Struggles like the male loneliness epidemic and men's mental health declining are things that could be helped by a collective effort made by people across the gender spectrum. What the manosphere discourages is connection, as a tool to prevent collaboration. The source of many of the issues is in that lack of connection, economic, and general social struggles that affect most people. However, feminism, women's rights, and the LGBTQ+ community are often the ones blamed.

To those who are used to having power, equality feels like oppression. Those who are convincing young men are oppressed are doing so easily, because they are able to point to affordances and powers men had in the past that are going away. In some realms, young men are finding that they don't have as much or as much power as their fathers or grandfathers before them. They're finding that the change has coincided with feminism. Where they forget to look is where women have gained rights, refusing to consider the oppression that women faced before and where they still face it to this day.

This reminds me of a comment made by a drag queen, about the bans on their readings to children in libraries. The queen remarked that the same politicians who are arguing that drag queens are dangerous to children, are protectors of the second amendment. They refuse reform on gun control, even in the midst of a school shooting crisis, so the safety of children does not seem like a real priority. The public knows that children are in danger, so instead of handling the real threat, they have chosen drag queens as the scapegoats.

This reminds me of the echo chambers that online communities create to radicalize people on the internet. Language used to perpetuate aggressive male behaviour in the 'manosphere', like "Alpha" or "Sigma" is based in myths around animal behaviour that has since, been debunked. The ways a man 'should' behave are presented in online spaces as fact though. The aggression and lack of emotional exploration encouraged by influencers only causes a rift between men and women, which also acts to alienate anything outside of or between those binaries. The ironic thing, though, is that the behaviours young men on the internet are encouraged to participate in, are often presented to them as way to 'get' women.

This reminds me of how platforms like YouTube have changed over time. Originally a space for independent creators to share their work with the public, with few restrictions or parameters, it has now become a game of pandering to the algorithm. As we've discussed in class, YouTube has become one of the primary tools used for things like the alt-right pipeline. It has become an echo chamber, because of how YouTube has changed its delivery methods. The pressures creators are under to pander to specific streams of consumers has synthesized (especially political) content into two streams, as nuance depletes. Part of this problem began with the need to please advertisers, so as not to get demonetized, then continued as YouTube changed its delivery methods.

This is also applicable to a person's likeness. AI uses images of people on the internet, who may not know that have given consent, to create images of new people. This creates a threat to jobs like acting or modeling. The potential use of a person's image, posted to the internet via Instagram or Facebook, in an AI prompts, without the person's consent is a common fear. It poses a threat to individual people, as well as the future validity of things like photo evidence.

I'm curious about what this could look like. Considering the wide variety of factors that have rendered AI a problematic tool, what policies could be put in place to reduce harm enough? Will greed always interfere with good intention, even if a solution is found eventually?