Decentralised Cults: The Rise of a Generation being Radicalised by Social Media

I have occupied both sides of radicalisation: I have been the person looking in, and the person desperately trying to find a way back out. In my 2024 memoir Chasing Shadows: My Life as a Pseudo-Law Extremist, I documented how an introduction to an online legal community grew from curiosity into a daily obsession and then eventually my name being brought up in conversation alongside domestic terrorists such as Desmond “Dezi Freeman” Filby as well as Nathaniel, Gareth, and Stacey Train (the Wieambilla Massacre).

I did not study ideological capture solely from the safety of an academic distance; I lived inside one of its decentralised ecosystems. I absorbed its language, repeated its arguments, challenged police and courts through its worldview, built relationships inside it, and experienced the intoxicating conviction that I had discovered truths invisible to everyone outside the group.

A few years later after crawling my way out and while writing The Forbesian Era: Field Notes from the Age of the Algorithm, I began recognising the architecture of that experience elsewhere: political extremism, the manosphere and femisphere, pseudo-spiritual movements, and other online tribes that loudly disagree about almost everything while recruiting through remarkably similar human vulnerabilities.

I am therefore writing this neither as a detached observer nor as someone claiming immunity from the forces currently “empowering” the youth. I am writing as someone who knows what radicalisation feels like before the radicalised person knows to call it radicalisation, when it still feels like discovery, community, purpose and, perhaps most dangerously, the exhilarating certainty that you have finally awakened while everybody else remains asleep.

A wolf amongst the sheep…

Except I wasn't a wolf.

That was part of the illusion.

I hadn’t escaped the herd. I had simply found another one.

The people surrounding me believed they were independent thinkers too. We questioned authority. We distrusted institutions. We challenged conventional interpretations of law. We congratulated one another for seeing what everybody else supposedly couldn't see.

Yet increasingly, we spoke the same language. Shared the same sources. Repeated the same arguments. Feared the same institutions. Identified the same enemies.

We had mistaken collective dissent for independent thought.

And this is where my experience becomes particularly relevant to a generation being raised by algorithms.

You do not need to tell somebody what to think if you can control what they repeatedly encounter while they are deciding what to think.

This is what makes algorithmic radicalisation fundamentally different from the cults we were taught to recognise.

We still imagine the cult leader.

The charismatic standing before a room of vulnerable people. The compound. The doctrine. The inner circle. The gradual isolation from family and friends. The demand that followers surrender their judgement to somebody who claims to possess a truth unavailable to the outside world.

But what happens when there is no leader?

What happens when there is no compound?

What happens when the doctrine is assembled individually, one recommendation at a time?

The modern cult does not necessarily recruit you.

It learns you.

It learns what frightens you. What humiliates you. What makes you angry. What makes you lonely. What you secretly desire. What injustice you cannot stop thinking about. What explanation makes your suffering feel meaningful.

And then it gives you another piece.

Another video.

Another podcast, or post.

Another person who sounds exactly like you.

None of these encounters, viewed individually, needs to constitute radicalisation. There may be no mastermind arranging the sequence and no ideology embedded within the machinery itself. The system requires only an optimisation target: keep you engaged.

This distinction matters in a very important way.

A traditional cult leader needs you to believe their explanation of the world.

The algorithm does not care which explanation you choose.

It cares whether you keep watching.

And extremity is very good at keeping us watching.

This is how radically different decentralised cults can flourish inside the same machine.

• The manosphere tells wounded men that it understands why they are lonely.

• The femisphere tells wounded women that it understands why they are afraid.

• Pseudo-spiritual movements promise transcendence.

• Pseudo-legal movements promise hidden knowledge and liberation from oppressive authority.

• Political extremism promises an explanation for who destroyed the country, corrupted the system or stole the future.

• Conspiracy ecosystems promise that the chaos is not really chaos at all.

• Doomerism promises that your despair is simply an accurate perception of reality.

• Hustle culture and self-improvement extremism promise that your suffering can be defeated if you optimise yourself hard enough.

They disagree about the diagnosis.

They disagree about the enemy.

They disagree about almost everything.

But they frequently begin with the same human being:

Someone hurting.

Someone frightened.

Someone lonely.

Someone humiliated.

Someone searching.

This is something I failed to understand when I was radicalised.

I thought belief followed evidence.

Now I argue that belief follows need, and then the evidence is attached afterwards.

And once a belief becomes intertwined with identity, belonging, friendship, suffering, purpose and self-respect, asking somebody to reconsider that belief is no longer experienced as a simple intellectual disagreement.

You are not merely challenging an argument.

You may be challenging the explanation they have constructed for their suffering. The community that finally accepted them. The language through which they understand themselves. The enemy responsible for everything that went wrong. The future they believe they are fighting toward. Perhaps even the person they now believe themselves to be.

This is why human beings captured by ideological systems can become extraordinarily difficult to reason with.

The belief is no longer sitting inside the person.

The person is sitting inside the belief.

Every contradiction can become further evidence of persecution. Every outsider who disagrees can become proof that outsiders cannot understand. Every institutional rebuttal can become proof that the institution is corrupt. Every friendship inside the worldview makes departure more socially expensive.

Eventually, the ideology becomes self-sealing.

I know because mine did.

