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What we do have is an explosion in the number of, let's say, tight-knit groups that each push a specific worldview, and which recruit by playing on people's fears and insecurities. They always promise to fill a specific hole that is very common in the lives of 21st-century young people by offering them:

A) An explanation for how the world works, and by extension, why you should bother waking up in the morning -- it's usually framed as some sort of battle you must join;

B) Instructions for how to live your day-to-day life;

C) A social group you can hang out with and be proud of.

These aren't just fandoms or shared interests. They may start that way, but I'm specifically talking about the ones that turn their cause into an identity and lifestyle, to the point where eventually the tribe exists primarily to protect itself against the normies who would destroy it. Some are destined to end in blood, but most are harmless and their members will grow out of it after college. (I don't expect Joe Rogan's fans to try to blow up a building or anything.)

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Now, there are plenty of stories in the news media about how sites like Reddit are being used to radicalize young white men, or how Facebook is still an ISIS recruitment tool. And there was just an article about the sudden explosion of right-wing YouTube personalities (they referred to it as "The Intellectual Dark Web"). But I think they're all missing the larger issue, which is that there are certain recruitment techniques that are now pervasive because they're proven to work. The internet has become a vast ocean of groups, causes, and personality cults, all of them trying to profit by filling a societal void.

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What void? Well, for much of American history, people were generally forced into a faith as children and told not to question it. Then, around the 1960s, church attendance started to drop, and with that came an explosion in alternative belief systems (if you watch movies from that era, this is why you see lots of jokes about Hare Krishnas trying to recruit people at airports). You got yoga, Transcendental Meditation, palm readers, 900 people drinking poison at a goddamned jungle compound. Some think the UFO craze was just another one of these, another way to fill the natural desire for a "higher power."