The road I helped build for him
I was a social media evangelist in 2005. I owe these young men an account.
Part one of a trilogy on the manosphere and how I see it at 67 years of age, living in a hillside town in Viet Nam.
There’s a café on the way down from my place where the coffee is good and the wifi is better, which in Đà Lạt is the wrong way round for my nervous system and the right way round for the entire population under thirty. A young bloke sits there most mornings. Vietnamese, maybe twenty, polite to the staff, watching videos on his phone with the sound turned down. I don’t need the sound. I can read the cadence off his face—the small jut of the jaw, the nod that isn’t agreement so much as enlistment. I’ve seen that nod in three languages now and it means the same thing in all of them: somebody is explaining to him that his problems are a conspiracy, that the cure is to want it harder and trust no one, and that the men who already worked this out are watching from a balcony he can rent his way onto for nine easy payments.
I know roughly what he’s watching. And here is the sentence I’ve been carrying around for the better part of a year like a stone in a shoe I keep meaning to take off: I helped pave the road that brought it to him.
In 2005 I was one of the men in Australia standing on chairs, metaphorically and once or twice literally, telling anyone who’d stop chewing long enough to listen that the internet was about to become human. I believed it with the particular intensity of a forty-six-year-old who has finally found work that fits the shape of his head, which is to say I was insufferable. I recorded what I’m fairly sure was one of the first business podcasts in Australia, in my home office in Adelaide, on a service called Libsyn, back when “podcast” was a word you had to spell twice and then define. I filed the first correspondent reports for an American/British show called For Immediate Release. I co-hosted a thing called The Comms Cafe with Allan Jenkins, who is gone now, and who was the most decent man the medium ever produced and would be mortified to hear me say so. I opened a YouTube channel in July 2006, roughly six months after YouTube became a thing that existed, because that was the species of early I was. We early adopters were not careful people. We were excited people, which history suggests is a good deal more dangerous.
The gospel came mostly from a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto, whose first commandment was that markets are conversations. We said it the way other people say grace. Markets are conversations. The big institutions had spent a century shouting through a megaphone, and here was a technology that took the megaphone off them and handed it to the kid in the spare room, the customer nobody would refund, the patient nobody believed, and the bloke who’d been told to sit down and wait his turn since primary school. We thought we were giving out voice like flyers at a train station. We were so pleased with ourselves you could have run Adelaide off the grid for a fortnight on it.
We were right about the technology, by the way. That’s the part that ought to have frightened us and instead just made us smug. Everything we predicted came to pass—the connection, the amplification, the collapse of distance between a person and the people ignoring them. Every word. I simply never once, in all those earnest hours, sat in my home office and asked the only question that turned out to matter: connection to whom, amplified by whom, and who’s standing at the far end of the road with a clipboard, taking a cut.
Here is what the road was for, once the optimists like me had finished cutting the ribbon and gone home for a celebratory cup of tea.
An algorithm holds no view on whether you are connected to another human being. It holds a keen and abiding interest in whether you are still scrolling, and those are different conditions, and the most reliable way to keep a man scrolling is to keep him exactly lonely enough to believe the next video might fix it. That’s the whole engine. Connection is terrible for business—a connected man puts the phone down and goes to dinner. Loneliness is the product. Metered, monetised, sold back to the lonely at a markup, on a loop that tightens the worse he feels. The platforms I spent a decade selling to a sceptical country had quietly worked out the one thing I never said from any chair: that the most dependable fortune you can build sits squarely on a man who needs a friend and has been raised to feel that admitting it would kill his father.
And once loneliness is the engine, the men who win are the ones best at feeding it. Not the wisest or the kindest or the ones with a working theory of how a human being actually recovers from anything. The angriest. The most certain. The ones cheerfully prepared to tell a frightened nineteen-year-old that his loneliness is a heist perpetrated against his greatness by women, universities, immigrants, and men who own cardigans. Andrew Tate didn’t invent that pitch. He’s just what the machine selects for if you leave it running long enough, the way a particular swamp will reliably, given a warm season, produce a particular mosquito. I helped drain the field and lay the tarmac. I didn’t build him. I held the door, called it democratising media, and drove home pleased with myself, which is more or less the through-line of my entire forties.
