NO NETWORKING!!!!!!!!!!!

On how networking has replaced friendships and a theory about greater gayness affecting men.

Nov 02, 2025

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✏️ Two free talks on writing coming up!! They are…
- 🌈 Happening November 22 at 10AM PST / 1PM EST / 7PM CEST, Rax Ishida Will will be talking queer narratives and translating identity into writing: RSVP here!
- 📖 Happening December 3 at 9AM PST / 12PM EST / 6PM CEST, Sarah Labrie will be doing a deep dive into memoir, essay, and beyond: RSVP here!
🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 this week features Megan Collins and Kaley Mullin of Cool Shiny Culture, where the duo, Ben Dietz, and I chat if we’d be friends with our 25 year old selves, why Halloween continues to be a cross-generational (and branded) hit, and about that dang gooning story. Listen on Spotify and YouTube!

Blood visible from space in Sudan
UN condemn ‘horrifying’ mass killings
“Emerging evidence of systematic killings”

The civil war in Sudan took a grim turn, grim in a way that suggests we’ve been subjected to a series of magicians who are constantly stepping up to perform tricks of barbarism that are worse than the last (starving Gaza, destroying immigrant families, etc.). Also? It’s tied to countries from Columbia to the UAE to China to the UK, who are supplying weapons and personnel. Trump’s got it handled though, as he’s going to attack…Nigeria? Ugh.

SNAP: Trump won’t use contingency fund
States sue Trump over halting Snap
“Trumps war against the working class”
Trump to overrule protecting credit from medical debt

I don’t think I need to tell you this but this is what class war looks like, that we can bail out Argentina and build ballrooms and arcs and have parties all as people (Children!) starve. A slim silver lining: it’s been very refreshing to see people share help and share insights for those in need to get food. For what it’s worth, Trump’s popularity/approval is at its lowest.

UK voters more anti-immigrant than Trumps

A fascinating story, revealing how British conservatives are far more anti-immigrant than MAGA. But a big difference? They support social issues like gay marriage and abortion. The story goes deeper, showing the peculiarities of the British left too.

Paul Biya Extends Rule Over Cameroon

Think Trump and Biden are old? You clearly haven’t looked into Cameroonian politics.

Argentina’s Milei wins friendlier Congress
Liberal-progressive party wins Dutch election
Leftwing Catherine Connolly wins Ireland president

The Argentine news is bad as it fits into the Trumpian global politic (Japan, Germany). But! A hot gay guy and an ally auntie won in the EU. We ain’t out of the woods but I love to hear it!

OpenAI data on users with suicidal thoughts
OpenAI’s Porn Pivot: Problematic But Lucrative
“ambitions goals are starting to look hazy”

Even if Nvidia can become the first $5T company — which is more than every country on earth’s GDP, minus the US and China — the red flags continue as any advances in AI are eclipsed by OpenAI using these chips for shit like porn and enabling psychosis. Crashing the economy just to make us all goon as we asphyxiate!

Monkey truck overturns in Mississippi

They had herpes and Covi too. The AP story assures things “are good” but this feels quite literally like Outbreak, hence it generation conspiracies.

Normal’ BMI but Hidden Obesity

They finally studied “skinny-fat,” finding that BMI is a flawed metric (and that waist circumference could be useful). Do with that what you will, especially gay men who are going to go into a body dysmorphic hysteria like myself 🫠

