We dash through the countryside at high speed, swinging round hedges and tripping over potholes. My increasingly sweaty palms lubricate the phone in my hand like I’m gripping a bar of soap. I ask him what model of car we’re in. “You don’t know an [Audi] S3?” he asks with gleeful confusion, turning his gaze to me, and away from the road that throws itself at the neon headlights. “No, I can’t even drive,” I admit. “You can’t drive!?” His confusion is warranted. Why wouldn’t I drive? The honest answer is that I started to learn, left home for university, and never sat behind the wheel again. Among the Lime-bike riding metropolitan set, not having a license would barely register as unusual; it would be virtuous even: one less dangerous car polluting the road. But where I am right now, outside the Tube map, in the suburbs and shires, cars are an essential part of life. I place my hand flatly against the roof as he crushes the accelerator.

We’re hurtling down a dual carriageway toward my first ever car meet. Mostly operated by organized groups, car meets are conceptually lawful but can devolve into unlawful or illegal activities like speeding, stunts, and antisocial behavior. Events like this often occur at night in public spaces like retail parks, public roads and car parks — but can venture into the inner city where the attendant dangers of injury and death increase.

In June 2025, teenager Lewis Samuels was sentenced to five years in a young offender institution and a nine-year driving ban for causing the death of 23-year-old Connor Richards and injuring 11 others at a car meet in Lincolnshire. Samuels lost control of his vehicle and plowed into a crowd of attendees. He was 17 at the time and had only passed his driving test 11 weeks earlier. The case was not an outlier. In Hampshire, police dealt with more than 200 offenses linked to unlawful car meets in just over a year. In Northern Ireland — home to what enthusiasts routinely refer to as an “unhinged” car modification scene — there were twice the number of road deaths in the first four months of 2026 than in the equivalent period in 2025. In a House of Commons debate last year, MP Julia Buckley highlighted how drivers under 24 make up 6% of total license holders but represent 18% of all car drivers killed and seriously injured. This is, overwhelmingly, a young person’s game.

In recent years, various UK police forces have attempted to deter attendees from meets, issuing dispersal orders and written warnings, seizing vehicles and making arrests. In December 2024, the RAC conducted a freedom of information request to all 45 UK territorial police forces. The 13 that responded reported around 500 unauthorized gatherings taking place across the UK up to mid-October the year before. But given this is primarily a working class male hobby that relies on furtive behavior, it is not easy to track. The subculture only tends to penetrate mainstream consciousness via anxious Neighborhood Watch committees, a stray reel from boy racer Instagram landing in your feed, or a tragic local news headline about a teenager killed while speeding.

And yet car meets have existed as long as cars themselves. One of the earliest known examples took place in London in 1900. Organized by the Automobile Club of Great Britain, the “Concours d’Elegance” (“Competition of elegance”) was an opportunity for individuals to exhibit their vehicles and form a community. In post-war America, car meets became mainstream, partly as a result of Second World War veterans with newfound skills as mechanics customizing muscle cars. In the Sixties, The Beach Boys soundtracked hot rod culture: their 1963 hit “Shut Down” is peppered with motoring jargon and tells the story of a drag race between a Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray and a Dodge Dart.

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Britain, meanwhile, developed its own distinct culture. The first known use of the term “boy racer” appeared in The Times in 1968 — the label is commonly reserved for young men who drive in an aggressive manner. Jeremy Clarkson, who has spent much of his career hymning this era of “proper cars”, recalled the rituals of his own youth in the same publication: “One day I fitted the engine with a chromed sports air filter and convinced my friends that it added another 100 horsepower. They would talk about their cars and then the sun would come up and we’d all drive home.” But these were the glory days of the internal combustion engine: pre-Congestion Charge, pre-ULEZ, pre-20mph speed limits, when cars were comprehensible, parking places plentiful and seatbelts optional. Britain now has many, many more vehicles on its roads than it ever has — but they are hemmed in, frowned upon, everywhere and yet on the margins. Nevertheless, one thing remains constant: young men want to push the limits of engineering while sharing the experience with likeminded enthusiasts. In other words, they’re keen to show off.

