The Living Doll : How our digital poppets change our perception of the world.
When I was a little girl, like many other little girls I was told the tale of Red Riding Hood. As I got older we learned more about the meta of the tale.
We updated the tale, found sympathy for the wolf. Sometimes we saw it as a dark romance. Sometimes the wolf and the woodman found love together. Tales change. We update them for our needs. Fairytales are encoded folklore, lost memory encoded for a lesson.
We took the metaphor and considered the woods managed. They became forests. But danger still lurked in our forests and the internet is no different.
We still have the dangers. But the villains of the forest like to chop down the trees, drive fast cars and make money.
Beware the Manosphere
Within a space we have a habit as humans of descending into archetypes. The masculine man, the very feminine woman. Good obedient kids. That hateful old scold telling you what you shouldn't do. She's an evil witch, kill her.
People who are no better than they should be.
Do you recognise these? Do you see yourself in them?
How do you find your community when you don't see a path for you in the world?
Who will welcome you?
Some of us queers (before some of us knew we were queer) went online. We found family and some of us learned how to function in a community and see ourselves as part of a collective rather than an individual. Some folks had done this before us, had organised before us in meatspace. So they brought their experience online as well.
But what about the straights? What about the baby queers who don't know they are queer yet but know somethings different. They are lost.
The Lost Boys
I'm choosing to focus on the straight boys here. The mainstream are focusing on the manosphere of Andrew Tate etc. Although these types have always been online. The issue is the sheer scale and availability. Because it's not just about searching, it's about what our addictive websites and apps serve. In service of the algorithm.
So we have a bunch of lost directionless young men, who've been brought up on the idea of the nuclear household. 2.4 Children, go to university, marry, have kids. Be successful.
But our social contract has been broken, with boys and young men feeling very isolated with some very stark prospects of debt. There aren't the youth clubs anymore, furnishing social activities. The church (the other source of local community clubs) is shrinking. The pandemic has also shrunk the social sphere. Although the issue of the manosphere was a concern for a lot longer than that. We've always had toxic abusers on the internet who are good at building up a cult. Which is what this is. A cult with a bunch of devotees. Who started out wanting to improve themselves and looking for community.
'Some of what pulls Men towards the manosphere, is a search for connection and a sense of belonging and meaning,' says David Bartless of Equimundo. A sense of belonging that is lacking elsewhere. [1]
Like I said, looking for community. When I was growing up in my small village we had a community centre with events during the holidays for six up to sixteen. Then the funding got cut. My Father and Uncles had a very rich community centre life even being working class. Their mothers local church had a film club, there were outward bound events. Because of those my Dad and Uncle went hillwalking and across Rannoch Moor. But they learned about how to do that because of the community clubs.
It's not enough to ban apps, or content. The damage is done. What you need to do as a society is invest in community again. Invest in youth. Bring back grants so that further education is affordable. Invest in community sport beyond football. Expand funding out to the charities that already provide activity clubs. Invest in local hacker spaces and repair cafes.
In order to ensure that the kids don't look for community online, you need to give them something offline.
Our digital poppets
I don't think we can truly lay this at the door of the internet entirely. After all what's on the internet is our physical universe manifested with all of our toxic culture. All the internet does is what our media landscape does. Serve all of this toxicity at scale.
Our ephemeral world, our algorithms serve physical masters who use the data that our digital poppets serve them.
But what are our poppets?
Poppets and witchcraft
A poppet is a doll made to represent a person. It's purpose is to cast a spell on them, or help them through magic. They are made, then often hidden.
You could make them from anything, but something from the person the poppet needed to affect was needed. So hair clippings, nail trimmings were attached to the poppet.
There's folklore about being very careful about what you did with your hair and nail trimmings. Folks would bury or burn them so that they couldn't be used against them later. [3]
Digital Poppets
Digital poppets are our digital twins, our advertising profiles on our phones. Our metadata from our browsers with our buying preferences, our Internet addresses we access the web from. It's our browser settings including our accessibility preferences. Our poppets are created from what we put up there, what we send to one another unencrypted. All little pieces of data, which on their own doesn't seem like that much.
