Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie

The incel community, just coming to the fore when Cambridge Analytica was being established, was the kind of group he had in mind. Incels, or “involuntary celibates,” were men who felt ignored and chastised by a society—particularly women—that did not value average men anymore. An offshoot of the Men’s Rights Movement, the incel community was in part propelled by the increasing economic inequality depriving young millennial men from accessing the same kinds of well-paying jobs their fathers had. This economic deprivation was coupled with increasingly unattainable body image standards for men in conventional and social media (without the same public recognition of male body issues or gendered pressures as for women) and the growing importance placed on physical looks in a dating scene increasingly defined by swiping left or right on a split-second glance at a photo. And as women had become more economically independent, they could afford to be more selective about their partners. Deprived of good looks and a respectable paycheck, “average men” faced a hard reality of constant romantic rejection.