The operation is top secret. My driver had received the location for this car meet only an hour earlier. All details are provided last minute to a trusted contact list to limit the possibility of police intervention. As the location — an industrial complex of corrugated warehouses and offices — rises into view, the concentration of surrounding speeding vehicles increases, like pathogens, weaving among the flow of ordinary traffic. We turn off an A-road and form a decelerating convoy that joins the dozens of parked cars that barricade the entrance road to the factory district. “It’s the police versus us,” Ben reminds me with Che Guavaran gusto. After coming to a stop, I pluck my fingernails out of the dashboard and stumble onto the wet tarmac.

The air is misted with tire fumes, pyrotechnic smoke, and Elfbar vapor. A barrage of bangs, whines, and bass-heavy music orchestrates my path as I make my way on foot toward the distant jamboree. Fireworks scream into the air and crimson flares erupt from the crowd as dozens of us approach the clouded specters.

I hit a contingent of black puffer jackets and nudge my way through. Two cars are doing donuts on a small roundabout, their tires burning. People cheer. Passengers hang out of all available windows, whiplashed as if riding a rodeo bull. Then the chaos suddenly ceases. The police arrive, on foot. Clad in high vis, they resemble a row of traffic cones as they amble toward the crowd. The puffer jackets disperse, not with the panic that follows a speakeasy raid but with a purposeful nonchalance. They rustle into their cars and the ephemeral hive disperses into the night to reassemble elsewhere. Ben decides it’s best if we both go home.

Disappointed, I approach a police officer. In principle, he says, they’re “All for” this kind of thing. “If you’re seventeen and like your cars [and] want somewhere to go with likeminded people, then it’s perfect.” But he stresses that there is a safer option: “Static car meets don’t kill people. Street racing, doing donuts, and breaking the speed limit does.”

The static car meets he refers to are a more benign part of the subculture. These consist of people driving to an area, parking their vehicles, and talking to one another. There are no races or stunts. Instead, there is a more diverse crowd of attendees (men and women of all ages) and a continual police presence. According to one of my contacts in the car meet world, such an event happens every Sunday in a car park in the center of Milton Keynes. Unlike other car meets: “No one runs it or organises it, it’s just been a thing for so long to meet on a Sunday at that time that people just attend.”

Another source takes me there the following weekend. The sun hasn’t yet set as we navigate the cardinal grid and roll into a car park outside the Network Rail offices. Dozens of parked cars sputter, whine and pulse. Music blares. Pairs of police officers meander. There’s a carnival atmosphere. Even for a non-enthusiast like me, some vehicles are objectively beautiful: Porsches, Aston Martins, and what I’m informed is a Lamborghini Aventador are in attendance. In the far corner, a cluster of discarded motorcyclists mingle among themselves.

The need for recognition is ubiquitous, exemplified by the custom-made stickers of Instagram handles plastered across car windshields. The cars that attract the most attention are not the most expensive ones but, rather, the ones that have the most modifications. A burgundy Audi A3 is encircled by a mob of outstretched iPhones. A woman in her mid 30s, in a clubbing dress and black heels hangs out of the passenger seat. The ajar door, pock-marked with speakers, produces a bass so monumental it explodes her hair like an electrocuted Looney Tunes character. She poses for the cameras and films herself before being led away by her partner, the car owner.

I chat with a group of women sitting in a crescent of fold-out chairs. Some dandle (ear-plugged) babies; others sip tins of gin. None took their own car and most have partners nearby. I am offered some apple cake by a lady whose facial studs put me in mind of a Chesterfield armchair. After coming alone for four years, she has now made friends on the scene. She would be “just sat at home” if she wasn’t here. “Everything else costs money,” she notes. “I love the cars, I love the modifications and I never feel intimidated.”

Night descends. Lampposts and headlights are illuminated. The music volume rises and the frequency of bangs and revs increases. I meet “Ryan” who is in his mid 20s and works as a Team Leader in a highstreet chain’s warehouse. He drives a premium brand of car which he’s modified with a “lowered suspension, more tire grip and some bolt ons”. He claims his vehicle is worth “over 50k”. “The types of cars people bring have definitely changed,” he says. “It started with what people call boy-racer cars, but now, on finance and if you live at home or have a small rent, you can basically drive what you like.”

