Incel Capitalism: Weaponized Loneliness in a Neoliberal Patriarchy

Introduction

                  The idea that one can be lonely in a room full of people is pervasive as an oxymoronic truism. Aloneness and loneliness are not interchangeable, a fact widely accepted and increasingly prevalent in the era of social media. Currently, people connect with one another instantly from across the world, form relationships with friends in different time zones, and share jokes about current events in real time. Virtually everybody has a digital footprint, an imprint of themselves immortalized in a complex network of infinite capacity. But within a culture more connected than ever, the Surgeon General of the United States of America declared loneliness a grave epidemic rivalling smoking and obesity in its effect on public health (4). Dr. Murthy cites the implications for “performance, productivity, and engagement” as indicators of urgency in addressing this malaise, highlighting the potentially devastating effects on “schools, workplaces, and civic organizations” (4). Despite recognizing the importance of “reimagining the structures, policies, and programs that shape a community,” he locates the burden of addressing this epidemic in the individual choices of US citizens, whom he urges to view “our individual relationships [as] an untapped resource” (5).  According to Murthy, “the keys to human connection are simple, but extraordinarily powerful,” such as talking to friends on the phone or doing somebody a favour (5). Dr. Murthy has noble intentions that profoundly misunderstand the mechanisms producing loneliness, locating the affliction in its symptoms rather than its cause. Framing loneliness, in any context, as an epidemic is nonsensical in a world that has commodified all meaningful forms of human connection through algorithm culture. In such a context, loneliness is not a malaise, but a prescription mandated by neoliberalism.

            This paper argues the above claim through an analysis of how neoliberalism has commodified human connection and attention while depoliticising public discourse. This enforced loneliness and its multifaceted effects will be illustrated through a case study of incels, a term short for involuntary celibates and referring to a male internet community that blames women and the so-called sexual marketplace for the romantic loneliness they experience. As a case study, incels will illustrate the underlying mechanisms of neoliberalism as a driving force of loneliness. To provide a definition of this central key term, “neoliberalism has functioned historically less as a clearly defined set of ideas and theories and more as an internally contradictory mode of upward redistribution of wealth and power and an extension of the practices of imperial extraction of resources from economies of the global South” (Duggan 182). According to Henry Giroux, this current system is “[d]riven by a ruthless emphasis on privatization, deregulation, commodification, a sclerotic individualism and ruthless model of competition—neoliberal capitalism has morphed into a machinery of death—an unabashed form of gangster capitalism.” An exploration of these ideas and effects seeks to respond to questions such as: why is the reproduction of existing power imbalances a response to loneliness under neoliberalism? What is it about existing at the mercy of neoliberalism that lends itself to the misassignment of blame? A path for future study may also question which other groups might also be experiencing this misassignment of blame.

Incel Culture

            Incels offer a compelling case study of neoliberal loneliness because their ostracization is the basis for their establishment of themselves as an internet subgroup. According to researchers Brandon Sparks et al., incels are a group that began in 1997 with a girl named Alana, who was frustrated by her lack of success in dating and created a site for connection and support (732). This group was diverse along lines of age, gender, and sexuality, but by 2014 “had splintered into male-only assemblies whose sexual frustrations were often directed at the women who have ‘shunned’ them,” (732) and who predominantly lived in industrialized western countries (733). That year is also marked by the first incel attack by Elliot Rodger, which resulted in the deaths of six individuals and Rodgers himself, who is now celebrated as a “martyr” within the community (731). Notably, high levels of incel activity have been linked not only to “competitive sex ratios,” but also to “high income inequality and lower gender income gaps” (733).  These groups have constructed a pervasively misogynistic subculture that blames feminism and gender equity for their lack of sexual activity, many proposing a reversal of women’s rights and divorce laws, or acts of violence such as rape as solutions to their subjugation under the “sexual marketplace” arbitrated by women (733). Despite the inherent violence of such myopic ideology, incels are statistically unlikely to commit violence and often report finding relief from their loneliness on these dogmatic forums (734). Frustrated by their isolation and unmet social desires, incels exhibit bitterness towards the “upper echelons” of society, such as attractive men colloquially called “Chads[,] for hoarding all of the women while also wishing to attain this status” (733). Hoping to ascend the ranks of the sexual marketplace, some incels make attempts to remedy their unattractiveness called “looksmaxxing” and “gymmaxxing” (733). This is a group of individuals who are trying, in however misguided ways, to grapple with the unrelenting loneliness felt by enough people to warrant a Surgeon General’s public advisory.

