Words On A Screen - An Op-Ed On Synthetic Man

It was sometime in 2022 when I first encountered the YouTube channel known as Synthetic Man. I knew nothing of either his content or his politics. However, I approached, as one must with all such digital artifacts, from a position of curiosity rather than judgment. The algorithms and echo chambers of online discourse had already elevated him to some measure of notoriety, largely due to his critique of God of War: Ragnarok, a title lavishly praised by the dominant voices of the “Commentary Community,” notably EFAP and its high priest, Mauler. What struck me, however, was not merely the content of his critique, but its tone: raw, unvarnished, lacking the carefully lacquered polish of the centrist-libertarian orthodoxy that so often coats industry-approved criticism in a veneer of objectivity.

In a world increasingly governed by aestheticized moderation, where even dissent is stagemanaged to remain within the boundaries of polite neoliberalism, Synthetic Man was something else. Not exceptional, necessarily, in the quality of his content, but authentic in a way that resisted commodification. He is not what many seem to want him to be: a polished symbol of anti-woke resistance, a brand to follow or a cause to finance. He is, stubbornly, just a guy. A flawed, sometimes irascible, often inconsistent man who speaks not to win consensus, but to make sense of the nonsense.

It is this ordinary, embodied voice--shaped by misanthropy, fatigue, and a sharpened instinct for hypocrisy--that I came to respect. By some odd accident, I was made a moderator on his channel. No grand application. No meritocratic vetting. I asked. He said yes. And in that moment, I encountered a posture toward online life that has since reshaped my own: a refusal to imbue digital status with sacred weight. To not take the LARP seriously.

Synthetic Man’s detachment isn’t a performance, it’s his natural state. He simply limits his presence. His online footprints are narrow by design. What some interpret as aloofness is perhaps something more honest: the recognition that the internet is a deeply unreliable narrator. That most of what passes for community here is theater. This is not a cynical conclusion, it is a humane one. To remain sane in this space, one must remember that parasociality is not relationship, it is a projection. Words on a screen are not windows to the soul.

Synth has, at times, ventured into personal territory, and one could rightly question the coherence of his own boundaries. But even this ambiguity is revelatory. All human interaction, especially in mediated space, is laced with performance. What matters is not perfection, but the integrity of one’s posture.

It should not be ignored that Synthetic Man, though not an atheist, names himself agnostic. He maintains a posture of curiosity toward the sacred without presuming to inhabit it. His relationship to religion is neither reverent nor dismissive. Instead, it is hesitant, unresolved, marked more by exhaustion than rebellion. He is, by his own admission, lazy, disaffected, and deeply black-pilled (often to the point of parody.) Synth has spoken openly about suicidal ideation. However, the fact that he has not acted on it has only deepened the aura surrounding him. This is not a cult of personality in the traditional sense, but a kind of anti-mythos, a reluctant martyrdom for the terminally online.

I have contributed to that mythology. Unapologetically. My own content has fed the narrative; not by embellishing him, but by meeting his sincerity with my own. That I have angered the right people in doing so is no accident. Nor will I retract a word of it, however forcefully I may be pressed. If Synthetic Man has carved out a space for sincerity amid irony-poisoned media, then I have taken him at his word and replied not with deference, but with equal weight. If nothing else, he has modeled that it is still possible to speak plainly in a space governed by performance. That, I believe, is worth honoring; not as reverence, but as a reply.

I was eventually removed as a moderator, made the casualty of a minor scandal fanned into significance by the usual bad-faith actors. The occasion? Synthetic Man had chosen, perhaps wisely, to speak privately and then apologize publicly to a woman over what he perceived as a personal slight. I disagreed with his interpretation of events but his contrition was sincere, and his conscience (not mine) bore the weight of it. In retrospect, the entire affair was trifling, a blip magnified by the terminally online. But for the fraction of his audience whose attachment had crossed the threshold from listener to disciple, it was interpreted as betrayal. The man behind the mic had broken script.

Although the blue text beside my name disappeared, it meant little. The relief I felt was quiet but real. After all, I had never been more than a name among countless others, just another sequence of words on a screen. I accepted the shift without grievance and continued, as I do now, to engage with his content more remotely which may be the more faithful way.

There’s nothing to moralize here; no scandal to dissect, no fallout to reframe. It just happened. The screen was never sacred. The man behind the microphone never asked to be canonized. His metrics may be high, but like everyone else, most of his life remains off-camera. For those who insist otherwise, Synth simply writes it off as Main Character Syndrome; the delusion that someone else’s story exists to resolve our own.

What holds my attention in Synthetic Man isn’t the sharpness of his takes or the quality of his videos, but the way he refuses to play the part people script for him. He doesn’t cultivate loyalty. He doesn’t sell redemption arcs. He just keeps going; flawed, unvarnished, unperformed. And that, if anything, is the point.

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