The Bright Forest: Social Media, Trans Activism, and a No-Truth World

Our first community sensemaking call will be announced on Monday, so keep an eye on your inbox if you’re a paid subscriber. On Saturday 27 April, I’m co-facilitating a one day men’s retreat in London, more info here.

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The old stories warn us about enticing places. Hansel and Gretel walk hand in hand to the candy-covered cabin deep in the woods. A wanderer is lured by beautiful music to a fairy knoll. He loses himself in a strange world where weeks of his life pass as hours. There comes a pivotal moment when our protagonists realise they are hopelessly trapped by what first appeared beautiful, and have to draw on cunning and courage to escape.

This is the moment we’re facing in the story of the internet. In recent months, psychologists, philosophers, and academics have been decrying the negative impact of our online lives. In Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation, he demonstrates the shocking degree to which the mental health of girls and boys has declined since the invention of the smartphone.

At the same time, a new meme has taken hold of TikTok, #socialmediaisfake, with young people sharing things they’re ashamed to admit in an attempt to regain a sense of authenticity.

Earlier this week, the NHS released a landmark study into gender-affirming care for children in the UK. Known as the Cass Report, it presents a damning indictment of the way some clinicians have allowed ideology to take priority over evidence-based medicine. The report places part of the blame on the toxic social media narratives around gender identity, which created a culture of silence in which people were too afraid to question trans-activists.

What binds these events is our increasing recognition that we are living two lives; an online life and an embodied life. As the gap widens, we are pulled further and further from our sense of being at home in the world. We struggle to understand what is real and true, and the internet, which once seemed so beautiful, is revealed to be a dark and twisted place.

The gingerbread house is rotting, and the witch draws near. The fairies drag us by the ankle into a world not our own, and we have to draw on all our guile to claw our way back to open skies. But in an age when the internet is entangled with so much of our lives, how do we free ourselves? 

It’s actually very simple.

Zen and a No-Truth World

Escape is so simple, in fact, that it is not the subject of this piece. Instead, I will be exploring what we can learn from the unprecedented breach of internet ideology into the real world in the last decade, and what it can teach us about how to approach social technologies in the future.

This is a more interesting line of inquiry, because escape is so simple as to barely be worth mentioning. To free ourselves from the confusion wrought by the internet, we just have to come back to the reality of our bodies. To pay attention to what is here right now, which is and always will be rooted in the reality of our senses.

Stop scrolling. Listen to the sounds around you. Feel the swell of your breath. Touch the vast and mysterious landscape of your emotions. This is freedom, and it is with you in every moment. When you pay attention to life without reacting or categorising, you have escaped. You have touched reality. There is a Zen saying that ‘The sound of the raindrops needs no translation.’ 

But this way of being that is completely inimical to the internet, which demands that we make the raindrops our own. Have an opinion about them. Post them, like them, scroll past them. Compare them, share them. Then do it again and again and again, adding to the churning sea of emotion, outrage, bright lights and spectacle. 

The internet has become a bullshit-generating entity.

I am using the word ‘bullshit’ as defined by Harry Frankfurt in his 2005 essay On Bullshit. Bullshit is different to lying; a liar cares about the truth in that they are intentionally trying to manipulate it. The bullshitter doesn’t care about truth, but about how they are perceived and how much they can convince others.

The internet is full of bullshit opinions. Bullshit faces hidden by Instagram filters. Bullshit posts about how great your life is. More bullshit about how the last bullshit you posted was in fact bullshit, because you are actually really struggling and #socialmediaisfake. Another layer of dopamine-laden bullshit when you post about how touched you are about the way everyone responded to the authentic bullshit you just posted.

To date, this process has been largely user-generated, but will soon be AI-generated at a scale we’ve never seen. We stand on the shore beneath a rising bullshit tsunami: self-generating AI will create endless videos, music, images, writing, flooding us with layer upon layer of made up ideas, symbols, ideologies, dopamine hits, hot-takes and bullshit opinions until we can’t breathe. At that point, we will have moved beyond post-truth, and into a no-truth world.

Or, we could close our eyes and listen to the patter of rain on leaves.

Another option is to find places to hide within the internet. In 2019, Yancey Strickler named this phenomenon the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. The idea comes from the sci-fi book Three Body Problem (now a Netflix series) which answers the Fermi paradox (the question of why we haven’t encountered intelligent life) by suggesting that intelligent life doesn’t broadcast itself to avoid being attacked by other species. In the same way, a mouse stays very quiet in a dark forest. Strickler argued that the level of discourse had become so toxic on the mainstream internet, and the threat of cancellation so pervasive, that people were retreating into dark forests, for example WhatsApp conversations or Zoom rooms, because they “provide psychological and reputational cover. They allow us to be ourselves because we know who else is there.” 

