The road we built

Draft 07 of Chapter 2 of 'Death of a Gentleman'

Part I: Social masculinity

Chapter 2

The road we built for him

The café

The two young Australians at the next table are explaining women to a Vietnamese woman who is not sitting with them. She is at her own table, two across, reading a book in Vietnamese and drinking her own coffee, and the smaller of the two men has just called out to her that she should smile more. He says it in English, with the confidence of someone who has not considered the possibility that she speaks four languages and has chosen, at this precise moment, to use none of them.

The t-shirt is what gives the game away. Top G. Black cotton, gold lettering, the kind of shirt a man wears specifically so that other men who know what it means will nod at him in airports. The owner is perhaps twenty-two. His friend wears a gym shirt from a chain that has no Đà Lạt branch, which means he brought it with him, which means he dressed for this trip, which means Đà Lạt has a role in whatever story he is telling himself about the trip.

I am sixty-seven years old, sitting in a café I ride my scooter to many mornings, drinking the same coffee I have drunk for the last year, and I realise with the dull certainty of someone recognising an old injury that I know exactly where these two men came from. Not geographically. Geographically they came from, at a guess, somewhere between Parramatta and the Gold Coast. I mean ideologically. Algorithmically. I know which feeds they watched in the three years before they decided Vietnam was a place they would go to find women who had not been, in their phrasing, ruined.

The woman two tables over finishes her coffee, marks her page with a receipt, stands up, and leaves. She does not look at them. She does not need to.

The smaller man turns back to his friend and says something I cannot quite hear but can guess the shape of, the small face-saving adjustment a man makes when a woman has declined to participate in the scene he had written for her. His friend laughs. They are, I notice, drinking expensive coffee. Someone has taught them that expensive coffee is part of the package. That is also in the feed. The feed is thorough.

I want, very much, to dislike them. It would be clean. It would be satisfying. It would let me leave the café with the moral geometry of the morning intact and a small sense of generational superiority to carry home with my bread stick.

I do not dislike them. I am suspicious of my own inability to dislike them, the way a clinician gets suspicious when a diagnosis arrives too quickly. What I feel instead is closer to the recognition you get when you see someone wearing a uniform you used to wear, and you know how the uniform feels from the inside, and you know what it cost you to take it off.

They are customers. Someone has sold them this. And I, for a decade, helped build the shop.

The gentleman is dead

The book you are reading has a central claim, and this is the chapter where I need to say it out loud, because everything that follows depends on it. The gentleman, that particular construction of masculine identity that was handed to me on the yellow footprints in 1981 and to my father before me and his father before him, is dead. Not dying. Dead. The only question is what rushes in to fill the space.

The gentleman was a cultural product. An elaborate and mostly well-meaning one, but a product all the same. He required a particular economy, a particular set of institutions, a particular arrangement of work and family and fraternity, and when those supports collapsed, he collapsed with them, in the way a trellis collapses when the wall it was leaning against is demolished. The wall was apprenticeships. The wall was unions. The wall was churches that still had congregations. The wall was fraternal orders and men’s sheds and the sort of stable employment that let a man of twenty-four imagine the rough shape of his sixty-fourth birthday without laughing. Those walls came down in the final third of the twentieth century, for reasons that had nothing to do with feminism and everything to do with capitalism. The gentleman outlived his infrastructure by about a generation, which is generous by historical standards but not especially useful if you are currently a man.

Here is the thing no one quite says out loud. The two young Australians at the next table are not nostalgic for traditional masculinity. They never had it. The gentleman was a middle-class construction with working-class aspirations attached, and by the time these lads were born the middle class was already being disassembled, the working-class aspirations were being rebranded as deplorable, and the actual apprenticeship pipeline that used to induct young men into adult labour had been replaced by a gig economy that inducted them into precarious adult lateness. They are wearing the Top G shirt because the gentleman was not offered to them. What is being offered to them is a counterfeit, manufactured in Romania and distributed globally, of a script their grandfathers knew. They have been sold a photocopy of a photocopy of a thing that used to exist, and they are the paying audience for the photocopier.

