The past few years have seen increasing discussion of the ‘manosphere’ in the media, in government circles, and among the general public. Conceived by the men’s rights movement of the 1970s, nurtured by ‘seduction gurus’ and others on the early Internet, the manosphere has grown into a hydra of crypto, supercars, ripped muscles and equally ripped hyperbole. Its body is assembled from podcasts, forums and imageboards, Telegram and other messaging apps, and accounts on YouTube, TikTok, X and Instagram. Its beating heart is hatred of women. 

Beyond ‘backlash’

Feminists have been researching the manosphere since its conception. This work includes insights into specific communities (incels, pick-up artists, ‘men going their own way’), theorisations of reactionary masculinities and exposés of the growing influence of digital misogyny in classrooms.

Much of this feminist analysis uses a ‘cultural backlash’ lens – backlash against the limited gains achieved for a few (white, bourgeois) women. These have become the ‘nasty women’ and ‘Stacys’ the manosphere puts back in their place, through sexism and harassment that makes digital spaces unbearable and frequently spills over from online to off. 

The backlash lens is useful and necessary. Andrew Tate famously called feminism a lie that has ‘emasculated men and made women resentful of their own nature.’ Taking the red pill means realising men are now the victimised gender, and feminism is to blame. This revelation underpins assorted Ponzi schemes promising to teach men how to dominate women, alongside the online misogyny that runs the gamut between ‘make me a sandwich’ memes and deepfake porn. 

But the view of the manosphere as a ‘culture war’ artefact that re-imposes conservative gender roles is only part of the picture. There is a political economy at work here that also needs to be seen. 

Networked rage

On the surface, manosphere influencers (‘manfluencers’) have a studied appreciation of their own grift; they self-consciously clip-farm rather than working to advance any collective politics. Harrison Sullivan (HSTikkyTokky) recently used the academic term ‘attention economy’, when asked to describe the digital stall from which he touts his wares. Beneath this attention economy sits a deeper economy, related to late (or too-late) capitalist modes that have sometimes been called neofeudal. Dynamics of hoarding and wasting, which are business as usual for the Global South, are now planetary in scale. Obscene wealth is amassed for the price of debt, precarity, violence (both slow and quick) and organised abandonment. 

In digitally networked societies, the frustration, bitterness and despair this produces finds expression online as well as off, in conspiracy theory networks, ethnonationalist and white supremacist forums, and the various enclaves of the manosphere. Manfluencers sell the cheat codes for winning at gender supremacy, if nothing else – but while some men can afford these (both literally and figuratively), others cannot get in on the deal. 

Manfluencers might be lords of the cyberculture fief, but a much more powerful class owns the digital land

Then, completing the circuit, the rage of those who can never measure up is channelled, through far-right discourse, away from elites and towards marginalised groups. You might pay £6,000 in subs to the War Room – Andrew Tate’s platform that promises to ‘uplift’ you (by teaching you to seduce, manipulate and isolate women into webcamming for your profit). If you’re not raking it in by Christmas, this is not Tate’s fault (or yours), because women are to blame. 

The technofeudal bargain

Our screens are hectic with words, sounds and images powered by this circuit. Misogyny, racism and other ‘-isms’ are now tethered to the digital devices that are tethered to us, our extra limbs. We need online platforms for consumption of information, services and commodities (of which the platform takes a cut) and for production of the same (of which the platform also takes a cut). 

We also work for platforms, for free, under the guise of participation. Our data is mined and sold to brokers and advertisers, or hoarded (‘banked’) to attract venture capital investment. This is what Yanis Varoufakis has called technofeudalism, which I understand as a mode of production growing within (or perhaps alongside) late capitalist systems. Technofeudal relations are different to capitalist ones: we all own the means of production in the form of our own electronic devices, while our personal data is the ‘raw material’ extracted to generate massive wealth for the owners of cloud capital.

So, while manfluencers might be lords of the cyberculture fief, a much more powerful class owns the digital land. This means that every act of networked rage-baiting, and the hashtagged outrage that follows, is both monetised by manosphere edgelords and enables data extraction at scale on behalf of cloud kings such as Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk.

Understanding this deeper political economy complicates ideas about digital misogyny as a backlash that aims to push women out of technological spaces. Beneath the backlash, mass data extraction requires everyone to be as online as possible, for as long as possible: a form of ungendering that reduces us all to zeroes and ones. 

The new patriarchs

As technofeudalism meets neofeudalism, cloud billionaires hold sway over both the financial conditions and the cultural discourses that fuel digital misogyny. The ‘new patriarchs’ of the cloud are predators in both economic and sexual terms, and they give downwardly mobile men the means to mimic them by abusing women and other marginalised people (what reactionaries call ‘free speech’) with impunity online. 

This does two things. First, it feeds the algorithm, which increases the value of the digital real estate. Secondly, this technofeudal bargain offers men opportunities to violate the Other as compensation for the tenable economic and social futures being pushed out of view. 

As the new alpha masculinities turn out unhackable and the cheat codes to prosperity turn out defunct, the online feedback loop will always be there for men who need to act out. Put bluntly: whoever wins the digital ‘gender wars’, the cloud kings will ultimately expect us all to bend the knee.