What Did The Internet Do To White Men?

let's talk about it

These are my observations. Take them or leave them.

White guys on the internet make up a very distinct sect of our digital fabric. I am not talking about far-right MAGA heads. I am not talking about incels or red-pilled alphas. I am not talking about technocrat sycophants. Though sometimes they dabble in aspects of grifting, my area of study is The Shamed White Man.

While most have chosen to remain shrouded in one or many layers of internet-accommodated ambiguity, I know several in real life. This access affords me an understanding of their psyche that most within my internet zeitgeist lack. It also led to my realization that many of them are internet thought leaders. Many many more than you might suspect.

In rooms littered with empty beef jerky packets, Gatorade bottles, and a dragon's hoard of psychotropic drugs, they are anonymously publishing essays, memes, long-form video essays, entire comedy specials; collectively and individually accounting for huge works of indisputable cultural significance.

They have pathologized themselves into a digitized corner, sharing aspirations of shamanic megalomania, fueled by caffeine, Adderall, THC, and a processed sugar dependency second to none.

In our progressivist desire to disenfranchise white men as humanity's primary oppressors, it appears we have been almost entirely unsuccessful in:

a. challenging the power of rich white men (evidenced by them currently making up 60% of the billionaire class)

b. escaping the cultural pervasiveness of white men who talk on the internet, anonymously or otherwise.

c. forecasting the inevitable void that will inevitably be filled if/when institutions change, but the systems they uphold so not.

Affirmative action, DEI, etc. begs for equality in a system so broken that all it really aims for is "equal access" to a cultural identity of capitalistic success typically associated with whiteness.

So, just to clarify here: we're not trying to undo capitalism through these programs and initiatives. We're just trying to get more diversity in our ruling class. Whatever. more on that another time.

In light of the panic about DEI's cancellation I have decided it's time to ask the unthinkable question:

What did the internet do to white men?

Here's my demographic analysis, per my marketing background, on The Shamed White Man:

- upper middle class

- religious upbringing (usually catholic)

- above average intelligence that they physically can't stfu about

- a deep and profound shame

- self awareness;

- that leads to being recreationally, if not quite clinically suicidal

- hyperactive pattern recognition

- obsessions with "scientifically legitimate" personality types and psychological archetypes, which they adamantly separate from astrology and other similar, but overly mystical (read: feminine) methods for categorizing people

- an inescapable, cosmic gravitas attached to their early life's failures

- a slight bitterness at their culturally asserted lot in life

- a learned helplessness about changing it

- a profound desire to be a martyr

- or at least useful

- an obsessive paranoia about being taken advantage of for/by their perceived weakness of spirit;

- the inability to find any intrinsic value in themselves, no matter how gifted, lauded, or successful

I'm working on a larger piece that will stitch together historical and institutional advantages, power structures still alive and well today that enable them to continue, how internet anonymity creates a unique meritocracy through which we can properly study the “superior” cultural value of white men. etc.

I am not a white man apologist. I am not looking to drive tons of traffic to my page by being divisive. I am looking to ask a human question about a sect of humanity that we have progressively turned into more and more of 'an other.' Through all of this, I want to treat with delicacy the actual people at the core of this identity. I know it's fun and entirely easy to kick at them. Many deserve it. However, a few things are obvious and deserving of further investigation:

When I said no one wins in the gender war, I revealed a broader cultural truth. No one wins under capitalism. Period. Except the 2,400 billionaires who make up the oligarchy and their morally bankrupt, fiscally bank-rolled lackeys. But even those morons aren't truly winning because victory does not have the blood money of child exploitation, slavery, and global destruction on its hands. And they most certainly do.

So, when we look at The Shamed White Man demographic, it's worth nodding to the fact that they suck a lot. They also suffer a great deal for it. Survivor's guilt is still a torment, no matter how dead everyone else is.

If there is only one thing that the numerous ongoing global genocides have taught us, it is that dehumanization is the most essential ingredient to excusing human atrocities. We do it constantly without thinking anything of it. Why?

Our political leanings. Our socioeconomic backgrounds. Our sex, certainly. Our religions and belief systems. How many people have you recently heard say "All Nazis should die." While I can't help but appreciate their go getter spirit, it surprises me that no one has pointed out that that philosophy aligns more closely with the Nazis than any revolutionary ideologies opposing Nazism.

If you are not careful, you inevitably become what you are broken by. That, I truly believe, is what is playing out in Gaza right now: an expression of festering Jewish trauma from thousands of years of being dehumanized, hunted, and murdered en masse.

If long dead corpse of peace is ever to be exhumed, we must begin reaching for the people we have been told to shove off a cliff with both hands. It has been dressed up and displayed at international governing conventions for decades, but it's bloated body is festering too obviously now. The flies are everywhere. Not even the stupidest among us can ignore the stench.

But peace is not a body. It is not a man, white or otherwise. It is an idea. It is a promise, divinely ordained by our evolution. Humans are not special for our ability to conquer the world. We are special for our ability to love and heal and help it. To choose peace when war is an option. We have failed, yes. But no failure is yet too absolute to rebel against.

Failure as an absolute state is one of the most damning aspects of The Shamed White Man psyche, and one we unintentionally drive home at every opportunity. "All men are trash." "All men are liars." "All men are lying manipulators." These are the natural expressions of traumatized pattern-recognizing brains. There is an entire cultural framework designed to forecast evil in men, especially white men. Unfortunately, these are not universal truths and we must stop treating them as such.

Here's a universal truth: All men are human.

Our humanity binds us. Our humanity is the only thing that can save us. Robbing one another of it is the most idiotic way to retaliate against all that is currently burning around us.

At its core, this is all I ever write about. I call it a lot of things, most often love, but at its heart, it is the ability to recognize humanity in others. The fact that I have been able to consistently go viral off the novelty of that idea disturbs me more than I can say. But I will never stop writing about it.

Please share this with someone who you think could use the reminder.

Please be gentle with yourself and each other. Seek out a human moment with someone today. Let it heal you in tiny increments. Let it stitch up your gaping psychological wounds with golden thread. Realize that that thread is wound through all of us. The more we insist that only some are deserving of it, the more we create a king rat of everyone who could be saved but is instead crushed in our collective the rush for the exit.