I’ve been thinking about this essay since I read it last week, and turning over and over in my head quite why it feels so dystopian. It’s not that the overall subject matter isn’t dystopian by itself — my first reaction to hearing that Charlie Kirk had been shot, even before it emerged that he’d been killed, was a sense of dread that basically went along the lines of, oh fuck, no matter who is responsible, the Administration and all its supporters are definitely going to blame this on trans folk, and oh fucking look I was right. (One of the few things I like about that NY Post link I just posted is that it misspells “Biden” in the URL.)
(I wasn’t psychic, by the way, when I thought that they were going to blame the trans community; I was just thinking about the fact that, just a week before, the Trump administration was reportedly looking at how to take guns away from trans people and this felt like too obvious of a set up, in multiple senses of the term.) (That attempt to take guns away from people led to the unexpected moment where the NRA accidentally ended up on the right side of history for once.)
That essay, though. For those who don’t have the stomach to read it, the takeaway is that all signs point to the fact that Charlie Kirk’s shooter wasn’t necessarily politically motivated as much as they were… internet troll motivated…? “As easy as it is to point to these costumes as proof that Robinson was a far-right extremist radicalized online by 4chan posts, it’s just as likely that he was a teenage boy dressing up as memes he saw online. This kind of content is basically the water young people swim in now,” it reads at one point. “It’s also possible Robinson genuinely believes in antifascist principles. But his alleged use of random internet brainrot is notable.”
It ends, “We have let school shootings in America persist long enough that we have created a culture where kids grow up seeing them as a path towards fame and glory. Another consequence of how thoroughly the internet has flattened pop culture, politics, and real life violence. All of it now is just another meme you can participate in to go viral. Made even more confusing by a new nihilistic accelerationist movement that delights in muddying the waters for older people who still adhere to a traditional political spectrum. Many young extremists now believe in a much simpler binary: Order and chaos. And if you are spending any time at all trying to derive meaning from violent acts like this then you are, by definition, their enemy.”
The reason it sticks in my head is… I can’t find a counterargument that I really believe in. I think this is the nihilistic worldview that kids (a holdall term I’ll use to include, honestly, anyone through their mid-20s if not their 30s) are immersed in and using as a primary lens through which to look at the world. I joke, at times, about how frustrated I find the “roast” and “troll” cultures to be in general online, but the truth is, it’s not “online” anymore; it’s everywhere. The last election proved it, and this last week proved it even more.
I’m not sure I know where we go from here, even beyond surviving the fascistic reign of the next few years. (Do you remember that Trump only took office again less than a year ago?) There are times I’m not sure I necessarily want to know, either.