Solo-maxxing and the femosphere (live at Crossed Wires)

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1:14Okay, top commenters. This is a different kind of episode today because we are speaking to you live from, not exactly live because this is pre-recorded, but we are speaking live to an audience at CrossWires in Sheffield Podcast Festival. And Matt is not here, but I am joined by a special guest, Rachel Connolly. Hi, really nice to be here today. I am a journalist and a cultural commentator, and I read a lot about internet trends and so forth. So excited to chat today. Unlike Matt Shea, we don't believe Rachel is a belieber, but nonetheless, we can continue on. We're going to be talking about loads of different stuff today, Rachel, particularly this loneliness influences trend that you have written about yes which we hope everyone here is is ready for some some solo maxing and discussing all sorts of terms that we're going to get into and define and we're also going to be talking about uh hetero pessimism yes which just feels like a bit of a bit of a hard word to say and also um the femisphere and femcells So we're going to take you on a bit of a journey through social media land and the kind of inner workings of your algorithms and feeds.

2:24And without further ado, let's get cracking.

2:33Let's start by defining sort of solo maxing. What is it? There's a kind of new trend, a relatively new trend, slash it's being called a new trend for these influencers who really advertise the fact that they spend a lot of their social time alone. So they come home from work, they don't have friends, as they say, they make dinner by themselves, they kind of rewatch a TV show, they do sort of like a lot of like cozy activities and then bed. and part of what they're promoting is like this kind of lifestyle which is like very divorced from other people and it's interesting because in some ways they're posting as though they're alone but then they're getting their reward so to speak through the interactions they have with their followers right so it's almost like showing that you're lonely in order to then interact with the world but through this different kind of interface it's a very strange lifestyle because theoretically you would always be alone but never really by yourself because you're always making content and putting it out to be viewed by other people and so and I think that's something that's quite interesting about this content too because um there's a lot of benefits to spending time by yourself you know like reading an interesting book learning a language like but none of this is really promoting doing anything that's particularly like enriching so it's not kind kind of like about developing yourself or even challenging yourself or anything like that it's very much like retreating into like comforts and this solo maxing concept seems to have started with quite a few gen z influencers basically saying it's so expensive now to go out for dinner or go to the cinema or whatever it is that you you fancy doing that it's better to kind of spend time alone doing these sorts of activities but actually it seems like some of the influences I mean I was having a bit of a scroll beforehand and I read the piece that you'd written and it seems like so many of these influencers are people who are not doing it from a kind of economic viewpoint now but rather as a sort of persona online or actually just being able to be like I don't really want to talk to people yeah well that's that's the interesting thing about anything that becomes a popular persona online is that um you basically have to think of a USP to make yourself stand out and influencers are all trying to do that.

4:53And there is a kind of bent, I think, in the online space for, because we see so much content, you have to do something slightly freakish, I think, to attract attention to yourself. Something that starts like solo maxing, it starts as like, okay, it's so expensive to go out and entertain all the time. And like, you know, let's kind of do something, a revolt against that. But I think it sort of starts as a way to attract attention for yourself. and then someone kind of really beds into the identity because it's like how they've attracted followers and how they've attracted attention. And I guess some of this also seems to be born from the way that social media works because unlike sort of pre-social media, I guess, you can grow a huge community or even quite a niche community, but nonetheless committed community of people without having to actually talk to anyone.

5:39And it's that phenomena of, I guess, meeting someone who's super chatty online and then you meet them in person and they kind of don't really say very much. And you're like, oh, hang on a second. You don't quite seem like the person you've represented online. It's super interesting. And like, I wrote about this when I was writing about the loneliness influencers. What really struck me about this trend of loneliness influencers is that to me, it doesn't feel like that much of a new trend because influencers have always been, you don't really see much of their life. Like you don't see some of them hide their boyfriends.

