Clicks, not conviction, are really driving hate
There are some obvious differences in personal deportment, political orientation and muscle mass. But watching Louis Theroux’s parade of lunkheaded manosphere influencers — all skintight suits, neolithic theories of gender relations and sub-Del Boy schemes to get rich — I felt a whisper of recognition.
I am, I hope, a long way from Inside the Manosphere but anyone who depends for their livelihood on a public profile is familiar with the tyranny of the attention economy. Having spent the early part of my career obsessing over likes, retweets and page views, I know the insanity the preoccupation brings. Theroux’s influencers, some of whom broadcast for seven hours a day, live for the algorithm. They stand in the full roar of the hurricane of comments, likes and shares from which most of us would recoil.
Everything is measurable nowadays. And nothing is more carefully monitored than popularity. The average social media post has its vital signs tracked with hospital ward sensitivity. In 2026 mere “likes” are as old-fashioned a metric as those barometers you get in hallways of country house hotels. YouTube supplies its “content creators” with a series of space-age dashboards recording watch time, reach, average view duration and impressions.
Attention has always been desirable. It is becoming a dangerously unchallenged cultural force, displacing every other measure of value. It is, after all, so eminently quantifiable. Morality is subjective. Entertainment is subjective. Aesthetic value is subjective. But attention is hard inarguable currency (literally so for those influencers who succeed in channelling their followers on to trading platforms and gambling sites).
Nobody understands the uncompromising logic of attention better than the world’s most popular YouTuber James Donaldson, aka MrBeast, who issued a handbook to his employees advising them how to make successful videos. A 20thcentury media enterprise would have supplied its staff with chirpy instructions to entertain viewers. Donaldson is focused only on the utilitarian business of retaining eyeballs. His workers are instructed: “Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.” Rather, they are to concentrate on metrics: “Click Thru Rate (CTR), Average View Duration (AVD), and Average View Percentage (AVP)”.
I think there is a cultural change here. Once upon a time even the most grasping Z-lister would have hesitated to publicly admit their only aim was notoriety. There was a social obligation to talk, however hypocritically, about wanting to make people happy or make the world a better place. As Theroux’s main exhibit, the influencer HSTikkyTokky (his alias conveys his unembarrassable character) remarks, the sole point of his career is to acquire attention “and with the attention I get more fame” which he can “monetise”. In a recent interview Theroux commented that although influencers were generally dismissive of him, “You get credit when they see how big your social media following is”.
To many, Tate’s cigarsand-cars lifestyle make him a diverting buffoon
Hipsters, pseudo-bohemians and lovers of indie music could once be relied on to look down on “sellouts” and grifters. Such people were obnoxious but they provided useful support for values other than popularity. Their cultural influence is waning. Preposterous “Romantasy” novels must be taken seriously because they command eyeballs on TikTok. In music, the influential “poptimism” movement insists that mass-produced pop singers must be treated with the same critical reverence as independent artists. That one-time redoubt of indie sneering, the music review website Pitchfork, recently rewrote a number of old reviews to award higher scores to commercial pop stars.
Attention does not mean popularity. For many influencers the idea isn’t even to acquire fans. Teacher friends tell me Andrew Tate isn’t taken as universally seriously by young men as anxious commentators assume. To many, Tate’s cigars-andcars lifestyle and extreme opinions make him not an object of emulation but a diverting buffoon. This is the attention economy and the point is not to be liked or admired (subjective, unmeasurable and therefore useless qualities). What matters is clicks and views, even if it requires you to transform yourself into a carnival grotesque for the amusement of 13-year-old boys.
The logic of attention is its own morality. After filming himself and some friends beating up a man, the influencer Ed Matthews comments contentedly to Theroux: “Few thousand watching.” As Theroux says, these men seem to be in “an inflationary spiral of racism and bigotry in order to get people’s attention”. For many, the idea that attention trumps every other value is merely a statement of the obvious. A “content creator” recently interviewed by the news outlet London Centric for spreading viral misinformation about migrants explained he was not driven by politics or racial animus but by the observation that far-right content is “among the most engaged on TikTok” — which brought him to the pragmatic conclusion that “hate brings views”.
Because our society struggles to articulate any vision of a good or meaningful life, the void is filled by what can be measured, which is attention. The problem is compounded by the automation of the media landscape. The minimum that could be said for the old gatekeeping class of newspaper editors and TV producers was that they were human and therefore cared about human things like entertainment, fun and education. All algorithms can measure is brute likes and views ticking up on a screen. Those whose careers are driven by algorithms end up adopting the pitiless values of the machine: the numbers are all that matter.
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