Did you know that the Y chromosome might disappear sometime in the next five to ten million years? Did you also know that we are technically still in an ice age? The sun will explode in five billion years. Something about Rome. If you know some of this and can recite it, you are in possession of Boy Knowledge. A nugget of Boy Knowledge is characterised by the freedom that stems from bearing the social burden of information. This is okay. There is no better time in recent memory to possess Boy Knowledge, or eat Boy Dinner, or have a Boys’ Night. In the last couple of years, popular culture has seen a rightward shift. Gender roles, which have been eroding for decades, have begun to harden again. At risk of talking out of turn, I would point to the recent aesthetic pursuits of stars like Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter, noting the former’s significant drop-off in political involvement. Boys gamble and pop Zyns; girls make sourdough. Boys and girls will marry, and they will not understand each other, but there will be Boys’ Nights. There’s more. Rainbow capitalism is gone; Louis CK is back, I saw him at Massey Hall; and Sydney Sweeney is a denim eugenicist who isn’t going to apologize for it.
In my estimation, Woke took a huge blow after 2009, and Woke has been dying for the last two years (though Woke might be back soon). The Death of Woke is inseparable from tech. In the last two decades, the internet has become the primary cultural landscape. Since the election of Trump in 2016, the Woke Silicon Valley Democrat has transitioned to what journalist Gil Duran calls the “Nerd Reich.” It might be erased from cultural memory, but there was a time when the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel were well-liked by the liberal establishment. Tech billionaires appealed to a decent chunk of men. Musk ‘built’ rocket ships and guest-starred in Rick and Morty. Joe Rogan was a good model for the median bro. There was a time when Joe Rogan was a Woke Stoner. He was just a curious dude who liked facts about monkeys and thought Elon Musk was cool: harmless, if not overly positive. As we all know, Rogan lost his mind and moved to Austin, where he spends his days shilling out for tech billionaires and boosting terrible comics. Does that sound familiar? Are you listening to me? Joe Rogan’s brain was killed, at least in part, by the wanton pursuit of Boy Knowledge. In parallel with the Nerd Reich, Rogan’s curiosity underwent a transition, beginning with relatively harmless moon landing conspiracy theories. Rogan now hosts interviews with the likes of Eric Weinstein, Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen, providing them the platform to spew blatant slop, unchallenged by the stoned and ape-brained half-billionaire host. Rogan now lives in an eternal Boys’ Night (the Comedy Mothership) and eats Boy Dinner (elk). He is a case study in what the Nerd Reich wants to do to you. Boy or not, the Nerd Reich is winning the war on your brain and you don’t even know it.
I do not hate trivia, nor do I hate fun. I just need you to be a lot more careful on the internet. If you are in your 20s, the internet you grew up on is not what it is now. At least for the moment, the tech billionaires have lost any incentive to feign interest in responsibly running their platforms. It is no coincidence that there is an influx in alt-right accounts and even seemingly apolitical accounts, which use increasingly renormalized slurs and alt-right aesthetics. This is not normal or good. The only way to resist this nihilistic turn and move in a somewhat progressive direction is to be accountable to our principles. Think about what you see and what you know, and measure it against what you believe.
