I suspect that Musk plays an oversized role here both as a victim of the incel mind-virus and as a super-spreader.
He spreads it both by hosting the platform formerly known as twitter, and by standing before the masses as an exemplar of someone who has "maxxed" his sexual value and so is able to have many children.
And he has had facial surgery, and he is obsessed with getting wealthy, and he ticks all of the other incel boxes -- and he is made utterly miserable by all of his activities.
He is the perfect example of your final paragraph: having attained what all of his legions of fan-boys dream of (wealth, prominence, and many sexual partners), he can only strive for things permanently out of his reach, completely irrelevant to his life-world: things millions of years in the future or lightyears away obsess his thought. Meanwhile, he is turning the here and now -- even his here and now -- into a place of sterile, pointless misery and frustration.
It's never entirely clear how much one person's algorithm correlates with another's, but it sure seems that on both Substack and Twitter, "battle of the sexes" content (which isn't always quite so incel-ized but is always at least in conversation with that world) is being pushed very aggressively. It seems to have replaced Trump as the topic most able to keep users scrolling.
Is that revealed preference or is this a mass psychosis being driven by these platforms?
I think it’s a perennial obsession; I remember figuring out in retrospect that it was a hot topic in the 80s and 90s — so many terrible books on how to understand “the opposite sex”. You see the influence of this battle of the sexes thinking in pop culture.
What changes, IMO, is exactly how attractive the topic is. At various points, it seems like a silly notion or like an antiquated cliche. And then it has a resurgence, maybe correlating with increased focus on “traditional roles” or economic precariousness or whatever.
I also don’t know that “mass psychosis” would be the right term if it were some kind of algorithmically driven cultural shift in thinking. I don’t mean to be a nag, but psychosis isn’t just strange ideas (no matter how strange or repulsive). It involves a loss of function and a disconnection from both interpersonal and more broadly social interactions. Like, I’m willing to grant that QAnon can be spoken in such terms, but I feel that we do need to distinguish between mere intellectual fads (no matter how stupid or immoral) and the cult-y conspiratorial shit that sucks people in and results in them exhibiting actual psychotic symptoms.
I will note, however! Those are usually two ends of the same spectrum. For every gloomy nerd obsessing over how his widow’s peak is costing him girlfriends, there’s a teenage Clavicular ruining his life with ‘roids.
I’m just cautious about the non-specialist use of “psychosis”. Psychotic illnesses are not illness because they leads to peculiar thinking, they’re illnesses because they distort and destroy one’s daily life (including via the sheer stigma of being diagnosed as schizophrenic or psychotic, tbqh). So I feel like if were to extend the meaning to social phenomena, we might want to take advantage of that distinction between “peculiar but not destructive” and “destroys lives”.
I think, for the time being, the mainstream war of the sexes shit is still just patriarchal cope trying to essentialise the differences that emerge from men and women’s unequal status in society. The incel shit is well into the realm where we can talk about it warping lives around a central obsession.
I dunno. Just thinking aloud, since you brought up a valid observation.
I'm not sure women even do analogous things to "mogging" and "looksmaxxing" because already being exposed to the contingency of someone else's choice is such a part of the way femininity is learned in the first place. Since incels only see women (and themselves) as making calculations (rather than choices), their experiences of being the object-for seem pretty different.
I also do see an increasingly antisocial—in the true meaning of the world—emerging out of Silicon Valley and I can't help but feel that a lot of that has to do with generation of young people who dealt with the pandemic as impressionable teenagers coming of age. Everything seems mediated through ironic detachment made worse by being online constantly: nothing is serious, people are just abstract concepts that you only see through a screen.
It's very seldom that I open my laptop to find a genuinely thoughtful, even profound, blog post. Thank you, Mr. Ganz, for giving my aging Boomer mind something meaty and nutritious to chew on!
“It’s always been remarkable that incels, who, along with women, suffer most from the system of competitive rationality that they describe, are the most intent on reinstantiating it and insisting that it is the natural order of things.”
This comment above and your reference to Habermas’s concept of the colonization of the lifeworld remind me of a passage from Fanon. All caveats about the the poor form of comparing coddled white incels to Algerians living under a brutal colonial regime apply, of course. Still, I think there is a rhyme here.