He has a point. Around 90% of new cars bought privately in the UK are now reportedly financed using personal contract purchases (PCPs). The model is simple: pay a deposit, make lower monthly payments, and at the end of the contract, you either hand the car back, pay a lump sum to own it, or roll straight into a new deal. Buyers like Ryan don’t use a PCP to reduce their monthly payments; instead they use it to afford something flashier at the same cost. The result is that a young person living at home, pocketing a modest warehouse wage and eating his mum’s food, can pull up to a car meet in something previous generations of enthusiasts could only dream of.

What Ryan is driving at is that having a limited income no longer means you must accept a limited speed. He pays over £1,000 a month (over half of his income, working six days a week) paying his car’s finance and upkeep. Despite living at home, he can’t think of anything he’d rather spend his money on. A 2023 survey by the King’s Trust found that two thirds of 18-to-24-year-olds have lowered their career aspirations and expectation for financial security. Half of those surveyed said they weren’t planning beyond the next six months. According to the Office of National Statistics, there are over a million 16-24-year-olds not in education, jobs, or training (NEET).

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What Ryan’s £50K car provides that, say, a one-bedroom flat does not, is a thrill. He regularly races with friends and is “addicted” to the “freedom” that comes with driving fast. I ask him how he feels when people describe his behavior as dangerous and his eyes gloss over. “I’m just being myself,” he says. “I can’t change the fact we find it exciting.”

Stood in the warmth of exhaust fumes and glow of headlights, Ryan regales me with tales of the car community battling the police: driving bans, arrests, daring escapes and close calls. He boasts that “[The police have] been pelted with eggs and flour bombs, had their tires slashed” and shows me a video that appears to show a police officer punching a young man in the face — framed as an unnecessary retaliation. These stories clearly feed back into the culture’s mythos, YouTube-friendly updates of Marlon Brando in The Wild One growling: “Nobody tells me what to do.” In that classic movie, lawbreaking is represented as a tragic symptom of societal failure — but perhaps Ryan is unaware such stories are doomed to end in tragedy.

On the road adjacent to the carpark, a motorbike goads the police by maintaining a wheelie. It’s an invitation to test the boundaries that others predictably accept. The more weathered enthusiasts, however, are not impressed. “It’s so fucked up people start acting like dickheads,” says one. I start talking to “Pete” who is in his 50s and wears wire-framed glasses. He’s been coming to the Sunday meets for over a decade. “It used to be a bunch of fellas, mostly my age, with an actual passion for motoring,” he says. He seems like he’d be more at home at the sort of car meet that involves bunting. He doesn’t seem to realize he is surrounded by hundreds of people just as enthusiastic about motoring as he is. The difference is that, despite their relative generational poverty, car finance schemes have given them access to the sorts of cars it would have once taken half a lifetime to afford.

The atmosphere shifts. “Tyler” tells me the police have “tried clamping down [on this static car meet] for years, tried loads of different enforcements and plans, but nothing works”. Like an oncologist observing a tumor, law enforcement now consign themselves to a policy of watchful waiting. Two patrol cars are parked nearby, there are a dozen police officers on foot, a police van tactically placed near the exit and reflective signs declaring the area subject is to a “public space protection order” — with “car cruising / racing” specifically prohibited.

These orders are one of many tools authorities use to attempt to assert some control. Thames Valley Police Force informs me over email that the difficulty lies in car meets being conceptually legal while the sorts of anti-social behavior they give rise to are not — “and that’s why we monitor them”. The police can issue a Section 59 notice for anti-social or careless driving marking a driver or vehicle for the next 12 months. If they are seen driving recklessly again during that period, the vehicle can be seized and legal action potentially brought against the driver. In North London (a car meet hotspot), Enfield Council secured an interim injunction from the High Court to prohibit car meets across the borough, leading to several fines and suspended sentences. Sussex Police have also developed a dedicated unit called Operation Cruz to monitor car meets. But the question is: does providing boundaried infrastructure provide a safety value — or create an anti-authority culture?