            What is it about 21^st century neoliberal culture that fosters such polarized, isolated people? To understand how capitalism monopolizes the social sphere and enforces loneliness, it is crucial to illustrate the evolution of the cultural apparatus, a C. Wright Mills’ concept so seamlessly applicable to the age of social media that its origination in the pre-internet era seems nearly anachronistic. As part of this concept, Mills posits the ways a person interprets, negotiates, and experiences their reality as a process that is not inherently their own but rather dependent upon the complex web of interaction with culture that they participate in from birth. This web is an entanglement of ideas, images, facts, and symbols that are mostly inherited from one’s cultural surroundings but also observed independently (Mills). Under such a reality, it follows that incels understand and pathologize their own loneliness through a strikingly capitalist lens, employing both a resentment towards the ruling class of their imagined sexual economy, and a belief that the ranks of which can be permeable and traversed through looksmaxxing and gymmaxxing. Given that, according to Mills, the person understands their reality through predominant cultural images, capitalism emerges as an unavoidable arena of the cultural apparatus. These individuals, desperate to locate the source of their suffering in women, physical appearance, and the sexual marketplace, do so using methods of interpretation and symbols of expression inherited from their capitalist surroundings, leading to an overlooking of potential neoliberal roots of their loneliness. As such, in constructing a remedy for the loneliness they feel under capitalism, incels have effectively reconstructed a microcosmic capitalist landscape.

Incels and the Algorithm

            The difference in today’s cultural apparatus is the incorporation of algorithms, an unavoidable tool of social media that simultaneously widens and narrows the cultural apparatus into a grimly depoliticising echo chamber. The internet has undoubtedly increased access to information in western nations, leading to an explosion of new images, viewpoints, and methods of interpreting the world. It is in this sense that the cultural apparatus is diversified, as the average person receives methods of interpretation from a greater variety of sources, and has a greater ease of seeking these out independently. Limiting this unlimited potential, however, is the algorithm, which is understood more broadly by Ulises Ali Mejias as the network. Under this mechanism, software is used to “aggregate the opinions of large communities of users, but in doing so, they also operationalize decisions about what is included in and excluded from the list” (11). In other words, users are not just shown everything that is available but instead are fed content algorithmically anticipated to engage their participation. As a result, as the algorithm learns about a person’s ideas, preferences, and interests, it shows that person a greater concentration of those things to tailor user experience. The issue, as explained by Mejias, is that this customization is turning people and their attention into commodities by using these algorithms to strategically advertise and drive-up user participation (6). When users are glimpsing into a small infinity, where there is endless content supporting one’s own biases, a warped perception emerges where one’s worldview is disproportionately confirmed by this algorithmic cultural apparatus. Not only does such an effect logically depoliticise the social by making common the biases a user holds dear, but it is inherently capitalist in its commodification of community. Users, who perceive themselves to be engaging with a wide array of information, are funding the system that commodifies them while teaching it how to do so more efficiently. The result of this capitalist depoliticization is an echo chamber of loneliness, where users have their biases repeatedly confirmed while alienating themselves further and further from the diversity of human connection through this extreme and antisocial form of self-expression. It is in such a depoliticization that ideologies like incel culture can flourish, as they see their misogynistic worldview confirmed while connecting with others who feel the same, constructing a toxic community that is commodified and depoliticised by algorithm culture.