Fanon: “This is why the dreams of the native are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and of aggression. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing; I dream that I burst out laughing, that I span a river in one stride, or that I am followed by a flood of motorcars which never catch up with me. During the period of colonization, the native never stops achieving his freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning.
…
“The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people…. When the native is confronted with the colonial order of things, he finds he is in a state of permanent tension. The settler’s world is a hostile world, which spums the native, but at the same time it is a world of which he is envious. We have seen that the native never ceases to dream of putting himself in the place of the settler—not of becoming the settler but of substituting himself for the settler. This hostile world, ponderous and aggressive because it fends off the colonized masses with all the harshness it is capable of, represents not merely a hell from which the swiftest flight possible is desirable, but also a paradise close at hand which is guarded by terrible watchdogs.”
I feel there is some resonance here with what you have described. For Fanon, of course, this description is one moment in a dialectical process of national revolution.
Therapist here, psychoanalytically oriented. I wanted to say how visible this phenomenon is in clinical work with young men, both those who are sexually successful and those who are not. Sometimes it's as though being seen to be, or being verified as, sexually successful is more important than intimacy itself. Among the few who do well in the algorithmic dating market, there's always the tantalizing/threatening possibility of doing as it were quantitatively better, or of missing out on doing better, to rob them of the essential human pleasure of being together with someone. Sometimes, too, there's the haunting possibility that they're mostly in it for the clout. Those who the market does not favor search in frustration for the missing value in their romantic spreadsheet that will finally make their number go up. In some ways, same as it ever was; in others, it's never been quite like this. Thank you for capturing this dark turn so clearly.
" A career, a trade, an art, every experience, love itself; cells on a spreadsheet, into infinity."
Lines like that are what I subscribe for, just really good stuff, John.
I've come to be sort of grimly happy to be too old for this shit, but man do I weep for my nieces and nephews (who tbf seem to have their own personal shit mostly together, but what a minefield they're walking every day).
I think the incel phenomenon is mainly autism (bona fide real autism, not internet “autism”). These are people for whom social life is incomprehensible. It makes sense that in such circumstances anyone would become obsessed with the few parts of social life they can see and understand. Then those few parts have to explain the whole of social life.
It’s like primitive medicine or something. Bloodletting and making people vomit does work sometimes, and it’s all we know how to do, so therefore we need imbalance of humors to explain all biology and disease. Saying “I don’t know” is not really tolerable, the patients need to hear something certain.
(There are less odious versions of this in lots of the more pleasant weird nerd communities…)
If people without any social disability now begin to find incel logic appealing, perhaps they now also experience their social world as incomprehensible and out of control. I guess jobs and romance being mediated by proprietary recommender systems could do this, don’t know if that’s the whole story though.
I remember first noticing in the late-80s/early 90s - in a context of increasing economic insecurity and precarity - the evolving corporate language of individual self-optimization entering into more personal realms, and juiced, so to speak, by the incipient wellness industrial complex.
Partly, I suppose, in retrospect, it was neoliberalism’s psycho-social bandaid for deindustrialization, deregulation, and deunionization, but also creating, as always, its own novel mechanisms for profit maximization.
With the 21st century crowning this process into a gig economy where everybody is supposed to be an entrepreneur, self-marketer, administrator, accountant, and general individual capitalist go-getter, it makes sense that the body itself becomes a utility-maximizing vector in the “business” of human bonding.
"The person is explicitly imagined as a commodity with a market valuation."
Unless of course one is a government agency calculating the costs associated with an industry's pollution. The harms to actual humans have no cost, so can't be considered, and any amount of pollution can be allowed.
Excellent essay. Learning about the incel drive to find mathematical formulas that can reveal the true and objective worth of the person has been both fascinating and repellant. It's the latest in a series of ways that people are voluntarily adapting themselves to the property form.
You used to just have to create and sell yourself as a "personal brand," which at least implicitly recognized that your "brand" was still not identical to your person. But the incel version is totalizing. There is no "you" apart from your quantifiable properties, body ratios, wealth and power tallies, and the calculable total derived from these metrics.
I suspect that Musk plays an oversized role here both as a victim of the incel mind-virus and as a super-spreader.
He spreads it both by hosting the platform formerly known as twitter, and by standing before the masses as an exemplar of someone who has "maxxed" his sexual value and so is able to have many children.
And he has had facial surgery, and he is obsessed with getting wealthy, and he ticks all of the other incel boxes -- and he is made utterly miserable by all of his activities.