6:07You don't see a network of friends. You might see one or two other people, but you don't see like a network. work to make that much content where you're on your own you actually do have to spend a lot of time on your own but having said that it's like it's a sort of weird thing because it's like if you think about the kind of person who would want to spend a lot of time on their own making stuff to be viewed by other people but not interacting with other people it's quite a specific way to live and I think it's a sort of like fantasy life I guess where you can control your social interactions from like your bedroom so it's like it's probably not somebody who has ever found normal social environments particularly easy because if you did then why would you want to do that yeah and it's that kind of the way that I think that social media is reshaping how people interact and what and what they're rewarded for posting and sharing um one of the we were joking about this before I would be terrible at solo maxing particularly bad I'm very bad anything solo um but i think that um i think that that or rather like being around people and like talking too much hence my job um but i think that um yeah one of the things that that struck me about this as well is the idea of you don't need to have anyone in your life and that connects to this concept of sort of hetero pessimism right that you don't actually it's not worth being in a relationship anymore how do we define that hetero pessimism yes um hetero pessimism is a term that is like very discoursey for the past couple of years um i think it gets used in a lot of different ways so i think the way that i understand it there's some of the sort of like arguing points of hetero pessimism that i think everybody would agree with um but then sort of some of the corollaries i think are like a bit more dubious so i think um hetero pessimism kind of it's young women mostly and they kind of argue that you know we live in a very patriarchal culture which i would agree with i think most people would and i think even in the manosphere they would agree with that but then heteropessimism sort of says like let's dial up and you take what do you think about heteropessimism and you heteropessimism would sort of say like okay well because we live in this very patriarchal culture heterosexual relationships reflect the worst of that culture and they're sort of doomed to only reflect the worst of that culture and so hetero pessimism kind of argues we just stay in these relationships there's no hope for kind of better relationships and we basically just complain about men all the time and that's what I understand it to mean and I guess I mean I agree that we live in a very patriarchal culture but I think as I understand it like it affects every relationship we have not just our like romantic and sexual relationships and I kind of worry with this discourse that it has warped the conversation about sort of patriarchy around to be just a conversation about sexual and romantic relationships whereas as I would say you actually have more choice with those relationships than you do so you know like even if you vow to never date any any man like you will work with men and so like you know a producer sits quietly aside a man and you know hetero hetero pessimism I think can sometimes be really reductive too in terms of like our friendships and family relationships so like the reality of living in a patriarchy is that all of our friendships even our female relationships they're all affected by this and yeah I guess to me it's it's like boiled that whole wider sort of historical truth down into like men are the problem and relationships with men is the problem it's something that's been popping up quite a lot on my social media feed recently because um it's the latest series of love island which some of you may or may not be watching and there's quite a lot of discourse online about the attitudes of the women and men in the villa towards one another i mean it's always a topic of conversation every series of love island and people will analyze their relationships and what's healthy and what's toxic and what's not okay um but this year in particular there's been um there have been several of the women on the show who've been pretty sort of uh vocal about what they think about men and how they feel about the way men treat women and then there's been both praise and criticism for that and I've seen quite a few people mentioning this kind of pink-pilled ideology so this idea that people have been pink-pilled rather than red-pilled so I guess that's defining this femisphere in relation to the manosphere which for those of you sitting here and people listening I'm sure know to be you know this world where basically men are very derogatory about women the role they see women play in their lives is pretty transactional and in some ways the femisphere feels like the kind of yin and yang of that but actually is probably not reactive to the manosphere the idea of yeah like heteropessimism or whatever i think it is speaking to you know the fact that for all of history basically we've lived in a very patriarchal culture and society and that's been true basically everywhere um and i guess it's interesting because in the manosphere i don't like when i listen to joe Rogan they don't dispute that fact they would just argue that that's a reality of the way that men and women are so they would say like oh well men are mostly in leadership positions but that's because men are leaders and women aren't naturally um so they're not disputing the reality they're just disputing like whether or not that suits people um but I guess some of the kind of like on the feminist fear side of it sometimes to me it doesn't feel like it's disputing like it feels like it's making the same similar kind of arguments like there's a very sort of like men are from Mars women are from Venus and I actually think like we share so many more qualities than we have distinct so it's kind of yeah it's a sort of strange argument I think.

11:53And I think when you when you describe when you talk about the thermosphere I mean what I consider it to be is is in lots of ways it has parallels with the manosphere in terms of who populates it so there will be lots of influencers who very specifically build their content up talking about men sometimes they'll be talking about feeling pessimistic about relationships and so on but they take it that step further and you can see how you know a trend like uh anyone who uses tiktok might have come across the trend uh you know women in male fields with like women joking about doing the kinds of things that men do in relationships that aren't great and uh you can see how that then becomes a bit of a pipeline towards slightly more extreme ideas that are essentially saying that women get everything right and men don't and aren't actually talking about gender equality but kind of taking it that that step further and you've got podcasters as well there's a kind of irony that the one week that we have got a female co-host we're we're now two women talking on a podcast about the hemisphere it's it's a sort of weird thing i think because um you know it is obviously a truth and every sensible person would agree with this that you know there's an epidemic of like violence and sexual violence perpetrated by men not all men by any stretch of the imagination but that's obviously not being perpetrated by women so it's like it's obviously wrong and false to kind of like collate the two things as like equal but I think that something that is destructive in the sort of fem hemisphere side of things is that I think this kind of like divisive language fuels the rhetoric in the manosphere so I think in the manosphere they kind of point to some of the rhetoric that is used and that's on the other side and say well like look the way they speak about us men hating feminists and whatever and I think that that kind of divisiveness um has a trend that we've seen for the past like 10 or 15 years about all manner of topics and it never really leads to a positive place so it's like you generally cannot argue in a really angry way with someone to get them to agree with you it doesn't really work like that you sort of preach to the converted and then make them more extreme um and so yeah I kind of wonder about the utility of it I guess, on what it's actually doing.

