There is another aspect to all of this too. Big Tech.
Big Tech refers to the big technology players like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. Collectively these companies are known as the FAANGs. They hold an enormous amount of power today.
But it wasn’t always so. The 1990s saw widespread democratisation of technology. The Internet started to compete with proprietary online services such as CompuServe and America Online. Many forget that these services originally operated private networks. They competed with the public Internet. Later they adopted the position that “if you can’t beat them, join them” and became Internet service providers.
Around the world there was countless small ISPs mostly running modems. For most the Internet was slow and unreliable. But it was also free. I don’t mean you didn’t have to pay for it. I mean that the environment was not dominated by large corporations. Nor, to a large degree, was it dominated by governments. The law was trailing the technology at that point and it showed. Many described the Internet of the 90s as the “Wild West”.
The Internet is based on open standards. These allow anyone with the skills to develop software that will talk to other systems on the network. People can talk to one another about what is important to them without governments and Big Tech being able to limit their speech.
Another aspect of technology that really took off in the 90s was free and open source software. Most people would just known it as “open source” so that’s how I’ll refer to it. Adoption of open sourcd grew rapidly during the 90s. It allowed people to use software as they saw fit.
I’ve been involved in open source software since 1994. First business wasn’t interested. Then they felt threatened. Later they adopted opens source and made alot of money from it. In 2013 I concluded that open source had won. At around the same time I started to realise the problems facing men and boys were far worse than I had previously realised. And so I embraced men’s rights. I aim to help another movement to victory as I once did with open source.
Ten years on it’s clear that Big Tech has done an end-run around open source. A lot of the freedom with technology we had in the past thanks, in part, to open standards and open source has been curtailed. So many people rely on Big Tech for so much of their lives that it has become inordinately powerful.
We talk on Facebook, or Twitter rather than forums or mailing lists as we would have done 10 or 20 years ago. Modern social media is a memory hole. I see so much information on men’s issues posted to social media never to see the light of day again. Get the most bang for your buck and put your information were people can find it. We accept end user agreements that allow Big Tech to analyse and even control our data. We pay to use someone elses computer systems to run software that we could easily run ourselves.
Even if we do setup services ourselves we likely do so using infrastructure owned and controlled by Big Tech. Many of these large providers offer proprietary solutions that lock their customers in. They become dependent on one provider. Moving to another becomes impractical due to the expense and difficulty of doing so.
If the power of Big Tech continues to grow we may one day see the freedom of the underlying infrastructure threatened. But all is not lost. Everything we need to recapture the online freedom of earlier decades is still there. We just need to reach out and take it. And most of it is free. This is an area you will see A Voice for Men talking about more.
Big Tech sold a message that it was cheaper thanks, in part, to economies of scale. Decades of experience has shown this is often not true. Jeff Bezos, Founder and executive chairman of Amazon, is now worth more than $160 billion USD. That money came from somewhere, and it wasn’t just from Amazon sales – Amazon Web Services dwarfed the rest of the Amazon company long ago. According to VisualCapitalist.com, as of July 2022 74% of Amazon’s operating profit came from AWS.
A Voice for Men is entirely run on open source software, uses open standards and is portable. The systems run on a medium sized provider. If feminists brigaded the provider and forced us to move we can shift the entire site very quickly because we’re using open standards.
Related to this I encourage men who may be down and out to skill up in IT. There is a shortage of certain skills in the industry and this is another area where A Voice for Men will be assisting men. We’re all still too reliant on Big Tech for search. This is one aspect which I think is not yet solved.
The feminist historical narrative is an historical narrative widely believed by feminists and others. The feminist historical narrative is so pervasive that even many non-feminists buy in to it. It is largely built of lies, half-truths and oversimplifications.
Feminists love to claim that they freed women from the historical oppress of the Patriarchy. What Western civilisation has really done is dispense with gender roles. This is a huge social experiment and it remains to be seen how it will turn out.