This chapter is about the machinery that sold them the photocopy. The machinery is worth naming carefully, because the machinery is where the money is, and where the money is, is where the accountability has to sit.

The evangelist

I became a social media evangelist in 2005, which was the right year for it the way 1928 was the right year to start buying stocks on margin. For four or five years after that, I was flown around the world to explain to businesses why they needed to be on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on YouTube. I used words like authentic and conversation and community, and I believed them when I used them, because in 2008 those words described something that actually seemed to exist. I also, for the record, had a PowerPoint slide deck with the word engagement on it in at least three different fonts. I am not proud of this. I documented the arc of that disillusionment more fully elsewhere, after I had finally decided I was done (Hopkins, 2025b).

I stayed too long. Partly out of habit. Partly out of the hopeful idiocy that whispers, any year now, they will fix it. Partly out of the autistic loyalty reflex that refuses to abandon a system on aesthetic grounds, insisting on evidence, accumulating evidence, demanding still more evidence, until the evidence is so overwhelming that walking away feels less like a decision and more like finally breathing out.

There was no single moment of realisation. I want to be honest about that because the single-moment version is a better story, and a worse truth. What happened was a decade of incremental arrivals at the same conclusion, each one a little heavier than the last. The Cambridge Analytica revelations in 2018. The Rohingya in Myanmar. The Kenosha shooter’s Facebook event. Frances Haugen in 2021, sitting in front of the United States Senate with internal documents showing that Meta’s own researchers had measured the damage Instagram was doing to teenage girls and that the company had filed those findings in the drawer marked Do Not Act (Guardian, 2021). The 2014 emotional contagion study in which Facebook had, without informed consent, manipulated the news feeds of nearly seven hundred thousand people to see if they could alter the users’ emotional states (Kramer et al., 2014). They could. They published the finding in a peer-reviewed journal, as though it were ordinary science rather than the largest unconsented psychological experiment in human history. The peer reviewers, one assumes, were having a very strange afternoon.

I kept reading the papers. I kept being flown places to talk about conversation and community. At some point the gap between what I was saying on stage and what I was reading at night became load-bearing. The gap was doing work my nervous system could not sustain. The nervous system, in my experience, is the first to file the complaint that the intellect is still busy rationalising.

Zuckerberg, I realised somewhere around 2014, was not the nicest man in the room. This is, I grant you, an understatement of some magnitude, roughly equivalent to noting that the captain of the Titanic had made a questionable navigation choice. It is also, for a man of my generation and temperament, the form the realisation actually took, a slow quiet admission rather than a revelation. You do not wake up one morning certain that the chief executive of the company whose tools you have been selling is a man who would sell those tools to a regime committing ethnic cleansing if the engagement metrics were right. You arrive at that thought incrementally, in the way the frog allegedly fails to notice the water heating, except the frog in this version is also on payroll.

The cooling off

Arriving at the conclusion was the easy part. Acting on it turned out to be harder, because the company I had been selling for a decade had, in the years while I was rationalising, spent considerable engineering effort on the question of how to prevent exactly this moment. Not in the abstract. Not for me specifically. For anyone who came to the same conclusion I had, about any of their products, at any time. The answer they settled on is documented, if you know where to look, in the account deletion process itself.

Here is what it feels like to try to leave.

You go to the settings menu on Facebook. You scroll. You find the option to delete your account. You click it. Meta, ever reasonable, ever paternal, informs you that your deletion will take effect in thirty days. This is, they explain, a cooling off period. The implication is that you might change your mind. The subtext is that they think you are a person who acts rashly and needs protecting from yourself. This is the same company that ran a psychological experiment on seven hundred thousand people without their consent, but when you try to leave, you are the one with the impulse control problems.

You accept. You close the tab. You feel, momentarily, lighter.