And screaming at somebody from outside that structure rarely gives them somewhere safer to stand.

That should concern us enormously when thinking about the generation now coming of age inside algorithmic environments.

I believe we may be watching the emergence of one of the most radically exposed generations in human history, not necessarily because young people are inherently more extreme than previous generations, but because no previous generation has grown up with personalised ideological reinforcement operating continuously in their pockets.

The pamphleteer had to find you.

The preacher had to reach you.

The propagandist had to distribute something.

The cult recruiter had to meet you.

The algorithm is already there.

At breakfast. On the train. In the classroom. In bed. After the breakup. After the humiliation. During the loneliness. At two in the morning when nobody else is awake.

It’s already met you.

It already knows you.

And it can keep offering explanations, convincing explanations.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Until repetition begins resembling evidence.

And familiarity becomes truth.

Now an adolescent who originally searched for help with loneliness, relationships, masculinity, femininity, politics, spirituality, money, purpose or mental health finds themselves six months later possessing an entire vocabulary of enemies.

Please excuse the shameless plug but this is the very real danger I am attempting to combat with my book The Forbesian Era: Field Notes from the Age of the Algorithm.

Not simply that algorithms show us bad things.

My argument is not that these systems are identical or that everyone participating in them is an extremist. It is that radically different communities are attractive for remarkably similar reasons.

And that means the solution cannot simply be better arguments.

Critical thinking matters enormously.

But human beings require more than correct information.

We require somewhere to belong.

This is where I think we have made a serious mistake in the way we respond to radicalised people.

We categorise them as quickly as their ideology categorises us.

Idiot. Misogynist. Misandrist. Conspiracy theorist. Extremist. Brainwashed. Dangerous. Lost.

Sometimes those descriptions may identify genuine behaviours or risks. But a category is not a complete human being.

Behind the username is still a person.

Behind the ideology is still a nervous system.

Behind the certainty may be fear.

Behind the hatred and anger may be somebody who once got hurt and discovered an explanation that made being hurt slightly easier to endure.

Understanding this does not mean excusing cruelty, abuse, hatred or violence.

Empathy does not require surrendering judgement.

It requires refusing to surrender curiosity.

Instead of beginning with:

How could somebody possibly believe this?

Perhaps we should sometimes begin with:

• What happened in this person's life that made this explanation feel useful?

• What did it give them?

• Who welcomed them?

• What pain did it organise?

• What uncertainty did it remove?

• What identity did it provide?

And, most importantly:

What can replace it?

Because you cannot remove somebody's meaning and leave them with nothing.

I have learned that leaving an ideological system is not simply the process of discovering that you were wrong.

It is grief.

Depending on how far down the rabbit hole you have gone, you may lose everything by even considering stepping away.

But let us not replace one tantalising certainty with another.

We ought to develop the psychological strength to tolerate a world that refuses to become simple for us.

Men are not one thing.

Women are not one thing.

Governments are not one thing.

Institutions are not one thing.

The left is not one thing.

The right is not one thing.

Religion is not one thing.

Atheism is not one thing.

Human beings are not ideological categories.

They are terrified and terrifying individuals.

Contradictory, frightened, loving, selfish, generous, wounded, courageous, insecure, intelligent, irrational individuals.

Categories are efficient. Human beings are not.

Human beings require patience.

Systems require patience.

The person standing opposite you may have experienced crushing heartbreak.

They may know loneliness well.

They may have buried somebody they loved.

They may lie awake frightened about money or health.

They may desperately want their parents to be proud of them.

They may want intimacy while being terrified of rejection.

They may have been betrayed.

They may have betrayed somebody else.

They may be trying to understand what they are supposed to do with their life.

Just like you.

Just like I.

And perhaps one defence against algorithmic radicalisation is therefore almost embarrassingly old-fashioned:

• Meet people who disagree with you without treating the encounter as combat.

• Build friendships that cannot be reduced to political alignment.

• Learn how to suffer without immediately converting suffering into ideology.

• Learn how to experience rejection without transforming an entire gender into the enemy.

• Learn how to experience injustice without needing every institution to be evil.

• Create something.

• Read.

• Write.

• Train.

• Volunteer.

• Fall in love.

• Have conversations that go nowhere.

• Become useful to somebody who cannot improve your status.

• Spend time with people who have nothing to offer your personal brand.

• Sit with another human being while they suffer without filming it, posting it or converting their pain into content.

• Experience portions of your own life that the algorithm never gets to see.

Because there must remain some territory inside the human being that cannot be optimised for engagement.

That, ultimately, is what I mean by The Forbesian Era.

There is a perceptual conflict between human consciousness and behavioural optimisation systems, with artists attempting to preserve meaning inside machinery capable of producing attention but incapable of supplying meaning itself.

But this struggle does not belong only to artists.

It belongs to everybody.

The challenge of this era may be learning how to remain a compassionate, level-headed and understanding individual while machines become extraordinarily effective at turning us into predictable easy-to-market-to clusters.

I am not writing this because I have mastered these things.

I am writing it because I haven't.

My experiences have taught me something I feel that I already knew.

People do not need to agree about everything to recognise one another.

We are already sharing more than our ideologies allow us to admit.

The feed is still running.

But the question of The Forbesian Era is whether we are still capable of interrupting it...