“The police coming does add to the fun,” Ben admits weeks later as we make our way to a different type of car meet far from the watchful waiting of authorities. He says it’s frequently a “bit of a game of cat and mouse”. Often, once the police arrive, more chaos unfolds. As I had seen, police intervention can force the swarm out of the nest and into the open.

A clear stretch of semi-rural road unfurls and Ben quickly seizes the opportunity to speed. The number on the digital dashboard swiftly rises to 160mph and we zoom unencumbered by the materiality of the world. A roundabout confronts us and, like a ship unable to change course, we burst into the maelstrom and rapidly circumnavigate it. Ben reminds me that he “knows where all the [speed] cameras are”. We return to a straight road, and a car materializes directly ahead. Time slows as we hurtle toward its rear and Ben begins to apply the brake. Utterly powerless, my hand slams against the ceiling and I recoil in a futile attempt to gain distance from the seemingly inevitable crash. At the last second the other car swerves away and we fly on unharmed. Ben lets out a nervous laugh: “At this speed your head would detach from your spinal column if we hit something.” His bloodlust fails to reassure me. He’s interrupted by a car driving parallel to us. It matches our (now reduced) speed. The young driver gyrates and cheers after having witnessed the near-miss and gestures for a race. Ben declines on account of my visible terror.

In order to be sent the location for this car meet, Ben had to provide the organizers with two videos filmed at prior events, a requirement he fulfilled. He parks nearby. I am still numb from the near miss, and my distress as I slowly push open the car door counterpoints his exhilaration. Illuminated drones whir overhead, an army of hoods and masks encircle a roundabout. Dozens more spectators are crammed on the central island, marooned as multiple cars kaleidoscopically spin around with no barrier or means to prevent a vehicle from barreling into the crowd. A young driver tells me: “Illegal ones are very safe because they’re highly organized, roads are blocked off and you’ll be called out if you do something dangerous.” When I query the effectiveness of this, he declares: “I’m a good driver, I know I’m not going to crash into anyone.”

This confidence sits uneasily with the reality that people really do get killed at car meets — not to mention the riotous atmosphere. While there is admittedly no alcohol visibly present, men grip firework cannons between their legs and discharge sparks into the already smoke-filled air. I am jostled in a sea of contagious mob-mentality, clandestine thrill and apocalyptic hedonism.

But I have come to believe this subculture is far more nuanced than evidence suggests; as diverse as the areas it inhabits, as multifaceted and difficult to define as it is to police. I met many members who lament the boy-racer stereotype. They see it as a way of keeping working-class culture in its box and resent being forced underground. “If I had somewhere where me and my mates could race our cars for free, I would 100% go,” says “Sam”. Many of the young men I speak to describe a feeling of being constrained by society and unable to get on. The simple act of crowd-sourcing where the speed cameras are provides a semblance of community as well as autonomy amid a system that feels rigged against them.

The car was the democratizing vehicle of the 20th century: a guarantee of social autonomy and freedom. That version of freedom has since been revoked in a Britain, of compounding parking fines, proliferating speed cameras, and city-center congestion charges. The freedom of the open road may be a fallacy — but then so too are the opportunities for these young men to progress, aspire and achieve in life. But it is too convenient, too simplistic to blame social pressures for unlawful car meets. There are questions to be asked of society’s failure to fund third spaces and an economy that hands a generation of lost young men a £50,000 car on finance, but these individuals are not inarticulate victims. They are autonomous adults who choose to endanger themselves and others.

Since my visit to the Sunday meet in Milton Keynes, Thames Valley Police have reportedly launched a crackdown. Nearly 100 vehicles have received their final warning. Attendees and spectators now risk £100 fines. The car meet, needless to say, will move on, burrowing further underground, risking an escalation in casualties and injuries. But the danger isn’t incidental to the appeal — it is the appeal.

***

Note: Some names have been changed. 

But what had Kruger actually said that was so offensive? That Zoomer women’s wombs were factories for future taxpayers? That a Reform government would go full-Hungary, scrapping income tax for mothers of three or more? That they’d ban abortion? 

Wrong! Kruger said: “I’m not interested in your love life… But I am interested in the framework in which you make your decisions, and I’d like the framework to be more pro-social.” There were no plans to touch no-fault divorces, no handmaidens, no mothers’ medals after all. The biggest thing these anti-woman fascists wanted to do seemed to be to introduce household taxation… are you getting all this, Atwood? Labour’s faux-outrage, an opportunity for a tidy bit of political point-scoring, seemed for naught.