13:57On the fem cell side, it's like people would maybe argue like, oh, well, it's harmless because, you know, it's definitely not as harmful as the manosphere. But I don't think it's actually having any positive impact at the same time. And then in this kind of same ecosystem, you've got the trad wives phenomenon, which is influencers, women that will present themselves as very kind of conservative wife type figures who like they seem to be making butter, raising 10 hundred children and also like keeping seven pet chickens all in the same all in the same hour and um a lot of that content will be very aspirational like it will show a beautiful house and a beautiful um garden and a beautiful family i mean a lot of it's very us heavy but actually there are influencers in the uk who do this too in some ways that feels like the yin and yang of of the femisphere you've kind of got the people who are interesting thing about the trad wife thing is that like they're all business women so they're actually they all have these you know a successful trad wife influencer has a huge empire which they run and benefit from so they're actually the ceo of a company so they kind of are doing almost the opposite of being you know staying at home and and i guess part of why women historically that again if you listen to joe rogan a lot of the time when they have female guests on which is not that often but the women who they have on tend to argue people like I prefer to be a homemaker and that's how I get validation whatever but historically obviously that changed because a lot of women didn't feel like that's what they wanted to do and whatever and trad wives are not doing that like they're getting they are being a mother and they're having children but they're also a businesswoman and they're getting a huge amount of validation from the outside world so it's kind of like a lot of things online where it's like the lifestyle that they're selling is not the one they're living yeah and you notice that a lot of this content is so aspirational and it's essentially and I think when we talk about this and we talk about the impact of it whether it's the femisphere or whether it's trad wives phenomenon the thing that matters really is the impact on users which is particularly when an influencer is advocating for a point of view or a lifestyle that is not the one that they are authentically living so say someone who's like hate all men get rid of them and then they go to bed and they're lying next to their boyfriend and they're like good night or or the trad wife who is saying oh look my 10 children and all my chickens and then you know they go out and do pilates and someone else comes and looks after their kids it's like you're not seeing any of that behind the scenes but actually there will be people who who believe because influences are built around this kind of individualistic authenticity that that is true and real and that they can aspire to it when actually what's being sold to them is essentially just not true at all yeah with the heteropess pessimism sort of world you know and when it comes to relationships i believe everyone should do what they want but what they actually want so like i believe that like if a woman wants to be single and finds that enriching like for sure um but if you if what you actually want is a relationship you will make that more difficult for yourself if you're like posting angrily about men and how terrible men are like any man would see that and be like oh no so it's like it's a kind of weird thing because it's like the person who has at the top of the heteropessimism like pyramid scheme I guess who has like built their identity and brand by sort of like promoting that type of content and like you know like sort of that's what they say and they you know get a book deal out of it or whatever that's a person who's like materially benefiting from like that you know being their brand whereas the person at the bottom of the pyramid who's just sort of like angrily posting they're not materially benefiting in the same way and so it's like and if if they if that's what they want then like great but if if it's not then yeah yeah and in lots of ways it's it's the same as how many of these different online communities work um which is where you will have the people at the top of the food chain who are essentially benefiting from promoting a certain idea and they can exploit that division online emotional content rage all the usual stuff they can then make money from it they can get brand deals they can um build a business around it and it's the people who are effectively being um impacted by i mean indoctrinated or radicalized when we're talking about kind of extreme negative ideologies, but just broadly are buying into what they're saying and then become the kind of, the sort of shock troops, like the foot soldiers who are ready to sort of otherwise clip up this stuff and tell people what to believe and evangelise on their behalf.

18:21And that's, I guess, how all these systems work, like the same with lots of the conspiracy theory communities I've investigated. And you get, you kind of separate people out into these kind of true believers and then non-believers with a question mark where you're like, I'm not sure how much you actually subscribe to what you're posting and it's kind of like a weird idea because the Manosphere is a very like direct version of that where people like pay money to support the people at the top who you know they admire this glamorous lifestyle and all the money but the money comes from the people at the bottom so it's a strange kind of like um and it's quite a strange idea as well where like you know the person even when we're talking about the solo this sort of loneliness influence there's thing there's a person there who's realized like this is a way to get attention and attract followers and like I can potentially like get a brand deal out of this or whatever and the person at the bottom is someone who's sitting in their house by themselves and being told oh this is normal and in fact it's positive and like it's don't read a book just watch my Instagram like don't you know go to a bar and chat to people like just like luxuriate into this lifestyle but they're not really benefiting from it in the same way so It's like a kind of strange, it's a strange little like world.