I got out in the end, though not for any of the noble reasons I’d enjoy claiming at a dinner party. I burned out. The decade caught up with me around 2014, and the same nervous system that had made me good at the work—the AuDHD wiring I wouldn’t have a name for until I was sixty-six, my profession running roughly forty years behind schedule—turned the volume up past bearing and I walked out of the building. For years I dressed this up as disillusionment, which has the great advantage of sounding like something a wise man chooses. The truer version is that the road broke me before I’d had the wit to ask where it went, and I’ve had a long convalescence on a hillside on the far side of the planet to work out what I’d say to the young man in the café if he ever set the phone down.
I’d tell him the one thing the machine spends a fortune an hour making sure he never sits still long enough to hear: that the ache is real and the diagnosis he’s being sold is a swindle. The loneliness is not a wound inflicted on him by women, weakness, or the soft modern world. It’s the ordinary, survivable, almost boringly human signal of a nervous system that hasn’t yet been allowed to do the one thing it was built for, which is to be steadied by the company of someone who knows you and stays. We are co-regulating animals. A man’s body does not calm down because he won an argument with a stranger in a comment section, or watched a man in a leased Bugatti win one on his behalf. It calms in the presence of safety it doesn’t have to audition for. I know this from thirty years of clinical work, and I know it from the considerably more persuasive evidence of my own resting heart rate, which has done things this last year that no cold plunge, no supplement stack, and no five-step 4am routine narrated by a man shouting about discipline has come within a postcode of. The cause has a name and a laugh and a house up the road, and she has out-performed the entire global wellness economy without once selling me a powder.
That’s the swindle at the dead centre of it, and a cruel one even by the standards of an industry that runs on despair. The manosphere has correctly noticed that young men are in pain. It has correctly noticed that nobody official is talking to them straight. And then it sells them the exact opposite of the cure—isolation rebranded as independence, contempt rebranded as strength, a permanent defensive crouch rebranded as a throne—to the precise men whose actual problem is that no one ever let them put the armour down and not be punished for it. So we hand them more armour. We tell them the armour is the self. And the invoice lands twenty years later, in their forties and fifties, in my clinic and in the figures nobody reads aloud at dinner, by which point the man has built a life with no soft surfaces anywhere in it and cannot for the life of him work out why he is so tired.
So here is the account I owe, plainly, without the comfort of pretending I was a bystander who happened to be walking past while it went up.
I sold the road as a town square. It became a casino that pays out in attention and balances its books in despair. I sold it as a conversation. It became an auction, and most nights the lot under the hammer is a young man’s hope that with enough rage he might finally be worth something. I was wrong in a specific, culpable, deeply unfashionable way: not because I failed to predict the technology, but because I was so busy being right about it that I never once got curious about the people who would one day own the thing, or what they’d learn to farm on it. Mark Zuckerberg was twenty-one. Section 230 made the toll road legally immune from the wrecks stacking up along it. And I was on a chair in Adelaide, talking about conversations, powering the regional grid with my own certainty.
I can’t take the road back up. Nobody can—it’s load-bearing now, the whole world commutes on it. And I won’t pretend it only ever did harm, because the same infrastructure also found the late-diagnosed, the housebound, the grieving, and the magnificently strange, and handed a great many of them the first room they’d ever walked into that fit—including, on its better days, me. Both things are true and I’m not going to file them down into a verdict, because they don’t file down. We built a thing that connected the lonely and we built a thing that learned to farm them, and it is the same thing, running the same code, and the only variable that decides which one you get is who happens to be standing at the till.
What I can do is talk straight to the men the road is eating, and to the older ones reading this who know that café face because they’ve worn it themselves at two in the morning. The voice telling you your softness is the problem is selling you something. It is always selling you something—that is the one thing you can rely on it for. The men who reached a life worth having did not get there by trusting no one. They got there by being known by somebody and surviving the experience, which is harder and braver and a great deal more masculine than anything on offer on the platform, and the single move the road I built will never, ever recommend, because there is no money—none, not a cent—in a man who has stopped scrolling on account of being home.
I helped build the road. The least I can do is stand at the side of it and tell the truth about where it goes.
-----
Next: the one variable the whole economy is structurally incapable of letting a young man look at, which is what becomes of all this swagger at sixty-seven.
For more insights, read my book Death of a Gentleman. Due out Monday 15th June 2026. Paid subscribers to my Substack channel get it for free. quiethalf.substack.com/subscribe