For Kruger is perfectly correct in his suggestion that young women’s choices, especially around fertility, are influenced by society’s messaging around motherhood. Research that may surprise those readers sold on the idea of Gen Z as cat ladies-in-waiting reveals that about 92% of young women want children one day. Whether they’ll have them is a different matter entirely.

Why? The assumption, particularly among trad types online, is that old chestnut: women, the gatekeepers of fertility, are selfish and misled. We are said to desire only career advancement for its own sake, or meaningless casual sex, or to spend any disposable income on baby-replacements in the form of houseplants, toys and small dogs. A straw poll of Zoomer life goals over the next few years would admittedly bear this out: the women I know would tell you they want to travel, to meet someone, to get a dog or a better job. Wiping dribble off a baby’s chin hardly gets a look-in — but all but one of my friends ultimately desires motherhood. But will they have children? What is it about our current sexual culture — or the “sexual economy”, as Kruger called it — that might prevent them? 

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The Center for Social Justice, in a determined attempt to crack the case of tottering birth rates, recently identified 600,000 “missing mothers” — that is, women in the UK who want children one day but are probably going to miss out because of insecure housing, extortionate childcare costs and even environmental doomerism. But buried amid female economic woes was a purported solution: a call to arms for the other party in the business of babymaking. The father. 

For once, it was not just the cosmo-swigging career girls being scolded for not having babies; this time, actual researchers had spent more than 10 seconds thinking about the sexual marketplace and discovered that the Zoomer men expected to sire the next generation were not exactly up to snuff. (Of course, they might have realized this with a five-minute scroll through Hinge… but they got there in the end). Yes, the study found, our future baby daddies were both desperately unprepared and desperately unprepossessing as potential mates. This delayed maturation of today’s men means that their adolescence now extends well into their twenties. “The average age of leaving home for a young man sits at 25, three years older than for young women.” 

Of course, women often also find themselves in a state of suspended adolescence, reliant on parental funds and living in godforsaken houseshares with collections of cuddly toys — but the report found that male “readiness” for children was a critical factor for those women who were ready themselves. Its suggestions make perfect sense: “Start adulthood earlier — especially for men.” Reduce the school leaving age and the number of young people in higher education; get them, and especially the blokes — who are increasingly festering into a cohort of NEETs — into the workforce. Parental dependence is emasculating, off-putting and disastrous for self-esteem; politicians who are quick to point the finger at feminism for driving women to look for baby substitutes at cat shelters should only be taken seriously when they consider the problem of male listlessness. Much effort has been expended on the project of “changing women’s minds” about having babies — but when we already know we want them, it’s time to start considering what, or who, is getting in the way.

For Zoomettes, the banquet of potential partners cheffed up by the NEET pandemic is unappetizing indeed. Directionless dolts clog up dating apps, offering non-committal porn-infected sex interrupted by the periodic flushing of the loo by one of ten thousand housemates in his Flatbush flatshare. If you were us, would you have his child? My suspicion is that many more women would be more receptive to the delights of family life if the pick of husbands weren’t limply balding their way through their thirties until their bands “really take off”. The thought often occurs to me when I run into other women picking up their contraceptives from the pharmacy. Who’d do otherwise? After all, if you’re dating a man whose lifestyle is essentially unchanged since their teens, his suggestion that you have a baby is like a 10-year-old telling you they really really really want a puppy. Who’s gonna be doing all the work?

We are all to blame for tanking birth rates — and we will all suffer the consequences. But the tradition of giving women a kicking as the perpetrators is looking shabbier by the day. The reasoning that women are cold and selfish victors in a post-feminist world has never been borne out, not since Theodore Roosevelt was describing “the woman who deliberately avoids motherhood” as “in effect a criminal against the race”, nor even when JD Vance bemoaned that his country was run by a league of “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives”. 