Three days later, a friend sends you a message on Messenger. Or perhaps Meta itself emails you with a subject line like, we thought you’d want to see this memory, and the memory is a photograph from nine years ago, and the photograph is of someone you loved who is now dead. You click. Of course you click. The thirty-day clock resets. Your account is, in Meta’s cheerful phrasing, reinstated. You did not request reinstatement. You did nothing that a reasonable person would interpret as a change of mind. You clicked on a photograph of your dead fiancée. Meta interpreted that click as consent to continue the relationship.

You start again. You go back to the settings menu. You click delete. Thirty days. You close the tab. Someone messages you on Messenger. Reset.

I have done this, at the time of writing, four times. Each time I have told myself that this time I will avoid the triggers, and each time Meta has engineered a new one. The company’s behavioural scientists, who I have to assume exist because the system is too thoroughly optimised to be accidental, have decided that a friend’s message is sufficient evidence that you wish to remain reachable, and that a nostalgia-bait email is sufficient evidence that you wish to remain engaged. Neither of these propositions would survive thirty seconds of adversarial questioning by an ethics committee. Neither has ever been tested by one, because Meta does not submit its product decisions to ethics committees. Meta submits them to engagement metrics, which measure only whether you clicked, not whether clicking cost you anything.

I wonder, often, how legal this is. I suspect the answer is that it sits in the grey zone where most of Meta’s worst behaviour sits, technically defensible under the terms of service that nobody reads, morally indefensible by the standards of every profession that deals with consent as a concept. My own profession, counselling psychology, would strike a practitioner off the register for a tenth of what Meta does as a matter of routine Tuesday operations. A psychologist who contacted a client during a stated disengagement period, using emotional content to re-establish contact, would lose their licence, their professional indemnity, and possibly their car. Meta has built a business on the technique and a market capitalisation larger than the GDP of most actual countries.

I also know, with the dull certainty of someone who has given up expecting otherwise, that Meta does not care how I feel about this. I am not the customer. The advertisers are. I am the inventory.

This is the consumer-facing expression of the business model. What it looks like when you, personally, at your laptop, at ten o’clock on a Wednesday, try to exit. What it looks like from the other side, the regulatory side, the side where lawyers and data protection commissioners have access to internal documents and subpoena power, is an accumulation of fines, settlements, and admitted violations that together describe something the platforms have been doing at scale, to everyone, for twenty years. The dead fiancée and the nostalgia email are not aberrations. They are policy.

The architecture

It is worth being specific about what the platforms have done, because vague claims about social media are part of the problem. Vague claims let the companies hide behind the word ‘complicated’, which is what companies say when they would prefer you to lose interest before you reach paragraph three. The claims are not complicated. They are documented.

Meta paid the United States Federal Trade Commission five billion dollars in 2019 for privacy violations connected to Cambridge Analytica, in which the data of up to eighty-seven million users was harvested without meaningful consent and used to target political advertising during the 2016 election and the Brexit referendum (Federal Trade Commission, 2019). The fine was the largest privacy-related penalty in United States history. Meta admitted no wrongdoing, which is what companies say when they have paid five billion dollars but would prefer not to be quoted saying why. I have written at length elsewhere about the wider pattern of Meta’s data practices, which is worth reading if you want the extended version of this argument with the receipts attached (Hopkins, 2025a).

Meta was fined four hundred and five million euros by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission in 2022 for allowing children aged thirteen to seventeen to have their phone numbers and email addresses displayed publicly on Instagram, in a design decision that had no plausible justification other than the one it served, which was growth (BBC News, 2022).

Meta paid six hundred and fifty million dollars in 2021 to settle an Illinois class action alleging that Facebook’s photo-tagging system had collected biometric facial recognition data without consent (Reuters, 2021).

Frances Haugen’s 2021 Senate testimony, and the internal documents now known as the Facebook Papers, demonstrated that the company’s own researchers had found Instagram worsened body image for a significant proportion of teenage girls who already had body image problems, that the company’s algorithms amplified divisive and extremist content because that content produced engagement, and that proposed fixes had been rejected or delayed because they would reduce user growth (New York Times, 2021).

