The War That Was Installed

There is a particular kind of conversation that happens online every day, millions of times, in slightly different costumes. A woman describes a frustration — men won't commit, men won't grow up, men have checked out — and a chorus agrees. A man describes a mirror-image frustration — women are impossible to please, the rules keep changing, the whole game is rigged — and his own chorus agrees. The two conversations almost never meet. When they do, it is to confirm what each already believed: that the other side is the problem.

I want to suggest something that will sound, at first, like an evasion, and is in fact the opposite. The conversation is real. The frustration is real. The loneliness underneath it is real. But the framing — the part where the other sex is the cause — is not something either side worked out for themselves. It was installed. And the people who installed it are not men, and they are not women. They are the owners of the machines through which most of us now conduct the most intimate business of our lives.

This is the argument I have spent ten books making, and it is the argument this newsletter will keep making, from new angles, every week. So it is worth stating plainly, once, at the start.

The diagnosis everyone gets wrong

If you ask the internet what has gone wrong between men and women, you will get two confident answers, and they are mirror images. One says men have failed — they are less ambitious, less reliable, less willing to commit than their fathers were. The other says women have failed — they are too demanding, too distracted by options, too quick to discard. Each answer has its data, its anecdotes, its influencers, its merchandise. Each is delivered with the certainty of someone who has cracked the case.

They cannot both be right in the way they think they are. But they can both be describing something true while misattributing its cause — and that, I think, is exactly what is happening. Men really are withdrawing; the figures on male labour-force participation, friendship, and dating are not invented. Women really are exhausted and wary; the figures on the second shift, on harassment, on the rising distress of young women are not invented either. Both sides are reporting real injuries. What neither side tends to notice is that the injuries point, on inspection, to a common source that is neither of them.

The mistake is not in the noticing. It is in the next step — the reflex that says: I am struggling, therefore someone did this to me, and the obvious candidate is the people standing on the other side of the divide. That reflex feels like analysis. It is closer to a magic trick, and we are the audience, looking exactly where we have been directed to look.

Follow the incentives, not the outrage

Here is the part people resist, because it is less satisfying than blame. Most of us now meet, court, compare ourselves, and fall in and out of love through a small number of products owned by a small number of companies. Those products are free to use, which means we are not the customer. Our attention is the product, and it is sold to advertisers. The single metric that matters to the businesses involved is engagement — time on app, scrolls, returns.

Now ask the uncomfortable question. What kind of emotional state keeps a person scrolling? Not contentment. Contented people put the phone down and go to dinner. What keeps a person scrolling is a low-grade, unresolved agitation — grievance, comparison, the itch of an argument not quite won, the suspicion that someone out there is doing better or behaving worse than they should. An information environment optimised for engagement is, necessarily, an environment optimised for that agitation. It does not have to intend to set men and women against each other. It only has to notice that content which does so performs well, and serve more of it. The algorithm is not a misogynist or a misandrist. It is an accountant.

So the war between the sexes is not, mostly, a war between the sexes. It is what an attention economy produces when it points its engagement machinery at the most charged subject human beings have — how we love each other — and discovers that conflict converts better than peace. The contempt you feel for the other half of humanity was, to a degree that should genuinely free you, manufactured upstream of you and delivered to your feed because it kept you there.

This does not make anyone a saint

I want to be careful here, because this argument can be misused, and I would rather disarm the misuse than pretend it away. To say the war was installed is not to say that every individual behaves well, that all grievances are equal, or that structural explanation excuses personal cruelty. People remain responsible for how they treat each other. A man who is contemptuous is still contemptuous; a woman who is cruel is still cruel. The machine explains the climate, not every act of weather within it.

Nor is this an argument that men and women have no real differences to negotiate. They do — about labour, about safety, about what each owes the other in a world where the old scripts have dissolved and no new ones have been agreed. Those are real questions, and they are hard. But they are negotiable questions, the kind two people of goodwill could actually work through — and the war makes them unanswerable, precisely by turning the other party from a negotiating partner into an enemy. You cannot write a fair agreement with someone you have been trained to see as the saboteur.

What changes when you see it

The reason this matters — the reason I think it is worth a newsletter, and ten books, and your attention for a few minutes each week — is that the framing determines what you can do next.

If the other sex is the problem, there is nothing to do but defend your side, score points, and withdraw further into the company of people who already agree with you. That is the path the machine is quietly steering everyone down, because it is the path that keeps everyone engaged and miserable and scrolling. It has no exit, which is the point.

If the system is the problem, the picture changes. You can see the other person across the table as someone depleted from the opposite direction — grieving losses you were trained not to notice, standing on the far side of a divide that something in the middle profits from widening. You can stop mistaking the climate for the character of the people caught in it. And you can begin, in your own relationships, the small and unglamorous work the machine has no interest in: paying attention to one actual person instead of comparing them to an infinite feed, protecting a little privacy, refusing to perform your intimacy for an audience that was never on your side.

None of that is easy, and I am not selling a cure. The systems are powerful and the difficulty is real, and I have never wanted to write the kind of book — or the kind of essay — that only reports the convenient findings. But the first step out is available to anyone, and it costs nothing: stop mistaking the war for nature. Once you have seen that the contempt was installed rather than earned, you cannot quite unsee it. And seeing it, I have come to believe, is where everything else begins.