We may choose to unplug, or we may choose to retreat into dark forests. Whatever we decide, and however the internet evolves in the future, we would do well to look back at the last decade and learn its lessons. 

The most pressing one is the same we learn in most stories. It’s about the relationship between men and women. 

Gender and Tumblr

Nothing occupies our unconscious minds as much as the polarity between feminine and masculine. It is so deeply rooted in our biology and social dynamics that it finds endless expression through our stories, our technology and our dreams. As we reflect on what our online lives have become, it should come as no surprise to find they have been defined by tensions around sex, gender and power.

The internet, for all of its bright madness, is a reflection of our collective unconscious, and an amplifier. I have argued elsewhere that we are living in The Age of Breach; a time when unconscious ideas, fantasies and ideologies form in our disembodied online worlds and then breach into physical reality. When that happens, they last for a while and quickly fizzle out.

But not always.

As internet theorist Katherine Dee has pointed out, our modern ideas about gender identity and pop-psychology were largely birthed in the 2010’s on the messaging board called Tumblr. Many LGBTQ+ people found a safe haven on the site, and the idea of being recognised and celebrated for the gender you identify as grew in popularity. Concepts like ‘safe spaces’, ‘trigger warnings’, ‘cis-gender,’ and many more emerged from the platform.

A defining tenet of the space was that our true identity can be detached from our physical bodies, cultural backgrounds and historical contexts. That identity was, in essence, something like being on the internet: disembodied, free-flowing, imaginative and primarily situated in the realm of thought and feeling.

For a while, Tumblr was a safe haven for a mainly female and LGBTQ+ audience who felt disconnected, disenfranchised and unwelcome in mainstream society. It was a place where they could find others like them and freely express themselves, meeting basic human needs they often couldn’t in their geographical locations, and drawing courage and support in the process. As Dale Beran points out in It Came from Something Awful:

“Young people struggling to find a group that accepted them created groups that championed ‘radical acceptance' - their creed, everyone should be accepted for being different, unless of course you didn’t believe this, in which case you were out of the group…. Teens used this core belief in the right to define oneself (and the software’s invitation to so) as their system of defining themselves… the end result was a philosophy that emphasized an ultra-respect for personal identity and other’s viewpoints.”  

Fierce arguments raged over how far this concept could stretch. For example, some users began to identify as a ‘otherkin’, a non-human entity that was the true nature of their soul. As one user explained in 2014:

“My kintypes, or theriotypes, are me. I am a badger, a jackrabbit, and a bat. (Not physically, but I identify as them.) For me, I identify as them for spiritual reasons while others may identify as their kintypes for psychological reasons. We identify as animals or other beings because we experience urges and thoughts that we characterize as nonhuman….Kintypes are not choices; they are what we are at some psychological or spiritual level.”

While this culture was ascendant on Tumblr, another messaging board, 4Chan, was going in the opposite direction. For a while the site of radical left-activism and the home of the Anonymous hacker group, in the middle of the 2010’s the community started to become dark and twisted. As Beran points out: “Tumblr’s moral code became the exact inversion of the values of the adolescent boys of 4Chan, who eschewed identity and insisted that nothing was sacred.”

Many of the frustrated adolescent boys of 4Chan became isolated, hateful of women and the Chads (high-status men) who they felt they could never be. As Beran points out, they eventually birthed the Alt-Right and other similar movements, and had a not inconsiderable role in helping get Trump elected.

Of Boys and Girls

4Chan and Tumblr are extreme examples of a dynamic that has been playing out on the internet for the last decade. As Jonathan Haidt argues in The Anxious Generation, since the advent of the smartphone in 2010, adolescent mental health has declined significantly. However, it hasn’t affected girls and boys in the same way. As Haidt points out, men and women are psychologically similar in many ways, but we do differ in at least two domains. On the whole, men orient more to agency, and women orient more to communion. He points to a 2019 review by Chen et al that describes these two traits:  

“Agency arises from striving to individuate and expand the self and involves qualities such as efficiency, competence, and assertiveness. Communion arises from striving to integrate the self in a larger social unit through caring for others and involves qualities such as benevolence, cooperativeness, and empathy.”

Partly because of this, women have gravitated more toward social media while men have gravitated more toward video games. Each technology meets communion and agency needs respectively. However, it is in our social networks, not our video games, where most of the cultural change has taken place over the last decade, in part because it amplifies emotions and ideas at an incredible rate. 

As Haidt explains, “People pick up emotions from others, and emotional contagion is especially strong among girls.” One striking study he points to suggests that you are affected by the emotions of people in your social network up to three degrees of separation. If your friend’s friend is depressed, it might have an effect on you even though you don’t know them. 

