0:00

I'm Taylor Lorenz. Welcome to Power

0:02

User. Since Donald Trump won the

0:04

election last week, Democrats in the

0:06

media have been in panic mode.

0:08

Much of this panic is centered

0:10

around a powerful online subculture, loosely

0:12

known as the Manosphere. The Manosphere

0:14

consists of a vast network

0:16

of influencers, podcasters, and streamers that

0:18

speak to young men in a

0:21

way traditional media has failed to.

0:23

Influencers like Joe Rogan, Theo Vaughn,

0:25

Aidan Ross, or Andrew Schultz, once

0:27

seen as fringe personalities or mere

0:29

entertainers, have evolved into major political

0:31

players. Now, Democrats are left scrambling,

0:33

trying to understand this world, and

0:36

questioning whether the manuscript can be

0:38

countered or even co-opted. Can they

0:40

win young men on the internet

0:42

back in a way that doesn't

0:44

radicalize them further? Is it even possible

0:46

to create a Joe Rogan for the

0:49

left? To help break all this down,

0:51

I brought in Josh Siderella. Josh is

0:53

a researcher who has been studying the

0:55

radicalization of young men online for over

0:57

a decade. He is the host of

0:59

the Doom scroll podcast that covers culture

1:01

and politics in the 21st century. Hi

1:03

Josh, welcome to Fower User. Hey Taylor, good

1:05

to see you. I know you've been talking

1:08

to radicalized men online for almost a

1:10

decade now. Tell me what you've done in

1:12

this space. I've interviewed young people who

1:14

post radical memes online for the

1:16

past few years. I've written two

1:18

books about this. I've done a

1:20

series of audio interviews. I've done

1:22

a variety of museum programming in

1:24

both the states and in Europe.

1:27

So I've spent the last few

1:29

years just completely immersed in political

1:31

subcult, primarily talking to young people

1:33

who get politicized online. I know, every time

1:35

I talk to you, you are in some

1:37

like deep discussion with like communities of, you

1:39

know. fascist 15 year olds on

1:42

internet. Literally it's not a joke actually,

1:44

yeah. I spend a lot of time doing

1:46

it. Can you describe to me what

1:48

the Manosphere actually means? The

1:50

Manosphere refers to a large variety

1:53

of channels, primarily male influencers, who are

1:55

giving advice about how to date women,

1:57

how to exercise business. starting your small

1:59

business, opening up a drop shipping scam,

2:02

stuff like this. It's a very large

2:04

culture. It encompasses a lot of different

2:06

perspectives. Some of them extremely conservative, misogynistic,

2:09

too big of a space to really

2:11

summarize all together. Yeah, there's a lot

2:13

of like, I feel like, cast of

2:16

characters around here. We've got Andrew Tate,

2:18

he's sort of the perennial like male

2:20

lifestyle influencer, of course, accused of sex

2:22

trafficking, super misogynistic. But then it also

2:25

trickles down to people like the Nelk

2:27

Boys, right, who are like prank YouTubeers

2:29

and then you've got the comedy world

2:32

that I think is sort of adjacent

2:34

to this, the Joe Rogans, the Theovons,

2:36

and some of these other people, right?