It’s not that young women today don’t want children — ask them, as Vance probably never has, and you’ll realize they do. It’s that they would be foolish to center their lives around wanting them when the pool of potential partners is so desperately dank. Any government serious about helping those women who do want to become mothers must give up their “this-is-what-a-feminist-looks-like” act and stop being squeamish about pro-maternal policy. There is nothing anti-feminist about bringing about conditions in which women who want children end up having them; the radical solution is to stop yelling at we twentysomethings and lick the leagues of would-be fathers into shape first. Would Daniella Kruger want Mr Neet McNojob sulking around her house amid a rising pile of nappies? Me neither.

The early world of internet gaming was a kind of messy bachelor pad, and we button-pushing boy masterminds abounded. Each of us had independently discovered these games, as we might have done with Roger Corman films or post-punk music, and we manspread across this open frontier. A process of acculturation equated console gaming and computer technology with maladjusted “nerds”, meaning that they held scant appeal for women or any other normies. Ensconced in parents’ basements or rat-hole apartments, the most successful gamers could demonstrate mastery alone or against others: crushing foes in one of the various Super Smash Bros fighting games or extending the virtual empire in their grand strategy game to the limits of the known world. In lives otherwise without purpose, in an economy that had been rapidly deindustrialising for decades, video games offered an opportunity for the cultivation of arete, or “excellence”, here confined to the movement of a mouse.

As Clifford Geertz wrote of machine gambling, the conclusion of his famous 1973 interpretation of Balinese cockfighting, video games were portrayed for years in the mainstream media as shallow, unedifying activities that lacked depth of meaning, investment, or consequence. They had, most assumed, nothing to do with the fundamental concerns of culture; they could not properly be called a “sociological entity”. Gamers, in turn, were all too often classified the way Geertz characterised “the socially despised and personally idiosyncratic” Balinese men who played the mechanical gambling games on the periphery of cockfights.

Not only were games derided, they were demonised, often proving a useful vehicle for media outlets. Tales of violent games and their bloodthirsty players got clicks. The Columbine murderers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who played the first-person shooters Doom and Quake together, were villainous boy masterminds straight from central casting: a two-man “trenchcoat mafia” who used skills honed in these games to wreak vengeance on their better-adjusted high school classmates. After the 1999 Columbine massacre, the video game player became more than just a pitiable outcast; he was now a perpetual suspect, too.

But video games only grew in popularity, reaching ever-larger audiences and slowly raising “important questions”. Suddenly you had cultural critics, such as Tom Bissell, in a memorable 2011 essay for Grantland, expatiating about the literary merits and failings of big-budget games like the Elder Scrolls franchise. Where once all the video-gaming world had been the preserve of nerds, it was now supposed to be a welcoming place for everyone else. Stories about grandmothers fat-fingering mindless Candy Crush Saga games on their smartphones ceased to be novel; eventually they ceased to be stories at all.

Now, in the 2020s, video gaming has simply become culture. The fact that HBO’s big-budget, critically acclaimed new prestige television series, The Last of Us, is a faithful adaptation of a 10-year-old video game, offers compelling evidence. Mainstream pop-culture properties launched on the back of video-game success used to fail miserably, including the 1992 Super Mario Bros film or 2002 Resident Evil adaptation, reaffirming critic Roger Ebert’s point that “video games are not art”. Now nerdy video game culture is just plain old American monoculture. And the elites of this monoculture have elevated The Last of Us — a game beloved by many, but regarded by me as nothing more than an overwrought, ladder-moving simulator — to the level of middlebrow art: premium television status.

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The reason for this shift is crudely simple: video games are where the money is. Worldwide video game revenue exceeds filmed entertainment revenue. In fact, where the global film and television industry brings in $100 billion in revenue, and the global sports industry roughly $75 billion, the video game industry produces more revenue than those two industries combined. And the multinational entertainment corporations have figured out how to package and repackage profitable intellectual property in as many ways, to as many people, as possible. It is only a matter of time before all the significant video gaming franchises — like all the significant comic books — are cannibalised by the Hollywood complex.

This process is proceeding apace. Last year gave us Uncharted — based on a popular video game from the same company that developed The Last of Us. It brought us, too, a television adaptation of Xbox Game Studios’ Halo. Neither was a critical success. As was the case with comics, what was lost along the way was exclusivity. Previously, these properties had belonged to a specific category of people, the video gamers. Now, they could be consumed, without the cultivation of any sort of gaming mastery, by everyone.