            Incel ideology does not just reproduce capitalism but also preexisting modes of prejudice such as sexism, a manifestation of both the cultural apparatus and algorithm culture as subsets of neoliberalism. By participating in both incel and internet culture, incels simultaneously reproduce both their own suffering and the inequality of others. Invoking Antonio Gramsci, Mejias argues that internet culture manufactures the illusion of an inclusive, level playing field on which participants consent to their own submission to the hegemonic ruling class (8). As discussed, incels participating in internet culture subject themselves to self-commodification while receiving perceived benefits of the internet like community and convenience (6). However, I argue that algorithm culture has the further effect of consolidating prejudice, which reproduces the harm onto others as well. By funneling people together who share a similar bitterness towards women and desire to ease loneliness, algorithm culture exacerbates the loneliness of incels through its isolating echo-chamber effect but also collapses social responsibility along lines of gender. Occupying a position of privilege within society as mostly straight white men, incels exhibit greater sexual entitlement than non-incels according to Sparks et al., placing their own individual desires above those of women. In summarizing his in-depth analysis of incel culture, Jacob Johanssen describes how incel “states of alleged misery are commonly responded to and debated within the community in two ways: by aggressively demanding that (attractive) women see/recognise incels or by concluding that no hope is left and that they are on their own” (104). The former, sometimes called Redpill ideology, would subscribe to aforementioned looksmaxxing and gymmaxxing practices to traverse the sexual marketplace. The latter ideology, called Blackpill, is accepted by a large portion of the incel community (Sparks et al 733) and locates the responsibility for their loneliness either with women or nobody at all. Despite recognizing their alterity as a societal issue in the sexual marketplace, incels, supported within their echo chambers, locate the burden of repair on others or nobody at all, entirely forfeiting their agency as both individuals and a digital community. Within the structure of the algorithmic apparatus, incels are unable to interpret their own positions of privilege, instead reproducing misogynistic solutions that involve sexual entitlement or nihilistic individualism. Absent is the notion that anything is owed to either women, from whom they are demanding appreciation despite their violent bitterness towards them, or to one another, despite their shared struggle and cohabitation of the same digital space. Such a collapse of responsibility is not just permitted, but enforced within an algorithmic apparatus that repeats entitlement, prejudice, and hatred back to those who already seek confirmation of it.

The Roots of Loneliness

            Users of the internet are subjected to the belief that the solutions to their problems can be found within the very social systems imposing those problems. As has been shown so far, the issues presented for the social consciousness, demonstrated through incel and algorithm culture, are not a mere result of social media itself but rather a symptom of the disease that is neoliberalism. Such a paradox is a logical strategy for a system to reinforce itself, as people will justify their own positions within the hegemonic paradigm while also pursuing solutions that solidify their place within it. Neoliberalism has shown numerous examples of this tactic beyond algorithm culture, such as the military prison industrial complex, which cannot be charted here but can nonetheless be explored through a recognition of substitutive grievances and symptomatic responses. There is an ease with which one can misassign blame for their suffering to easily targetable groups, like women in the case of incels, and address this suffering through means that reproduce their own suffering, such as a participating in self-commodification, which also often reproduces the suffering of others along preexisting lines of societal hierarchization. As such, neoliberalism reproduces itself through a logic that implicates people in their own suffering. Henry Giroux cogently implicates capitalism in this enterprise through his critique of what he calls gangster capitalism, which is “relentlessly aiming for a public that internalizes its own oppression as second nature.” According to Giroux, the potential for culture to serve as an educational tool against gangster capitalism has been limited by its transformation into “a flame thrower of hate and bigotry, stylized as spectacle,” a development certainly illustrated by social media culture. This connection is explained by Kerrin Jacobs in Frontiers in Digital Health, where she links the exhausting demands of a capitalist society with “restricted social participation,” which can contribute to radicalization and aggression that she directly recognizes in incels (8). As such, the demands of capitalism enforce the loneliness that attracts people to the capitalist echo-chamber of social media.

