Platforming Tate Speech
It’s easy to forget what being a teenager is like, mostly because we probably want to forget. When I hear James Murphy sing-chant “Sound of silver, talk to me/Makes you want to feel like a teenager/Until you remember the feelings of/A real-life emotional teenager/Then you think again” in LCD Soundsystem’s “Sound of Silver,” it’s about as close as I want to get to reliving being seventeen years old. As older and rational adults, we tend to look at teenagers and project rationality. But there’s not a lot of rationality there. I bring this up because it’s key to thinking about the Tate Brothers and the Manosphere.
I remember being a teenage boy. I probably don’t remember it with 100% accuracy because of how memory works, especially as we age, but I remember being concerned with really big, abstract questions like “how to be as a person” and “how to do good” because I wanted to be the kind of person who was concerned with those kinds of things. But I was also more deeply concerned with normal teenager stuff like “how do I get girls to like me.” I would have gladly changed everything about myself if someone gave me an easy answer to any of those questions. (I’ve always thought convictions come later.) In the moment there’s just a mad scramble to quiet down the maelstrom of thoughts and, more importantly, Really Big Feelings. And that’s what all of these guys (your Tates, your Jordans Peterson, and your Adins Ross) are there to exploit.
Last week a teenager who attends an all-boys school wrote about the Tate Brothers in the Wall Street Journal. I think it’s a remarkably self-aware piece of writing for an 18-year-old to produce, and it’s a level of honesty that I don’t think people usually attempt at that age. What struck me most about it is that the author understands there aren’t a lot of answers, and that mirrors what I remember from being 18. “Being a teenage man today feels like standing in a hallway with a dozen doors, each leading somewhere different, and no one telling you which to pick,” Eli Thompson wrote. There was some backlash to that, but he’s right. That’s exactly what being that age feels like. His only mistake was the same mistake everyone makes at that age — assuming that their time and place is somehow unique, instead of being unique to them by dint of not having lived through much of the world yet. That’s where those easy answers come in. And Thompson says as much, too:
That’s where figures like the Tates, Elon Musk and President Trump step in with bold answers: Don’t worry, just dominate. Trump’s brashness mirrors what many of the teenage boys I know crave — unapologetic power.
The Tates, popping up in our feeds and speaking our language, make it personal, like they are coaching us through the chaos. They tell us we don’t have to feel remorse for the things we didn’t do, or even for things we did.
In my opinion, teenagers are easy marks because they haven’t yet developed the ability to recognize a con; i.e., when a stranger is telling you exactly what you want to hear, they’re generally lying to you. A lot of adults don’t seem to know it either, for what it’s worth. But teenagers have always been like that. I remember being easily persuadable as a teenager on the early internet. It was a big contributor to my version of the libertarian phase that most teenage boys go through and get over. So why does this feel different? Why are we so worried that they won’t get over it? The problem is that we live in an era where platforms aren’t just allowing people to tell teenagers what they want to hear. They’re encouraging it.
It used to be that to get in front of an audience the size of the one that the Tates command you’d have to have a show on a TV station, a talk show job on the radio, or a regular column in print. In order to get yourself onto these platforms you’d need to impress a lot of people who would be deeply concerned about how your message would reflect on them and their advertisers. Gatekeeping access to platforms like this wasn’t perfect, of course. Anyone who has an AM Talk Radio Dad could tell you that there was still a place in media for proto-Tates, but the infrastructure that you needed to spin up to do that was vast, and that barrier to entry kept cranks confined to smaller networks or public access TV. If you spewed outright hate, The Powers That Be wouldn’t platform you because they had to worry about maintaining their revenue, regulators at the FCC, and their reputations.
