(Don't Fear) The Blackpill

thought digest, 06.16.2025

Hello!

Many of you found your way here from Hacker News—welcome!

For those who don’t know me, I’m an amateur internet ethnographer, professional Art Bell fan, and reporter who writes about internet subcultures. I interview people about their internet usage, and you can find transcripts of those conversations under the case studies tab.

I also host a weekly themed call-in show on Thursdays at 7:30 PM Central in the spirit of old Coast to Coast AM. This week’s theme is “(DON’T FEAR) THE BLACKPILL,”¹ featuring special guest Jon Stokes, co-founder of Symbolic.ai and Ars Technica.

To everyone who indulged my ridiculous discount code experiment, thank you! I’m planning to make this a monthly tradition, so if you missed the ridiculous 99%-off sale, don’t worry. I’ll run another promotion next month. It won’t be 99% off again, but I promise I’ll do something equally enticing. The wheels are already turning…

If you’re new here, this newsletter format is called a “thought digest.” It’s stuff that’s not quite worth a full article, but that’s still been kicking around my mind. I write them whenever the mood strikes me.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately.

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Incel-pilled. I hate to hit you guys with a “well, actually”² twice in a row, but a video about incel slang has been making the rounds on my timeline, FYP, and inbox. It’s by Adam Aleksic, a linguist who explains how language evolves and spreads online. He writes a very good Substack you can read here.

etymologynerd

A post shared by @etymologynerd

For those who haven’t seen it, Aleksic gives a quick rundown on how incel slang—like “blackpill,” “mogging,” “mewing,” etc.—has seeped into mainstream culture. He posits that this happened for two reasons:

1. Slang is a gatekeeping tactic in the incelosphere, and it’s used to prove membership and establish hierarchy.

2. Incels use memes as trojan horses to spread their ideology in a more palatable package to “redpill” normies.

Now, I completely agree about the gatekeeping. Many—maybe all—subcultures use slang in this way. It’s how you prove you're not a normie, that you're willing to post what normies would be too scared to post, that you have the requisite insider knowledge to be there. This is what makes evaluating what things actually mean online so difficult, and why we can't always take what people say at face value. Sometimes when people post extreme language³, it really is just to scare outsiders away. That doesn’t absolve them from accountability—intent isn’t always the most important metric, as my footnote shows—but it is a useful detail to keep in mind.

Where I disagree with Aleksic is the idea that there’s an agenda behind incel memes going mainstream. I also disagree with his characterization of the incel ecosystem.

Calling the entire incelosphere “far-right” is too simplistic. Yes, there’s real overlap with far-right politics, especially around anti-feminism. But it’s much more politically (and racially) diverse than people assume it to be. Some incels are leftists. Many are apolitical. Plenty, of course, are right-wing. It’s also not a strictly white space. The website I suspect that Aleksic was referring to in his video—incels.is—is run by a black man. Men who identify as incels come from all walks of life, believe many different things, and can’t be easily boxed into one definitive type.

These communities have the potential to cause real harm.⁴ Just last week, I read a suicide note posted in an incel community on X. I don’t know if it was genuine, but what’s important is that it was plausible. The person in question claimed they were ending their life because they were blackpilled on height. But it really is worth noting that it’s not exclusively or even primarily far-right white guys looking to brainwash and take over the country. The Incelosphere is sprawling and complicated.

More importantly, the “trojan horse” theory makes it sound way more organized than it actually is. There’s no centralized Incel Authority or even Incel Culture.

So here’s my “yes and,” to Aleksic’s video:

• This slang spreads organically. A lot of these spaces blow up because they tap into real anxieties. So, part of the reason it’s spread into the mainstream is because incels are mainstream. An interesting complement to this is women who join radical feminist communities. On Tumblr and during the Blogosphere, radfem content took off as an alternative to mainstream feminism—that is, sex positive and trans-inclusive feminism. Today, it’s not only a reaction to millennial feminism, but also a refuge for women who grew up marinating in “red pill” content.
  

• Media coverage amplifies everything and creates pernicious feedback loops. Remember the alt-right? The more outlets covered them, the more curious people got. I strongly believe that CNN, Vice, MSNBC, etc. coverage created the alt-right as much as the internet did. Had they not been a traveling sideshow to reporters, it may have remained an obscure subculture. Back in 2015, the media was doing everything in its power to make these people look cool. That same attention amplified #GamerGate. Same thing with incels! So, people start using this language because it feels transgressive. Plenty more start using it because we’ve been talking about it for over a decade. For some useful context: the incel panic started when my geriatric ass was an undergrad. Chew on that!
  

