A Tale of Two Sixties

How The Woke Mob and the Tech Bros Were Forged in the Same Primordial Soup

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This morning I saw an article in my Substack inbox from the indispensable Stay Grounded about how an online public square cannot be for-profit if it is actually built for civil discourse. Have not read the piece entirely yet but I am all too familiar with the cast of characters: LGBT/minorities and their advocates that want a safe space free from harassment vs. cocky tech bros that may or may not pay lip service to meeting these demands while simultaneously finding new ways to monetize outrage and conflict.

Every time I read a story about internet and/or cancel culture, I look at these two groups. Ever since I read Strange Rites by Tara Isabella Burton, a fascinating book about today’s godless online religions. Two of the biggest are the social justice movement and the transhumanist, techno utopian movement. Burton does a splendid job placing the latter movement’s roots in the ‘60s, but surprisingly undervalues how white college students marching with black civil rights leaders in the ‘60s is the Genesis of the woke bible (“Let there be rights”).

It is difficult to remember a time when Silicon Valley and SJWs were not at war. But, in the beginning, there was quite a bit of overlap. Though many of the tech pioneers were dropouts, many of them tried college before tinkering in their garages full-time. On that same campus were many antiwar protesters who also advocated for racial equality as well as the very sexual revolution that would prove to be the very bulwark which would help foment every lifestyle struggle from gay marriage to trans acceptance to personal pronouns, even furries.

Both movements having their start in the ‘60s, neither of them were fully developed enough to have so many major differences between them. That said, from the inception there was one major fundamental difference of opinion. While both San Francisco and Silicon Valley fought heartily in the sexual revolution, the hippies believed that major changes in society were necessary to undo centuries of repression. Or they made their own societies on communes. Silicon Valley of course wanted as little government intervention as possible. Yes, technology would be the vehicle of techno-utopian deliverance, but the fuel for this evolution has always been human desire. Courts and laws would only hold this innovation back.

Nowadays it is easier to see the two sixties, but it wasn’t always easy to. For one, the activists were far more visible. Steve Jobs and Stewart Brand may have gotten their start in the ‘60s, but their impact on the world was not truly felt until the ‘80s. Paradoxically, even though this is a story about the two sixties, the impact of Silicon Valley would not even be known - let alone acknowledged - until the ‘80s, when Stewart Brand introduced the world to the first major online community: The Well. In keeping with its tech libertarian roots, there was little moderation and much self-governance. Freedom of speech was a must. Though discussion of tech’s future was far from uncommon on The Well, the culture was tellingly still stuck in the tie dye past of the Grateful Dead, with many Well members mailing bootlegs to each other.

The sixties activists underwent their own transformation in the ‘80s of course. The ones that did not sell out and become yuppies either infiltrated the mainstream media or academia. Many of the central texts of the woke movement were published by academics in the ‘80s, like Audre Lorde’s Burst of Light (which introduced the now ubiquitous concept of self care as a feminist act) and Peggy McIntosh’s essay “White Privilege,” which remains a major buzzword in the Twittersphere (perhaps it is for this reason that Burton decides to place the start of the social justice movement in ‘80s academia).

It took neoliberal rock star President Bill Clinton to stall Silicon Valley’s inevitable slouch to the right. Though web surfing itself was not truly introduced to the public until 1995, when Clinton campaigned for President in 1992, he proselytized the techno-utopian promise of the Internet as the “information superhighway,” much the way his hero JFK campaigned on the promise of landing on the moon. Sure enough, the similarities of campus liberals and tech rebels seemed greater than the differences, and the turn of the century saw great overlap of the two ‘60s. The hipster subculture that grew greater and greater online in the ‘00s was arguably a fusion of the two sensibilities. Hipster bloggers that listened to and often cited liberal activist mainstay NPR also wrote screed after screed of breathless cyber utopianism about how the Internet was the Great Leveler.

There were subtle changes in the late ‘00s though that would prove too great to ignore by the great schism between the two groups later. One major one: the repudiation of New Atheism by the left. In the early ‘00s, New Atheism was sexy. The 9/11 attacks were used to justify any and all attacks on organized religion, let alone Islam. As the Iraq War raged on though, New Atheism was inevitably coded as right wing and racist. This helped pave the way for the Intellectual Dark Web, many of whom gave a new lease of life for an increasingly aging right wing simply by questioning Islam.

By 2014, the great schism happened: GamerGate. Hardcore gamers resented the attention being lavished by New Games Journalists on an indie game called Depression Quest. But the central conflict proved less fascinating than what it evolved into: a war between two classes of nerds - the aforementioned tech geeks and academics, who began distinguishing their respective identities in the ‘80s. The hardcore gamers were conservative; they loved games that were entertaining and challenging. Academics increasingly saw the educational potential of video games like Depression Quest.