2:39

Like, I mean, even like someone like

2:41

Shane Gillis, who's pretty mainstream comedian, I

2:43

would say, is sort of adjacent to

2:45

the broader like, Manosphere. capital A capital

2:48

R alt right people who had really

2:50

reprehensible worldviews But now kind of extends

2:52

to this soft cultural stuff including like

2:55

the milk boys and comedians and stuff

2:57

like this I would say that we're

2:59

kind of watching a shift into something

3:02

that the writer Max Reed has described

3:04

as the z internet Which is just

3:06

a subculture of young men who are

3:08

interested in sports and betting and light

3:11

beer and those in nicotine pouches, and

3:13

they really like comedy stuff It's just

3:15

men's interests and is not particularly advancing

3:18

a clear, explicit ideology, just kind of

3:20

general common sense conservatism. So there's a

3:22

real gradation from stuff that is within

3:25

the Overton window, regular politics, and then

3:27

stuff that is extreme. And part of

3:29

the problem is that we're using the

3:31

single-term manosphere to refer to all of

3:34

those communities which are very different from

3:36

each other. What draws people into the

3:38

manosphere? I mean, is it ideology? Is

3:41

it a sense of community? Like, what

3:43

makes this broader group of content creators,

3:45

podcastsers, etc., appealing to young men? A

3:48

lot of them get into it through

3:50

self-help, oddly enough. You know, it's a

3:52

very reasonable thing, looking into self-improvement, into

3:54

workout advice, into presentation, how to groom

3:57

yourself, how to dress. There's very little

3:59

content that is geared towards young men

4:01

that does not also include these implicit

4:04

political positions along with it. So generally

4:06

people get into it through a cultural

4:08

layer where they're looking for self-help or

4:10

exercise advice and then following that several

4:13

years later there's all of these other

4:15

things that they pick up along the

4:17

way. So you can call this a

4:20

rabbit hole, you can call it a

4:22

funnel, there's various types of models for

4:24

it, but people weighed into this material

4:27

slowly over time. Do you think it's accurate

4:29

to see the banosphere is sort

4:31

of one larger collective and group or

4:33

are these all just like disparate

4:35

communities that outsiders have looped together? I

4:37

think both you and I have been

4:40

saying this for a very long time,

4:42

but there are a lot of people

4:44

in these movements, they're very large groups,

4:46

and they have important disagreements with each

4:49

other, and those fractures are actually sources

4:51

of conflict in which people break off

4:53

into different political blocks or factions. So

4:55

you can find things that are like

4:58

an embrace of conservative, traditional gender roles,

5:00

you can also find things that are

5:02

rejections of modern society in which people

5:04

want to revert to revert to in

5:07

this, how women should be treated, whether

5:09

they should be in the workplace, whether

5:11

they should be in the home, there's

5:13

not a kind of homogenous description. Manosphere

5:16

as a category is kind of lumping

5:18

together dozens and dozens of different communities

5:20

that have a lot of different

5:22

perspectives. Are there any historical parallels

5:24

to the manosphere? Like have we

5:26

seen this type of thing before?

5:29

It's kind of an anomalous... development of

5:31

the internet because we haven't really

5:33

had quantitative measurements of subcultures before.

5:35

There are certainly political movements in

5:37

older methods of media. I'm thinking

5:39

of Father Coughlin who is a

5:41

conservative preacher during the era of

5:43

the Great Depression in which people

5:45

literally mailed in dollar bills to

5:48

support his radio program. Very analogous

5:50

to a twitch streamer but you

5:52

know 90 years earlier. Those things

5:54

exist but the kind of soft

5:56

cultural component that slowly acculturates people

5:58

to political ideas later. we haven't

6:00

ever been able to measure that in

6:02

quantitative terms before. So I think it's

6:04

in some ways quite new. Trump tapped

6:06

into the atmosphere so heavily during this

6:09

campaign, how much do you think it

6:11

really helped him? I mean, it's kind

6:13

of impossible to tell. I certainly feel

6:15

like it did have a big influence.

6:17

We would be, I think, hard-pressed to

6:19

find the total number of people who

6:21

decided to change their vote one way

6:23

or another, or decided to come out

6:26

and vote as a result of hearing

6:28

him on a podcast. We have an

6:30

enormous amount of data for how many

6:32

people that they reach. My perspective on

6:34

this stuff is that if you're looking

6:36

for the gate over whether someone makes

6:38

their voting decision towards option A or

6:41

option B, you're missing. the forest for

6:43

the trees. These are processes that start

6:45

eight, ten years before where people are

6:47

slowly acculturated to political ideas. So it's

6:49

not like they heard it from an

6:51

influencer and then decided to go out

6:53

and vote that afternoon. They have been

6:56

listening to these opinions for almost a

6:58

decade and that has shaped their worldview

7:00

as a result. It's a very kind

7:02

of soft and slow approach if you're

7:04

looking through the cultural lens. What's one

7:06

thing that you think critics of the

7:08

Manister kind of completely misunderstand about it?