Data leaks, data gets sold. What happens when that data is collated together from different sources? When we use google as a login, or various payment providers to pay at different websites.
All that data is our digital clippings and becomes a digital taglock to add to our digital poppets.
With folklore, folks used to be cautious about what to do with hair and nail clippings. As those could give a witch or sorcerer power over you.
We have this now with our electronic clippings, we give our clippings to social networks and that gives a whole heap of power to them and to the buyers of that data who can then analyse it.
There's an analogy for you. – Esther Payne (me) [2]
Digital Puppetry
We know how effective propaganda can be. Humanity is hackable through the meme. It's hackable through our storytelling. We want life to make sense and have a level of control over it. So we are susceptible to propaganda. We have very effective ways to spread this propaganda at scale.
Look at Cambridge Analytica and the Vote Leave campaign. They were able to use targeted ads to Brexit voters as part of a political campaign. Those ads were served everywhere and they weren't always marked as advertisements. They spread through our walled gardens like poison. The poison was also spread and is still being spread across traditional media.
There's nothing particularly special about the internet other than the scale and the personalisation of what can be served to you, thanks to your digital profile. Your digital poppet.
Targeted advertising follows folks around the Internet. It's a harmful part of a complex system. But the harm isn't mythical. Information is leverage, particularly when it's combined with your other information.
Knowledge about a person is power. If knowledge isn't really power, then why are governments threatening E2EE with the Earn IT act. Why do we have to keep fighting against chat control in the EU.
Information applied with targeted analysis is leverage. Your metadata contributes to an organisations' knowledge about you. In various circumstances it can be life threatening to investigative journalists etc. Your digital poppet snitches information about you to all sorts, to hackers, governments and big tech.
That's before we even get to who want's to send you a message and reel you into buying what they sell.
The Manosphere
So we can see what lures in young folks. It's a subculture. We've had sub cultures before. The difference is, how much access young folks are getting. The sheer scale of what's being served to them.
They aren't getting adult supervision, and it's like letting your kids onto the motorways on a balance bike. They don't have the initial training. The cognitive and critical thinking training.
Then we allow them to access this information motorway through a smartphone.
But we also need to remember it's not just the internet to blame for our culture. Gen X came of age having internalised some pretty hetero normal stuff. So did the millennials. We shouldn't be surprised at the grifters telling young folks that “feminism and diversity” has gone too far.
We know that's not true. But when you have a system that depends on objectifying people so that the grift can keep happening a narrative needs to be told. A point of view.
So boys much like girls are taught a fairy tale. Except boys aren't taught to be Disney princes. They are told the fairy tale of masculinity. We're taught it in sitcoms, in our media, with the majority of our politicians. We're taught the average, so there's no space for diversity when you're looking for the norm. Which leaves no space for the rest of us.
As a woman, I struggled under the expectation of dating and being expected to marry and have kids one day. Yet I also wanted a career. The women in my family being working class worked. We couldn't afford to not to. Yet the workplace also didn't have accessibility affordances so one parent couldn't work. We didn't fit the mold. So I get why boys feel they must be doing something wrong. Especially with the lack of opportunity available for young folks.
Folks are taught you must find a wife, marry have kids and life will be complete. So when the social contract is broken, who will young men blame?
The Traditional Roles of the household
However as we've seen in this idea with the “Tradwife” women are objectified reduced to a doll, a servant, expected to service a man's needs. A sexbot, a mother for the children. A confident, a cheerleader, a domestic servant to curate the house and keep it clean. A hostess for dinners. Be his validation. His purpose is to take care of you. Like he takes care of all his possessions.
In return women can just settle in and be taken care of. A man will take care of everything
But what happens when a man's earning potential is damaged? What happens when the man dies. Is there a succession plan? Does another man take over the responsibility for the wife and kids?
