All the Sad Young Terminally Online Men

All the Sad Young Terminally Online Men(derekthompson.org)

9 points by gamechangr 242 days ago | 6 comments

bell-cot 242 days ago |

Quite a few good points - but I would limit how much blame one puts on the web, and the obviously unhealthy influences and ideologies found there.

And bear in mind that 99.9999%+ of online young men are not suddenly going out and killing people. Sadly, humans' obsession with rare violent acts leads journalism into providing us with an extremely unrepresentative worldview.

(And imagining the Kirk killing to be part of some huge nefarious liberal plot is just a "politically useful" conservative delusion.)

And also that young men were occasionally doing political-looking violence - for random-, crazy-, or idiotic-seeming reasons - long before there was a web. Once the facts came out, John Hinckley Jr. was not an ideological actor. Nor an enemy agent. Nor part of any conspiracy. Just a sexually obsessed lone nut job.

DaveZale 242 days ago | |

Yes, but online cliques like "accelerationists" are said to exist. Sounds like they are anarchist-like, trying to accelerate the destruction of society. Anyone else hear about this?

The wiki seems to indicate thar this, too, preceded the internet

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism

bell-cot 242 days ago | | |

Sure, there's an endless salad bar (the article's phrase) of nasty ideas and ideologies online.

But is the online talk a meaningful cause of real-world bad stuff, or a symptom or side-effect?

I'd say that Accelerationism was (in effect) a real-world thing for over century before the ~1970 thinking that Wikipedia cites as its background. Just look at the staggering social and technological upheavals from 1850 to 1950. At the start, a sail-powered wooden warship, capable of 10-ish MPH and using gunpowder to fire small balls of iron, was still pretty much state of the art for a major nation projecting military power. At the end, that state of the art was intercontinental bombers dropping atomic warheads.

And no techno-capitalist ideology was needed to force those changes. Nations which wanted to be (or stay) on the world's A List had to change, invent, and industrialize as fast as they could, just to keep up. Nations which couldn't, or didn't, faded into obscurity.

nis0s 242 days ago |

Not saying that’s what happened in the Kirk case, but the reason video games are prevalent in such cases of violence is because they are a good recruitment tool for agents all along the political spectrum to nab fresh blood. In the past, cults used to do the same thing with music or religion, or social activities like festivals, but the playbook is the same. From what I can tell, predators are going to use whatever people do socially to target them as it’s the easiest way to build trust and demonstrate shared values.

gamechangr 242 days ago | |

I also have a son who's a gamer. it's a tighter community Than what you mentioned (Music or Religion) and way more exposure. Its not uncommon for him to spend 30+ hrs a week in his "community"

nis0s 242 days ago | | |

The upside is that there are more video game players on average than video game players who do something violent. But it’s helpful to keep people aware of cult-like behaviors and cult-like recruitment techniques.

Here’s one place to start some research https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combating_Cult_Mind_Control