The Vile Leading The Lost

Insecurity Vampires and the Attention Economy

On Saturday, the news broke that a years-long joint investigation by The Sunday Times, The Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches had uncovered compelling evidence (based on a wealth of victim and eyewitness testimony, along with SMS messages and other materials) that British “comedian” and podcasting “personality” Russell Brand had committed multiple instances of sexual assault, rape and grooming.

As is horribly often the case, it quickly emerged that Brand’s tendencies were something of an open secret within some parts of the industry. Nonetheless by Sunday morning three wealthy and well-known men had come out in vocal support of Brand.

Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and Andrew fucking Tate — who is currently awaiting trial for rape and human trafficking in Romania.

Because of course they would.

Full disclosure: I’ve always loathed Russell Brand. When he was a “comedian” his hectic schtick relied upon hyperactive shock value, an adolescent “look how smart I am” vocabulary, and an alleged hotness that I could never perceive. Sure, I’m a heterosexual man, but I can tell when a guy’s handsome and to me even at his youthful best Brand always looked like he needed disinfecting.

He got thrown off the BBC for being an asshole (in a particularly mean, unpleasant way, involving taunting an elderly actor with the fact that Brand had slept with his grand-daughter) and afterwards slyly re-invented himself as a “wellness” “guru” while slipping smoothly into the insidious “I’m just asking questions” model of right-wing conspiracy bullshit now poured over everything from COVID to Ukraine.

And yes of course, both he and Tate are entitled to due process. But that’s not the point. The point is the pattern, and its implications. These three other men have come out in support of Brand because they’re all the same, and in a very specific way: they’re C-suite super-stars of the Attention Economy, Insecurity Vampire Division.

Musk has achieved massive success in the conventional economy too — though his companies’ sturdiness without billions and billions of dollars from government tax breaks, subsidies and contracts is less clear. That doesn’t really matter because money isn’t real any more — share price is king, not profitability: it is wealth and fame (from Tucker’s long and lucrative tenure as a Fox host, Brand’s former career as a presenter and actor, and influencer Tate’s spell in MMA) that elevated them to the point where they’re poised to start raking in cash from the Attention Economy. Musk’s an asshole but he’s not an idiot: his over-priced acquisition of Twitter was at least partly an investment in himself and his Attention Economy Brand. It worked.

In the Attention Economy, people paying attention to you = cultural elevation + real money. It doesn’t matter what you do or say to earn that attention, and for this reason and many others the Attention Economy is wholly destructive. It never produces good things because it is born out loneliness and greed. But it’s baked into the Internet and has been since its early obsession with rating goods and services. This hooked people in by making them feel “empowered”, and as if they were “joining the conversation”. Instead, it merely created a screwed and useless reviews system because people are far more likely to rant about something they hate, than something they quite liked.

From there it was a short step to the ludicrous “influencer” phenomenon — note a recent piece in the Washington Post about how registered dietitians are out there in droves pushing pro-aspartame propaganda despite serious concerns over it being carcinogenic, because Big Soda is paying them to. It’s further led to a situation where teenagers think that yakking about their inconsequential days on YouTube or TikTok can make their fortune because… well, in some cases it actually does. All you have to do is make people look at you. That is the most valuable capital in the world.

On Musk’s Twitter/X paid subscribers can now earn money through “engagement” — i.e. how often other users interact with their tweets: as a result, non-subscriber content is buried and real engagement and community there is close to dead. Has that promoted worthwhile discourse? Of course not. It means a bunch of paid-blue-tick dickheads post the most annoying rage-bait they can think of, so enraged liberals line the baiters’ pockets by shouting back. The same motivation (in addition to being an actual racist shithead) underlies Musk himself coyly promoting viciously vile views like anti-Semitism. This behavior gets these men (they’re mainly men, though there are female practitioners like Candace Owens, who just finally got kicked off YouTube for relentless homophobia) attention, which is converted into cash: the model for the kinds of entire career it’s now possible to conduct on the Internet.

But also in Washington DC: was there any chance Trump would have been elected President without the attention he received for years as a reality TV host and relentless self-publicist? His entire MAGA brand leverages the Insecurity Vampire grievance-stoking, constant lies that boil down to: “Everybody hates you, I’m the only person who understands and can save you… so hand over your cash”.