This thing keeps happening where I meet someone and we talk and they share what they do, which eventually morphs into pitching me their product or service, conflating connection with commerce. All those Creative Lunch Club meet-ups I went to? They were almost always fast tracks to hearing about someone’s app. That happy hour with friends of a friend? Someone wanted me to opt-into a specific supplement system they developed for healing. The mixer for queer people? A dude tried to sell me on an AI scheme while another tried to sell me on life coaching. There is an inherent grift to all of these interactions, which is something that I’ve found is very much in the water of where I physically am, exposing not only a cultural and economic neediness but that so often spaces of connection turn into unwanted “networking,” LinkedIn rot, personal Ponzi schemes: you have money, I need money, let’s transact. Blame Mel Robbins, blame Jay Shetty, blame Shark Tank, blame Trump, blame the “entrepreneur” mentality that has infected young men worldwide: the whole world is faking it until they make it. The Economist may claim that something like AI has resulted in “the end” of the rip-off economy but what’s happening is a larger rip-off culture. A popular TikTok on “friendphishing” captured this well, as did spotting a “NO NETWORKING ALLOWED” sign that a friend posted from a Halloween party. “After they hung out for a bit, she sent her a text message that was like, ‘I want to offer you my life coaching services,’” the post goes. “This is Brooklyn — this is not LA.” This idea sums up the experiences I’ve had in Barcelona well, and does get at something that has almost always existed in the LA ecosystem: people trying to cobble together work as they try to make a Hollywood dream come true. The grift is the grind until you go big. It’s a means of survival! So why is it that the world has become full grift grinders?

My guess is this behavior fits into a wider tapestry of global economics and a shift of what modern work is, or at least this precarious every-person-for-themself moment. This is all tied to American politics and AI: from Disney to Paramount, Amazon to Target, Puma to Novo Nordisk, Mexico to Lesotho, India to Canada, layoffs and furloughs (Hello, shutdown!) continue to dominate the 2020s, as companies pivot to “efficiency” and “culture,” as “more big companies bet they can still grow without hiring,” slashing white collar jobs due to AI (be it because poor spending or its not paying off) or slashing workforces due to tariff woes. (This is happening alongside a rise in women quitting the workforce and women of a certain age being left out of the work force.) This context relates and doesn’t to the fall of the email job and tech no longer being a safe career space, as people log off and being extremely online falls out of fashion. Meanwhile, entry jobs and remote jobs and diverse jobs and sustainable jobs are going away, all as industries — Tech! Fashion! Hollywood! — are crumbling which explains why so many people are looking for work outside of their industry and expertise, attempting a speedrun of adaptation within an impossibly shifty landscape. This is best represented by the 2010s push for a Gen Z to code only for that industry to disappear, showing the growing sensation that education is a scam. Work in the 2020s, much like life in the 2020s, has become an ongoing humiliation ritual that requires constant juggling.

Thus: grifting! Everyone is an influencer! Everyone is hawking affiliate links! NPR grovels to you for money to exist as people on SNAP grovel that they need money to exist as I grovel to you that I need money to exist as everyone everywhere has been forced to beg on their knees to be seen as human, GoFundMe as a worldview because the world is too imbalance for the 99% of us, where our loss of friendships have been replaced with seeing each other as potential bread to win, as nets to work. Polyworking and everyone being a strategist isn’t a trend without context: it’s a statement that the system is broken, that we all are in a constant state of trying to fellate the bank so we don’t die. Welcome to life within the K economy!

What makes this wilder — and infuriating — is this isn’t just a trickle down effect but also a parroting, a mirroring of what’s happening in the larger cultural picture: layoffs at Amazon despite profits being up 38%, buyouts and job losses at Google as Alphabet’s revenue and stock soars. Somehow, Nvidia became the world’s first $5 trillion dollar company because of the supposed AI boom, all as companies like McKinsey win awards for ChatGPT’ing shit for their clients. Crypto! Bitcoin! AI! A feast of charmless scams everywhere you look. Vogue World in Hollywood was being touted as a flashy joint slay but was a monument to industry failure. “American consumers ready to come to Saudi,” the Delta Airlines CEO seriously says to someone at Fortune, both of them sitting in Riyadh, as a part of a greed parade that builds off of video games and comedy festivals and AI, all to smudge out very real evils via dreams of vacations. Humanoid robots to pantomime work around the house, costing tens of thousands of dollars when real people don’t have jobs. The richest country in the world! And it slashed the admission of refugees by well over a hundred thousand. “What happens when economic data isn’t trusted?” PBS asks, pointing to Greek and Argentine depressions that happened for similar reasons. How lucky are we? The stupidest future for us, the stupidest people.

