A new book examines how digital media turned an ‘incel’ support group into a misogynistic nightmare

The incel movement is a perfect case study of what can happen when an initially innocent group of lonely people looking for kinship and support get twisted and perverted through the amplification and extremification of digital media.

I’ve said earlier that social media has become a seemingly sentient organism that feeds off our primal id and then regurgitates those baser impulses back to us in high-octane form, not only intensified but veiled by the normalcy of “community” – Hey, look, others feel this way, too!

Today, on the so-called dark web, there are all sorts of groups catering to the once socially outcast; entire virtual communities devotedto everything from bondage enthusiasts, to cannibalism, to pedophile groups, to all manner of fetishes and/or deviancies. Some might say, “Hey, it’s not such a bad thing to have certain fetish enthusiasts come out of the shame, isolation, and darkness of their innermost and socially unacceptable impulses and come up into the warm bathing light of fellow peers who feel the same way. After all, our need to find community and a like-minded tribe is embedded in our psychological DNA.” And that may be true for all sorts of fetishes, as many fetish groups are fairly innocuous, and,...

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