How white male victimhood got monetised

Back when Gamergate was still burrowing its way, maggot-like, up out of the rotting body of online misogyny, a bunch of well-meaning folks asked me: 'Why are you writing about this?' And my answer at the time was: this is the future of politics

In order to get people to join your far right, neo-Nazi brigade, you have to convince them they're victims first (Reuters)

The most famous I've ever been, in the fluctuating sense of internet "fame", was when I was playing an internet strategy game in the late 90s. There can't have been more than a few thousand players, but the Geocities site I wrote for on game tactics had a huge audience and stratospheric traffic.

In adult life I've been a newspaper columnist, done live TV, lectured to packed rooms and more. But there's nothing quite like the buzz of being intensely famous inside the focused communities that gamers form.

I also learned a metric crap-tonne about how online communities of angry young nerd dudes function. Which is, to put it simply, around principles of pure toxicity. And now that toxicity has bled into wider society.

Kevin Kelly's famous diktat – that an artist can make a living with "1,000 true fans" – probably wasn't meant to include Nazis. But the same idea that empowers tens of thousands of writers, musicians and other creatives today also unleashes destructive forces.

In a twist on the "1,000 true fans" principle worthy of Black Mirror, any alt-right demagogue who can gather 1,000 whining, bitter, angry men with zero self-awareness now has a self-sustaining full time job as an online sh*tposter.

Social media has been assailed by one toxic "movement" after another, from Gamergate to Incel terrorism. But the "leaders" of these movements, a ragtag band of demagogues, profiteers and charlatans, seem less interested in political change than in racking up Patreon backers.

Popular alt-right provocateurs can pull in hefty figures via Patreon, over $8,000 a month for some leading YouTubers. These figures style themselves as leaders of a new political movement, defending the world against the "menace" of Social Justice Warriors. But the real alt-right business model is much simpler than that.

Making a buck from the alt-right is quite simple. Get a blog or a YouTube channel. Then under the guise of political dialogue or pseudo-science, start spouting hate speech. You'll soon find followers flocking to your banner.

Then all you have to do is start milking your flock for cash. Publish a crappy ebook explaining why SJWs Always Lie. Or teach your followers how to “think like a silverback gorilla” (surely an arena where the far right already triumph?) via a pricey seminar. Launch a Kickstarter for a badly drawn comic packed with anti-diversity propaganda. They'll sell by the bucketload to followers eager to virtue-signal their membership in the rank and file of the alt-right.

Because if there's one easy way to fame in this world – something that even the most mediocre can achieve – it's by exploiting the seemingly bottomless reservoirs of white male victimhood.

Jordan B Peterson, currently raking in $80,000 per month on Patreon, and with a global bestseller to boot, is someone who believes in white male victimhood above all else. Peterson will literally weep, actual flowing salty tears, in front of a video camera, over the fate of the young white male. And then he will upload the result to his YouTube channel, where a small army of devoted followers eagerly lap it up.

Then there’s Infowars founder Alex Jones. Between unhinged rants about the AI robots who secretly rule the world, Jones shills everything from body-building supplements to anti-radiation iodine pills, for the prepper who is truly prepared for anything. Of course people who style themselves as truth-tellers for the alt-right come in all different stripes, and Peterson and Jones are just two types of successful online men playing up to the “white male victimhood” trope. But in terms of the alt-right, these men are fairly tame. There are much more dangerous groups and individuals out there, some of whom may well have pushed the world toward a change in international politics.

A good conspiracy theory is central to the alt-right, because anyone who believes that a secret Illuminati conspiracy hosts a child abuse ring under a pizza parlour in Washington DC, or that the CIA was behind 9/11, or that aliens have been visiting Earth since 1947, is self-selecting for the essential quality the alt-right plays on: credulity.

And nowhere is there a better supply of the credulous than among the angry white men who flock to the far right. Embittered by their own life failures, the alt-right follower is eager to believe they have a genetically superior IQ and are simply the victim of a libtard conspiracy to keep them down. Nothing makes a person more credulous than their own sense of entitled victimhood.

Back when Gamergate was still burrowing its way, maggot-like, up out of the rotting body of online misogyny, a bunch of well-meaning folks asked me: "Why are you writing about this? It hardly seems relevant." And my answer at the time was: this is the future of politics.

Since that moment, we've seen the tactics and techniques of alt-right demagogues go mainstream. Like Thanos unleashing the Infinity Gauntlet, right-wing political forces are tapping into the seemingly unlimited power of white male victimhood to score political wins with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.

We're barely in the foothills of the mountains of madness that the internet and social media are unleashing into our political process. If you think petty demagogues like Jordan Peterson are good at milking cash from the crowd, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Because he was just the beginning – and his ideology of the white male victim is rapidly spiralling into something that even he can no longer control.