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Until recently, if asked to profile a typical mass shooter, we would have described a middle-aged man who was socially isolated and in despair. He was not in the grip of a political ideology, nor did he have a mental health condition such as schizophrenia. Rather, he was deeply despondent about a life crisis, perhaps a divorce or a job loss. In attacking a workplace or a group of people he blamed for his problems, he was both exacting vengeance and effectively or literally committing suicide.
Over the past several years, something has changed. We are witnessing the emergence of a different paradigm: a mass shooter no less despairing about life’s hardships but younger, highly connected to online social networks and seemingly convinced that in acting violently he or she is carrying out the only meaningful act possible in a world otherwise devoid of meaning.
We are seeing that boys often arrive in this community through gore forums, girls through eating-disorder communities.
hat the true crime community has done, in effect, is take the despair that has always typified mass shootings and give it a performative script. The community turns private pain into a public narrative:
the performative turn in mass violence. The shooter becomes the main character in a story that the true crime community has been writing together for years, and the attack is the climax — both the culmination of nihilism (nothing matters) and, somehow, its imagined overcoming through violence (this matters). The violence is not a means to an end. It is the end. The shooters are not trying to change the world. They are trying to be seen in it, one last time, on terms they control.
There have long been copycat killers, but this is a whole other level — copycat killing fueled by the viral power of meme culture.
The internet was once simply a place you visited to learn things. Now it learns you. If you’re a teenager in crisis, you don’t need to seek out dark material; the algorithms study what you linger on and serve you more content like it.
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