Rollo writes in his latest post entitled The Purple Pill:
"While I am humbled to be accounted as one of the Red Pill’s prominent writers I will never lay claim to having created it. The Red Pill in its truest sense belongs to the collective that has contributed to it as a whole. It belongs to the men who’ve fostered it, who’ve risked their livelihoods and families apart from it to make other men aware; it belongs to those who understand that its objectivity is what’s kept it open and honest, discussable and debatable...
...I believe that in the coming years there will be a concerted effort to claim authorship and definition rights to the “Red Pill”, and it’s important for anyone identifying as being Red Pill aware to acknowledge that what we’re a part of is a collective experience. We are, we become, the developments of a totality of men’s experiences across the world. Beware of any man or woman attempting to lay claims of ownership of the Red Pill. Beware of anyone defining this awareness, distorting these truths, to accommodate their narratives."
I agree with Rollo, but it's not something that's going to happen in the near future, it's already happened, and it will happen again as this allegory continues to spread and will eventually attain mainstream awareness. Soon we will be most likely seeing and hearing references to The Red PillTM on Late Night TV show monologues and referenced on celebutard tweets.
So for the record, here's my perspective on the history of this particular meme.
There are not many folks left that where there in the beginning stages of the MAndrosphere who are still going at it on a regular basis. And of those who are still going, most have moved on to capitalizing off of the success of their online blogging efforts and now have ulterior motives to continue their blogging.
Of course, I must disclaim here, that this is not a criticism of any of these folks who have done so, as we are all citizens of our Brave New World Order's Babylon System and we must all pay our tithes to Mammon to survive...but I still note that the moment any blogger crosses over into blogging for revenues, the motives and objectives for their participation in these fever swamps of the politically incorrect fringes of teh Interwebs become intrinsically altered.
But in the early days, for most of us that threw our hat into the ring and proffered our own views and perspectives for the emerging MAndrosphere (which Novaseeker accurately described as a clearing house of ideas), there was no other motive than to seek the truth and to wage a counter-revolutionary 4th generation war against the emerging recognition of the long march through our common culture. It was in this embryonic state of existence that the Red Pill meme arose.
In 2009, the early stages of the "manosphere" started in the "Roissysphere" which was primarily the comment sections of the now defunct Roissy in D.C. blog, Matt Forney's (writing as Ferdinand Bardamu) In Mala Fide and Bill Price's The Spearhead.
It was in these comment sections that I came across several commenters that drew analogies between the Matrix movie allegory and our current state of society. Intrigued by the idea, I consulted Googliath for articles on "the Matrix" and came across the following: The Media is the Matrix.
Up to that point, I was what I considered myself an MRA blogger, but I had begun reading "game" forums and other PUA blogs that were at that time a completely separate blogosphere from the Men's Rights sphere. At that time, I considered the PUA blogosphere an interesting sidetrack on the main topic of our culture's gender dysfunction and the divorce industrial complex that was my primary blogging focus.
After reading up on the Matrix allegory, I wrote my own blogpost Game is the Red Pill and shortly there after, it went viral. Six years, hundreds of blog posts and millions of page views later, and that post is still my number one linked to and most read post here.
Go ahead and look, you will not find a manosphere-associated blog post using The Red PillTM metaphor dated anytime before I made that post. After that initial success of that post, I decided to run with the theme a bit more and did a series on my blog called Red Pill Realities Dispelling Blue Pill Delusions. Prior to my first few posts of that series, no one else was blogging about The Red PillTM at that time.
A short while later though, and the idea caught fire and a whole host of formerly non-monetary bloggers saw an opportunity to capitalize on an idea and turn their blogging hobby into a money-making venture. At one point there were a large number of blogs that had The Red PillTM imagery or incorporated the words into their blog titles, screen names and avatars. Many saw the rising tide and quickly maneuvered to take their place and surf the zeitgeist for maximum gain.
From 2010 to 2012, everyone in these fringes of teh Interwebz was hip to The Red PillTM. Then it seemed to hit a saturation point, and many of these same folks dropped the imagery and themes from their blogs, and a few sought to denounce and disassociate themselves from it (once they realized maximum gain from using it, of course). Yet the idea persevered and survived the initial gold-rush.We now have subreddits, twitter hashtags and even some feminist who is purportedly producing a movie about The Red PillTM and it;'s association with the men's rights "movement" on teh Interwebz.
I have only one reason for pointing this out...because if there was anyone who has an even partial claim to "owning" this meme that has now gone into common parlance out in these fringes of teh Interwebz, that would be me. But I won't, because that would be taking credit for ideas and insights I gained from reading many others and just doing my best to pay it forward using an allegory I found very useful in seeking to understand our modern dystopian existence.
I took an idea from a blog post from a lady who noticed how the emergence of mass media and the tell-a-vision allowed corporate entities to construct an artificial reality to take over our collective minds, and I synthesized it with my own understandings gleaned from reading a host of other free thinkers and truth seekers on the topics of game, feminism, pick up, etc., and put it together to come to a hypothesis that understanding the theories behind game served as a doorway to understanding just how much we have all been lied to by our controlled culture and society. I had no idea it would go viral like it did.
I certainly didn't plant the seed, but I helped to water it, and was amazed as anyone else when it sprouted and grew wild like it did.
No, the only thing I will claim is to being one of the original members of La Resistance who played his part in helping to wage the counter-revolution by helping the now ubiquitous meme go viral. I was only a contributor to the collective experience that Rollo rightly credits for the ascendancy of this allegory into popular, near-mainstream consciousness.
While Laurie Kramer, the original authoress of The Media is the Matrix post (who as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with the MAndrosphere past or present), doled out her prescription at the end of her post on what we can do about the situation once we realize that we do in fact live in THE MATRIX. Her advice turns out to be remarkably prescient when you consider where we are today and how the The Red PillTM has become our present day, allegorical paradigm.
As she wrote in 2009:
How can doing that make a difference? There is only one way to circumvent the media matrix. We have to start talking to EACH OTHER. Sure, we're not going to be able to reach thousands that way, but we will reach some. We need to check things out with each other to make sure we both have the same information, and that it is accurate. We have to not be afraid to voice our concerns and opinions to our friends and family. And yes, there will be those that won't listen. And yes, there will be those who will say you are nuts, or an idiot, and that you don't know what you are talking about. However, if you do your own research, you check out what you are being told, and from what source you are receiving the information, YOU will be empowered by those truths. Those that listen may then be empowered to get information that is crucial to handle what is happening around them. Or, they say you are nuts, or an idiot, and that you don't know what you are talking about. But YOU know different, and in the end, that's all that matters.
That is exactly what he have today....a large (and continually increasing), worldwide community of like-minded folks who started talking to each other over teh Interwebz. We who as Rollo states "...fostered it, who’ve risked their livelihoods and families apart from it to make other men aware," are all owners of this thing we call The Red PillTM.
Don't ever let anyone else try to $ell you otherwise.