The Attention Trap : What ‘Inside the Manosphere’ Can Teach Brands About Losing Themselves.
Misogyny is on the rise. Why? I'm not sure. I do think a lot of male influencers are making use of it to outrage, to get attention - mistaking attention for connection, noise for meaning. And I see a lot of brands falling into exactly the same trap.
The men, who are ‘influencers’, interviewed in Louis Theroux’s new Netflix documentary, ‘Inside the Manosphere’, are not stupid. They have correctly identified that attention is the currency of the age, and they are mining it with extraordinary efficiency. Supposed self-improvement content, attracting women, making money, outrage-bait, - whatever generates the most eyeballs this week becomes the strategy. There is no governing idea, no long-term vision, no coherent philosophy. There is only the algorithm, and the question of how to feed it. The result is a kind of creative bankruptcy dressed up as productivity: an endless, frantic churn of content that means less and less with every passing post.
And - here is the uncomfortable part - it is exactly what a growing number of brands are doing too.
The pressure to post daily across every platform. The obsession with metrics - views, impressions, reach - over meaning. The migration of budget away from carefully considered campaigns and towards faster, cheaper, higher-volume output. And now, accelerating all of it, the arrival of AI-generated content, synthetic imagery, automated video, machine written copy, produced at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time. On paper, it is efficient. In practice, it is the brand equivalent of not knowing which camera to look at.
There is a moment in Theroux's documentary that stays with you. A young influencer, mid-shoot on the streets of Marbella, turns to face the wrong camera. For a split second he has no idea which lens is supposed to be making him famous. It is small, almost throwaway. But it is a perfect picture of what happens when the production of content becomes the focus. You lose track of who you are talking to, and why.
Theroux's influencers are entirely made up of other people's projections. They cannot say or do anything that might cost them the commodity of public attention, and they are constantly thinking of ways to get more. For all their surface confidence, they are quietly miserable - trapped, hollowed out, optimising their identity for an audience they can never quite satisfy. It is worth asking, honestly, how many brands would recognise themselves in that description.
The case for AI-generated content rests on a seductive logic: more output, lower cost, faster turnaround, consistent brand voice. What is not to like? The answer is the same thing that was missing from every influencer Theroux interviewed - humanity. AI can process every campaign ever made and produce a statistically plausible version of the next one. What it cannot do is walk into a room, read the atmosphere, notice the thing that was not in the brief, and make the decision - in the moment, a real life human moment. It has never earned a contributor's trust. It has never waited out a silence. It has never felt the difference between a performance and the real thing, because it has no experience of either.
Consider two scenarios that are no longer hypothetical. A charity commissions a synthetic reconstruction of a grieving family rather than filming a real one, because it is faster and avoids the complexity of working with vulnerable contributors. A brand produces an AI-generated customer testimonial assembled from demographic data and focus group transcripts, because real interviews take time and the results are harder to control. Both pass a surface-level inspection. Both hit the brief. And both are, at their core, a sophisticated guess about what human experience looks like - assembled from the outside, by something that has never lived it. Audiences are becoming more sensitive to this, not less. This type of cheap content is flooding every feed, and the amount is growing daily. Social media is literally swamped with it. And the more this happens the sharper the instinct becomes for what is missing.
Cheaper, of course, is a relative term. The upfront cost of AI-generated content is lower. The long-term cost - measured in eroded audience trust, diminishing engagement, and the slow haemorrhage of customers to brands that still bother to make them feel something - is considerably harder to put on a spreadsheet, and considerably harder to recover from. Substance is not a production value. It is the reason people come back.
Authenticity is not a visual style that can be reverse-engineered. It is a residue of actual human contact. It lives in the slight imperfection of a genuine reaction, the particular quality of attention in someone's eyes, the moment that landed because it was not planned. None of these things can be generated. They can only be captured - and only by someone who was there.
This is where craft and experience become not a nostalgic preference but a genuine competitive advantage. A filmmaker who has spent decades learning how to put people at ease, how to find the emotion at the heart of a brief, how to make a hundred small decisions on a shoot day that the audience will never consciously notice but will absolutely feel - that accumulated knowledge is not a legacy luxury. It is the difference between content that fills a feed and work that fills a memory.
There is a strong professional argument for working this way, and it is worth making plainly. A contributor who trusts you will give you material that no amount of retakes can manufacture. Authentic emotion is not just ethically preferable to performed emotion - it is visually, technically, and narratively superior. You cannot light your way to truth. You cannot find it in the grade. It either happened in the room or it did not. The best moments in the most enduring campaigns were not planned. They arrived because the room was calm enough, and the person in it felt free enough, for something real to surface. You create the conditions. Then you pay close enough attention to catch it.
Theroux's documentary ends with archive footage of two of its subjects as children - sweet, unremarkable boys with no idea what the algorithm would eventually make of them. It is striking precisely because it shows what was lost in the chase for attention, the unperformed self, the genuine article, the thing that was real before it was monetised. The best brand films work in exactly the opposite direction. They find the unperformed self - in a customer, a colleague, a founder - and hold it carefully on screen, so that an audience can recognise something true.
The ‘attention economy’ will keep accelerating. The tools will keep getting cheaper and faster. But the films and campaigns that last - the ones that move people, build trust, and mean something beyond their campaign window - will not be produced by the fastest or cheapest process. They will be made by people who understood that the point was never the content.
It was always the connection.