All the Sad Young Terminally Online Men

Summary

Charlie Kirk’s assassination was a terminally online event, in every literal and tragic connotation of the term. The living record of Kirk’s work extends across the internet, where he has amassed millions of posthumous followers. The recorded moment of his death was grotesquely inescapable on social media. The killer’s bullets were engraved with gaming references and Discord memes. The political reaction was not only on the internet but also very much of the internet: negative, emotional, fixated on the worst examples of out-group commentary, collectively determined to demolish one’s faith in humanity. The far-left accounts cheering political assassination and prominent right-media personalities calling for civil war against “the party of murder” were engaged in a mirrored cosplay, both play-acting as violent revolutionaries from the comfort of air-conditioned rooms with WiFi. How can something like this happen in America? is an important question to ask, but not a difficult one to answer. To see what we are doing to ourselves, you only had to do the easiest thing: log on.We don’t know the full story of Tyler Robinson, the suspect arrested in Kirk’s murder. Early reporting by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times paints a sadly familiar picture of a smart young man who fell off the path and slid into some digital gutter whose subterranean corridors led to hell. Robinson was a college dropout who “lost contact” with his friends, devoted much of his life to video games, and “lived much of life on the internet.” Everybody arrives at a news story with the biases they’ve already accumulated, and I’ve made my bias known on this subject: I believe that this is the anti-social century and that rising American solitude that funnels life onto the internet is the most important social fact of our lifetimes. Most socially isolated people do not become political terrorists, and it would be reckless to suggest otherwise. But most mass shooters are socially isolated young...