7:11

I think there's a... knee jerk reflex

7:13

to kind of write off all of

7:15

these young men is having reprehensible views

7:17

that they are beyond persuasion and that

7:19

they basically should not be message to

7:21

attempted to recruit or bring into some

7:23

type of political coalition. I have been

7:25

a proponent for many years of saying

7:28

that if you don't like these developments

7:30

in internet culture, then your job is

7:32

to get in there and try to

7:34

persuade these people otherwise. You actually have

7:36

to engage in conversation with them. If

7:38

you attempt to deplatform these communities, they

7:40

actually... get worse and we can quantitatively

7:43

prove that through studies at this point.

7:45

The instinct to rule out the possibility

7:47

that these people can be brought into

7:49

a different political coalition is I think

7:51

a grave mistake in this point. I

7:53

want to back up for a second

7:55

and talk about something that is something

7:58

that's kind of the bane of my

8:00

existence because I feel like as someone

8:02

that covers young... and people in technology,

8:04

I'm constantly hearing in the media about

8:06

the male loneliness epidemic. And you know,

8:08

there's a lot of sort of moral

8:10

panic about young men and their place

8:13

in the world and did we alienate

8:15

young men. So first of all, do

8:17

you think that there is a male

8:19

loneliness epidemic? And obviously, of course, there's

8:21

also a female loneliness epidemic and everyone

8:23

is lonely. But do you think that

8:25

there's something really specific and broken

8:27

right now with young men, rather? like do you

8:30

think that they're sort of really uniquely struggling in

8:32

a way that we haven't addressed? So this is

8:34

the predominant narrative that it's an

8:36

epidemic of male loneliness, that it's

8:38

in cells, involuntary celibates, and so

8:40

on. I think there's a general

8:43

pronounced loneliness in society that is

8:45

maybe more likely among young people,

8:47

but it's just generally trending upwards

8:49

everywhere. So the idea that increased

8:51

content, consumption, and social atomization, those

8:54

are just measuring the same thing.

8:56

I think there's just a regular

8:58

amount of loneliness that is universal

9:00

to everybody right now, actually. And

9:02

the men seem to get a lot

9:05

more attention for it, but I don't know

9:07

if we could actually support that with

9:09

data. Yeah. I mean, I think

9:11

everyone, like you said, is definitely

9:13

lonely, and there are ways to

9:15

sort of address loneliness in different

9:17

cohorts, probably through different means. And

9:19

you mentioned that a lot of

9:21

this manosphere is built around this

9:23

concept of self-help. This is something

9:25

I was thinking of, especially with Andrew

9:27

Tate, who's sort of the pinnacle,

9:29

like, like, manosphere influencer in the

9:31

most awful. In 2021, he started

9:33

this thing called Hustlers University, where

9:35

he was sort of teaching people

9:37

allegedly like how to make money

9:39

online. And so much of this

9:41

manosphere world is not just, it's

9:44

not just like about like betterment,

9:46

right, in terms of working out

9:48

in the gym or getting ripped.

9:50

It's also about making money. Do

9:52

you think economic insecurity among young

9:54

men and teenagers also feeds people

9:56

into this more like radicalized section

9:59

of the internet? I mean, I feel

10:01

like a broken record because I've been

10:03

saying that for eight years. Yeah, I

10:05

would say that's one of the primary

10:07

drivers. You know, people are, they're like,

10:09

okay, Andrew Tate is teaching people how

10:11

to do drop shipping scams on the

10:13

internet. And then they forget to ask

10:16

the primary question that even brings people

10:18

to ask the primary question that even

10:20

brings people to look for that material

10:22

in the first place, which is like,

10:24

why can't you find dignified high paying

10:26

work in the richest country in the

10:28

world? the legacy media is uncomfortable in

10:30

talking about that, like, this is the

10:33

problem. You know, we've put the cart

10:35

in front of the horse if we're

10:37

going to blame these people for harnessing

10:39

an audience that is interested in their

10:41

material because they've been disappointed by the

10:43

legacy structures. So I think there is

10:45

a larger political economic shift that is

10:47

far more effective in de radicalizing or

10:50

persuading people, then trying to deplatform these

10:52

horrible influencers, which I completely disagree with

10:54

and have no sympathy for them. I

10:56

hate these guys, but unless we address

10:58

that kind of downward mobility that is

11:00

really pronounced for young people, Gen Z,

11:02

millennials like myself, and particularly young men

11:04

under the age of 25, then we're

11:07

just feeding them more and more audience.