Every one of these findings is a matter of public record. Every one of them has been settled, admitted, or documented in filings. None of them has meaningfully changed how the company operates. The fines, in every case, were smaller than the quarterly profit. A regulatory system in which fines are smaller than the profit of the behaviour being fined is not a regulatory system. It is a licensing fee, and a fairly modest one at that, of the sort a mid-sized restaurant pays annually for the right to serve alcohol.

There is a legal scaffold that makes all of this possible. In 1996, the United States Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields platforms from liability for content posted by their users. Section 230 was written in the era of the bulletin board and the early web, when the argument was that small platforms could not be expected to police every posted message, and where the alternative was a chilling effect that would strangle the emerging medium at birth. That argument made sense in 1996. It has not made sense for at least fifteen years. The platforms are no longer passive conduits. Their algorithms are engineered to amplify whatever keeps users on the site longest, regardless of what that content does to the user or the culture. Section 230, as the American writer Mike Underell put it recently, gives the platforms legal cover to do nothing, and they are taking it (Underell, 2026).

The Australian reader should note that our own framework is only slightly less permissive. The Online Safety Act 2021 gives the eSafety Commissioner takedown powers for specific categories of harm, and the Basic Online Safety Expectations require platforms to produce transparency reports, but neither regime establishes the kind of publisher-grade liability that would actually shift the platforms’ commercial calculus. We rely, in practice, on the platforms deciding to behave, which is to say we rely on a mechanism with a twenty-year track record of not working.

The academy

A note before this section. It covers sexual violence, including the organised online coordination of it. A reader who already knows too much about this does not need to read the next five paragraphs to understand what this chapter is arguing. The rest of the chapter will still make sense if you skip to the catalyst section.

In early 2026, CNN published the findings of a months-long investigation into a global online network whose explicit function was the sharing of methods, videos, and community advice for men who wanted to drug, rape, and otherwise assault their wives and partners without the women knowing. The network’s main hub was visited, in February 2026 alone, sixty-two million times. The investigation documented men filming their own attacks, uploading the footage, commenting on each other’s work, trading what the network euphemistically called tips, and generally building the kind of camaraderie around a violent crime that in any other context would be called a criminal conspiracy but that here was called a community (see Underell, 2026, for contemporaneous commentary and links to the CNN coverage).

Sixty-two million visits in a month is not a fringe. Sixty-two million visits in a month is a large mid-tier content vertical. Somewhere in the stack of sites those men visited on the same day, there were almost certainly advertisements, and somewhere behind those advertisements there were almost certainly programmatic buyers, and somewhere in the data trail there were almost certainly platforms tracking the behaviour of those users for other purposes, which is to say that the academy was not hiding. It was visible to anyone whose business model involved looking.

I mention this not to shock, which would be cheap, but to name the logical endpoint of the architecture described in the previous section. A platform economy optimised for engagement, freed from publisher liability by a thirty-year-old American statute, populated by algorithms that promote whatever keeps users on the site longest, is an environment in which a rape academy is not an aberration. It is an emergent property. It is what happens when you build an ecosystem in which outrage, dominance, and contempt for women are all reliably engagement-positive signals, and you refuse to treat the engagement as evidence of harm until someone else has spent months assembling the paper trail.

Mike Underell, an American writer on Substack whose newsletter Mind the Gap has been one of the more honest voices on men’s responsibility for what men do to women, makes the point I keep returning to. Not engaging is a choice (Underell, 2026). Staying silent is a choice. Continuing to host a man who has been indicted on charges of rape and human trafficking while he builds an audience of a million subscribers on your platform is a choice. The choice is made by specific people. In Substack’s case, those people are Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi, the three men who run the company. They are choosing. Their choice has consequences for women they will never meet, in part because the culture in which those women live is shaped, at the margins, by what the platforms decide to amplify and what they decide to leave alone.

This is the road. This is the infrastructure. This is the apparatus that, in 2026, delivered Andrew Tate to Substack’s bestseller list.

