Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to take on one of the key ideas that has shaped everyday discourse about the online practices of incels: the idea of the “echo chamber” of incel radicalization. In our account, the idea of the echo chamber is challenged in several ways. As a concept, it is static and totalizing, and the result is that explanations of incel behavior online start to generate simplistic representations of incel politics. Our account provides a radical alternative to the idea of the echo chamber, using the theoretical approaches of Deleuze and Guattari, (1977) to illuminate the operation of the internet as a machine of desire and capital, and locate the interplay between the disruptions of online information capitalism and the social forces of the incel subculture. In short, the internet extracts the frustrated desires of heterosexual masculinity and produces fascism as its surplus. To make this argument, we draw on a study of three incel forums—Incels.is, Looksmax.org, and r/incelexit—to reveal how the internet produces much more than echoes.