Photo by John MacLean/ Millennium Images

Back in my day (2014), you’d log on to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and have a bloody laugh. You’d share 37 pictures from one night out, post a heavily filtered snap of the pancakes you’d had for brunch, or simply discuss ephemeral but incredibly pressing nonsense with other mentally ill left-wing people and assorted – also mentally ill – journalists.

Sure, people may have used flimsy political disguises to settle long-running personal conflicts, and yes, the hard right has co-opted the worst – and most effective – aspects of a cancel culture we helped create and nurture, folding them into their political playbook to use against us. But look: Wayne Rooney was tweeting about Whitney Houston. Stephen Fry was joking around with the general public. Even the writer from Father Ted was there – and there was no suggestion he would turn into a deeply unsettling figure.

It wasn’t as hip and cool as this ‘big-tech fuelled neo-fascism’ the kids are into nowadays, but it was a rollicking good time. None of this woke ‘I’m angry about woke’ nonsense. Just a good old-fashioned, annoyingly liberal internet, the way things should be. And so on. There simply aren’t many safe spaces left on the internet, and I mean that sincerely. Everywhere is too hostile, everything too incessant, everyone too mean.

After spending so long wading through this digital morass, I was pleasantly surprised, as a wet leftist bald man, by a group on Reddit called r/bald. Its philosophy, as explained in the group description, is simple: “Embrace bald and strive to make the world a more bald-friendly place.” In practice, this mostly means men – and occasionally women – posting photos of their receding hairlines and asking the group whether it is time to take the plunge and go fully bald. The top reply is almost invariably a bald adaptation of the familiar hand-on-the-shoulder meme, lifted from the 1970s anime Akakichi no Irebun, gently conveying the message: “It’s time to go bald.” Often, users share their bald transformations, with before-and-after shots documenting the moment of surrender. At other times, it is simply a photograph of someone newly bald, looking chuffed.

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From its very conception, social media has been a place for men to judge others – mostly women – on their appearance. Facebook began as a website called Facemash, a derivative of Hot or Not, where male Harvard students would rate their unsuspecting female peers. It was, at the very least, creepy – and symptomatic of something darker. From that, we now have a company that a sizable portion of the global population would struggle to function without, if you include its subsidiaries WhatsApp and Instagram.

What is remarkable about r/bald is its sheer positivity. Nearly every other digital third space is full to the brim with brutal critiques of people’s bodies and the aging process – a tone, to be fair, that legacy media has set in stone long before the internet existed.

As a 38-year-old bald man, I am considered ‘washed’ and/or a ‘chopped unc’ by 20-year-olds online who think they will never age – just as I once thought I would never age when I was 20. Yet in r/bald, hundreds of men like me, all grappling with their appearance and the realities of ageing, are lifted up by others in the same position.

There is no use of “bald” as a pejorative – something it has increasingly become online over the past decade. Even bald women, often undergoing chemotherapy or living with alopecia, are celebrated and encouraged for their appearance in a way I have rarely seen online, except perhaps in the frantic and excessive manner in which women compliment each other under their friends’ Instagram selfies. There is no sexualising, nor are there comments on their looks or bodies.

It is a far cry from the alarming use of ‘GrokAI’ on X – and the worryingly unregulated use of AI more broadly. You may have seen that Ofcom has recently stepped in to investigate ‘Grok’ after people – mostly men – began using it to digitally undress women, and even children, placing them in sexualised positions and without clothing.

Labour suggested they might even ban the website if it could not adequately regulate its AI – a proposal met with loud cries of ‘censorship’ from leading right-wing figures such as Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk. The logic seems to be that if the Great British public is not free to create paedophilic or highly sexualised – and sometimes violent – imagery of women without their consent, it is like 1984 all over again. And who, the argument goes, will be left to “protect” women and children if those producing such paedophilic and violently sexual images are no longer able to congregate online every day?

Even if AI could be net positive for society, which, judging by the evidence so far, it clearly is not, how is it allowed to be unleashed on the public with virtually no regulation? How is it acceptable that someone on X can take pictures of random women and children and digitally manipulate them however they see fit, without consent, using a technology promoted as if its deployment were inevitable? How is it that some men can use the internet to be kind, nurturing and supportive – with zero ulterior motive – as they are in r/bald, while others can use the same tools to produce child pornography and rape fantasies openly, as though it were perfectly normal?

One theory might be that a sizable number of men really only love other men – and hate women. Not even in a “repressed homosexual” way – a trope that is itself rather homophobic, as it assumes being gay is somehow deserving of disdain. Rather, just straight men loving other straight men, and hating women for not being straight men – in much the same way that a racist might despise those of a different skin colour, or a homophobic person might despise those who are not straight.

Whether they understand that about themselves or not is something else, but it would explain why they’re so comfortable indulging in violent ideas online when it comes to women, but are loving and supportive when it comes to men, especially as in both cases they’re often freed from social expectations by anonymity.

I’d like to believe it is not as fundamental as this. Perhaps because I was weaned on Stephen Fry tweets, I Can Haz Cheezburger memes, and the possibility of being cancelled into dust for cooking a national cuisine the wrong way, I want to believe that we are not fundamentally broken as a society – that we have merely been edged ever closer to this precipice by borderline James Bond–villain tech billionaires.

And that is why r/bald may simply be a community of people happy that someone else is bald – and yes, it may seem trivial, and funny, which it is. Yet it gives me hope for a more accepting, understanding, and emotionally mature internet than the one we have now.

We may never return to the annoyingly liberal days of yesteryear, but perhaps we will grow tired of hating each other all the time – and start trying to be nice instead. It’s time to go bald.

[Further reading: Why left wingers need to stay on X]

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