• Relatedly, the internet is a source of inspiration for artists, podcasters, hipsters, and hipster podcasters. There’s a very real Internet → Underground Culture pipeline. These groups adopt incel aesthetics and language to look edgy, avant-garde, like they uniquely “get it,” whatever. So that’s another vector.
  

• Influencers know their audience. Content creators who notice they have incel or incel-adjacent followers will speak directly to them—sometimes to help, sometimes to profit, sometimes both. Sometimes they are part of these communities themselves. See reason #1.

Aleksic’s video is under two minutes long, and he’s brilliant at what he does. I’m not just saying that, either. His book, Algospeak, probably captures all this messiness and contradiction. But in this particular video, while the gatekeeping observation was spot-on, he at least appears to miss how chaotic and unplanned most of this really is.

AI and Attachment Theory. h/t

Rob Brooks

@ A Natural History of the Future. Researchers at Waseda University have published a study that shows people form measurable emotional bonds with generative AI and that those bonds follow similar attachment patterns to human relationships.

They first ran a pilot survey with 56 Chinese adults who already used LLMs. On the classic WHOTO checklist, 75% said they would “count on AI for advice” when they were struggling, 20% would turn to it for comfort when upset, and 39% felt they could “always count on” it—functions normally played by close human relationships.

Building on that pilot, the team created a seven-item Experiences in Human-AI Relationships Scale (EHARS) and validated it with a new sample of 242 participants. AI-specific attachment scores sit on their own track. In the 242-person validation sample, AI-attachment anxiety overlaps only modestly with human-attachment anxiety and AI-attachment avoidance shows no reliable link to human-attachment avoidance. But once you look within the AI relationship, the classic patterns re-appear. Higher AI-attachment anxiety goes with lower self-esteem, whereas higher AI-attachment avoidance predicts cooler attitudes toward AI and less frequent chatbot use.

In other words, your style of attaching to AI is largely separate from how you attach to people, but once that style is in place it operates according to the same logic: anxiety maps onto a shaky self-model, and avoidance maps onto distrust and disengagement—just as interpersonal attachment theory would predict.

Why does this matter? Provided the results aren’t culturally specific, it helps us spot who might be vulnerable to manipulative design or, conversely, who might benefit from using AI as a low-stakes space to practice healthier relationship habits.

Like

Leah (Prime)

and I discussed when evaluating friend.com—maybe there is hope yet for LLMs to be “training wheels” for the socially anxious:

Traumagotchi Redeemed?

Objects and Waifus of Our Affection. Last week, I gave a talk at VISIONS NYC about animism, fictosexuality, and what they have to do with commerce. Oldhead readers will already be familiar with the term—it’s one of my favorite topics. But if you’re not, fictosexuality is when people develop romantic or sexual feelings for fictional characters.

An article in Clausius Scientific Press argues that fictosexuality rests on three intertwined dynamics:

• Mediated social interaction, which lets people practice relating to others (there it is again!)

• Emotional compensation when real world ties feel unsafe or unsatisfying

• Identity exploration freed from real life constraints.

The authors highlight the positive side of these bonds: emotional support and community. But they also remind us that companies know exactly how to exploit these emotional connections.

In other words, your waifu isn’t just a character—she’s a business model.

Machines don’t fear the blackpill… nor does the wind, the sun, or the rain…

1. I’m in a very anxious headspace right now. The Buddhism → efilism → AI relationship marathon has been mentally and emotionally taxing… WHAT is the meaning of life? WHY humans?!

2. Especially since I’m not sure I’m in any position to be “well, actually-ing” anyone…

3. This gatekeeping exists on a spectrum and on the more extreme end, goes beyond just words. There are groups on platforms as public as X that “haze” new members by making them post or engage with loli, CSAM, or animal torture videos. As Bx Writes has reported extensively, there are predatory networks that publicly and privately coax young people into cutting words into their skin. Very long way of saying, the gatekeeping is real, and it ranges from harmless jargon all the way to disturbing and even illegal content.

4. I also wonder which incel forum he “infiltrated.” If it’s incels.is, the one that’s owned by the same guy who owns Sanctioned Suicide, that’s a whole other ball of wax. To untangle the incel web—the honeypots, the corruption, the scandals—would take several newsletters.