'Men make their own history

... but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past." Given your obvious erudition, I am sure you are familiar that quotation. To that end, you make an interesting point that our beloved Pharmakon grants agency with one hand (social/individual construction of gender!) while snatching it back with the other (we're prisoners of this particular point in the development of the "productive forces" -- i.e., "economics and technology" to use your words, or to quote a seemingly favorite prophet of yours, "The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist," and, to continue the train of thought, the internet and the algorithm give you a society with hordes of busy-body feminists in the work place rather than the home policing males for any sign of thought crime, of which pederasty ranks as the most egregious.) Well...not meaning to pose as a "brilliant," "consequential" champion of the dialetic (gee whizz, blushing -- thanks -- love you too!) I think Pharmy gets it backwards. Human nature is what it is, whether you're huddled around the flickering flames of the campfire fearing those saber-tooth tigers on the loose or sitting alone in your basement mesmerized by flickering images of nude bodies on screens as the case may be. You can bury, suppress, and otherwise pronounce anathema on this or that key aspect of the human condition ("male and female created He them" or, as Steven Pinker put it, "there is a technical term for people who maintain there is no meaningful difference between boys and girls. That term is 'childless'") but it's going to rear its head one way or another whatever you do. That includes the clustering together of young males -- the instinctive formation of male hierarchies -- and the mutual attraction between boys and men (to be sure, an attraction based on a curiosity and a hankering to know on the one hand and, well, lust on the other.) Plato set it all out 2500 years ago in the Phaedrus and human nature HAS NOT CHANGED since then. Much else has, though, and Plato would not recognize our world (although he would recognize certain patterns of attraction and behavior). Are we condemned to be slaves of AI, everywhere and always visible in the panopticon that Klaus Schwab and Kamela Harris are busy constructing around us ("we shall meet in a place where there is no darkness" O'Brien says to Winston)? Do we have to give up any hope of properly structured, fulfilling man/boy relationships in a world that has no use for such, in which they form some sort of vestigial remnant of the hunter/warrior societies of old along the lines of a tailbone or an appendix? Sit around hoping that if enough boys can be induced to lop off their balls -- figuratively or literally -- that just maybe now and again one of the thoroughly de-masculinized, unthreatening little creatures will be allowed to crawl onto our laps? To hell with that. We may not be a position to string Jeff Bezos and Judith Butler up on the nearest street laps; there may be no peace until the last Karen is hung by the entrails of the last tech billionaire; and, yeah, making colorful designs for flags does not really qualify as activism. But don't discount the power of ideas (not that you do). We are, to be sure, in the Café Central stage of revolution. But take my word for it -- some of the stuff we've been batting around here for the last couple of decades -- the dialectic if you will -- has seeped into the wider discourse (I know this to be true, although I can't tell you how without compromising security.) The King of Zembla may be right that we're just doing the equivalent here of masturbation on the ideological/revolutionary front. But one has to practice; to hone one's thinking. With minds like his and yours, there is hope. SR