The catalyst

Andrew Tate is, by his own description, a success coach. He is, by the description of Romanian prosecutors, a man facing charges including human trafficking, rape, and forming an organised criminal group, charges he denies. He is, by the measurable evidence of his content, someone who has made a career of telling lonely young men that women are property, that emotional restraint is weakness, and that the path to masculine dignity runs through dominance, discipline, and a significant monthly subscription to his training materials. The business model is legible. The target demographic is the same demographic whose attention the platforms have been shaping since the two men at the next table were in primary school.

In April 2026, Tate’s Substack account reached the top of the platform’s bestseller list, with more than a million followers, after eighteen months of posting to audiences of single-digit engagement. The platform’s algorithm had, in Substack’s phrasing, discovered him. I find the verb telling. An algorithm does not discover. An algorithm serves whatever the company has optimised it to serve, and if what reached the top is what was optimised for, then the optimisation was the decision, and the discovery narrative is the alibi.

Underell estimates, in a back-of-envelope calculation that seems roughly right, that a million Substack followers at even a one percent paid conversion rate translates to ten thousand paid subscribers, which at a hypothetical ten dollars a month is a hundred thousand dollars a month in subscription revenue, of which Substack keeps ten percent because that is Substack’s cut. The company’s annualised revenue is in the low tens of millions. Tate is therefore not a rounding error. Tate is a meaningful fraction of the company’s operating margin, which is not a reason to platform him but is a reason to be suspicious of any public explanation from the company that does not mention the money (Underell, 2026).

Here is where the book’s central argument applies directly, and where the contrarian move has to be made carefully. The two young men at the next table are not Tate. They are the audience. And the audience is where the genuine argument lives, because the audience is the thing the gentleman’s death made available for sale.

These men are lonely. They are lonely in ways the culture has, for two decades, declined to take seriously. Richard Reeves has documented the collapse in male educational attainment, the dissolution of apprenticeship pipelines, and the distortions that application-based matching has introduced to the dating economy, producing a class of young men for whom the conventional paths to partnership, status, and purpose have narrowed to vanishing point (Reeves, 2022). Niobe Way’s longitudinal work on adolescent boys describes the systematic cultural stripping of close male friendship between early and late adolescence, leaving young men with emotional intimacy needs and no legitimate language for them (Way, 2011).

Into that vacuum walks Tate, offering an explanation. The explanation is wrong, but it IS an explanation, and he delivers it in a register that does not treat the listener as the problem. This is the seduction. It is not the content of the answer. It is the fact of the answer, arriving to a man who has been told by every mainstream source that his discomfort is either imaginary or deserved.

Tate is wrong about women. He is wrong about dominance. He is wrong about what makes a life worth living. He is right that something has broken, and his willingness to say so, loudly, while the rest of the culture wrings its hands about whether young men are allowed to have problems, is the entire business model.

What Tate is selling, and this is the specific claim of this chapter, is not traditional masculinity. It is traditional masculinity with the restraint stripped out. The gentleman I was trained to be had, for all his faults, a whole system of internal brakes, honour among them, duty among them, the commitment to keep one’s word, the refusal to raise one’s voice in front of women, the absolute prohibition on hitting someone smaller than you, and the background assumption that being a man meant being responsible for the people in one’s orbit. Tate’s product is the dominance without the restraint. The uniform without the oath. The masculine display without the social sanctions that used to make the display tolerable to everyone else in the room. It is, in engineering terms, an older model with the safety features removed, sold to a generation who were never issued the manual.

Contempt, in this context, is the grift’s most reliable marketing partner. Every time a commentator describes Tate’s audience as irredeemable, a meaningful fraction of that audience moves one click further toward him, because the contempt confirms his central claim, which is that the mainstream hates them. This is not a reason to excuse Tate. It is a reason to understand that the mainstream response has been doing his recruitment for him, free of charge, with the enthusiasm of a man who does not realise he has been volunteered.

