured and then via these captives’ impact on the broader society. To escape its clutches must also mean rejecting its premises and scrutinizing its grifts and profiteers. It must mean embracing principles that don’t create haters and the hated the way the grift does. It may help to recognize that the broligarchs with all the power and status have none of the joy.