Among the major changes that GamerGate brought on: the right wing was now younger and more tech obsessed than ever, leading of course to the alt-right. For five years after Obama’s first election victory, the online right was primarily recognized as a bunch of aging red state boomers writing CAPS LOCK rants on Facebook. The youth, we were told time and again, skewed left and progressive. But after GamerGate, tech increasingly became right coded like the New Atheists before them. Battle lines were drawn. Alliances were formed. Libertarian techies would rely on the Intellectual Dark Web as hashtag hippies would both critique and harness the power of the academic and legacy media institutions that they whupped into shape.

Then Trump.

By 2017, the press demanded accountability from social media companies, consistently calling them to the carpet for not deplatforming hateful, dangerous voices. Though nowadays both the left and right are critical of Big Tech, the right rankles at deplatforming while the left believes more deplatforming needs to be done.

While the social warriors and the tech futurists got their knuckles bloody, a third online religious movement grew, according to Burton’s Strange Rites book: the backward-looking atavist movement. While the tech sector was obsessed with digital technology, the atavists (such as the raw egg weightlifters, the traditional Catholics, the neoreactionaries) looked to the biological sciences and nature to justify their beliefs. One group that grew out of the new atavism: blackpilled, nihilist incels. For years, women relied on men to provide for them. For this reason, many otherwise ugly, unsuitable mates were able to mate and help society function, passing along genes that were smart and empathetic as well as good looking and strong. Thanks to new developments like birth control and feminism, women increasingly favored attractive men - not average men, attractive men - leaving normal (let alone ugly men) to feel outrage at the new society that was upsetting years of logical, natural evolution.

Elliot Rodgers, the spree shooter that brought the incel movement to national attention

This incel movement began to gain momentum in 2012. Unfortunate coincidence: this was also the year that Tinder was introduced. In many ways, hookup culture apps like Tinder and Bumble represented the worst aspects of the two ‘60s. A major commonality between the social justice faction and the tech futurists is that both are sexual libertines that, from the ‘60s onward, knelt at the altar of free love. An app where you swipe right and get laid can only help.

So what went wrong? Dating was around long before these apps. Why now, incels? Before hookup apps, online dating cost a lot of money. eHarmony and Match.com had plenty of questionnaires and personality quizzes to intimidate those who weren’t serious. The ugly were scared off after an unsuccessful month. But so were the fuckboys that preferred popping bottles at the club. Besides the obvious visual-first nature of these platforms, there was the low barrier to entry for fuckboys. Now you didn’t need to pay money unless you wanted to see those four mysterious matches who liked you. If you were good looking, you didn’t need unlimited matches and those four “mystery matches” you didn’t already swipe on? Too bad, so sad. For the average chumps who were lunch meat for these apps? You needed to pay $20 to find out that these four matches were in Trinidad, Papua New Guinea, China and Thailand. And that they wanted an American to teach them English. Maybe marry them. As time went on, more men and women (femcels) felt less than, compared to their very lucky friends that kept spreading the hookup app gospel.

In other words, dating became gamified. Before dating apps, love was a sandbox game. Not a hit at parties? Perhaps you made a movie - heck, perhaps even a website - and somewhere on your journey, love appeared as a side mission. When you failed at Tinder, you implicitly failed at love.

Surely there were romantic failures before Tinder, before the sexual revolution of the 1960s. What did they do? They used the flame of unrequited love to fuel them to write poetry. Build cathedrals. In other words, before unrequited love curdled into wasted money on hookup apps, it was the fuel for muses.

The idea of a muse that inspires creatives has become increasingly antiquated. In the free love era, it made more sense to love the one you’re with than to pine for the one you can’t be with. Nowadays, of course, the idea of a muse is yet another old sexist ideology. But this concept should be reevaluated. Besides the obvious fix of male muses for female creatives (or even female muses for lesbian creatives) we should consider the implications for social media. Much social media content is fueled by acquisition. Of likes, of attention. What would we have if blackpilled incels stopped writing manifestos and instead used the unrequited love for their muse to build murals, write stories?

This line of questioning might be difficult to engage with because it runs counter to one major area of overlap for the two ‘60s: that the individual should get and do whatever the fuck they want. If a sixty year old wants to pose for Penthouse, hooray! If a blind man wants to direct a film, might as well be the next Marvel tentpole!. Both ‘60s religions have run so rampant in America because neither of them seriously question the central, Enlightenment-based liberal idea of the individual pursuing their own happiness (or in today’s parlance, bliss).

But what about not getting what you want? Many in the ‘60s gave lip service to Eastern philosophy, but seemed a lot more interested in the tantric sex/Kama Sutra/eating mushrooms side of things than in negating desire and joining a monastery. This is not exactly what I’m talking about when I talk about muses and unrequited love though, is it? One of the greatest secret histories of Western civilization is the story of great men who never got the love they sought. From the sonnet writer Petrarch to Dante the great narrative poet, to, of course, Morrissey.

Since this sort of thing is of no great interest to either hashtag hippies or digital daredevils, they can’t help but be impotent in the face of destructive incels. How tragic: two communities that cry day and night for freedom, but see no way out.