Irony, social media, nihilism, and viral political violence
Earlier this month, I went out on a limb and suggested that watching videos of people getting murdered might be bad for you. Violence on social media has since become a larger topic of discussion online and, while I will obviously take most of the credit, here’s Sam Harris on the toll social media is taking on society:
…platforms like X and TikTok are destroying our culture… If the medium is the message, the message is mass psychosis—and it will send us careening from one political emergency to the next… We are poisoning ourselves and inviting others to poison us. …
He goes on:
Many seem completely unaware that their hold on reality is being steadily undermined by what they are seeing online, and that the business models of these platforms… depend on our continuing to gaze, and howl, into the digital abyss.
It’s one thing to lose a common culture, but it’s another, far darker, to lose your grip on reality. How do you attach meaning to the world around you if you have no stable or coherent frame of reference? And a meaningless world is, by definition, nihilistic. Of all the things we’re short on right now—jobs, houses, Andre 3000 rap albums—nihilism isn’t one of them.
Charlie Kirk’s killer seems to have struggled with this.“Remember how I was engraving bullets?” he texted.
The fuckin messages are mostly a big meme,”
Here’s Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:
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… 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 internet and social media are not going to turn everyone into a deranged psychopath, but a certain degree of nihilism does appear to plague the pathologically online.
Again, look to the memes.
I used to think our collective humor swung between sincerity and irony. But internet “humor” has accelerated beyond irony and beyond even post-irony. Every “joke” and shitpost is now buried beneath at least three layers of irony. It’s trironic™ and it’s pure meaningless artisanal slop.
A Gen Zer recently went viral after Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” came on in her Uber. She tweeted that the song gave her “the most sinister vibes ever” and that she feared the “Uber was just gonna drive us off the road.” At this particular moment in time, people are so uncalibrated that they actually disagreed with her.
I kid! But the meaninglessness of everything is actually very meaningful, which is itself actually very ironic.
Here’s Sam Harris again:
Whatever the killer’s motives, he dropped a match onto an information landscape that was ready to burn…
And yet, the information landscape is not the only flammable terrain in sight. Ezra Klein offered up a very timely reminder that political violence is like wildfire:
Violence is viral. It infects, it spreads. Violence is combustible. It blazes into civil wars, world wars, totalitarian turns. Who knows which spark will light the wildfire?
I don’t know which spark, if any, will ignite a totalitarian turn in this country, but I do know that Jimmy Kimmel has not been on the air to talk about it. ⚑
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