Đà Lạt has a version of this

Đà Lạt has a version of this phenomenon, smaller and quieter than the Philippines or Pattaya, and no less revealing for its size. There is a thin layer of Western men in their twenties and thirties who have come here, not for work and not for family, but for what the online ecosystem has taught them to call traditional women. They cluster in particular cafés. They can be identified, at a distance, by a combination of the Top G merchandise, the specific kind of sunglasses, and a peculiar posture that involves holding the shoulders as if carrying something heavy and invisible. From behind, they look like men who have recently pulled a muscle and are pretending it did not hurt.

I know two men in Đà Lạt who do not fit this pattern, and their counterexample is instructive. One is an Australian in his sixties, here for the better part of three decades, married for most of that time, a businessman who arrived when Vietnam was still reassembling itself after the embargo and who never left. The other is an American in his seventies, a long-term expat for reasons that had to do with curiosity and a specific Vietnamese woman he loved, long before the passport bro discourse existed. Neither of them wears Top G shirts. Neither of them lectures Vietnamese women at cafés. Both of them are, by the measurable criteria that matter, successful with women, in the banal and unmonetisable sense that they have partners who have chosen them and continue to choose them. They did not acquire this outcome through dominance training. They acquired it through the unremarkable practice of being curious about another human being for longer than a subscription cycle.

The contrast is not moral. It is ecological. They came here for reasons that were not organised around the feed. The younger men at the next table came here for reasons that were. The feed is not neutral. The feed shapes the purpose of the journey before the journey begins, in the way a travel agent’s commission structure shapes which destinations they happen to recommend.

The pub

Which brings me to the problem I am writing from inside, and cannot see my way out of.

I write this chapter on Substack. Or rather, I publish pieces of my thinking on Substack, under the banner of a newsletter I call Letters from the Quiet Half. Substack is where the serious writers went when Twitter stopped being serious, and for about three years it felt like a pub where the interesting drinkers had relocated, and being on the same platform as them felt like being in the same room as them. That was the value. Not the email delivery, which I could rent from any number of services. The cultural proximity. The pub.

In April 2026, Tate came to the pub. He had been drinking quietly in the corner for eighteen months, posting to audiences of two and five and ten, and the pub’s owners, who had been promoting loud drinkers to everyone else as a discovery feature, promoted Tate to the top of the chalkboard. A million followers, featured drinker, bestselling.

The writers I respect started having a specific conversation. Do we stay? Do we leave? Where would we go? Is Ghost better? Has anyone tried Ghost? Is Ghost actually different or just Substack minus the bits we currently hate?

Russell Nohelty wrote the most coherent version of the case for leaving (and it is nothing to do with Tate), and the striking thing about his piece, to me, was that the ethical reason was the last reason he gave, not the first. The structural reasons were first. The ten percent cut. The missing API. The roadmap prioritising Notes over the actual newsletter. The ethics clarified the decision rather than causing it, and I think that is honest. The ethics usually clarify. They rarely cause.

Oh, and Russell actually has left Substack, but he has rebranded on Ghost as Hapitalist, the article is behind a subscribe paywall, and I link to his article in the references (Nohelty, 2026). Russell mentions the problems many writers on Substack have similarly found with the platform.

Underell has argued the other direction, which I want to name carefully because it is not a cowardly position and I suspect I need to sit with it for longer than I have. His argument is that Substack will only change if pressure is applied from inside by writers who stay and escalate, that the exit option comforts the platform more than it threatens it, and that the more useful move is to report Tate repeatedly, lobby the founders by name, call representatives on the legislation that makes Section 230 what it is, and refuse the easy dignity of leaving quietly (Underell, 2026). He may be right. I am unsure that I have the energy for the inside fight at sixty-seven, which is not a rebuttal of his position but an honest statement about my own bandwidth.

Ghost is a non-profit, based in the United Kingdom, with no shareholders, no algorithm, no bestseller list, no recommendation engine. The mechanism through which Substack promoted Tate into everyone’s feeds literally does not exist on Ghost. Which is a structural answer to one question and a new question in its own right, because if the mechanism through which I might discover new readers does not exist, what exactly am I paying Ghost for? Email delivery. I can get email delivery from fifteen services for less, and free on the hosting service I already use for my websites.