11:09

week after week, month after month. And

11:11

I feel like this economic thing is

11:13

getting really ignored because I think there's

11:15

a heavy focus of like, oh, well,

11:17

they're all adjacent to like sports and

11:19

you have C fighters and men just

11:21

want to be hot. And of course,

11:24

I'm sure a lot of teenage boys

11:26

want to also be ripped and you

11:28

know, all that stuff. They do. Yes,

11:30

that is also cool. But it's crazy.

11:32

You know, I talked to a lot

11:34

of young kids too. I feel like

11:36

young kids today. are involved in the

11:38

economy at such an earlier age, like

11:41

they're pressured to like start these online

11:43

businesses. And when you go on the

11:45

internet to try to find information about

11:47

starting an online business, these are the

11:49

influencers that come up, like these hustle

11:51

bros, or the like Grant Cardone, like

11:53

sales monster type stuff, where they're all

11:55

big Trump supporters, right? They're all super

11:58

conservative. It's hard to find, I guess,

12:00

like, a grussel hustle, like... influencer that's

12:02

espousing more progressive values. I would also throw

12:04

in that a lot of these

12:06

young people have been like trained

12:08

to do below minimum wage labor

12:10

in places like Minecraft and Roblox.

12:12

Like we have cultivated the entrepreneurial

12:14

instinct on children from like age

12:16

12 when they start playing these

12:18

games and then they're selling the

12:20

resources and and shit in MMO

12:23

RPGs and so on. So yeah,

12:25

just. The process of privatization and

12:27

the market kind of reaching into

12:29

every aspect of life that had

12:31

previously been decommodified, like having a

12:33

hobby as a video game, we are

12:35

just kind of cultivating a small business

12:37

owner mentality for a decade before

12:40

people are even able to vote in

12:42

some cases. We're going to take a

12:44

quick break. Coming up, we're going to

12:46

talk about why Democrats will never be

12:48

able to create the left-wing Joe Rogan.

12:59

There's some viral tweets from Democrats

13:02

that I think sort of woke up

13:04

to this new media landscape last week.

13:06

They woke up to it last week.

13:08

They really did. And I have to

13:11

say, I'm feeling very vindicated. I'm sure

13:13

you are too. I'm like, wow, you're

13:15

right. You're right. Youtubers can affect people.

13:17

But you started to see these tweets

13:20

from prominent Democrats saying, we need a

13:22

left Joe Rogan. which is hilarious, I

13:24

think, on its face because obviously Joe

13:26

Rogan supported Bernie Sanders in 2020 and

13:28

I think actually showed an openness to

13:31

supporting progressives or at least more sort

13:33

of like populist Democrats maybe several years

13:35

ago. I would argue at least that,

13:37

I mean, at least I did argue

13:39

in my piece that we can't have

13:41

a Democrat Joe Rogan that sort of

13:43

fundamentally misunderstands the media landscape. How would

13:45

you respond to those tweets? Yeah, I should say

13:48

I really appreciated your article what

13:50

I would describe as the structural

13:52

asymmetry or structural Advantage for the

13:54

Republican Party being very cozy with

13:57

capital being cozy with big business

13:59

interests It's kind of hard to

14:01

have a left-wing Joe Rogan or a

14:03

left-wing daily wire because all of these

14:05

things, I mean, just look at their

14:08

balance sheets, they're funded by billionaires, right?

14:10

They're funded by the oil industry and

14:12

all these other conservative interests, and I

14:14

mean, it's gonna be hard to find

14:17

like a left-wing billionaire who wants to

14:19

fund a political program that advocates for

14:21

them not existing. I mean, it's entirely...

