Louis Theroux’s new documentary captures the rise of online misogyny — but behind the world of far-right influencers lies the unchecked power of the tech companies and their profit-driven platforms.

Louis Theroux and HSTikkyTokky (Credit: Netflix.)

‘We live in an attention economy…with the attention I can get more fame and monetise,’ says 24-year-old Harrison Sullivan (known as HSTikkyTokky online) early on in Louis Theroux’s latest Netflix documentary, Inside The Manosphere, which explores the growing network of ultra-masculine online content creators. ‘I coach boys how to be fucking boys. How to make money. How to be outside the system, how to be your own boss…not [be] these soy boys or gimps.’ Depressingly, we are all becoming more familiar with these manosphere villains. We are also becoming more familiar with their game: misogynistic influencers who turn bigotry into extreme content, gathering followers and monetising them to generate a tidy profit.

The manosphere is often presented as an extreme, underground subculture seeping into the mainstream, terrifying parents by shaping the attitudes of young men and deepening generational gender divides. Theroux’s documentary cuts through some of this, exposing a pyramid of grifters: a small number of top-earning influencers selling a heady mix of wealth, power and bigotry; smaller creators scrambling to copy them in the hope of similar success; and followers subsidising the whole edifice with their attention, money and data. But the most important layer of the pyramid has been completely overlooked: the platform owners. To grasp the manosphere properly, we need to understand it less as an aberration of the real world and more as a reflection of how corrosive tech barons have become for our entire society.

Platform Patriarchy

The manosphere influencer dream is packaged much like other influencer lifestyles, an escape from the drudgery of the nine-to-five. It promises financial freedom, the chance to call the shots, to be your own boss. It is a way of life characterised by luxury: big, echoing, white-walled new-build apartments, fast cars, wrists adorned with sparkling Rolexes, nights out in Marbella or Dubai, and unfettered access to beautiful women who tick every beauty-standard box. They have gym-honed bodies and a level of fame and notoriety designed to appeal to young men who feel lost or invisible. Many maintain a neoliberal rhetoric fetishising ‘hard work’, but more often stress the absence of any boss to answer to. They are a law unto themselves, making money by posting their lives, extreme antics and opinions.

For aspiring manosphere creators, this framing as a cheat code out of insecure labour markets, dreary, uninspiring work and stagnant wages is understandably appealing. It is a romantic image of the entrepreneur forging his way out of economic constraint. They have escaped the ‘slave mindset’, Sullivan insists to Theroux. For a generation of young men who feel locked out of homeownership, well-paid, stable work and any meaningful social status, the manosphere offers something seductive.

A patriarchal worldview is central to the economic dream they sell. Influencer Myron Gaines, who hosts the absurd podcast ‘Fresh Fit’, attempted to justify saying things such as ‘I dictate when I put my dick in you’ when questioned by Theroux. Women ‘want a guy that can lead them and dominate them,’ he added. His shows often consist of directing a barrage of patriarchal abuse at his female guests. The promise their content makes is not just of wealth but of a restoration of male dominance, where reasserting a traditional gender hierarchy promises power, control and authority in their personal and domestic lives as well as their finances. Women’s independence is recast as authoritarian suffocation, akin to the authority of a boss. The rejection of ‘the boss’ in waged work mirrors a deeper anxiety about losing control. Economic insecurity and shifting gender norms are collapsed into the same grievance, with autonomy for others — particularly women — framed as an unnatural loss of power for men.

All of this is, of course, a fantasy. The manosphere reality is far closer to a trap than an escape from the current economic system. Even the highest-earning manosphere influencers are chained to the algorithm, constantly labouring in a digital space they do not own or control. One or two unexplained algorithmic tweaks can wipe out their visibility, relevance and income overnight. It is a hypercompetitive environment, meaning the incentive is to constantly post content that is as outrageous and boundary-pushing as possible to stand out, which helps explain why creators in the documentary, like 23-year-old Ed Matthews, have a bizarre online content portfolio that ranges from fitness to aggressive vigilante predator stings, live-streamed street flirting and conspiracy theories such as aliens building the pyramids. Some seem more bought into the bigoted ideologies than others, but perhaps believing in it or not is beside the point, because if it did not have the capacity to turn a profit, none of them would be doing it.

Digital Fiefdoms

In his book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism , economist Yanis Varoufakis describes what he sees as a new economic order in which digital platforms operate as ‘fiefdoms’, with platform owners extracting value from the activity that takes place within them like feudal landlords. It is an economic ecosystem in which there are increasingly fewer competitive markets, especially in the technology sector, and ownership is concentrated in ever fewer hands. While influencers mostly do not ‘pay rent’ to use these online spaces, they are working on digital land they do not own, generating value that others ultimately control and profit from. X owner Elon Musk (worth around $800 billion), OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky (worth $7.8 billion) and Telegram owner Pavel Durov (worth $17.1 billion) perform no labour in these digital fiefdoms, yet accrue vast quantities of valuable data and information, far exceeding that generated by influencers. Some owners, like Radvinsky, even take a cut of all earnings made on their app. Platform owners are by far the biggest winners of this perverse new economic world — and they are not mentioned in the documentary once.

If you are an entry-level influencer, you are likely earning zilch, splashing out on expensive recording equipment and spending hundreds of hours toiling away on these platforms like a digital serf, with no guarantee of financial reward. One aspiring Miami-based influencer, Matty, had recently been homeless and was dealing with a close family bereavement. It is difficult not to conclude that his real grievances were being exploited both by higher-earning influencers selling a pipe dream and by platform capitalists who profit from the endless labour required to try to make that dream a reality.

Even for those at the higher end of the earnings scale, that wealth comes at the heavy price of constant performance and dependence on platforms they neither own nor control. Channel 4’s 2025 documentary on OnlyFans creator Bonnie Blue, known for making extreme sexual content, demonstrated how easily her labour could become worthless when OnlyFans chose to remove and demonetise some of her videos. Sullivan, towards the end of Inside The Manosphere , seemed increasingly desperate, scouring his surroundings for opportunities to create more wacky, offensive content. ‘I’m real… I’m not a puppet… I’m not controlled,’ he declared. But behind the facade, he occasionally looked exhausted. Rather than being free, his position appears inherently unstable.

What we are seeing in the manosphere is not a niche subculture but part of a broader problem that cuts to the heart of our economic model. The bigotry that circulates so freely in these spaces is not incidental but structurally embedded in the economic incentives that sustain them, part of a wider pyramid of exploitation. While much political commentary focuses on a supposed decay in social norms and values — the kind of moral panic eagerly seized on by Telegraph columnists — this risks missing the deeper issue.

It is far bigger than boys needing better role models or more present father figures. The manosphere is a microcosm of a wider economic system in which platform capitalists profit from social conflict. We need to confront the economic structures that sustain it, challenge the power of tech platforms and begin to reclaim digital spaces so they operate in the public interest rather than for private extraction. A democratised digital sphere, organised for the common good, is the only real antidote.