Like many Millennial men, I used to be pretty invested in Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West—primarily because of his music, but also because of his unique position as the one celebrity who seemed empowered to behave however he wanted. He interrupted Taylor Swift at the Video Music Awards; he said “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” at a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser; he brought a Jesus look-alike onstage. I would shrug, and keep listening. Then his do what I want ethos went very bad. Ye called slavery “a choice”; he came out as a fan of Hitler; he wore a KKK-style hood.
With escalating horror, I questioned what had happened. Was it about having too much money? Untreated mental illness? I wondered when logic and shame might kick in—when someone might get him to stop. But the more he was rejected by his peers, the media, and some fans, the more Kanye seemed to act out. Eventually, I accepted, grimly, that I was watching someone who, feeling abandoned and misunderstood, was determined to ignore all of his critics and double down on pursuing his chosen path.
I thought about Ye while I was reading The Castle, a new nonfiction work by the journalist Jon Ronson that attempts to unpack the motivations of wayward men who no longer fit into traditional society. Ronson is probably best-known for his 2015 book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, a journalistic account of the emotional incentives and historical context behind the social-media-fueled frenzy that became known as “cancel culture.” Like the people in that book, many of the subjects of The Castle have been shoved to the margins. But the forces at play in this new book are more disparate, and perhaps more stubborn, than an angry online mob. Ronson explores how men become alienated because they can’t achieve success in their chosen field, because they can’t pay their bills, because they have too much money, because the town around them went to hell. The book shows how their free will, coupled with a lot of free time on the internet, leads them to pursue their self-interest as best they can—which, eventually, begets more alienation.
The Castle opens with the story of a strange encounter with a strange man. One night in 2023, Ronson’s 20-something son, Joel, and three of his friends (two are women) are invited to a mysterious castle in the middle of nowhere—specifically, Woodstock, Connecticut—for what they believe is a party. There, the women are asked to participate in a bizarre dating show hosted by a man named Chris Mark. The idea is apparently that 101 women will dress up like princesses and vie to be Mark’s girlfriend; once the situation becomes predictably awkward, Mark seemingly deems the night a bust and kicks everyone out. Ronson, who wakes up to a slew of texts from Joel describing what happened, is alarmed by the whole episode—and decides he needs to meet Mark himself.
On their first meeting, Mark at first seems transparent about how he spends his time. He owns the castle, where he lives with several women who he met online. The entire scene strikes Ronson as reminiscent of Hugh Hefner’s grotto—an analogy they discuss at Ronson’s prompting. But Mark, in Ronson’s telling, quickly grows antagonistic, abruptly asking Ronson to sign an NDA, then later barraging him with suspicious texts and threatening him with a pair of goons. Ronson concludes that Mark has “nurtured a private fantasy of manhood” that the journalist has put at risk by asking questions. (Mark has contested many of the details and claims of The Castle, including that he sent anyone to threaten Ronson, and has said that Ronson “presented me and events involving me in a profoundly misleading manner.”)
The Castle is about both Ronson’s investigation into Mark and the bigger phenomenon Mark seems to represent: too-idle men, most of them less wealthy than Mark, littering the country, yearning for some kind of grander purpose. He’s especially interested in men ages 25 to 54 who are both unemployed and no longer looking for work—people he claims have “opted out of society,” choosing instead a “life of male nothingness.” In a moment of general anxiety about men—whom they vote for, what they’re reading, whether they share their feelings—his interest isn’t political. It’s empathic. He offers no prescriptive solutions, wags no fingers. Instead, he wants the reader to conceive of the scale of social anomie, and to envision the millions of other men chasing meaning in the wreckage of their former aspirations.
In particular, Ronson focuses on a demographic whose life expectancy has dropped in the 21st century: middle-aged white men without college degrees, many of whom suffer from what a pair of Princeton economists he speaks with define as “deaths of despair” brought on by “the erosion of a way of life.” Once upon a time, such men—who widely supported Donald Trump in all three of his runs for president—were sold on the American dream. Now some of them are characterized by “a kind of cowed, vaguely shocked hopelessness,” Ronson writes. Others, facing social rejection, have started to live “like separatists, creating worlds in which they didn’t have to live or interact with other people except on their own terms.” Women, too, suffer from deaths of despair—but it’s the men, Ronson indicates, who have been raised to envision themselves as heroes, a self-image that can drive them to dark places.
Ronson illustrates how easy it can be for these men to slide off the map. His most endearing subject is Greg Chism, a father of two daughters in small-town Illinois. Chism was a single parent with tons of medical debt living in a place without a lot of job opportunities when, in the 2010s, he discovered a YouTube channel encouraging viewers to “make a video and change your life.” A few of his early videos got some attention, after which Chism received coaching from the platform’s employees, and he eventually struck on a winning formula: bizarre sketches involving his two daughters that played like the output of a hallucinating LLM fed on Nickelodeon. These generated millions of views, and some of them got really weird; Chism and his kids dressed like babies, or pretended to eat cat food off pizza. Soon came the blowback: Chism was, the internet claimed, a bad father abusing his children by making them participate in these creepy videos. His channel was demonetized, then banned. He was shunned just as quickly as he’d been celebrated.
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But Chism, whom Ronson tracks down, has not been radicalized by the wave of hatred that came his way. Nor does he seem to be a bad father; his (now teenage) kids express mostly fond memories of their channel. He admits making errors in judgment—see: cat food—but in the end, Ronson writes, Chism was “a single father juggling responsibilities while feeling foolishly idealistic about sharing his family’s lives on the internet.” Becoming a YouTuber had seemed like a way for Chism to stop sliding toward destitution. Instead, his entire life was put under a microscope. Ronson uses Chism’s guilelessness to show how unexpected and profound the pitfalls can be for anyone looking to find a foothold in the new world.
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed examined a group of people whose lives were ruined by the internet in one particular way; The Castle flips the framing. In the latter book’s view, the internet allows its users to choose their own particular off-ramp from ennui. Seeking female companionship, Chris Mark turns to dating apps; eager to feel seen, Greg Chism becomes a YouTuber. One subject, the podcaster Andrew Gold, begins tailoring his content to anti-woke audiences, racking up huge numbers by playing to the preexisting grievances of his angry followers. Another chapter digs into Ronson’s rocky friendship with the comedy writer Graham Linehan, whose involvement in the gender-critical movement led him to act out online in ways that Ronson reads as self-destructive. (Linehan has disputed many of the details of Ronson’s depiction, and called it “an indictment of him and the cowardly, careerist, mendacious class of people who could roughly gather under the title ‘Graham Linehan’s old friends and colleagues.’”)
A swerve comes toward the end when Ronson wonders whether he has fallen into the same trap as some of those men. By treating Mark’s story as something only he can make sense of, Ronson has neglected his friends and his marriage. “Everyone I met for this book had, I thought, a similarly dysfunctional relationship with purpose, hunting too desperately for it,” he writes. “And now there was a generation of men, unanchored from society and going it alone—as content creators, culture war influencers, amateur sleuths.”
Ronson doesn’t build toward any prescriptive conclusions; he gives these men a platform to explain how they feel, and allows the reader to weigh the validity of those feelings. I remember the Chism pile-on well, and was slightly horrified to hear the story from his perspective—how confusing it must have felt to toggle so rapidly and randomly between being seen as heroic and villainous. Ronson’s empathy is not boundless; he draws hard lines around some of Mark’s behavior. But he seems to understand that his personal judgment is more or less meaningless. The factors shaping these men are external, but how they react comes from the inside—and many of them remain trapped in their own metaphorical castles, far from the light.
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