19:33I think as well when influencers build their entire brands around a particular idea, it becomes quite hard for them when their own circumstances change. There's a story of an influencer who, this happened in the past few weeks, where she's built an entire brand on basically like being a single woman in her 30s. And then she kind of secretly got married and then revealed it to her followers. And they were like, oh, where do we go? Where do we go from here? and I think there's that feeling as well and interestingly because she I was looking in the comments and she'd had quite a lot of hate from people who felt betrayed in some way because they were like oh hang on a second you told me you basically glamorized a certain lifestyle and then you seem to have been doing something different behind the scenes which is not to say you know she shouldn't as you say do whatever she wants but it's just hard when you become this persona to people because there's a backlash you can also experience it's and I think it's a weird thing on social media where like we've all become so much more aware of each other's lives and lifestyles and like it's fostered this has always been part of human nature I think but it has fostered this culture of like comparison and I think what a lot of influencers do is like they're almost giving people permission to live a certain kind of life and so it's sort of a strange thing if you feel like you've been granted permission to live the way you're living by this figure and then you find out it was all a lie it's kind of like it's like religion in a way like it's you know it's like basically finding out that you've subscribed to this doctrine which is fundamentally underneath not true like i think that's really would be really really destabilizing and i think being scammed it's almost it's almost the same as how scams work yeah oh wait what like what is this and i think also like um a lot of you know parasocial relationships sometimes they are just totally one way but a lot of parasocial relationships are kind of fostered by the influencer too in terms of like they kind of like they foster this level of kind of like like intrusion into their life like while they're what they're sharing is not necessarily their authentic life they perform the idea that it is and so that you're seeing behind the scenes and you're seeing like this truth and honesty and I think there are like a lot of people that will not be at all cynical about that when you meet influencers do you do you feel that kind of difference between what their content is like and then what they're like in person yeah I've met a lot of influencers over the years sorry to any influencers among um and they're often quite like socially odd um they're they're it's the kind of person who wants to to spend a lot of their time making content of themselves which and also like all of their interactions happen with a huge delay so like in a normal conversation like if we're chatting and i say something you're like that's not really the way that they spend their days interacting with people like most of their interactions are like they make something they plan it it's really prescribed they plan it think about all the responses you know they make a vlog or whatever they think about all the responses they try and and then they put it out and then they get the responses like with a big time delay and they're often getting like super emotive responses and then so it's like their whole social world is really quite different to what we would think of as like a normal social world so yeah I mean every time I've met them they're you know as a general rule like they're not good at making eye contact they find they seem to find like one-on-one interactions quite hard and if you actually think about where influencers start a lot of the time it's like a teenager in their bedroom maybe finds you know socializing difficult and then they start getting you know like they're posting that they start making videos new show they start getting validation from that side it's like it's not something people really like maybe that will change now because the internet's been around for but it's not something people get into when they're like 28 it's something they get into when they're like 16 which is like and then their whole life is like and can shape the way that you then interact with the world which is quite interesting i've noticed actually recently quite a few people posting about influencer culture and talking about for example being on holiday and describing how they saw some influencers who essentially just like turned up at a hotel by a swimming pool for half an hour filmed a load of content and then left and this idea that you then say oh i had such a i had a brilliant time on holiday but like you're at the swimming pool for about 15 minutes and then you're going to sit in a room and edit edit all of this content i mean it's it's like not authentic at all but yet it's what i've always noticed is like really short attention span so it's like I remember a couple of years ago I was staying at a hotel in Berlin and just there was an influencer conference that was happening there like totally unrelated to why I was staying but I think I was the only non-influencer there and in the lift I really noticed or like around people would come up and be like oh my god it's you to each other because they're in the same world but they they would have like a three second conversation and then just like drift away and just completely like it was like they it was like they'd been turned off and they just were like and then they just their capacity to have like a longer there was a really good piece I remember a couple of years ago with um there were these hype houses starting it was the start of COVID I think and it were these it was these houses where like they were being funded I think but it was like young influencers living in them and I think the content creator houses yes pandemic yeah and um there was a guy who went to stay with one of them and he was like they would start playing a basketball game and then everyone would just like forget that they were playing and just wander off like that kind of like inability to it sounds like playing the sims yeah and just like as you say if if something's not directly leading to content then the purpose of and i guess that relates to what we were saying about solo maxers like it's not really about developing your internal life as much as it is broadcasting your isolation and those are two very different things and also some of this relates to how this content can be monetized and the ability to make money and actually how precarious a job it can be to be an influencer because you're essentially beholden to the algorithmic systems and to the platforms where you can then amass likes views make money and so ultimately you've got to create so much content all the time in order to stay relevant in order to kind of keep up with what's going on and so it's almost so consuming like I think how long it takes me if I'm like posting an Instagram with some captions and like I like using so well I like investigating the bad bits on social media I also like posting on social media and it's really time consuming and so it's like it's almost hard for people to live their actual lives because they're spending a lot of time posting about presenting their lives and I guess that's partly why if somebody has a good strong brand as like a you know single woman in their 30s and then they get a boyfriend theoretically they could change avenue and like restyle themselves but they're probably worried about their brand you know it's like they I've got this brand doing this thing and like how would my followers react to that so it's like they're kind of like bedded into whatever thing that they've managed to attract attention for?