14:23

George Soros or something. Yeah, I mean

14:26

those are like that is not those

14:28

that George Soros is not the left

14:30

right George Soros is like a kind

14:32

of neoliberal third-way progressive Whatever that is

14:35

a very much a market ideology That's

14:37

not the kind of like trade unionist

14:39

left. That's going to appeal to these

14:41

young men who are you know looking

14:44

at all this different content. So I

14:46

fully I fully agree with you what

14:48

I would throw in there though is

14:50

that I think there are leaner ways

14:53

to accomplish this and just because it

14:55

is difficult does not mean that it

14:57

isn't also necessary. I can't count how

14:59

many interviews with young people as young

15:02

as the age of 13 that are

15:04

into material so radical that I won't

15:06

mention the names on this program. The

15:08

political messaging starts when they are so

15:11

young it is inconceivable to most mainstream

15:13

viewers. So the idea that Someone is

15:15

going out and voting for Donald Trump

15:17

after listening to one podcast from Aid

15:19

and Ross is just completely, completely wrong.

15:22

They are acculturated to this material over

15:24

the course of starting from like age

15:26

14 in most cases and having some

15:28

type of messaging for the pre-political portion

15:31

of their life. is very much necessary

15:33

because if you hear this at age

15:35

15 and you're like, I don't want

15:37

to join a union, my workplace, like

15:40

these guys sound dumb, the left-wing podcasters

15:42

are influencers, when you're 25 years old

15:44

and you're working in the Amazon fulfillment

15:46

center, you're going to be grateful that

15:49

you heard that podcast 10 years ago,

15:51

because that will then inform your decision

15:53

to actually organize in the workplace. That's

15:55

the game that we're playing with this

15:58

kind of material. I think it can

16:00

be done. how much it costs I

16:02

don't need billionaire funding. You probably do

16:04

need, just to be realistic about it,

16:07

millionaire funding. You do have to find

16:09

people who are sympathetic to the cause,

16:11

but we don't need George Soros to

16:13

fund a network of left-wing podcasters. We

16:16

do have a lot of left-wing podcasters

16:18

already, I will say. But you're right.

16:20

I mean, I think it's not just

16:22

the funding though, right? The funding is

16:24

part of it. But it's also the

16:26

sort of broader collaboration collaboration. Maybe we're

16:28

all guilty of this ourselves, but when

16:31

Trump goes on Rogan, like that's going

16:33

to be a very friendly interview, right?

16:35

Like when he goes on the Milk

16:37

Boys, like he's not going to be

16:39

challenged. If Kamala was to have gone

16:41

on his son, Piker, who is phenomenal

16:44

and brilliant, he would eat her up,

16:46

right? Like he would critique her.

16:48

Yeah, good. I know I'm participating

16:50

in it now. Yeah, yeah, I

16:52

hear you. But I mean, like,

16:54

what do you think of that?

16:56

Like, do you think it's also

16:59

just like, like, what would you

17:01

say to these critiques of, like,

17:03

well, the left doesn't have solidarity

17:05

the line enough? Right. So in

17:07

internet discourse there's a popular term

17:09

called the Overton Window. The Overton

17:12

Window refers to the range of

17:14

acceptable political debate at a certain

17:16

period. And so I would argue

17:18

that from, you know, let's say 2008

17:20

up until 2024, that Overton Window

17:22

has been shifting towards the right.

17:25

So if you have this alternative

17:27

media space where there are content

17:29

creators with dissenting opinions from the

17:31

mainstream that are on both the

17:33

left and the right. As the

17:35

Overton Window has shift... it's moved

17:37

towards the alternative media sphere that

17:39

is conservative aligned. It doesn't necessarily

17:42

mean that the people on the

17:44

left have opinions that shouldn't be

17:46

heard or are beyond the pale.

17:48

It just means that what we

17:50

call the center consensus is actually

17:52

floating and it's shifting right words.

17:54

So the gap between the alt

17:56

media sphere and the mainstream has

17:58

actually become relatively. more narrow on the

18:01

right, where it has gotten obviously observably larger

18:03

on the left. Imagine if Kamala Harris went

18:05

on the Hassan-Piker stream. I imagine they would

18:07

not get along in the least. I see

18:09

an opportunity now for the Democrats to really

18:11

kind of reimagine themselves entirely. I mean, this

18:13

is such a devastating defeat on every category.