I already own several domains across my various interests. I already pay a subscription for unlimited hosting. I have spent the last year building pillar pages on MindBlownPsychology and VietLeadershipCoach specifically so that people who are looking for what I write can find me without a platform’s help. That work is already done. I am not starting from zero. I am starting from several domains, a body of published books, a decent search position on several niches, and an audience that mostly found me through my writing rather than through anyone’s algorithm.

So why am I still thinking about this.

I think the honest answer is that leaving Substack feels like losing something, even though I have just written six thousand words arguing that I was never quite getting anything. A version of me still remembers when Substack felt like the pub, and wants the pub back. The pub now has a man accused of human trafficking promoted to featured drinker, and the landlord is taking ten percent of his tab, and the other people in the pub whose company I valued are slowly putting on their coats. Wanting the pub back is not, at this stage, a coherent request. It is grief for a version of the internet that did not survive the decade, which is a more dignified sentence than the one I usually end up at, which is that the internet I fell in love with has been replaced by a shopping mall run by people who actively dislike me. Back in the early-mid 2000s, social media was new, exciting, and you knew who the bastards were. By 2014, when I stopped evangelising the beast it had become, it was obvious the bastards were the deliberate and very clever rage creators and the platforms who monetised them, who amplified them for corporate gain.

I do not know, at the time of writing, what I am going to do. I have been turning the decision over in my mind for a while. I suspect that by the time this book is printed I will have drifted, without ceremony, onto my own domains, keeping the Substack account open out of obligation to the handful of paid subscribers who have already trusted me with their money. But I do not yet know. And I want, on this page, to resist the temptation to perform a decision I have not made, because performing decisions I have not made is the specific behaviour the platforms trained me into, and unlearning it is part of what this book is about.

The curriculum

Underell tells a story about his own nineteen-year-old self that I have been unable to get out of my head since I read it. In his first year at university, he had an experience where his feelings felt out of control. He did not like it. So he made what he describes as a deliberate choice. This is not how men operate. This is not how I should operate. I am going to turn my emotions off. And he did. For years. He aimed for apathy as his default state. He did not vote until his thirties because voting meant caring about something, and caring broke the rules he had set for himself (Underell, 2026).

The part of the story that lodged in me is not the suppression, which is ordinary, but his insistence that nobody told him to do it. Nobody sat him down and said ‘be a man’ (the Australian equivalents are ‘buckle up, princess’, and ‘toughen the fuck up’). He arrived at the decision on his own, at nineteen, and mistook the arrival for agency. This is, he argues, exactly how patriarchy works. The curriculum is so thoroughly baked into the environment that a teenager can reinvent it from scratch and believe he has chosen it. I spent forty years on a version of that same belief. I thought the emotional architecture I was maintaining was mine. It was never mine. It was issued, free of charge, by an institution that no longer exists, and maintained at my own expense by habits so old I had stopped noticing I was performing them.

The two men at the next table are doing the same thing. They think the Top G shirt is their idea. They think going to Vietnam for traditional women is their idea. They think the contempt for the feminists who ruined their generation is their idea. None of it is their idea. All of it arrived, at scale, through a feed that has been running in their peripheral vision since they were about ten years old, and the feed is paid for by advertisers who do not care whether the scaffolding of these men’s masculinity is sound, only whether the engagement numbers hold.

Underell’s piece argues, and this is the part I think the book needs to carry, that the analogue to consciousness-raising for men in this generation is the slow and uncomfortable labour of noticing what was put into us without our knowing. The yellow footprints at RAAF recruit training in 1981 were an obvious curriculum delivered by an obvious institution with obvious insignia. The algorithmic curriculum is invisible, distributed, and constantly updating. Noticing it requires the same move in both cases. You have to ask who benefits from you believing what you currently believe about yourself. If the answer is a corporal in 1981 or an advertising platform in 2026, the belief is not necessarily wrong, but it is not yours, and the part of the work that belongs to a grown man is sorting out which is which.