The war for exclusive control of these properties, which once resided on the video-gaming frontier, was waged — and lost — by the players roughly a decade ago. What began in 2014 as a targeted harassment campaign against independent game developer Zoë Quinn, for various alleged crimes against the integrity of game reviewing, coalesced into the fully-fledged “GamerGate” social movement. The nerds behind it took aim at the seemingly unethical collusion of the gaming press and various progressive groups, as well as the “mission creep” of social-justice ideology into games that had once been very nearly the private fiefdoms of their players. GamerGate pitted many veteran video gamers, interested in protecting their unique “gamer” identity, against the incursion of not merely what they considered “political correctness” into their territory but the millions of casual new video game fans who either didn’t mind or notice these changes or were actively interested in seeing them made. (Far more new players were in the former category than the latter.)

Initially playing out within the world of video games and video game journalism, GamerGate metastasised into a full-on political struggle, with many veteran “gamer”-identifying individuals ending up aligned with emerging Right-wing influencers who earned their stripes during this conflict, such as provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. Left-wing activists such as Anita Sarkeesian, backed by a new generation of video game players more closely aligned with the Left-liberal consensus of the Obama years, opposed them.

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Video gaming, which had once been an intense, albeit neutral and private, experience, was now a major battlefront in the ongoing culture wars. And the conflict field-tested many arguments and strategies that would later be deployed by alt-Right and dirtbag Left-identifying people in 2015 and 2016. Though it still sounds somewhat absurd to make this claim, an argument can be made that GamerGate was almost as important as the violent ideological clashes that defined the turbulent Sixties; it was roughly analogous, then, to the Free Speech Movement that took place on the University of California-Berkeley campus during the 1964-1965 academic year, a seemingly minor event in the scheme of things that in hindsight had extraordinary societal ramifications.

When the dust began to clear, the video gamers understood that they were losing their games, much as the comics nerds had ceded their fandom to the vanilla-bland, focus group-crafted Marvel Cinematic Universe that now mined their beloved, pulpy stories for middlebrow movie ticket sales. This is exactly what happened to Uncharted, Halo, and numerous other in-progress video game-based projects  — more than two dozen are slated for 2023 and beyond.)

My larger point is not whether GamerGate was “good” or “bad” — that issue was litigated to death at the time, a sort of Helen of Troy-grade topic capable of launching a thousand think pieces a day. My point is that it set in motion the politicisation of many whose identities depended entirely on being left alone on what had once been a vast, empty frontier. At the risk of overstating the claim — though it may not be possible to overstate it, given the declining fortunes of young men in the West — this development has contributed to the growth of a restive “reserve army” of incels, Neets(“not in education, employment, or training”). These forlorn boys have not only lost what they believe to be their rightful places in society but also the few pleasurable pastimes they had to themselves, which have been sanded down into something bland and digestible for the consumers of the monoculture.

Meanwhile, video games, like everything that gets too popular, have been absorbed by today’s dominant marketing methods. Much-hated microtransactions, subscriptions, and other bits of continuous re-selling are now built into games.

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By Oliver Bateman

There is no “return to monke” possible here, and those video-game primitivists must be left to rage on the margins of society or assimilate and disappear.  The final co-option of this community is the bitterest blackpill to swallow: both work and education have been video “gamified” by Human Resources managers trying to extract some cheap labour from all those Neets now idling on the sidelines of life itself. Where video gaming was once a private refuge from the workaday world, “gamification” is now a paradigm through which productivity is stocked. Neets can score points by reviewing digital documents, identifying images to be content-moderated, and other trivial but necessary tasks not yet amenable to full automation.

The true video gamers must face, to paraphrase Marx and Engels, their real conditions of life and their real relations with others. Capitalism, “the river in which we sink or swim”, has a swiftly-moving current that pulls them irresistibly into that future — which may contain even more ominous developments, such as the AI-fuelled redefinition of work. The loss is more tragic than many realise: a culture dependent on one of society’s last frontiers was destroyed and reshaped. And it is irreversible.