I stole the title for this post from a podcast episode with Prof. Scott Galloway. If you don't know him, he's a marketing professor and host of his own podcast which is by all accounts extremely popular (I've never listened). He seems very smart. He speaks with clarity and certainty. He isn't afraid to make bold predictions. He is very persuasive. These are the very online personalities I try to steer clear of as they are able to shoot perfectly crafted information bullets which seem to cut through the noise and draw in big audiences, audiences which then feed a growing narcissism and inclination towards even bolder, more radical statements. It often doesn’t end well.
But, but... He did say something that stuck in my brain, something which made podcast host Demetri Kofinas reply 'Shit Scott, shit!'.
Galloway was asked to pick one thing happening in society today which needs focus and he pointed toward young men in America. He then hit on the drivers of the problems they face, and one thing which caught my attention was sex (stop sniggering at the back).
Galloway pointed to one of the most dangerous elements in (American) society today: the young, broke, lonely male. Online dating apps such as Tinder offer insight into the problem. "If there are 50 men on Tinder and 50 women on Tinder, 46 of the women will show all of their attention to just four of the men, leaving 46 men to try and vie for four women."
Galloway described this as the 'Porsche polygamy effect’ where the top 10% of men get 90% of the opportunities, while 50% of the men get completely shut out.
Now, with the top 10% doing so well, their desire to stay in long-term relationships can be diminished, leading to crappy short-term relationships and bad dates for women. Then you’ve got another 50% who are just on their own, left to their own thoughts.
So you have a lot of men either being shut out or unwilling to jump into long-term relationships, leading to lower birth rates and less economic stability because there are fewer households with two earners, and just a breed of men who are either over-confident narcissists or lonely and hurt. Not great a great dating landscape right there…
The men who are shut out are, according to Galloway, more prone to engage in online misogynistic content, much less likely to believe in climate change, and more likely to engage in conspiracy theories. And, says the Prof, "when you hear about mass shooters, we all know who it is before we know who it is." It’s true.
But if men are doing so badly, why aren't more women getting into positions of power and influence? More women have graduated college in the US over the last 40 years, but only 28% of elected representatives in the US are women. Why? It's not clear. But what it does mean is that lots of white men in power leads to representation that will disproportionately cater to the needs of the angry, white, lonely male. See Trump.
Economic opportunity is a key driver here, but I don't consider myself in a good position to talk about that, particularly as I'm British and we're currently doing an excellent job of imploding a country through bizarre economic decisions. What struck me from Galloway's words, and something I think I can speak to, is the impact of online communication and social media on our relationships, our views on sex, and on loneliness.
II
Galloway's speech led the host Kofinas to speak about sexualised content online, how you could be searching for something entirely innocent on Instagram and suddenly be confronted with sexualised images of women. Porn is a problem, and not just the hardcore variety.
A few years ago, whilst living in Bangkok, I recall sitting in my office talking with colleagues about the explosion of TikTok. Time for me to take a look, I thought. I downloaded it, switched it on and I'm not exaggerating to say that 90% of the videos I saw in my first five minutes were of women in bikinis, or less, bouncing around. I assume the algorithm saw 'white male in Thailand in 30s' and decided that that's my thing.
Likewise on Instagram. I notice that if I click to search, it'll serve up things it understands to be in my sphere of interests: music, photography, football, and drumming. Sometimes it’ll be the wrong type of music, the wrong team, the wrong style of photography, but I understand that this is the algorithm figuring out what I like. But among these images, and more often than it should, the app will throw in a female celebrity or a scantily clad woman. It's the algorithm's way of asking: 'do you want more of this (wink wink)?'.
Now, I imagine being confronted with all this as a young teen and I'm not sure I'd have a hope in hell of resisting it. I know that once clicked, the algorithm takes it to be a response that 'yes, I want more of this'. Before long it would be all I see.
Just put that at the scale of millions, or even hundreds of millions, of young and you have a hellish cocktail of distraction and distortion.
I heard a quote somewhere the other day, I’ve forgotten where, from a mother. She said her teenage girl told her that she had seen more perfect bodies and faces in the last few minutes on her phone than her grandparents would have seen in a lifetime.
This exposure will create unreasonable expectations of how bodies should look, of sex, and of how partners should look and behave. Boys and girls will have a distorted view of themselves and others while living in a world that is more lonely and more online than ever before.
People tend to be happier when they're around other people, when they have strong bonds and relationships. The online onslaught of sexualised imagery is, in short, not helping bring people together, or society. That’s why the house seems to be falling apart in so many countries.