The online careers of men like Carlson, Musk, Brand, Tate — the more “intellectually respectable” Jordan Peterson fits the mold too; and just as I’m writing this, ur-conspiracy “theorist” Alex fucking Jones has added his putrid voice in support of Brand — all rely upon the same parlor trick: the idea that if anyone tries to bring them to account for their behavior or views then these vampires can blame The Woke Mob or Mainstream Media for gagging them and de-platforming The Truth, with the inevitable result their gullible audience believes them even harder. When Brand went ahead with a live performance on Saturday night — despite a televised hour-long exposé of the credible allegations against him — he received a standing ovation. Social media posts on the subject today are rife with replies from men (and women, astonishingly) shouting that the journalists involved are all liars. The next step with grifters like Brand is they find their online standing paradoxically elevated, because their followers “reason” that if The Deep State are so determined to bring him down, it can only be because He’s On To Something, which means his fans are even smarter than they thought they were!

Conspiracy theory endlessly self-reinforces, and it’s a helluva drug.

Crucially, and even more seriously, these four vampires have all also realized — either consciously or via some kind of feral cunning — that there are a lot of young (and not so young) men in the world who are lost. Who don’t understand their place in society or the economy any more; who are told their male privilege (which many may not have actually experienced in their own lives, except in trivial ways, or ones that do their souls no good) means they must now take a back seat in everything; and that their nasty, bestial nature must be trammeled at all costs.

DO NOT GET ME WRONG. I am absolutely and fully aware of the massive and unjust advantages men have enjoyed for a very, very long time. Systemic oppression of women is very real, the patriarchy is an actual thing, and fighting it in all its visible and hidden forms deserves priority. An overhaul of relative sexual opportunity, equity and status was many millennia overdue and has still barely started — at least out in the real world, where it stands a chance of producing actual results for real women.

But it’s nonetheless also true that in the culturally-dominant media of many countries in the West, a damaging message has emerged and is becoming mainstream wisdom: most men are bad, young men especially so, and all masculinity is toxic.

This is what the Insecurity Vampires prey upon. They lean into conspiracy theory because under that model lost men can blame a shadowy “Them” for everything they feel they lack — rather than asking whether it’s down to them to find and provide it. They push both casual and active misogyny because it’s an easy crack to lever wider in callow, lonely boys of any age, especially if they aren’t in a relationship because they’re spending all their time watching poisonous podcasts semi-scientifically designed to feed on their lack of confidence and experience. They leap to contrarianism (everyone sane supports Ukraine, therefore they all perversely support Russia) because it’s a cheap, sneaky way of making the ill-informed and angry believe they’re seeing a “truth” that all the sheeple haven’t. And the depressing and infuriating thing is that large and respectable media outlets from the BBC to the New York Times collude in this dangerous bullshit through an absurd execution of the idea of “balance”, in which assertions that are demonstrably incorrect, racist or bigoted are allowed equal time.

Meanwhile the issues for men, real men, normal men, are very real. Many of them have no idea who they’re supposed to be any more. In America, about seventy percent of the people who commit suicide are male. They are also almost exclusively responsible for mass shootings. There is clearly a fucking problem here, and just shrugging and saying “Well that’s men for you, they’re all bastards” is NOT the solution — and neither is letting them fall into the hands of cynical, greedy vampires like Brand, Tate, Carlson and Musk.

The most important fact with Brand, Tate and others of their kind is the real and actual physical and emotional trauma enacted upon their female victims, a crime that occurs to women all over the world, every day, and must be endlessly fought, and forever brought to account. Nothing I’ve tried to say here should detract from that.

Supporting people is not a zero-sum game, however. Saying “This cat needs food” does not mean we’re saying “So all dogs should starve”. Women and men both face challenges in this world, struggles which are sometimes radically different and may need quite different kinds of solutions. It’s past time to put real thought and effort and money into figuring out ways of actively supporting both, of centering everyone’s mental health and existential and practical fears, rather than consigning half the population to the greasy embrace of the kind of men who profit from misogyny and hatred, and who would watch the world burn if they could earn a few bucks from it.

The kind of men who genuinely are vile.