26:07I think that when we talk about particularly the the femisphere and this concept of femcells um if we're then comparing that also to the manosphere and even though they're obviously very different for me a lot of this seems to be a product of the algorithmic systems that I bang on about all the time and the way that they entrench certain viewpoints and will direct people down these pathways where they find themselves at a much more extreme point than the one that they started at and what's interesting is when I speak to lots of the insiders from the major social media companies and you know several engineers or people who've worked in trust and safety have spoken to me about the way that algorithms will decide what you're pushed based on usually the kind of set of interests that you've expressed through the content that you're watching and engaging with but the platforms themselves the social media companies get so defensive if you say to them well hang on you you effectively are pushing people content based on their gender they'll say no no no no we don't push people content based on whether they're a woman or a man but actually there's a certain set of interests like say for example you are really into world cup content gta f1 and you know that you could very you could be a girl but it's more more likely than not that that you might be a teenage boy or or not a teenage boy any boy um and and so actually it's the algorithmic systems that are like very directly contributing to the creation of these online worlds that are like this is my group this is the group i'm a part of and i am set up in opposition to this other group and because you're inhabiting this very sort of in a very solitary way actually on your phone scrolling on your feed there's a certain normalization to it as well you're like oh well all the people here agree with me yeah your feed is like a very private thing um it's public but it's also very private and distinct and I think it's we all know anecdotally from the way that we all use social media that like they algorithmically push content which is potentially more emotive so like I've even noticed that there's like one gym influencer who I like because she always does like go get it like productivity content I just find her funny so but since I started liking her content and engaging with her content my whole feed is weight loss and gym and whatever and I know that's just come from that one person but it's basically like if I think about how little I had to interact with that content for it to like take over my feed I basically didn't have to interact with it at all but they've obviously realized that that kind of content I think tends to trigger insecurities in people and I think it's beneficial for these companies for you to be interacting with the product in an emotive way because then you're spending more time going back to try and soothe the initial anxiety but I think that um one of the effects that can have particularly for people who are very young is that like sometimes they don't realize how extreme the stuff they say is sounding to people who do not agree and I think that relates to the like manosphere and femisphere stuff is like the way of talking which is normalized in those circles is not a normal way of talking and some of the stuff that they're saying like not in the manosphere I guess but in the femisphere some of the stuff they're saying it's not necessarily wrong but the way of expressing it is like so you know dramatic and extreme and I think within that sphere it looks totally normal because that's the way everybody talks and we all like even the way people talk about like death and dying and killing themselves on social media like it's a joke but like you know people use that kind of language so like or even the way people talk about laughter where they're like I died laughing I killed myself like there's like a really melodramatic way of speaking which is totally normalized but if you showed it to a person who'd never seen this before they'd be like what which is because the algorithms reward that kind of stuff because it's like anything that evokes a reaction provokes a reaction that makes you think oh makes you feel strongly negatively or positively you're going to engage with and I think that's what's so interesting when I speak to particularly engineers who've worked at the social media companies and you'll ask them about the kind of secret recipe behind the recommendation systems which x have basically published their secret recipe which is saying like arguments are good rage is good that gets you clicks and likes good in terms of metrics and engagement but I think because the algorithms in some ways sort of take on a life of their own that's how like I don't think that for example the guy who came up with this algorithm called the edge rank algorithm back when facebook was facebook only facebook not meta the parent company that was essentially one of the first examples of of an algorithmic system that ranked our feed and i think that when he came up with that he couldn't have predicted that the manosphere would come to exist in the way it has or that this kind of femisphere thing would exist or trad wives but actually all of these things to me are a product of that system and to bring it back to what you were saying, Rachel, about everything feels very extreme and intense and dramatized.

