Beaufbourrin: A Networked Guide to the 2020s Manosphere

My project deals with the manosphere, a term often used to describe various masculinity-affiliated subcultures online.

This term manosphere has context in relation to other terms that have described man's epistemic aspirations over the past 100 years.

Starting with Verdansky's term noosphere in the 1920s, we developed internet in the 1960s, advanced to an infosphere in the 1970s, a datasphere in the 1980s, the World Wide Web in 1989, and finally the manosphere and cognisphere neologisms most recently.

Across these changing terms, we have lot of shifting social conclusions in man's orientation to reason, finance, optimism, war, cybernetics, computing, and gender/ sexuality.

The idea of a distinction between the Internet and the World Wide Web is news to many, especially millennials and younger who have grown up with the terms used interchangeably. My research anticipates subcultural radicalization and semantic drift that will complicate alignment and other lexicon and sentiment stylometry questions in AI software design.

Across a sample of manosphere subpopulations--beauf, bourrin, con, mec, barbu (France), chav, scally, lad, bloke (UK), larrikin, bogan, eshay (Australia), chum (Canada), and United States equivalents--I'm laying the foundation for smooth and safe AI software futures by mapping the broad intellectual geography across which masculinities and other subcultural affiliations might enjoy lifestyle freedom without devolving into violence or cyberbullying. These words are meaningful to me as a person trained in the library and information sciences.

Companies' push to help AI softwares ingest reading material at early 2000s Kazaa/Limewire/Napster speed demonstrates the relevance of language itself to the functions of a large language model (Elsevier Inc. et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. and Mark Zuckerberg). The scope and content of available input data influences quality of computing thoughts. Let's refine this.

I was a pre-teen during the previous Napster style flow of information. I remember writing to a rabbi in 2001 to ask him if such downloading was stealing. He respondedly wisely for the time and for my age by infimitely delaying the answer. Now 35, I enjoy the chance to make prudent choices during the high stakes information flow of the late 2020s.

The Green New Deal by Jeremy Rifkin predicts 2028 as a turning point year for society; The Singularity is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil predicts 2030. AGI's frontier moment may in some way correspond to the predictions of these two books. Time is ticking, and I am eager to get to work.