I don't think a devotee to the manosphere particularly thinks about that or cares. When you treat women as disposable objects and kids as extensions of yourself, how, or if your woman and kids can survive your death doesn't matter. In extreme cases some men try to take us with them, a la the myth of the Pharaoh's in Egypt taking their servants with them via murder.
A very middle class idea.
Historically and socially, the idea of the trad wife at home is a very specific white idea of the family. This idea is very rooted in white supremacy. It's the Patriarchy. It what defines the middle class from the working class. It's aspiration. It's also not realistic. It's another fairy tale.
Both of my Grandparent's working class families had both parents working. The only reason my Grandmother stopped working for a short while was when her local factory closed.
When my Grandfather was killed in a car accident, she had to go back to work. She'd grown up in a family where her father died young at 34. It was the 1930s after all. There was no social safety net.
The dream of the manosphere is a very specific individualistic idea, but it attracts a lot of lonely boys and the addictive nature of app's like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok peddle more of it to make money. That's not to say that what's being peddled to the rest of us is great either.
While the kids are watching their digital poppets get filled in with bits of metadata. So more of these libertarian individualistic ideas get peddled. White supremacy packaged up to be more palatable.
I don't have an answer for what we do about the manosphere, other than advocate for a social safety net offline. Where we aim for Universal Basic Income, Universal Healthcare, Free Education and Free Public Transport. Where we aim for the commons rather than the individual.
It's soulless to chase status for money and a partner. It feels soulless having to work to just survive. It's isolating, but there's a false sense of community. Because you're being told by the cult leader “just do this next thing bro. Just keep going bro. You'll be successful with women, have money like me.”
It's modern folklore with none of the learned wisdom. It's fake.
I'm horrified by the abusive potential of the manosphere and the abuse that's already been done by Tate and his ilk. I'm horrified by the idea of Women's choices being limited, of being negged so much by abusive men that we feel we have no choice.
Which isn't true. Some of us in the past have managed. It's not easy and poverty sucks. There's a reason why the right wing gradually sought to disable the social safety net to help capitalism thrive.
What parts of Folklore to keep?
As I've got older, I stopped believing in faeries. But I work in a world that I access through a screen and keyboard. My world is the unseen. Coders create code, a series of incantations to tell the device of zeros and ones what to do. We have words like daemons, so magics always been a part of my vocabulary.
So perhaps in order for folks outside our fields to understand our world with all of it's risks; we need to update folklore to explain what's happening with our technology and our online spaces. To use the idea of the digital poppet and explain how those poppets have helped to shape our democratic choices. How those poppets have helped to peddle the manosphere to our kids. But also how our mass media plays into that.
Our internet peddles fairytales the same way our folklore used to. To tell the tale of a point of view, how to act. So choose your fairytale wisely. In the old days we used to say don't give your real name out. I've broken that old rule. Our world is built that way so we have to break the rule. But it's also why we need to push back against age verification and ID verification that takes our biometric data. [5]
You have to work really hard on youtube to not get peddled right wing videos. You have to work hard to not see AI slop. Youtube doesn't really do moderation. You can't block content creators.
But this has always been the case. Free Speech without Free Association in safety. No techbro ever considers the right of Free Association. Or the other Human Rights listed in the UDHR, if they did, they'd never use github. [6],[7]
It's why the Fediverse is important, although even then, there will be a bastion of the manosphere somewhere on the Fediverse. If not now, give it time. How we build our online communities and how we build our tech is determined by the political ideals of the builders.
At least with the Fediverse we do have other options, with developers who do care about these sorts of things. [8]
The idea that information must be free for everyone to take part in and consumer is the mainstay of the internet. But within our physical community spaces there are rules. So we must consider when we build our online communities what our tools are. We must consider how do we enable boundaries? We must consider consent and what we do with our community members data.
Remember the old ways. It's a dark forest out there.
[2] https://chaos.social/@onepict/107780763058678202
[3] https://magickalspot.com/taglock/
[4] https://dotart.blog/cobbles/defiance
[6] https://www.ohchr.org/en/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
[7] https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/10/9/20906605/github-ice-contract-immigration-ice-dan-friedman