I’ve talked extensively about the feminist historical narrative over the last few years. Anyone interested in this topic should watch my presentations for ICMI20, ICMI21, articles I’ve written for A Voice for Men and keep an eye out for my upcoming book, The Victorian Fallacy.
Unfortunately there are many academics in the West who are well paid to come up with waffle about The Patriarchy and other aspects of the feminist historical narrative. Those of us fighting it are mostly doing it on our own time.
Only independent researchers can truly be independent as we’re not beholden to the public funds doled out to those that embrace orthodoxy.
The problems in the West are growing. Increasingly these problems are spilling in to other cultures thanks to Western, particularly American, cultural hegemony. These problems include, but are not limited to:
Gender fluidity is something quite new. This isn’t about sexuality or about a male wanting to be a female or vice versa. Those who are gender fluid sometimes claim to be genderless, sometimes they claim to switch between male and female and sometimes they claim to be a new gender entirely.
From the outside it might look like the West has gone crazy. Sometimes it looks like that from the inside too. The truth isn’t so simple though. The reality is the majority of people just act like none of this is happening a lot of the time. But it is happening.
Proponents of gender fluidity would have us believe that of all of the more than 100 billion humans who have ever lived they alone understand the true nature gender. Yes they argue that ancient cultures had 3rd genders or whatnot but their evidence is weak and sparse. The concept of male and female with distinct gender roles is evident throughout the world and through history. This is true even of hunter-gatherer societies which were arguably more egalitarian and with less strict gender roles than many societies that came after the adoption of agriculture.
There is growing intolerance to alternative viewpoints in Western nations. We see political partisanship in which followers on each side of politics are intolerant of the others.
We also see attacks on free speech with younger people being more likely to argue that speech that offends can legitimately be censored. This is particularly dangerous.
Free speech is an often misunderstood concept, especially by those who would seek to curtail it. The concept of free speech gives people the ability to express ideas publicly without fear.
Free speech does not mean anyone has to listen. Nor does it free a person from the consequences of their speech. Most countries place some limits on free speech. In particular incitement to violence is often not protected as free speech.
Free speech isn’t some abstract idea dreamed up by people living in an ivory tower. It’s a practical need and in a very real sense the only defence we have against tyranny. I say this to people who want to limit free speech:
- If you can do it then so can others
- They might just be better at it than you are
Censorship is another growing problem in the West with government increasingly seeking to block ill defined concepts such as hate speech.
Governments, though are not the only ones that can censor. Any organisation capable of sufficient control of the disemination of information can censor. Thus a media monopoly could censor even though it may be a commercial enterprise.
The mainstream media pushes a woke narrative. Interestingly comments sections on media publications over the last 10 years have seen a dramatic reversal. Years ago there would have been a lot of support for the position espoused by the media organisation. Now there is rejection and anger at their position.
This is clear evidence of a growing divide between the media and the community.
Young men are disengaging. Between 2008 and 2018 the number of men in one age category who reported not having had sex in the last 12 months tripled from 10 to 28%. These men were under 20 in 2008 and under 30 in 2018. In contrast the protion of women went up about 8%. Regardless of one’s views on premarital sex a sudden demographic change like this should be cause for concern.
A 2023 Pew Research study found that twice as many young American men describe themselves as single as do young American women. A few explanations have been proposed and there may be multiple causes. The single most plausible seems to be that young men and women may simply be using different definitions of the word ’single’.
Feminist women have never understood the male psyche. Despite what feminists claim the vast majority of men are adverse to harming women. Men who do harm women are very much in the minority.
Feminists expected a backlash but it never happened. Instead men simply walked away because to do otherwise would be to risk conflict with women, which most men find abhorent.
Feminists now like to claim there is a crisis in masculinity. Rather I think the crisis is being caused by how men are being treated.
I believe that most men do not buy in to the misandry. Rather I suspect they see straight through it and are angry as a result.
Men and boys are facing certain issues in Western countries, and in other part of the world. Some of these problems occur everywhere, while others are country-specific.
Western men are increasingly responding by disengaging. Given the situation young men find themselves in their actions are entirely rational.
Continued in part 3.