There’s a world where all of this is actually positive, where such growth is shared and such innovations actually lead to meaningful change, to universal incomes and shared resources. There’s a world where our constant selling to each other is a means to support community and manifest economic freedom for each other. Abundance! But that’s a grift too: Andrew Yang weeps as that’s not the world we’re living in. Instead, we — Not just America: the world. — are within the grip of greed from the top down, where scams enacted upon the vulnerable are now being repeated in inter-personal relationships, less out of an innately “evil” reason but more because we’ve become cornered creatures desperate to survive. Yes, we are and will work toward collective liberation and creating community — but that doesn’t mean our fighting for our lives in these impoverished trenches is going to go away. Scams and grifts are symptoms of financial systems becoming infected as culture and intellect erodes in desperation, the restless leg shaking as it awaits the calm of “what’s next.” In the meantime, the lost lead each other astray, one “Can I send you my deck?” text at a time.

Sigh: here’s my deck of services, as I navigate a 996 nightmare trying to turn this newsletter into a job.

A conservative group visits an HBCU

For homecoming too. And the group? A Talking Points associated effort, which highlights how nothing is sacred given their racism. Thankfully, they weren’t successful in their effort!

The Tackiness of Evil

To the above essay: “tacky” really sums up these times, as this story maps via the aesthetics of the right.

Going to art galleries can improve wellbeing
Could art be as good for your health as exercise?

There were two big reveals about the body and art in terms of health. Cue Your Brain On Art! Perhaps this is a good cure for all the skinny-fats? 🫥

WOTW awarded £10,000 Cass Art Prize
“Who Do You Support?”

The Cass Prize may not be the biggest art prize but the work by WOTW (Wankers of the World) (lol) is incredible as it uses soccer/football scarves to tell the story of these times, of the right and left “war” of culture. Which would you buy to support your team?

Billie called out billionaires.
“$11.5M to support”

This is likely to do nothing, but credit where credit is due: Billie Eilish received an award from the Wall Street Journal with Zuckerberg in the room, then proceeded to call him out (making him “visibly upset”), all underscored by her giving a big donation to help undo this moment. The quote, which you can watch here: “There’s a few people in here that have a lot more money than me...If you are a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? No hate, but yeah, give your money away.”

No Rap in the Hot 100’s Top 40

…for the first time since 1990. This plays into “a recent dip in rap’s commercial dominance” which I think we can note in parallel to country’s rise (even if it’s quite divided territory). It’s probably wise to tie this to conservatism being in vogue too: cue my interview with Elijah!

The snail farmer of London
“Why are snail farms all over London?”

A wild local London story, originally by London Centric that Metro ran with, about snails are being used as a way for landlords to avoid paying taxes. Follow this up with the story of the man who died when a urinal fell on him.

Last year, I wrote about how marriage as we knew it was over, theorizing about a movement toward lavender marriages and relationships that prioritize love and compatibility over sexuality or sexual consummation as a success metric. Cut to now, where this idea is actually taking off, or at least is becoming a buzzy conversation. While the evolutionary wlw component hasn’t fully borne fruit yet, the crux of this belief is that so many (heterosexual) women are disenchanted with and dislike (heterosexual) men, resulting in women who are looking for nontraditional companionship and relationships, which queer men are filling. Where does that leave straight men though? I have an idea, which I’d like to share as an addendum: they’re going to be gay — or are becoming gay’d — in a way that will never be realized, as if they’re locked in a forever closet more akin to a bank vault that they’re content to never leave as they stare at each other.

We can look at a Tweet from 2021 as a great representation of this idea, which compared two brothers, one fit and traditionally hot with and one very extremely average. Which is straight and which is gay? You already know the answer, which inspired a lot of conversation then (and now) about how men who have sex with men use their bodies as cultural currencies based in whiteness and perfection, illustrating how the “Best Little Boy in the World” theory of gay maleness continues as they seek to be exceptional on the job, in the bedroom, and as a physical specimens. This is a very specific, age old gay brain rot (that I’m sadly infected with) that leads to a lot of body modification extremes as gay men — like women — are at war with themselves and their bodies as lookism creates clout within the culture, a culture most of us don’t want to be in but are required to as it’s the broth with which we stew.

