I like this piece, but there’s an aspect of it that doesn’t quite sit right with me. It’s really easy for leftist critiques to accidentally imbibe the imaginary of ‘the market’ as impersonal force by projecting it onto the objects of their critique. I think it does too much here.
https://twitter.com/OlufemiOTaiwo/status/1367970771935637509
The primal awkwardness of most incels is obviously shaped in bad ways by capitalism, neoliberalism, and their ideological apparatuses, but there’s diversity in this awkwardness beyond the stamp ‘the market’ has put on it, and I suspect that it’s worth delving deeper here.
I don’t want to provide a unified theory of the intel here, not only because that would require a lot of work, but because it would also undermine my point. My sympathies are open here: I know many men (not ‘incels’) who’ve been twisted into bad shapes by romantic incapacity.
This creates resentments of various sorts, feelings of inadequacy, learned helplessness, and other pathologies, but though there are recognisable genres of bitter and twisted here, the underlying social terroir is surprisingly subtle. Such contingency might be the place to start.
I'm deep into the predictive processing paradigm, so I think experience (Erlebnis) just *is* expectation, and that means its parameters are defined by the contingent interplay of prediction and surprise. The lessons we learn (Erfahrung) are essentially responses to surprise.
How does someone end up in a state of learned romantic helplessness then? This is a huge factor contributing to the sort of entitlement that gets talked about in incel discourse, because the loss of a sense of agency leads naturally to a demand for external compensation.
This perceived lack of agency is indeed a more general feature of capitalism. It's no coincidence that the inability to get a girlfriend easily becomes symbolic of a wider complex of disappointed expectations regarding the shape of their life, economic and otherwise.
But there's a specific lack of agency here, and its one that doesn't always lead to this symbolic collapse, or even to pathological senses of entitlement. I've met many men who are best described as existing in states ranging from mild bafflement to outright self-loathing.
I don't think this is unique to men either, even though it's more obviously characteristic of the current regime of masculinity, and its pathologies are *deeply* entwined with the pathologies of this regime more generally. Hopefully this is sufficient qualification.
I think at least some of what's going on here is an incompatibility between social capacities (which are variable) and romantic opportunities (which are increasingly restricted to contexts some people find alienating). Forget the bridal imaginary, look to the meet cute.
One of the weirder and more interesting features of the media contexts in which incel culture got incubated was the prevalence of anime, and there could be a flight of books written on the represenation/idealisation of romance peculiar to it and its myriad ramifying subgenres.
To say that male anime protagonists are by and large passive vehicles for audience projection whose romantic lives are almost entirely determined by seemingly chance encounters should be pretty cliche at this point. There's a whole subgenre of 'girl falls from the sky' anime.
But I think the tendency is to see this as feeding directly into the toxic expectations of feminine availability, care, and support, rather than to look at it in the way we look at Mills and Boon novels or Disney princesses. There's a distinctive romantic imaginary here.
To qualify this again, I'm not saying that anime consumption is the defining factor of the nexus I'm trying to unearth, just that it's one of those strands that's indicative of the issues that shape its underlying diversity, and that beyond merchandise/waifuism it's non-market.
Let's go to the other end of the spectrum for a moment. Tinder is the closest we get to the literalisation of the market analogy: a churning sea of gamified supply and demand negotiation. For some, it's liberating. For others, it's a hell composed of other people.
I'll admit to having tried it very unsuccessfully. The first time I tried online dating, using OKCupid, I really liked it. It cut out the parts of dating that I personally find very anxiety inducing: initially co-ordinating mutual interest and advertising potential deal-breakers.
Look at me using contractual language! How corrupted I have become. Seriously though, I experienced a very abrupt and visceral shift between online dating platforms, where apps sucked everything in through network effects and the geography of the socio-romantic terrain morphed.
Since then new apps and services have proliferated and really articulated a market for sexual and romantic encounters, in which services compete to sell us to one another in ways that suit different demographic interests. I'm not going to label this good or bad. It merely is.
What I'm interested in is not so much what draws people into this market, shaping romantic interactions in contractual and even transactional ways, but what is driving them away from whatever we had before and exists outside this, if any of us can even remember or describe it.
Is there a particularly healthy or exemplary model of romantic encounter that we would like to hold up as an ideal that these digital love markets fail to live up to? Is there a natural order, some geometry of intersecting passions that they have (innovatively) disrupted?
Or is the contingency of the romantic encounter, that which refuses to situate it within any deliberate plan or prescribed system, precisely that which is most ideologically salient? The interesting thing about most dating apps is that they remain aleatoric, within constraints.
Apps promise a balance between contingency and comprehensibility we can't find elsewhere, a probabilistic meet cute managed either by sheer volume or by more subtle metrics, whose parameters we can learn, leading sometimes to mastery (PUAs) and sometimes to helplessness (incels).
Again, I'm not trying to reduce everything to apps, but showing how even within the constrained contexts they constitute the same dynamics occur: some get the dynamics, some game them, and some learn nothing but lessons about their own incapacities. These lessons are often wrong.