18:15

Yeah, I mean, this goes back to like

18:17

the question of like, is it that these

18:19

left-wing podcasters aren't on board enough? we have

18:21

mainstream Democrat candidates that are sort of completely

18:23

out of step with the ideology of what

18:25

most young people on the internet support. That's

18:27

the, it's the latter, it's the latter, yeah.

18:29

Yeah, I mean, they're just far too much,

18:31

kind of third way, Blairite, Clinton, yeah, neoliberal

18:33

compromise. I guess when we also think about

18:35

Democrats and young men, I want to go

18:38

back again to 2020, because this is when

18:40

you had Bernie on, you had this moral

18:42

panic in the media of the Bernie Bro,

18:44

right, where there was like toxic young men

18:46

are supporting, you know, progressives and Bernie and

18:48

their toxic and their male and a lot

18:50

of young progressive felt alienated from the Democratic

18:52

Party or like these sort of like cisgender

18:54

straight men felt that they were being pushed

18:56

down or their voices weren't supposed to be

18:58

heard, right? This is this critique. How much

19:00

of that critique do you think is real?

19:02

And do you think the Democratic Party kind

19:04

of abandoned young straight men? I mean, it

19:06

is a extraordinarily weird period because I've gotten

19:08

shit for being a Bernie Bro for eight

19:10

years, basically up until last week when the

19:12

predominant narrative became that we need more left-wing

19:15

podcasters who are going to talk to young

19:17

men. So it's a pretty big narrative flip

19:19

that's kind of hard to grasp. I would

19:21

say that Young men are quantitatively one large

19:23

demographic that are not being spoken to by

19:25

the current iteration of the Democratic Party. If

19:27

there were a labor constituency in the Democratic

19:29

Party, it would be speaking to them.

19:31

You don't have to

19:33

message the people just

19:35

based on their identity

19:37

or their race or

19:39

whatever. If you're trying

19:41

to reach young white

19:43

men, you can talk

19:45

to them in the

19:47

workplace. Like the thing

19:49

that unifies everyone in

19:52

society is that we

19:54

all need to work.

19:56

We all need to

19:58

sell our labor on

20:00

the market because this

20:02

is a capitalist society.

20:04

That's not going to

20:06

change anytime soon, but

20:08

if you want to

20:10

reach them, maybe don't

20:12

do, like it's just

20:14

too narrow of an

20:16

approach to do like

20:18

identity -based targeting to like,

20:20

okay, so we'll insert

20:22

democratic ads into Sunday

20:24

night football. Is that

20:26

really the solution they're

20:28

going to come up with? What about

20:31

on the sphere, Josh? Oh

20:35

my God, the amount of money

20:37

alone incredible. I want to bring

20:39

things back to tech because I think

20:41

there's also a conversation to be had around

20:43

like platforms and you mentioned that de -platforming

20:45

these influencers doesn't work and I

20:47

actually agree with you, but I want to

20:49

hear you sort of tease it out because,

20:52

you know, in the 2010s, there was this

20:54

idea that really emerged of like kick these

20:56

people off Instagram, Facebook, whatever. I mean, Andrew

20:58

Tate's been de -platformed, right? He was kicked

21:00

off like TikTok and YouTube and stuff and

21:02

their power will evaporate. Do you think

21:04

that's still a true belief? I

21:06

think in the case of influencers, it

21:08

does clearly, quantitatively reduce their audience

21:10

and their messaging. Absolutely. Okay, so shouldn't

21:12

we just like ban all these people then

21:15

with problematic manosphere opinions? Well,

21:17

the thing that happens is that the audiences

21:19

that then migrate to their new platforms

21:21

become more radicalized than they were before. So

21:24

you're then in this kind of whack -a

21:26

-mole situation where you're debating whether it's more

21:28

dangerous to society to have a large

21:30

group of mildly radical people or a small

21:32

group of very radical people. And that's

21:34

a difficult cost benefit that has to be

21:36

done kind of case by case, because

21:38

in some cases, people do horrific acts in

21:40

the real world. You know, those are

21:43

the types of things that we want to

21:45

avoid. I think at the worst ends of

21:47

this, people who are calling

21:49

for violence in the real world, who are committing

21:51

crimes, who are like storming the Capitol, for

21:53

example, and streaming it on social media, those are

21:55

grounds for deplatforming. But then there are people

21:57

who are kind of like in the middle tier.