He is the perfect example of your final paragraph: having attained what all of his legions of fan-boys dream of (wealth, prominence, and many sexual partners), he can only strive for things permanently out of his reach, completely irrelevant to his life-world: things millions of years in the future or lightyears away obsess his thought. Meanwhile, he is turning the here and now -- even his here and now -- into a place of sterile, pointless misery and frustration.
It's never entirely clear how much one person's algorithm correlates with another's, but it sure seems that on both Substack and Twitter, "battle of the sexes" content (which isn't always quite so incel-ized but is always at least in conversation with that world) is being pushed very aggressively. It seems to have replaced Trump as the topic most able to keep users scrolling.
Is that revealed preference or is this a mass psychosis being driven by these platforms?
been wondering that my self
I think it’s a perennial obsession; I remember figuring out in retrospect that it was a hot topic in the 80s and 90s — so many terrible books on how to understand “the opposite sex”. You see the influence of this battle of the sexes thinking in pop culture.
What changes, IMO, is exactly how attractive the topic is. At various points, it seems like a silly notion or like an antiquated cliche. And then it has a resurgence, maybe correlating with increased focus on “traditional roles” or economic precariousness or whatever.
I also don’t know that “mass psychosis” would be the right term if it were some kind of algorithmically driven cultural shift in thinking. I don’t mean to be a nag, but psychosis isn’t just strange ideas (no matter how strange or repulsive). It involves a loss of function and a disconnection from both interpersonal and more broadly social interactions. Like, I’m willing to grant that QAnon can be spoken in such terms, but I feel that we do need to distinguish between mere intellectual fads (no matter how stupid or immoral) and the cult-y conspiratorial shit that sucks people in and results in them exhibiting actual psychotic symptoms.
I will note, however! Those are usually two ends of the same spectrum. For every gloomy nerd obsessing over how his widow’s peak is costing him girlfriends, there’s a teenage Clavicular ruining his life with ‘roids.
I’m just cautious about the non-specialist use of “psychosis”. Psychotic illnesses are not illness because they leads to peculiar thinking, they’re illnesses because they distort and destroy one’s daily life (including via the sheer stigma of being diagnosed as schizophrenic or psychotic, tbqh). So I feel like if were to extend the meaning to social phenomena, we might want to take advantage of that distinction between “peculiar but not destructive” and “destroys lives”.
I think, for the time being, the mainstream war of the sexes shit is still just patriarchal cope trying to essentialise the differences that emerge from men and women’s unequal status in society. The incel shit is well into the realm where we can talk about it warping lives around a central obsession.
I dunno. Just thinking aloud, since you brought up a valid observation.
I'm not sure women even do analogous things to "mogging" and "looksmaxxing" because already being exposed to the contingency of someone else's choice is such a part of the way femininity is learned in the first place. Since incels only see women (and themselves) as making calculations (rather than choices), their experiences of being the object-for seem pretty different.
good point
I've done some reporting on the financialization of the self w/r/t young men and hypergamy might be the word of the decade at this point.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/style/these-men-want-to-know-their-sexual-market-value.html?unlocked_article_code=1.-FA.07E-.F51Zk6_MMH_P&smid=url-share
I also do see an increasingly antisocial—in the true meaning of the world—emerging out of Silicon Valley and I can't help but feel that a lot of that has to do with generation of young people who dealt with the pandemic as impressionable teenagers coming of age. Everything seems mediated through ironic detachment made worse by being online constantly: nothing is serious, people are just abstract concepts that you only see through a screen.
It's very seldom that I open my laptop to find a genuinely thoughtful, even profound, blog post. Thank you, Mr. Ganz, for giving my aging Boomer mind something meaty and nutritious to chew on!
One hates to "like" this. So bleak, but on the nose.
“It’s always been remarkable that incels, who, along with women, suffer most from the system of competitive rationality that they describe, are the most intent on reinstantiating it and insisting that it is the natural order of things.”
This comment above and your reference to Habermas’s concept of the colonization of the lifeworld remind me of a passage from Fanon. All caveats about the the poor form of comparing coddled white incels to Algerians living under a brutal colonial regime apply, of course. Still, I think there is a rhyme here.
