The New Zealand shooter is one of us
If you know me and are reading this, you are probably everpresent online. You have knowledge of memes and internet darlings and weird porn and stupid tropes that come with channeling life through your browser. You are probably in likewise communities, whether that be music or politics or games or sports on whatever amalgamation of Twitter/Reddit/Tumblr/Instagram you frequent. Irony is a dial that you pull back and forth when applicable, and its presence is felt in many interactions you have. Millenials and now Gen Z are couched through this mindset, and it is consistently politicized explicitly if not implicitly through the behavioral transactions of the subconscious. We’re probably more psychologically fucked up than any other generation because of this, and the vast depth of influence that the Internet wields is troublingly unknowable and will have to be dealt with and interrogated vociferously.
Reading the New Zealand shooter’s manifesto, I felt aghast at how detached and impassionate the gunman was. Unlike past aggrieved mass killers whose neuroses had been shaped by the Internet, he felt he needed to do this, but without the frenzied ranting of an Elliott Rodger, whose incel diatribes will continue to haunt our culture for some time. Many of the recent terrorist attacks in the Western world have been framed around the alt-right, specifically people like Candace Owens, Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, and other fascist caliphates that depend on conspiratorial loons to lap up their words without question. Certainly moments like the Pittsburgh synagogue, or Charlottesville, have contextualized the widespread power in utilizing social media to gather followers, which incidentally just happen to be violent psychopaths who use murderous tactics in order to harm marginalized groups and their allies.
But this new shooter went one step further, that truly hit close to home. His unabashed 4chan tonality, coupled with the livestreaming of the attack, is a pure manifestation of lulz culture, warped from merely trolling Scientology and Habbo Hotel, into a brutal anti-Islam creed that mirrors the rise of Donald Trump. Promoted by /pol/, the craven racism and bigotry that plagued the forum for years manifested itself into not only a movement that can be actively called upon by the right online to bleed into mainstream conservative ideology (see: QAnon), but is interested in continuing that insurrectionary charge against its targets in real life, culminating in the unspeakable act of the other day.
It’s a stunning atrocity, but one that is not surprising at all. We see these people all the time online, in Youtube and Breitbart and Daily Caller comment sections and in Twitter mentions where slurs are used without emotion or a veneer. They function as this mass wave, tirelessly opposing and trolling anyone that dares to go against their white identitarianism and its cult leaders. You have to be numb to it in order to browse the web without abandon because it’s always there, lurking in the shadows, waiting to call you a nigger. The Christchurch shooter is a mere variant of this culture, in that instead of being 58 and re-igniting his hate with the Internet, he is 28 and seeped himself into the belief system from the beginning vis a vis online community.
For me at least, it is a reminder of how wrong being attached to the Internet can go, and the tightrope one walks culminating personality and ethics through these mediums. Although many people have obviously avoided this disastrous framework by which the shooter operated under, the pull of radicalism for those affixed by the Internet is undeniable, whether it be incel hysteria or white ironic-nee-unironic nationalism. I and many of my friends have walked this line. We are lucky that we were able to critically process why certain creds were abhorrent, even when faced with fervent and dogmatic semiotics on 4chan and its ilk unearthing the vilest propaganda known to man.
Eventually, at least for my fellow Americans and I, we will forget about this catastrophe, as we do covered under the sheet of banality that begets violence in our country. It will disappear into the landscape of mayhem caused by whiteness, characterized by men who have become wholly disenfranchised in the late era of capitalism, choosing power in racism and misogyny and xenophobia in order to recapture an imagined nostalgia or live out a fantasy as a martyr. This particular circumstance, however, grabs me as the first of its kind, or at least the most sickening of its kind. It is a reminder that there is an uncomfortable kinship between the brain poisoned leftists we posit ourselves as and the slur-wielding Anons that move silently across the Internet. Without a proper environment by which introspection and empathy can grow, unfiltered access to content like this breeds hate at an appalling pace, by which leftism cannot compete with. If there is not a comprehensive initiative to curb the neo-fascism dominating social media by these platforms, our generations that feed on memes stand to become more demented and hateful than ever, leading to copycat terrorists. White supremacy is thriving in 2019, and it is using our shared vernacular and cultural understanding to do so.