On the other hand, those same powers also suppressed voices that weren’t white and male, and consolidating that much media power in such a small set of hands led to a lot of people getting locked out. This is why when the Internet came along, all kinds of new voices flourished. Ones who should have had those big platforms and ones who didn’t for good reason. In the span of a couple decades, the Internet managed to kill the gatekeepers: magazines and newspapers got replaced by blogs, podcasts became the new radio, and YouTube murdered TV. The gatekeepers didn’t survive the new regime. The attitude of the new platforms was “the more the merrier”, and they happily let everyone make a living off it, allowing and, more importantly, financially incentivizing a diversity of programming and effort that was unthinkable when I was a teenager in the mid-2000s. But obviously it was a double-edged sword. Sometimes the gates are being kept for a reason.
Internet media is fundamentally a battle for attention, and teenage boys are an absolute goldmine for that currency as bottomless pits of media consumption. We can worry about how teenagers are more isolated now that they were and the effect that has on them, but even when I was a teenager we spent most of our time socializing as consumers of media. I think I watched The Big Lebowski like thirty times in a summer when I was 16. You have a lot of time and a very short attention span, and that makes you a very active consumer of media. That’s why there has always been advertising and media targeting teens.
I never watched that much of the teenage media of my youth, but shows like Boy Meets World and Clarissa Explains it All are clearly written by adults for a teenage audience to challenge them to become better people. The people who made them understood that being a teenager was confusing and weird, and also understood that they could give them a little help along the way. The winners of the online attention economy — the Pauls, Mr. Beast, and the Tates — on the other hand, show their young audiences a rancid view of the world, one that’s easy and cynical. And because their answers are easy, millions of young people tune in to hear how their lives could be if they just hated the wrong kind of people a little bit more, or were a worse kind of person than the old teenage media tried to create. And their attention is extremely profitable, for both the influencers and the platforms.
The real problem here isn’t teenage boys, because teenage boys have always been edgelord-y balls of confusion. The problem is the platforms — the same ones that killed the gatekeepers. They’ve decided teens are easy money. They incentivize people like your Tates and your Pauls because those people bring in profitable eyeballs. If you don’t set a floor the users of a platform will find one for you.
It’s even more laughable when you think about The Algorithm, the platforms’ biggest innovation. They want to keep you there but also have a fig leaf of plausible deniability; meaning that these platforms will keep serving you more of the stuff you’re interested in while the companies behind them say to Congress that they can’t police this kind of thing at scale. Unbound by the FCC regulations of the TV networks they killed, the algorithm is a laundering of responsibility, because of course the algorithm is too complex to just tinker with. Functionally the race for profitable attention is a race for scale, meaning it’s also a race to the absolute bottom. The difference, of course, is that platforms get to say they’re not networks, which is to say not responsible for the content people post.
I think platforms have an obligation to both create and maintain a culture. Web 1.0 was not an era of platforms, but the administrators and moderators of forums and online communities understood the obligations that they had to their significantly smaller communities. They tried (sometimes unsuccessfully) to enforce a culture through their rules and actions. Since then, we’ve seen what happens when platforms grow and let go of the reins.
Andrew Tate and his brother are obviously bad for everyone, but without the tacit support of the places they post, they would have topped out at the level of a lesser Rush Limbaugh acolyte. It’s the platforms, places like YouTube or TikTok, that allow them and people like them to thrive. The platforms know this, too. Spotify wouldn’t have given Joe Rogan $250 million if they didn’t know they were going to be making a lot of money off of being in the Joe Rogan business.
It’s natural for us to worry about this crop of teenage boys, because every generation worries about what’s coming up behind them. That’s just what aging is like. But it certainly feels more urgent in the wake of a 2024 election that seemed to demolish the “the kids will save us” mantra that has existed in American politics since WWII. The only problem is that by focusing on the kids we’re missing the forest for the trees.
I think — hope — They might not be quite as progressive as we’d like them to be, but they’ll be better than they are now because that’s just how growing up works. And hey, the Tates might get thrown in jail for sex trafficking.
My point is simple. These things will go with time, but the structures and platforms that enabled this mess will stick around. And if they’re still there, in their current form, we’ll just be waiting around until the next time we have to have the same conversation about toxic influencers and teenagers. And there will be a next time. After all, I wrote about this topic for Vox eight years ago and it looks like we’re back here again.
