The internet looks right-wing

David Foster Wallace’s speech to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College begins with this “didactic little parable-ish story” (← his words):

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

It’s a bit corny to cite DFW, particularly the first few sentences of his best known work (🥴) but it feels germane both to “the moment” the U.S. is entering (broadly defined) and the interests of this newsletter: video games, the internet and media (i.e. concerns that are basically analogous to “the water” in DFW’s anecdote for a meaningful portion of young people).

A disclaimer: It is in my professional best interest to tread carefully with respect to what I write here. I’m not a political scientist, nor a data analyst. As I write this, we don’t even have a final vote tally. If you’re skeptical of takes written within 24 hours of an election, join the club. Me too! Still, this is a vibes-based newsletter, and I write this newsletter because I like writing. I’m jotting this down quickly, to capture a feeling. I reserve the right to change my mind about what I’ve written here as more data flows in.¹

A lot has been said already about the rightward swing among young men in the U.S. A Wall Street Journal analysis of partial voting data found that in the 18-29 demographic, men shifted nearly 30 points to the right between 2020 and 2024, from +15 D to +14 R. At a glance, this mirrors broader trends; the election obviously can’t be explained just by the shifting preferences of young men. But on the subject of young men, there are some obvious culprits — household names, many of them — who commentators have already blamed for the shift: Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, Elon Musk, Barstool, Jake and Logan Paul, Adin Ross and the broader right-wing or right-curious male comedy/self-improvement content ecosystem.²

The shift can’t be blamed entirely on these people, for several reasons. First and most obviously, younger male voters could have plausibly turned to Trump for reasons that have nothing to do with media consumption³ , ranging from sensible Political Scientist Approved reasons like “The Economy,” to stupid reasons that boil down to plain old trolling, i.e. picking what a young man might consider the funniest or dumbest or most ~countercultural~ or ~non-woke~ outcome.

But also (and this is me, as someone just barely outside of the 18-29 category, extrapolating from my own consumption habits) I don’t believe that young male media consumers are uniformly malleable, or that they fully absorb the ideological content of the creators they follow. Sometimes I’ll be listening to a podcast and I’ll notice the hosts getting some newsy fact wrong, or maybe I won’t agree with their political or cultural analysis. Still, I remain a fan because I find the hosts funny or just familiar after years of engaging with them. For a lot of reasons, I hope this is true of young men more broadly. (Counterpoint-ing myself here: This theory probably runs both ways. If there are people who identify ideological gaps between themselves and the content creators they like and do not succumb to the pressure to close that gap, there must also be people who do not have any strongly-held ideological convictions who immediately adopt their favorite celebrity’s politics.)

The individual actions of all of these prominent and broadly-right-wing male celebrities are important, and I’m sure there will be no shortage of media coverage of the new class of kingmakers in the next few years. But also, I think it’s worth widening the aperture somewhat.

My experience of the internet growing up was this: When I was figuring myself out online, I definitely leaned edgy — some of which manifested as watching (or more often, reading about) graphic snuff videos, and then talking about that with friends. Over time though, millennials online matured, picking up a ~nicer~ affect. There are plenty of examples of this (Think: any content creator with a Markiplier haircut) but one particularly instructive example of this shift was how many Call of Duty content creators at the time pivoted to mushy lib-coded sentimentality in the form of “I’m a slightly older guy doling out advice” videos. (Think: WoodysGamertag, Seananners, Hutch⁴ ).

These videos were totally lo-fi, just gameplay clips with narration set over the top. (In retrospect, though, these were a shockingly highbrow antecedent to the barren stream clip culture we’re living in now). At the same time, the right-wing, which frequently did and still does lament its supposedly diminished place in culture, was building an alternative media online. These upstarts were cursed with a patina of unseriousness, because they were measured aesthetically and in terms of their actual product against the professionalism of their major competitors.⁵

The pubescence of right-wing alt media coincided, however, with that of the major online platforms (by which I mostly mean YouTube and other video platforms, which are generally more popular than the text-based ones, in my view). As the right-wing commentariat developed on these major social platforms, it borrowed from and contributed to the development of an online visual language. And so, the style of the online right (the camera angles, the studio setups, the lighting, etc.) that once looked chintzy relative to TV production slowly scaled up and was polished into what it is now: the dominant look of online content. Even when the speakers are quite extreme, the style is largely indistinguishable from a Marques Brownlee video.⁶

This all feels a bit chicken-or-the-egg to me, but generally, the ~algorithm~ encourages borrowing from content that succeeds, which means every time right-wing content succeeds — and it does this very frequently on platforms like YouTube, and, now that it’s owned by a right-wing ideologue, Twitter — other creators are incentivized to replicate that success, through form as well as content. The left does not really have a comparable operation or place in that ecosystem.

When I woke up this morning, I immediately turned to Instagram and started watching Reels (a very bad habit of mine). Already, there were triumphalist Fortnite memes about “Donald Pump” defeating “Kamala Highground” in a “1v1.” My instinct — and maybe this is naive — is that the person who made the video (a child?) does not have strong ideological convictions, but is instead aping the dominant comedic and visual modes of this era. That’s water.

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1. Speaking of writing: I’m appending a little editors note, and I’m doing it here because 1) I know the real Grevheads will find the footnote and 2) I think it’s a bit self-important to put a “here’s how I’m doing these days” update at the top of a newsletter with a headline; presumably, that’s what people are clicking to read about. As you may have noticed, I haven’t published in a while. I wrote a lot this summer — more than I thought I would or could. Things slowed down after my Concord piece. I don’t think it’s bad, but the kind of analysis I did in that piece doesn’t really come naturally to me, and I wrote it mostly to retain the momentum of the previous weeks. In the end, I felt a bit disillusioned by the whole thing. On a brighter note: I’m biking and playing tennis more! I’m doing ~career planning~! There’s a lot going on! (← I wrote this last sentence before the election results. Still true!) The list of stories I’d like to write grows virtually every week, not to mention the pieces already in progress. There’s a book review I’m wrapping up, a podcast segment I’m scripting that is way behind schedule (all apologies to the producers who commissioned me), a story in the works that I expect will run on some other website for legal liability reasons that will become clear later, some interviews being scheduled for an informal series I’m hoping to introduce soon, etcetera, etcetera. I’m still here. I want to keep writing. Stick around.

2. I think the “zynternet,” as described by Max Read, criss-crosses with this larger grouping without being a part of it.

3. I grant that these choices can be informed by media consumption, but in drawing the distinction, I’m specifically talking about people whose views have not been “informed” in that exact way.

4. I have not checked in on all of these creators’ current political views. I would not be shocked if they’ve changed.

5. I want to be super clear as I write this sentence that this is my impression of that time. Perhaps the historical record will show that everyone really loved early PragerU and Daily Wire videos and that they looked great. That is not how I remember that time, though.

6. AI generated images also kind of fall into this category, because they’re virtually nonexistent in left-leaning messaging, and are thereby mostly shared by tech-positive hobbyists and reactionaries with very weird messages.