30:47I mean, that's the whole maxing thing, right? If we go back to solo maxing or cross wires maxing, as you guys are doing, or podcast maxing or whatever we want it to be, London maxing, we've spoken about decline porn and other issues like that on top comment before. It's like maxing is a direct product of algorithms that basically reward optimization. And freakishness, I think, is sort of rewarded because when you see so much content, anything that looks different is basically something that you're more likely to look at i think and so like even the whole lux maxer world and undergoing these like very extreme sort of self-administered um beauty procedures like breaking bones and so on like that kind of freakishness is a way of attracting attention because it's like it's sort of like just just going to the gym and whatever it's like everybody's doing that and so you have to break your nose just to be a person of interest it's kind of like the way the circus used to work I suppose I actually think though and I get loads of messages about this a lot of people are really exhausted by that kind of content like they actually don't enjoy this whole yeah like oh everything has to be like really over the top and extreme and too much and I have several people who messaged me saying I've actually come off this platform or I've tried to reset my algorithm because I just really don't want that sort of content I remember a couple of years ago I was doing a piece about um there was a trend for people just covering their face and catch up and I was talking to like one of the like younger people about like why this was a trend and he was like oh it's just the way to get to the top of the algorithm this week and I was like and there there it is like so much of this behavior is just like oh like catch up because then that's the way to ascend the algorithm this week so it's kind of like um but yeah what you're watching then is always like very insincere and I think that's something that like sort of sits underneath all of this is that like like house sincere or the people at the top of the pyramid or like uh the ballerina farm thing is like you know her husband's from a very wealthy family and he kind of like funded the enterprise and it's like it's just not possible to start a farm and have it be that successful it's like it has all of this other stuff sitting underneath it but that doesn't fit into the fantasy and so yeah and it feels like now there's a there's a bit of a thirst for people being normal like actually just being like here I am going about my normal day plating up my supper here's my life but the problem is almost that it feels like there's a limited you have a limited shelf life of time that you can be an influencer who is normal quote-unquote who's like posting normal stuff because then you become an influencer and suddenly your life is not actually like a normal life because you're showing yeah it's interesting this sounds old-fashioned but I don't believe that normal people should be famous like I believe that people who are doing like it should be an exceptional category like you should be like really good looking or a really talented actress or whatever like I don't believe that this kind of banality should be should be sort of like so visible I think that's quite a strange thing that's happened um and I'm not really sure like who that benefits I mean ultimately really it benefits if we think of social media companies as products it benefits them to have a lot of people who are hyper engaged feeling like they can realize a dream or a lifestyle or a way of being because ultimately it's a bit like a lottery right it's like that feeling that you might post a video and this might be your video that goes really really viral yeah and then your life has changed overnight and it can be changed it's like you can have a profile opportunities money in a way that wasn't necessarily accessible before but without actually any clear or transparency other than being very kind of extreme or eye-catching that you yeah in order to realize that dream it doesn't feel like there's a that it can happen at random to people and often I've spoken to people who have gone sort of mistakenly viral and have often behaved in ways that they actually regret on social media maybe they got involved in sleuthing we talk about the sleuth disease on top comment a fair bit and they kind of say oh I didn't really expect to go viral but then I was rewarded for it and it normalized it and then kind of here I am I wonder with the long for the social media platforms long term whether this exhaustion from the maxing might mean that actually they do have to tweak and try and alter their algorithmic systems because actually people do turn off or will it be the case that maxing becomes so normal that actually it's almost normal maxing zero maxing zero maxing becomes a new thing um i do think one of the big truths of social media is that people love to argue and people like it's addictive because it gives an emotional response like that's part of any addiction is based on a kind of like emotional absence and emotional high that creates the absence that then you chase the high again because we were talking earlier about why none of the x replacements have taken off and it's like i think it's because there's they're all liberal and so nobody's arguing enough and so it's like there's no um emotional investment to be on the sort of like why why would you be there if it's not kind of i don't think people just like talking i think you don't get the algorithmic reward really you're not arguing either yeah and there's no kind of like but ultimately i don't actually think it's just and algorithmic no it's actually a human thing yeah I think there's a kind of um the reason that people sort of like find social media so addictive is because it taps into the underlying sort of like on the dopamine of doing a really good comment or winning an argument or sort of like I think that really it really ignites something in people on that topic of people quitting x or not we were talking about Lisa Nandy um the Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport who's decided actually I'm not going to be on here anymore because of the misinformation and hey I don't want to be here and it's been pretty divisive because some people are like fair enough if loads of government departments and you know the police and authorities weren't on x then perhaps we wouldn't use it for news and politics in the way that we still do even though the platform has changed very significantly since Elon Musk took over and sacked a lot of people and made changes to safety teams and just how the platform works buying blue ticks all that kind of thing but then the counter argument from a lot of other people is like hang on a second you're in government so if you feel like you can't you can't fix this problem then I think we're in a bit of trouble yeah I think it's not realistic I agree like it's it's not realistic to say that and because there hasn't been a successful replacement like there hasn't been another platform which replicates the thing that Twitter used to do where it was like extremely discursive widespread discursive environment it's like none of the others have really taken off in the same way And so it's like, I just think it's not realistic to think that like, if you're in the government, you can just like opt out of the toxicity.

37:22It's like that's inbuilt into the system now, but you need to kind of interact with that to get all of the other stuff too. Now, in the spirit of non-rage based conversations, we'd love to take some questions. So any questions that you have, please put your hand up and we will make sure a microphone comes to you. Ask us about any of the things we've been chatting about or anything else about your social media feed being in a pickle that you would like unpickling. Hi, I'm Matthew. I wanted to touch on what you said about kind of influencers' brands being pulled out from underneath them, like, for example, if they got a boyfriend.

37:55And there's been loads of investment from like the Middle East and Saudi Arabia and UAE and influencers going over there. And then now with the kind of Iran-US war, there's been a lot of posting about kind of like them actually feeling unsafe there. Do you have any thoughts about like suddenly influences almost like having those brands in that like real world situation where this war is a real thing that's impacting so many people? And yet influences are kind of like shilling Dubai chocolate and having a great time over there and then suddenly being scared that bombs are flying a couple of days later.

38:27we did an episode of top comment exactly about this because um it it was it there was that really stark contrast between what we saw was happening in terms of the the conflict um in the middle east and then influencers posting this kind of quite idealistic version of of dubai or wherever else they were um and one of the things that really um one of the things that was particularly interesting were allegations made about this legislation in dubai that essentially you could get in really big trouble and or be arrested and you had to have these influencer permits to be able to sort of operate in the country and you could basically get in trouble if you said, actually, this is a bit scary and I don't like it very much.

