The Real Crisis Young Men Are Facing Today

If you aren’t on X — or Twitter, if you insist on deadnaming it — you will often be surprised to learn about the kinds of things people are arguing about on that platform. In many cases, the debates do not resemble anything that anyone outside of the site is talking about. These debates are often insular and parochial. Groups of people will get into heated disputes that last sometimes for weeks or months or longer, and yet which have no relevance beyond the confines of the platform itself.

I’ll give just one example of millions. Among Right-wingers on X, there has been a long running and quite tedious quarrel over the term “Woke Right.” Various groups of conservatives are accusing each other of being “Woke Right,” as they debate what the term means, and whether it describes anything real. I don’t know where this “Woke Right” idea comes from, but I do know that I’ve never heard a single soul in the three dimensional, physical world ever use the phrase or express any opinion on it one way or another. There are relatively prominent conservatives on X who have spent months locked in combat over a concept that has no real political or cultural relevance whatsoever. Nobody cares about it but them. Needless to say, there are a great many examples of this sort of thing. And even less do I need to say that I have myself been guilty of arguing about things on X that nobody outside of the app cares about. I might even sometimes be the one starting the argument, admittedly.