Grappling with Red Pilling: Part II and Reflections on “Chip War”
Happy Sunday and may God forever show favor on my beloved Seattle Sounders, who somehow lost to last place Sporting KC earlier today, and are headed back below the playoff line.
In the previous newsletter, we talked about online red pilling and the indoctrination of boys and young men. I recounted a story for my classroom, where a parent reached out with some concerns about political stances their child was espousing at home. I concluded the newsletter by asking for your stories and thoughts about this topic. As usual, you did not disappoint! So we’re dedicating most of this week’s newsletter to responses and takes that came in. In the closing, I’ll talk a bit more about Chip War by Chris Miller and a meetup for newsletter readers who happen to be Sounders fans.
I think a good starting point for this conversation is thinking about how boys get started down this road. Nobody goes onto the internet looking to be indoctrinated. Instead, they're often looking for answers that aren't available in their lives and when they look, there’s some bro in a ballcap waiting there with easy answers and scapegoats. Here’s NJ on that:
Something I hear from young men is that, when they go looking for information on how to attract and date women, or information on sexuality, it's either the manosphere or porn that they find. They're such an enormous amount of both on the internet, and so little real information.
The online manosphere is the boy equivalent of the old advice columns in Cosmopolitan Magazine. Today, young people (and adults) are habituated to turning to YouTube and social media for answers. Hell, when I had to replace a light fixture in my house in Tacoma, I got on YouTube and (then called my friend Cheryl and with their help) I was able to figure it out. It's no different for boys. If you use YouTube to figure out how to tie a necktie, how to pass a level on a video game when you are stuck, or how to knuckle a free kick in soccer, of course it makes sense you’d go there to find out how to get a girl to like you, and the next thing you know, you’re getting served red pill-y content.
Another reader talked about how their curiosity about the “men’s rights movement” led them to get lost for a while on Reddit. Here’s AMO:
I subscribed to r/MensRights on Reddit some years ago, out of concern for my and my fellow men's interests. I vaguely recall there were some pretty horrifying stories of women ruining men's lives. I later unsubscribed when I started seeing hatred and rage against women in general. They had become no better than the terrible exploitative women they used to post horror stories about. It was a frog pot. I noticed the heat and jumped out. Others did not, and were boiled.
Reddit, like YouTube, is a place where people flock for DIY advice. Reddit comes with the added bonus of a built in supportive community. The people on r/castiron and r/easyrecipies have helped me become a better cook. But like with YouTube, you are often algorithmically served more rage bait and more extreme material. I’ve discussed this phenomenon prior in the newsletter.
A long-time reader, NB, sent a note that resonated with me. He responded to my explanation that the emergence of this political gender gap is a backlash to gains in women's equality. He noted how those gains are revocable:
I have watched, through most of my almost eight decades, as women, very gradually, have been "allowed" to find their place in the world. Throughout those years, I have also reminded others how fragile any improvement in their situation is. The world you're part of now and those I've worked in are evidence of this, and, in most cultures, how precarious it all is.
Yep. In the same way that post-Civil War Reconstruction led to a spike of racial resentment among Southern whites, many men in the US feel that women’s equality has come at a cost to them. Because they hold this zero-sum view on equality, they believe the best way to improve their own lot is to resubjugate women. They want to roll back the gender gains of the last century. This is where this manosphere stuff meets the tradwife discourse but that's a whole nother newsletter. That said, this episode of You’re Wrong About discusses the tradwife movement and is worth your time.
Next, let’s turn to solutions. Neither of these are silver bullets—there are none—but both replies resonated with me. First, SDB talked about their concern about what their kid consumes online and how they monitor their activity, in particular YouTube:
I worry about my tween getting sucked into this, because he watches a lot of YT. I monitor his watch history and we've had frequent conversations about how the far-right uses it as a recruiting tool. And we've had ongoing conversations about justice and power imbalances since he was little.
I'm never not amazed by the limitless internet access some people allow children to have. I've watched toddlers who know their way around their parents' smartphones better than they do. I’ve watched some of those toddlers become iPad addicted tweens or worse. At the extreme end, a 2022 episode of Darknet Diaries, a podcast about online security, featured a group of hackers who got their start in Roblox. One kid in the episode ran a criminal hacker/scam ring out of his bedroom. I'm not one to tell someone else how to parent but it makes sense to me that people should have a firmer grasp on what their children are consuming online.
The last one is the most straight-forward but also the hardest. Here’s P.
Perhaps it's obvious, and/or easily said than done, but teaching critical thinking skills ahead of facts. One early history lesson I got was "never make the mistake of confusing truth with history" meaning there is no universal truth in history, and everyone writing about it has biases, blind spots, and agendas. So people need to hear - and respect - multiple perspectives. Conversely, anyone who claims to be speaking universal truth can't be trusted.
I like to trade in stats and anecdotes that help me contextualize the world. But in a world where so much of the discourse is through memes and short-form videos, we collectively have to become more skeptical of convenient facts from people with no real expertise. I think that’s my big takeaway here: we all need to be more skeptical of the stuff we see online, (the same conclusion I reached after writing about AI deepfakes).
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Chip War was informative and compelling, although it sputtered a bit toward the end. I found the author fell a little too in love with glorifying smart weapons and the military-industrial-complex implications of the semiconductor race. But I learned a ton about the chip industry, how chips are manufactured, how Intel—once the global chip leader—fumbled the bag, and I got a crash course on the different use cases for CPU and GPU chips.
I also don't think I had my head around how dependent we are on semiconductors in our daily lives and now I find myself thinking about how many chips are in various apparatuses I use on a daily basis. American corporations decided they'd rather make more money designing chips and offshore the manufacturing of chips to firms in Taiwan and South Korea. Now the US has near-zero capacity to produce state-of-the-art semiconductors, arguably the most important commodity produced in the world today.
One final takeaway is the crippling impact of a lack of American investment. Tax money that we could have spent on R&D or partnering with industry to build public-private chip foundries has instead gone into buying F-35 fighter jets ($110,000,000 each) and waves of tax cuts for the wealthy. Building a state of the art foundry costs as much as two aircraft carriers, of which the US has eleven.
The rest of the planet has nine.
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Finally, on June 30th, Hope and I will be attending the Seattle Sounders match versus the Chicago Fire. As I am wont to do, we will be doing pregame at the Central Saloon in Pioneer Square. If you are reading this, consider it an invitation to join us for pregame. Come by, have a frosty beverage, and say “hi.”
As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback about the newsletter, I welcome it, and I really appreciate it when folks share the newsletter with their friends.