The road

The two men at the next table are finishing their coffees. The smaller one is showing the other one something on his phone. His friend laughs, the kind of laugh that is calibrated for the person who is about to look up and see if you are laughing, because the laugh is itself part of the performance and the performance is the point.

I was on yellow footprints in 1981, aged twenty-one, being taught a version of masculinity that was specific to the RAAF and general to the culture. The lesson was delivered by men in uniform at full volume, and the curriculum was administered by an institution that had been refining it for decades. The infrastructure was visible. You could see the tarmac. You could read the corporal’s rank insignia. You knew you were being shaped, even if you did not yet know into what.

The two men at the next table are being shaped by a curriculum they cannot see, administered by engineers they will never meet, in the service of revenue targets that are not disclosed in the terms of service. The tarmac is an algorithm. The corporal is a recommendation engine. The institution is a publicly traded company whose chief executive appeared before the United States Congress and was asked, under oath, whether his product was harming children, and whose answer was sufficiently evasive that the hearing produced no meaningful consequence, which may be the only part of this story a young RAAF corporal from 1981 would have recognised immediately.

The architectures are the same. The uniforms differ. That is the argument this book keeps returning to, and this chapter is where it has to be said most plainly. Masculine identity is, and always has been, an external curriculum delivered by whichever institution currently has the budget. The RAAF had the budget in 1981. Meta and its successors have the budget now. The curriculum differs in content. The curriculum differs in tone. The curriculum is identical in its basic move, which is to offer a lonely young man a role in exchange for his obedience, and to call the exchange identity.

The gentleman I was trained to be is dead. The performance became too expensive for the performer, as the first chapter of this book argues, and the infrastructure that used to underwrite the performance is gone. But the fact that the gentleman is dead does not mean nothing fills the space. Nature, capital, and adolescence all abhor a vacuum. Into the vacuum walked a market. Into the market walked Tate. Around Tate organised a thousand smaller grifters doing smaller versions of the same trick, and above them all, hosting the infrastructure, taking a percentage, and describing the whole arrangement as a thriving creator economy, sat the platforms. The universe took 13.8 billion years to produce a species capable of abstract thought and reciprocal love, and the species decided, on roughly a Tuesday, to rent out its loneliness to advertisers.

I helped build the road. Not the specific piece of road that delivered these two men to this café with these shirts and these ideas, because that piece of road was built after I had mostly stopped contributing. But the earlier pieces. The onboarding. The case studies I used in presentations to justify to businesses why they needed to be on these platforms. The language I used—authentic, conversation, community—which in retrospect was the marketing department’s laundering of a business model I did not yet understand. I sold the idea that these tools were neutral. They were not neutral. They were never neutral. They were engineered to optimise for engagement, and engagement is what you get when you hand a grievance a microphone and tell it that outrage is a form of intimacy.

I owe these two men something. I do not owe them absolution, because it is not mine to give. I do not owe them agreement, because they are wrong about the women who are not smiling at them, and wrong about what kind of man they are becoming. What I owe them is the honest statement that the road they walked in on was partly paved by people in my profession, and that naming the road is the smallest thing anyone can do who wants to be done with building it.

The two men stand up. They leave a tip that is twice what it should be, which is another tell, because the feed has told them that generosity is a form of dominance display and they are practising. The waiter takes the money and nods, in the way waiters nod at tourists, and gets on with his morning.

The woman two tables over has been gone for twenty minutes. She will not return while they are here. She knew the whole thing before I did, because she has had a lifetime of knowing this particular thing, and the fact that she knew it without needing to read any of the studies cited in this chapter is the final evidence, if any were still required, that the studies are not the point. The point is that we built a road that delivers these two men to this café, and we built it knowing, or we built it without wanting to know, which for the purposes of moral accountability is close enough to the same thing that the difference will not matter to the coroner.

What to do about it is the territory of the next chapter, where the economics of male shame explains why the men who are most captured by the grift are also the men whose economic ground has given way most completely underneath them. It is hard to refuse a man who sells you dignity when dignity is the resource you have run out of.

References

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