This subtle messaging over the past decade and a half — that hot, smart gay men are the peak form of maleness — seems to have spread this approach from gay men to a certain style of straight men, which is best coalesced by someone like rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate, who claimed last year that “any man who has sex with women because it ‘feels good’ is gay.” That’s rage bait, but let’s walk this road and look at the larger picture of the modern man and how he has become queer: this decade has been marked by CEOs and billionaires pivoting to clothing obsessed, a “midlife crisis” package best perfected by Zuckerberg and Bezos; men have become obsessed with being at your physical “peak” and youth, which they tie to “health” (Brian Johnson) and dovetails into traditional vanity (Again: Zuckerberg, Bezos), all of which is taking horrific turns as a few male body horrors this week illustrated (the monstrous before-and-after guy; the monstrous steroid skin guy; the monstrous Benson Boone’s makeover); which brings us to Bradley Cooper and Simon Cowell and David Beckham and Ryan Gosling, an economy of men that are attempting to copy the notes of gay men aging gracefully like Tom Ford and Ricky Martin and Coleman Domingo, landing us in the new trend of tech bros getting facelifts and taking Ozempic; all of which ends at the larger right wing co-opting of woke talking points, which isn’t uniquely a gay male thing but is a larger queer worldview that has been adopted and exploited. The results? A sizeable portion of straight men who are using the gay male culture playbook without the benefits of difference and oppression to suck the venom out of such aesthetic and lifestyle choices (which isn’t to say gay men are holy as we are deeply flawed). This is how we end up with the masturbating-while-looking-in-the-mirror neo-Patrick Bateman manscape which has repaved the dating pool in their image, of men looking for someone to worship and adore them — and the people who are increasingly willing, interested, and longing for that are other men. We’re seconds away from realizing an observation from a popular TikTok: “From a strict stats perspective, a dude hand job is always gonna be better.” Technically speaking: this is true.

We know this is a problem of gazes, of the male gaze now being a dagger that cuts us all as the aforementioned traits reveal that everyone is now on television, meaning everyone abides by a very LA image-first mindset. What makes it gay is the particular intersectional obsessions and that these aesthetics are increasingly, exclusively for the enjoyment of other men. There’s a lot of proof to this which is where straight women come in, as they’ve been sending unsubtle Morse codes for months: the very viral “bird theory” has been floating around as a test — or proof — of certain men’s disinterest in the lives and interests of the women in their life; every few weeks a story goes very viral about a husband going to great lengths to humiliate his wife, from Keke the cruise ship lady to the viral “dog food wife” thing to the wife of the Astronomer CEO guy to the ongoing saga that is Hailey Bieber’s relationship; situations that expose how men hate having to be with their wives, as best expressed by the Costco wife trend and return to office thinking; the very viral “having a boyfriend is embarrassing” story for Vogue and the very viral “mankeeping” stories; the ongoing conversations about men hating women and preferring the company of other men; obviously all the dating-is-hell-now stories, which is where this theory all originates from. “We provide no benefit,” a guy explained of the Vogue boyfriend story. “We’re probably a burden to them. We need to realize having a girlfriend is a privilege.”

In the vacuum of women not wanting men, men will turn to each other to fill the void — and may very soon start filling in certain relationship blanks with each other. Hello, transmaxxing! Hello, trendy testosterone-for-women! Hello, simmering chatter about gay men taking on masc aesthetics and masc traits — and vice versa! These things are all related, showing how a shift or trickle down of queerness has primed a group men to recreate straight gayness out of necessity, to be taken seriously, to be loved, all to become what a viral TikTok explained: “If you ever just wonder why people are obsessed with you…it’s because you’re gay.” How interesting that we’ve recreated a Roman reality, considering we’re approaching its fall. Happy No Nut November, dudes!