22:00

that are amenable to some of these ideas,

22:02

but they actually just need to be

22:04

met with conversation. So having the Bernie Sanders

22:06

go on the Joe Rogan show is

22:08

like a far better response to this than

22:10

de -platforming Joe Rogan, for example. Which some

22:12

people will suggest. Yeah, whoa.

22:14

Good luck on that one,

22:17

not going anywhere. But I also

22:19

think what a lot of these conversations

22:21

fail to take into account is also that

22:23

the right has spent the past decade building

22:25

up this alternative platform ecosystem where if you

22:27

do get de -platformed on YouTube, you can just

22:29

go have a show on rumble. If you

22:31

get de -platformed on Twitch, you can make

22:33

millions on kick. It feels increasingly

22:35

impossible to de -platform people, especially in

22:37

the podcast world, or as media

22:39

just gets more distributed, it's like,

22:42

does that even work? Yeah,

22:44

yeah. I mean, that may, you're very right

22:46

about this. It may actually be a phenomena

22:48

of an older period of social media. When

22:50

we were having these conversations eight years ago,

22:52

the alt platforms were far, far smaller than

22:54

they are now. And that media system has

22:56

grown substantially. So we may be looking at

22:59

a future if we kind of roll this

23:01

forward eight years from now. It may be

23:03

just impossible to meaningfully de -platform someone because all

23:05

of our audiences are so spread. And if

23:07

you're not on this one platform, if you're

23:09

not on X, then you'll be on threads.

23:11

Or if you're not on threads, then you'll

23:13

be on Blue Sky. And there's gonna

23:15

be some place where people can get your

23:17

stuff and it'll be widespread enough that shutting

23:19

off one valve, one output for it, does

23:21

not meaningfully limit its reach for the audience.

23:23

So I think at that point kicking

23:25

off any extremists. That's the, no, that's

23:27

true, that's true. I think they're

23:29

monetizing them. They're monetizing

23:32

it quite well. Yeah, it seems to be, they're

23:34

raking it in from the, I think

23:36

they're incentivizing it too, if I'm being honest. Oh

23:38

hell yeah, yeah. If you had

23:40

to make a prediction, speaking of eight

23:42

years from now, where do you see

23:44

the atmosphere going? Do you see this

23:46

broader ecosystem becoming more mainstream and more

23:48

influential or do you think it could

23:50

fade away? Is it a product of

23:52

this unique political time? As long

23:54

as I've been doing this work, interviewing young

23:56

people, writing about internet culture, there

23:58

have been so many people who have - to me that this

24:00

stuff is over, it's a trend cycle, it's going to

24:02

end, and over the entirety of that time, it has

24:04

only grown larger and more influential. This is the new

24:06

world, this is the new media landscape, the old model,

24:09

it's not going to be around, the old model, it's

24:11

not going to be around for much longer. So we

24:13

are looking to be around for much longer. So we

24:15

are looking at the shape of the old model, I'm

24:17

sorry to say it, it's not going to be around

24:19

for much longer. It's not going to be around, I'm, I'm

24:21

sorry to be around, I'm sorry to be around, I'm sorry to

24:23

say, I'm sorry to say, it, I'm sorry to say, it, it, it, it,

24:25

it, I'm sorry to say, it, it, it, it, it, I'm sorry to say,

24:27

it, it, it, it, it, I'm sorry to say, it, it, it, it, it,

24:29

it, it That's all for this week's episode. You

24:31

can watch full episodes of Power User

24:33

on the YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz.

24:36

Power User is produced by Travis Larchook

24:38

and Jalani Carter. Our video editor is

24:40

Sam Essex. Our executive producer is Zach

24:42

Mac. Power User is part of the

24:44

Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like

24:46

this show, give us a rating and

24:48

review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever

24:51

you listen. And in the meantime, subscribe

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See you next week.