39:03And I think what it reveals is how influencers have become a very effective tool, actually, for all kinds of different people, whether it's political groups and parties or whether it's governments, because they are this vessel that appears to present an authentic opinion or view, but actually often don't have to be necessarily entirely transparent about what they're saying and whether they believe it or why. and you know you see it even with wider influence operations that um it used to be the case that a network of bot accounts was sort of enough now it seems more effective to actually um support or pay or even just kind of feed and influence a certain ideas and encourage them to express those because it creates this feeling of kind of grassroots support that's very hard for journalists to investigate because you're reliant on influence of being like yeah someone some random person from russia messaged me actually saying would you like to post about this which they usually wouldn't do I don't know what you think Rachel about about the whole Dubai situation and what it tells us about influence yeah it's such an interesting question because I feel that like a lot of influencers this this type of influencer who was in Dubai their whole pitch about themselves is that they're sort of apolitical and they just have nothing to do with politics and like and they sort of also I think sometimes like play dumb where they're like well I'm just like posting my bum on holiday and like why should I know about politics and then it's sort of like I guess it like expose the fallacy of that because um you know it's it's a very specific way of life in Dubai that they obviously knew what it was like because they were living there and um yeah I think it was kind of interesting as well like I guess some of the ones that I saw like they instantly sort of jumped to this thing of being like I had no idea that this was going to possibly happen like this in Dubai who knew and it was like you did it was a possibility and that kind of like yeah I guess that's sort of like um like phone naivety almost yeah that's sort of like maybe it is naivety willful naivety i think most of them are probably much smarter than they um sort of perform like it's not i don't think it's a very advantageous brand to be like i'm really cynical and whatever that's like not what they would perform but yeah i think it did it exposed the level of sort of like performance i guess um that i think yeah some of the audience is probably quite naive to before thank you so much um other questions hiya um i'm millie um and i've recently sort of been doing a bit of research into the sort of clipping economy um and how that's tied to the manosphere and i was wondering what you think about how much control people like clavicula and andrew tate actually have over their brand once sort of this clipping economy is sort of taken over and pushing all this um attention grabbing short form content and it takes their comments out of context um and I was just yeah wondering how much control these people really have over their brand when it when they get so large I have lots of thoughts about this um clavicular I don't know if you've actually watched his stream but like it's the most boring thing you would ever watch for like it's like it's just so boring like basically 99.999 percent of the time and then the idea is like one 0.1 percent of the time something happens that's worth clipping and he's very young and I don't think he I don't think anybody who's that age new knows what they're getting themselves in for I mean his life is it has been so weird it's like he literally just sits all day filming himself being extremely boring and then in the hope that something manages to sort of like spark and pop out of it um and I think he has sort of no control over that at all and I think also like it drives extreme behavior on his end obviously to try and like do something that might seem entertaining but ultimately like he can't really control the way that will that get picked up will it go viral it's like it's almost like quite a precarious existence so I think in a way like while not Andrew Tate I wouldn't put him in the same category but while someone like clavicular like has a lot of influence in one way he's sort of a bit of a prisoner of his like enterprise and another it's a really really strange existence yeah I think that clipping is so interesting because so if anyone who's not heard of it before it's basically just people watching a stream or content from a user and then and then just taking clips and essentially putting them out everywhere and it's one of the reasons why Andrew Tate became such a big deal because he had this army of people who would clip stuff up and actually in order to be effective when it comes to clipping, you've got to have this very devoted army of followers.

43:29And I see it with some of the conspiracy theory influences, the sort of health misinformation space is similar. And again, it gives this kind of guise of authenticity because it's like, great, people who are fans of or support this person are putting the clips out. So it's not from them. So therefore it must be a viewpoint that you could agree with. But exactly like you say, you don't actually have huge amounts of control over it. And I think one thing that's been really interesting has been looking at how political figures sort of tried to use clipping as well um i mean donald trump and and u.s politics more generally are i feel have tried to sort of dip their toe in the clipping space but then actually and relying on these kind of big fandoms whether it's maga or you know you've seen people like gavin newsom to some extent try and do it as well on the left and it's interesting that actually like with politicians it's a really dangerous game because loads of stuff can get clipped up that you absolutely did not want to go viral or intend to go viral at all um and you just don't really really have that have that control and i think that the link between clipping and streaming is so interesting because it feels like that's now the kind of new way of i'm going to do this really boring stream for hours and hours and hours and see and see where we go yeah exactly um and you kind of wonder what the next what the next version of clipping will be and how and how it will how it will manifest um and people know that they they can themselves grow huge followings by clipping stuff up in that way the internet has always had this weird or well not the internet sorry social media has always had this weird context collapse sort of quality to it where like all tweets get resurfaced and clips and like it's this one sort of piece of information that's separated from everything else that's linked to that piece of information and it's basically just where misinformation comes from because you're encouraged and and like almost forced to just see it on its own terms without anything else attached to it I think that's been quite strange for like people's brains having to like view that and I kind of think like in the sort of cancel kind of the cancel culture era there was a lot of like dragging up old tweets and so on and I often find it strange that someone's tweets from when they were like a 16 year old were taken to be but I actually think it's because the platform is flat and you would see it in the same way that you see present tense information it felt like it was happening like right now like it felt like it wasn't that long ago and I think um I think the same is true of like the clipping thing it's like you're seeing stuff and it feels like really immediate it feels like it's really it's evidence because it's a video and they said there's some video, but it's like you didn't see anything that happened around it.