So why am I banging on about this?
Well, having worked in communications for many years, I realise that while I've been producing positive content online, it's sitting side-by-side with this harmful stuff. Am I - are we in this field - facilitating the spread of this problem?
III
Now, let me first say that I know this analysis is oversimplified. A lot is going on in society and it's not just boobs on Instagram that are causing social woes. And there's a huge amount of good that's come with social media. I love discovering beautiful photos on Instagram. I love the tutorials on YouTube.
I also know that you can use TikTok and Instagram responsibly to teach the apps to keep the harmful content away. But that's not easy because it’s not the default setting. The apps need you hooked and it’s the saucy content which captures our attention best.
Something is amiss when you look at how much money is being spent by big tech to lobby the US Government.
"In 2000 tech companies spent $7 million courting legislators. Twenty years later, they spent $80 million —more than the commercial banking industry ($62 million) and approaching the budget of oil & gas ($113 million). Facebook spent $20 million on lobbying in 2020, followed closely by Amazon with $19 million and Alphabet with $8 million." - Scott Galloway
Let that sink in: tech companies spent more money on lobbying than banks. Banks. And I checked the tobacco industry spend on lobbying - it was a measly $29 million in 2020.
Now, I could get angry about this but first I need to look at myself and accept that I’ve been part of what made these companies so powerful. I have been handing money over to the likes of Facebook to promote my own content. And while what I posted might be seen as, say, one positive message about stopping online bullying, there's a decent chance, unbeknownst to me, it will sit next to a video of a child being bullied for laughs.
It’s a bit like doing a nationwide vaccination campaign for children - good - in smoke-filled pubs with go-go dancers - not so good.
So what's the answer to this?
IV
Well, first is accepting that people need people, real people. Facebook may say we have 500+ friends, but they're not friends. Mostly they’re acquaintances at best. You see, the secret sauce of Facebook is making us feel connected and, through that, placing a high value on the number of connections. It's about quantity, not quality.
Then we start following and measuring the popularity of something we shared online and before long big organisations handed over millions of dollars to Facebook to put a big number of views under that content to make them feel good about themselves.
These big numbers simply need to matter less, because they don't matter. I've blathered on about this a lot before but we all know, deep down, that a lot of the metrics are meaningless. Video X got 1 million views on Facebook? Big whoop. That's 1 million people who watched the expensively produced video for more than 3 seconds. A good result is if 0.001% watched the entire 4 minutes.
There is of course great value in creating something that gets seen by a lot of people, but having virality as a driving metric leads us down a shallow path. And in the end, the most viral content is usually the most hateful, most misogynistic, and most shocking. Or it features a grumpy cat. We shouldn't want to play the same game on the same field.
So those are the first two steps right there: wean ourselves off the number obsession, and start looking for a new field to play on.
That new field will be very quiet at first. But slowly but surely, if you're playing a good game, people will come. You could say you’re building micro-communities if you need a modern marketing term to convince the bosses.
My recent experience with NFTs and Discord communities has been interesting to witness how, in the more successful groups, large meeting spaces break out into smaller groups matching interests or locations. People come together to build things, meet up in real life, or simply create weird art. It can feel more like a cultural transaction rather than a metric-driven one.
Focus then should not be on attracting the millions but rather on honing skills around how to engage smaller groups in online, positive, self-supporting communities. The key starting point here is, boringly, listening.
Sitting there and just listening and observing takes time, it doesn’t feel like action. But it’s the only way to learn. It’s difficult to justify ‘sitting and listening’ as an activity at work today, which is why we often just jump in and do. But there’s no way we can possibly understand what’s going on if we don’t listen.
Building this way is less sexy, for sure. It's slow, it's hard work. Paying $500 for a video to have 1,000,000 views feels much better in the short term. But, in my humble opinion, it's infinitely more valuable to focus on listening and talking to small groups rahter than spending thousands of dollars a year of videos made for metrics. And with that, we start playing a game on our terms, building inside a house that is more positive, more hopeful, and more productive.
I appreciate this article very much. I have heard/read Galloway a bit and have been intrigued at some of what he says. I think this point you make is one seldom raised, even by those of us who are leery of the algorithms and so on:
<<<Now, I could get angry about this but first I need to look at myself and accept that I’ve been part of what made these companies so powerful. I have been handing money over to the likes of Facebook to promote my own content. And while what I posted might be seen as, say, one positive message about stopping online bullying, there's a decent chance, unbeknownst to me, it will sit next to a video of a child being bullied for laughs.>>>