Fanon: “This is why the dreams of the native are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and of aggression. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing; I dream that I burst out laughing, that I span a river in one stride, or that I am followed by a flood of motorcars which never catch up with me. During the period of colonization, the native never stops achieving his freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning.
…
“The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people…. When the native is confronted with the colonial order of things, he finds he is in a state of permanent tension. The settler’s world is a hostile world, which spums the native, but at the same time it is a world of which he is envious. We have seen that the native never ceases to dream of putting himself in the place of the settler—not of becoming the settler but of substituting himself for the settler. This hostile world, ponderous and aggressive because it fends off the colonized masses with all the harshness it is capable of, represents not merely a hell from which the swiftest flight possible is desirable, but also a paradise close at hand which is guarded by terrible watchdogs.”
I feel there is some resonance here with what you have described. For Fanon, of course, this description is one moment in a dialectical process of national revolution.
Therapist here, psychoanalytically oriented. I wanted to say how visible this phenomenon is in clinical work with young men, both those who are sexually successful and those who are not. Sometimes it's as though being seen to be, or being verified as, sexually successful is more important than intimacy itself. Among the few who do well in the algorithmic dating market, there's always the tantalizing/threatening possibility of doing as it were quantitatively better, or of missing out on doing better, to rob them of the essential human pleasure of being together with someone. Sometimes, too, there's the haunting possibility that they're mostly in it for the clout. Those who the market does not favor search in frustration for the missing value in their romantic spreadsheet that will finally make their number go up. In some ways, same as it ever was; in others, it's never been quite like this. Thank you for capturing this dark turn so clearly.
Does Zuckerberg's raison d'etre for Facebook deserve an honorable mention? He continually stretches the word "creepy" until it screams for mercy!
" A career, a trade, an art, every experience, love itself; cells on a spreadsheet, into infinity."
Lines like that are what I subscribe for, just really good stuff, John.
I've come to be sort of grimly happy to be too old for this shit, but man do I weep for my nieces and nephews (who tbf seem to have their own personal shit mostly together, but what a minefield they're walking every day).
You write with such elegant clarity about such elusive human things. This piece evokes BAP ironic nihilism vibes for me.
I think the incel phenomenon is mainly autism (bona fide real autism, not internet “autism”). These are people for whom social life is incomprehensible. It makes sense that in such circumstances anyone would become obsessed with the few parts of social life they can see and understand. Then those few parts have to explain the whole of social life.
It’s like primitive medicine or something. Bloodletting and making people vomit does work sometimes, and it’s all we know how to do, so therefore we need imbalance of humors to explain all biology and disease. Saying “I don’t know” is not really tolerable, the patients need to hear something certain.
(There are less odious versions of this in lots of the more pleasant weird nerd communities…)
If people without any social disability now begin to find incel logic appealing, perhaps they now also experience their social world as incomprehensible and out of control. I guess jobs and romance being mediated by proprietary recommender systems could do this, don’t know if that’s the whole story though.
I remember first noticing in the late-80s/early 90s - in a context of increasing economic insecurity and precarity - the evolving corporate language of individual self-optimization entering into more personal realms, and juiced, so to speak, by the incipient wellness industrial complex.
Partly, I suppose, in retrospect, it was neoliberalism’s psycho-social bandaid for deindustrialization, deregulation, and deunionization, but also creating, as always, its own novel mechanisms for profit maximization.
With the 21st century crowning this process into a gig economy where everybody is supposed to be an entrepreneur, self-marketer, administrator, accountant, and general individual capitalist go-getter, it makes sense that the body itself becomes a utility-maximizing vector in the “business” of human bonding.
"The person is explicitly imagined as a commodity with a market valuation."
Unless of course one is a government agency calculating the costs associated with an industry's pollution. The harms to actual humans have no cost, so can't be considered, and any amount of pollution can be allowed.
Ah, the crisis of bourgeois modernity, a precursor to the upcoming "spiritual rejuvenation" in some form of the World War 3.
Excellent essay. Learning about the incel drive to find mathematical formulas that can reveal the true and objective worth of the person has been both fascinating and repellant. It's the latest in a series of ways that people are voluntarily adapting themselves to the property form.
You used to just have to create and sell yourself as a "personal brand," which at least implicitly recognized that your "brand" was still not identical to your person. But the incel version is totalizing. There is no "you" apart from your quantifiable properties, body ratios, wealth and power tallies, and the calculable total derived from these metrics.