45:53It's kind of like it's encouraging people to, like, I guess see stuff as factual when it's not necessarily factual. This question at the front. Hi, my name's Katie. I was just wanting to know, really, if it's possible to cleanse your algorithm. As a woman who recently turned 50 and, as Rachel said, maybe interacted with a post about health or wellness, I am now completely bombarded with ways to make myself more beautiful and more perfect and to cure all my ailments with all sorts of different pills and injections and blood tests. And is there any way of stopping it? That is a very good question.

46:33I've been watching lots of cat videos. Yeah. Well, that is like tip number one. This is probably the question I get asked the most of any question. tip number one is to actually just deliberately seek out other types of content that you really like and find funny and try and engage more so with those and there are certain ways that you can game your algorithm not just watching stuff but like sending it to someone as well so if someone like a friend likes similar stuff to you it's quite good to share stuff with them because then that will again indicate to your algorithmic systems that oh i want more of that sort of thing they do have inbuilt tools on the platforms where you can be like i'm not interested in this i don't want this they can be pretty ineffective i mean i've spoken to loads of users who are like yeah I'll say I don't want this and then for a day I don't get it and then I get it again and it's really annoying I think even just the fact that you realize what's happening to you is sort of like first step actually deliberately seeking out like counter points to the specific content that you don't like is quite good as well because then your algorithm gets a bit confused and it's like oh you kind of want to like eat 10 McDonald's and also like go to the gym what's going on you can also set up an entirely new account the difficulty with that often is that it will be interconnected with your other accounts and you find that actually content from all of the platforms are feeding into one another it's that thing of when people feel like is your phone listening to you because it's so weird that it knew that I just talked about that and usually it's actually because you will have like googled something or you will have you will have messaged someone something and you realize that even though people aren't necessarily reading your messages they are ultimately using that data to program your algorithm so all of those just being aware of all of those things I think is probably probably tip number one I think saving other stuff you know where you can click on Instagram you can click save I think saving stuff is also helps to prioritize it so like clicking save on cat videos helps like demonstrate your interest we've got time for one more question i'm so sorry i i did not tell the truth when i said we'll have time for all the questions and that one at the back a lot of the time when i come across this sort of content it tends to be through the lens of like mockery and bullying like clavicular i first came across when he was interviewed by adam friedland and he was a sort of bullied and run rings around and how much of these sort of scenes do you think are driven by that irony and mocking compared to actual genuine interest in what the content is?

48:46I think that's a really good question because actually I think, you know, if we're going down this route of algorithms run off emotions, obviously also people taking the mic or not liking it but nonetheless being drawn to it make up a huge portion of that user base often. Like lots of people will be seeing stuff that they actively don't like but nonetheless are kind of drawn to and continue watching. I think the issue with that is that obviously it doesn't mean that everybody watching exactly like you say everyone watching Clavicular or any of these influencers we're talking about necessarily subscribe to their worldview or even are impacted by it I think the corrosive impact actually is in so it is in the cumulative effect of that which is because more people are viewing that content that influencer or person or their content becomes more prominent in a way that's actually disproportionate perhaps to how much someone people actually like that content or care about it and then it starts to shape and influence our wider sort of political and societal discourse I think the media are complicit in that as well often they'll cover things because it's getting traction that doesn't necessarily mean that people actually like it and I think a lot of this is about covering what's popping up on social media feeds in a way that is responsible so yeah I think I think that you're right that actually probably quite a significant proportion of people watching this stuff don't necessarily buy into it or subscribe to it but it's the normalization thing it's like we take our cues from like if you see a video's had 10 million views you don't know how how many of those 10 million are people who like it or not?

50:03And so you might think, oh, does everyone else think this is normal? It's like when you run to the comments and you're like, oh, why? Oh, I didn't think that about this, but now everyone else seems to think. And you always have to remember with the comments, it's like most people don't comment on stuff. So the people who do as a specific type of person who like is the type to do that. But I also think with a lot of this stuff, like we do all have to remember as adults that a lot of the people who are seeing this are very young and like much more impressionable and their critical thinking skills are a lot lower.

50:29so like even if we're sort of looking at it with like a kind of critical lens or making fun of it or whatever it's not the way that it necessarily is being seen Okay, we've run out of time but any other questions please do come and chat to us at the end or send me a DM or Rachel a DM you can also get in touch with Top Comment topcomment at bbc.co.uk or the WhatsApp number which is plus 44 330 123 9480 Thank you so much for Top Comment Maxing with us we have loved chatting to you and do go listen to the podcast which is on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts.

51:28to reshaping capitalism? Or is he just the king of the attention economy? Find out on Good Bad Billionaire. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.