In his book Scorched Earth, Jonathan Crary devises a call to action asserting the inextricability of the internet and capitalism. In his analysis, Crary outlines the ways in which the internet is not quite a new phenomenon but rather a logical and anticipated stage in the capitalist regime as outlined by Karl Marx (6). Notably, the internet is delineated by Crary not as a tool, but as an institution that “functions as an unending announcement of its indispensability and of the insignificance of whatever life remains unassimilable to its protocols” (3). The internet is more than a mere weapon; it is capitalism itself. Understanding this idea requires the acknowledgement that a social sphere operating within the internet and the algorithmic apparatus will not be capable of amending loneliness. According to Jacobs, loneliness is derived not from a lack of connection to others but the quality of that connection, and the ability to be recognized in the other (3). As such, in a social sphere that filters all human interaction through algorithmic tactics designed to commodify, polarize, depoliticise, and encourage continued use of its services, eradicating loneliness would be a counterproductive measure. Such a system, thriving off of the participation of its subjects, must simultaneously present itself as social while maintaining societal alienation. Thus, in making all life outside the algorithm insignificant, as indicated by Crary, the neoliberal social network can enforce the conditions for its continuation.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, neoliberalism has subjected people to a life of commodified human connection, leading people to grasp for community in digital spaces where their attention and participation is being monetized to further the reach of gangster capitalism. The result is a subjugation that justifies and reproduces itself, as users seek refuge from their lonely reality in a digital world that enforces loneliness. Despite the possibility of connection and support within these spaces, the underlying absorption into the information economy drains human life of civic responsibility, as echo-chamber algorithm culture skews reality to the point of polarization. Within this self-enforced reproduction of isolation, preexisting prejudices along lines of gender are reproduced by members of incel culture. Their embodiment of a privileged subjecthood leads them to entirely misunderstand their loneliness to be derived from aspects of their subjecthood that are actually least precarious. Gangster capitalism, which benefits from social division and abandonment of civic responsibility, nourishes that misunderstanding to uphold itself. So long as people blame one another for loneliness, blame social media for the collapse of the social, and run to social media to amend this suffering, neoliberalism will endure in the form of gangster capitalism. Imagining a world without loneliness requires the recognition that the source of one’s suffering is not likely to be the one suggested by the ruling elite. As such, the solution will require a reconstruction of the sociocultural and economic systems we hold to be unquestionable, and, to quote Crary, “would mean changing everything. Yes, precisely” (4).

Works Cited

Crary, Jonathan. Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World. Verso, 2022.

Duggan, Lisa. “Neoliberalism.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies, 2^nd ed., NYU Press, 2014, pp. 181-183, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1287j69.50

Giroux, Henry A. “Gangster Capitalism and the Politics of Fascist Education.” CounterPunch, 5 June 2023, https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/05/gangster-capitalism-and-the-politics-of-fascist-education/

Jacobs, Kerrin Artemis. “Digital loneliness—changes of social recognition through AI companions.” Frontiers in Digital Health vol. 6, 2024, pp. 1-12. Doi: 10.3389/fdgth.2024.1281037

Johanssen, Jacob. Fantasy, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere: Male Bodies of Dis/Inhibition. 1st ed., Routledge, 2022.

Mejias, Ulises Ali. Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World. 1st ed., vol. 41, University of Minnesota Press, 2013, https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt3fh6jh.

Mills, C. Wright. “The Cultural Apparatus.” Cultural Apparatus, https://culturalapparatus.wordpress.com/culture-and-politics-the-fourth-epoch/the-cultural-apparatus/

Office of the Surgeon General. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. US Public Health Service, 2023, https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf

Sparks, Brandon et al. “Involuntary Celibacy: A Review of Incel Ideology and Experiences with Dating, Rejection, and Associated Mental Health and Emotional Sequelae.” Current Psychiatry Reports vol. 24, no. 12, 2022, pp. 731-40. doi:10.1007/s11920-022-01382-9

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