Social media further amplifies these dynamics. It also amplifies how we act on “prestige bias,” our penchant to try to emulate the person in a network who is getting the most attention. As Haidt points out, “On social media, the way to gain followers and likes is to be more extreme, so those who present with more extreme symptoms are likely to rise fastest, making them the models that everyone else locks onto for social learning.”

Children began to see influencers who ascribed to the new gender-fluid ideologies, while films and TV all simultaneously put out a narrative that gender-affirming care was to be celebrated in all circumstances. This created a new kind of cultural norm, one that demanded radical acceptance on its own terms, and which championed the fluidity of identity as an immutable fact that transcended biology, culture and nuance.

This sparked a quiet reaction in the political centre and a loud reaction on the political right. The man-children of 4Chan became convinced that we are living in an overly-feminised world. These arguments were often mired in bitterness and misogyny, but they also touched on some socio-economic truths.

The idea that we’re living in a world inimical to male psychology is fast-moving from incel-controversy to serious academic study. It is now widely established that men are falling behind women in multiple domains. As Richard Reeves argues in Of Boys and Men, this is due to deep economic structures and cultural changes over the last fifty years. 

What is particularly interesting is how this plays out online, and how that in turn creates modern culture. Cory Clark is a behavioural scientist and Executive Director and Co-Founder of The Adversarial Collaboration Research Center at University of Pennsylvania. In a recent conversation with Louise Perry, she explained how more traditionally feminine values are changing academia and other public institutions. 

“People [can be] more socially expendable in women's psychology than in men's psychology. Men, because they evolved in these large coalitions and they were competing with other groups for status and resources, benefited from having maximally large coalitions. So they couldn't afford to just be kicking people out of the group left and right, because those are people who can potentially help in large coalitional competition. 

Women, on the other hand, benefited more if they had fiercely loyal and safe, small social groups. So they would not want anyone in their social circle who posed a potential risk to them. And so women should be more inclined to just boot people out permanently and forever if they signal any sign to others that they're potentially risky or disloyal.

The cancel culture strategy of this total and permanent ostracism if a person says something wrong or does something wrong, is something that would be more aligned with the female psychology of making sure I have a small but good group rather than the male approach, which would be as big of a group as possible within certain boundaries, so long as people are still contributing something.”

Social media is used more by women than men, and selects for female strategies of connection and conflict resolution over male strategies. A specific consequence of this in the social conversation around gender, and many other topics, was to create a culture of silence, in which contradiction resulted in exclusion. This is not a commentary on the relative values around how men and women relate, but on how social media twists our desires for communion and agency beyond recognition.

For years, any clinicians or commentators who argued that we have to be very careful with the treatment of children coming out as trans because clinical complexity outweighed internet ideology were labelled as bigots and transphobes. Trans-influencers gained status and celebration from the wider culture, and the writing rooms of the major TV and film studios and the HR rooms of most major corporations adopted an internet ideology as unquestioned moral obligation and social fact. Across the social and political spectrum, people were either swept up in an emotional tidal wave or into rage-filled rejection of that wave.

This had significant and long-lasting real world consequences. In the Cass Report, the author points out that some clinicians were so afraid of being condemned as transphobic that they failed to provide adequate evidence-based care to vulnerable children, and that the toxicity of the other side of the debate had a significant impact as well. In some cases, clinicians provided irreversible medical procedures to children based on ideological assumptions rather than a medical evidence-base. 

Gender Critical Feminism

This points to a deeper tension in the modern psyche that has been enhanced by our online lives: whether we’re defined by ourselves, or by the world. Whether we can choose who we are down the deepest levels, or whether we are innately moulded by circumstances beyond us.

Few commentators highlight this tension more than JK Rowling, who has been attacked by trans activists for years for arguing from a gender-critical feminist position. Recently, Rowling challenged a controversial new Scottish hate crime law and was told she wouldn’t be arrested for her gender-critical views. Shortly after she was asked to explain her position, and released a viral statement on X:

“I believe a woman is a human being who belongs to the sex class that produces large gametes…Some people feel strongly that they should have been, or wish to be seen as, the sex class into which they weren't born. Gender dysphoria is a real and very painful condition and I feel nothing but sympathy for anyone who suffers from it. I want them to be free to dress and present themselves however they like and I want them to have exactly the same rights as every other citizen regarding housing, employment and personal safety. 

I do not, however, believe that surgeries and cross-sex hormones literally turn a person into the opposite sex, nor do I believe in the idea that each of us has a nebulous ‘gender identity’ that may or might not match our sexed bodies. I believe the ideology that preaches those tenets has caused, and continues to cause, very real harm to vulnerable people.”

I have always agreed with the fundamentals of Rowling’s position, but had a sense that she is missing something as well. While researching this piece, I got in touch with Kai Cheng Thom, an award-winning author and former clinical social worker. As a non-binary trans woman who has written about these topics in-depth, I was curious to get her take on Rowling’s statement.

