manosphere

The loose network of men's-interest websites, forums, YouTube channels and podcasts — pickup artists, 'red pill' forums, men's-rights groups, and later 'alpha' self-improvement creators — known collectively as the manosphere, a term that dates to about 2009 and reached mainstream use around 2022. The record notes the sphere's parts disagree with each other constantly and agree only on what the problem is.

Content optimised past the point of meaning, and the mental state of having consumed it. The first internet term that is also a self-diagnosis.

The confident, effortless man who wins — first as a bitter archetype on forums, then as a joke, then, by 2021, as an adjective for anything done with confidence: 'a chad move'. The record's entry for an insult that became a compliment by way of a drawing.

The generation born from about 2010, which entered the culture in 2023 as the children with the iPads, the slang nobody understood — skibidi, rizz, gyatt — and the Sephora habit. The record's entry for the first generation to be memed before it could vote.

A black-and-white photograph of a man with an impossible jaw, from a Russian art project, adopted as the image of the ultimate Chad — and used since for anyone who does something confidently and correctly. The face of 'average X fan versus average Y enjoyer'.

The pill from The Matrix that shows the truth, adopted by online communities — first about relationships, then about everything — as the word for a conversion to their view. 'Redpilled' is the state; 'take the red pill' the invitation. The record's entry for the film prop that became an ideology, filed for the word and not the ideology.

A lone wolf above the hierarchy, or a kid saying 'what the sigma'. Meant a personality type, then meant nothing, then appeared in a bank's youth-account advert, and that was that.

The pill beyond the red one: the belief that nothing can be done, that looks are fate, that effort is pointless. The vocabulary of the most hopeless corner of the internet, filed for the word, which has spread as a general term for fatalism about anything.