What exists outside of these walled libidinal gardens, whose Edenic confluence of innocent sin always alienates some, feeding them rotten apples infused with the wrong sort of carnal knowledge? What does the offline romantic world look like right now?
Well, right now, not like much. But as with most forms of sociality, the drastic transposition of meatspace meet cutes into virtual encounters during the pandemic is not so much a phase transition as the acceleration of a process emptying the offline world of its old affordances.
Again, I don't want to say this is good or bad, it merely is. It's generally the case that women now have more romantic agency than they used to, and this is before we talk about the proliferation of queer spaces and orientations, or the spread of polyamory. Culture has shifted.
But economics has shifted too, and their ratcheting ambient anxieties have combined with other social changes, such as gradual hardening and enforcement of norms governing workplace relationships, communication, and anything in the vicinity of a romantic proposition.
We often talk about how anxieties about healthcare provision, making rent, and other economic necessities prevent people from taking the sorts of entrepreneurial risks we are told that capitalism specialises in generating and cultivating. What about romantic risks?
Once more, I'm somewhat biased here, as this is the most acute form of social anxiety I personally feel, but I think this concrete sympathy provides a useful perspective. I overthink everything, and despite what this thread might suggest, this really doesn't help me in romance.
I don't want to talk about the details here, because even I must draw certain hard boundaries about what things I will and won't discuss, but I can tell you this: I can imagine a version of myself alienated and politically naive enough to have been drawn into the incel vortex.
This is a terrifying thought, made worse by the other men I know who've come close and may yet come closer to that toxic mess of resentment and rationalisation. Yet this invites further thoughts, because their difficulties, even when worse, are never quite the same as mine.
The shape of the social terrain has changed in ways that have created and responded to new sorts of sexual and romantic agency, but these changes have disenfranchised many whose social instincts fail to get purchase on let alone navigate it with any reliability.
To say something concrete, whatever the various forms of arranged marriage and matchmaking prevalent in pre-modern periods did, they often compensated for social awkwardness by taking the responsibility out of the hands of those being paired, to greater or lesser degrees.
I'm not trying to argue for a return to arranged marriage. I'm not that guy: 
I'm cautiously pro-match maker though:
What do I mean here? Well, I'm very much in favour of increased agency and the increased responsibility it both enables and demands. Personal autonomy for all is my terminal value. But this doesn't need to be individualised or marketised, and one quickly leads to the other.
Demanding that someone stop complaining about the limited opportunities for personal growth that their social environment has provided them is bad whether these opportunities are economic, aesthetic, or romantic, even if the seriousness of such complaints is highly relative.
Personal autonomy entails personal responsibility, but ought-implies-can. There are concrete obstacles to articulating our own personal destiny, of whatever type, which we cannot overcome because on our own we lack the resources. Therefore, we should pool our resources.
We should create the opportunities we want to see in the world, and aim to make them as diverse and inclusive as possible. We shouldn't encourage the narrowing of these opportunities to those mandated by specific modes of sociality or desire. This is a collective responsibility.
This is merely one facet of a wider responsibility not to impose our own preferred modes of sociality on others, by appealing to implicit social imaginaries whose consequences we have not fully thought through (cf. deontologistics.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/uncann…).
But it's equally another injunction not to evade responsibility by delegating it to systems that are not only not autonomous, but which potentially diminish rather than enhancing our collective autonomy:
https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1366906638855192576?s=20
What does this say about incels and how we should treat them? I'm not entirely sure to be honest. I'm not arguing that their entitlement should be appeased in any way. I'm only arguing that we should understand them as a symptom of a deeper issue we should tackle head on.
If this means building better markets for sexual and romantic exploration, then so be it. Could there be an OnlyFans, but for bespoke matchmaking? Can this proximity between sex work and care work be exploited for good, rather than evil? I simply don't know.
But it might otherwise mean making an effort to stage social opportunities in which lonely and/or awkward people might encounter one another, and accepting the risks involved, because in romance, as in business, risk and reward tend to go hand in hand. 🖖
CODA: Here are some other things I've written that might provide context or elaborate some of these thoughts.
1. 'Sexuality as Process vs. Sexuality as Product' -
1. 'Sexuality as Process vs. Sexuality as Product' -
https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1362033637219311616?s=20
2. 'Risk, Investment, and Inequality' -
https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1361638974591275008?s=20
3. 'Sincerity vs. Honesty' - deontologistics.co/2019/10/29/tfe…
4. 'Social Graphs and Speech Policing' -
https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1360892488664383496
5. 'Cognitive Economics and the Functional Theory of Stress' - deontologistics.co/2018/02/18/oft…
5. 'Nicotine, Self-medication, and Cognitive Liberation' -
https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1358548607134236672?s=20
And finally, to address the relation between collective responsibility and algorithmic contingency:
6. 'AI Ethics and Questions of Autonomy/Automation' -
6. 'AI Ethics and Questions of Autonomy/Automation' -
https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1363955404896677893?s=20
🖖
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