“My opinion is that the gender critical movement's rhetorical focus on defining biological sex in regards to "large versus small gametes" is just that, a rhetorical device that unfortunately distracts from the real issue. Like Rowling, the gender critical movement as a whole tends to attack the construct of "gender identity," apparently as a way to dismiss transgender-related concerns as a whole. Yet the truth is that we do not need to believe in an innate gender identity in order to recognize that we live in a cultural context where gendered social roles and gender stereotypes have a very significant impact on our psychological development and material circumstances. 

The primary social struggle here is not about who has large or small gametes, it is about how we as a society should respond when somebody transgresses the gendered social role that is forced upon them because of how their biological sex is perceived. Transgender rights activism and gender critical feminism actually share a number of concerns in this regard, but both sides tend to refuse to see the commonality.”

What struck me in particular about Kai Cheng Thom’s response was her focus on what I have always seen to be the most legitimate and important aspect of the postmodern critique: the rejection of imposed social roles by a hierarchical social structure, whether that’s explicit through law or implicit through social conditioning, and the championing of marginalised perspectives and identities. 

The lived experience of trans people and their fight against enforced social norms is something that should be celebrated and supported by a compassionate society, and in my view the acceptance and support for marginalised identities is a mark of social evolution. At the same time, as Rowling points out, women have a lived experience of being women that is based in immutable biology, and that there are some realities that transcend questions about identity. 

The issue is not that people disagree vehemently on these topics, or how they should translate into policy. These debates touch on fundamental questions about what it means to be human, what compassion looks like, and what kind of society we want to build. They are, in that sense, the most important conversations we could be having. 

The issue is that the internet, by its very design, has for the last decade prevented us from being able to have the kinds of human conversations needed to find a way forward.

The way the conversation around gender-identity has played out in the last decade shows us that we have, in many ways, become homo interneticus. Our distributed cognition has been fused with the internet, and we are struggling to cope. It also shows that regardless of how we identify or what our background is, or how complex our technology becomes, the deepest polarities of the human experience stay with us. 

It is no surprise that it is trans-genderism that has been the focal point of the culture wars, when there are so many trans identities that might have been. Trans-racialism and trans-speciesism are still taboo, and Tumblr users largely rejected the idea of identities like ‘Hamilkin’ (those who spiritually identify with the cast of Hamilton) as real identities, even though the same ontological principles should apply. This might be because gender dysphoria is qualitatively different, or that these other identities don’t play with the core polarity between masculine and feminine that exists in each of our hearts.

The human experience is, and always has been, a love story between these two forces. A dance of opposites. A shimmering of ones and zeroes. Light and dark. Love and hate. It is by going deeply into this polarity that we can find the way to unshackle ourselves.

The Return of Polarity

The witch draws near, and the fairies drag us deeper. Generative AI is rushing toward us like a wave as social networks warp our children’s minds. What is the wit and guile we need to escape? It is, as is so often the case in stories; to unite the masculine and feminine archetypes.

This is essential, because the internet isn’t just a place of endless bullshit: it is also emotionally exhausting. We are experiencing a collective form of emotional fatigue, similar to compassion fatigue people experience in caring professions. The internet asks us to unendingly care, react, respond or have an opinion. It forces us into numbness and nihilism. 

An intelligent response to this is to be less swayed by our emotions, both individually and culturally. To reclaim an inner discipline, stoicism and unmoving clarity of purpose. These could be seen as traditional masculine qualities, and in a sense I am calling for a return of the archetypal masculine into culture. However, it’s important to note that both men and women are equally reactive and petty online. Ultimately, it is a question of balancing internal essences, not of sexuality.

Right now, the ordering masculine principle is lacking in culture. Stoicism, a desire to focus on action instead of feelings, and a tough-love approach to setting boundaries have all been labeled as toxic and backward. But as the bright forest of the internet becomes ever more chaotic, we need these qualities to survive. As Haidt argues in The Anxious Generation, we can find these qualities by returning to practices that help us cultivate a clarity of mind and appreciation for life beyond the screen, and to let go of the safety-ism that has defined the West’s approach to children, and life, for too long.

A key tenet of wisdom traditions centered on mindfulness practice is that thoughts aren’t facts, and neither are feelings. They are real; they tell you about your lived experience. But they are also deceptive and misleading. With the advent of generative AI and increasing political polarisation, we have little choice but to learn how to withstand waves of intense emotion without losing our sovereignty.

This means balancing the masculine and feminine essences in each of us to know when to be subsumed in feeling, and when to step back and be stoic. When to allow our imaginations to run wild with possibility, and when to feel our feet on the ground and remember what’s real. If we can find a way back to this awareness, and to fearlessly inhabit this moment, we might be able to turn our escape into a beautiful dance.