Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein challenged conflicting narratives circulating about Tyler Robinson by obtaining online chats and speaking with a childhood friend of the 22-year-old man accused of assassinating far-right activist Charlie Kirk.
this country isn’t ready for what the youngest online male zoomers are like lol. i’m a millennial but i’ve been here the whole time watching cultures come and go and the memelord nihilist has been growing since ‘04. there are many variations and they range from sad and pathetic yet ultimately harmless to sad and pathetic and goddamn dangerous. these people can have a mixture of politics and usually prefer whatever has the most public condemnation so they can align themselves with immorality as a point of pride which becomes their identity. fuck having your own beliefs, just follow whatever gets the most negative response from society.
Agreed - I really hate doing this “next generation bad” thing, but this really is a different situation than what we’ve seen before. The way the Internet creates a feedback loop of extremism around every single topic is terrifying, and people are completely missing the profound effects this is having on developing brains - priming them for radicalization while critical thought atrophies.
When we grew up we had a set of influences which grounded us in reality. Even if we found subversive places on the Internet, we still spent most of our time with our parents and teacher and coaches, etc. This is completely inverted now. Kids traverse the internet like a dog sniffing out idiotic ideas, and when they find the validation they seek, there’s seemingly no way to pull it out of them.
i hear ya. i’m not one to participate in generation wars but zoomers were given access to the worst parts of the internet left behind by millennials and younger gen xers and it is doing a number on them psychologically. i feel bad more than anything. our government didn’t care and let these kids get ruined by their control of information through media and the internet.
I used to live in a house that was on a big circle, with all the back yards joining in the middle. None of the houses had fences, so it was just one huge field, with the occasional tree. If that had been my backyard as a kid in the 60s and 70s, that giant field of combined backyards would have been filled with kids every day. I would have known the names of every other kid, where they lived, and probably their parents, too.
But when I lived there about 10 years ago, I seldom saw a single kid out there. In the 5 years I was there, I saw kids playing maybe 3 times.
A couple years before we moved, one of the house on the circle sold to a family with kids. They put a giant fence up, and the kids played in their own backyard, with no contact with others.
as someone what has been online since '96…don’t these kids realize we were all joking? evidently not. They take it seriously when “back in my day” we would have ridiculed them for it. I mean I’m old enough to see the rise and fall of 4chan, it’s dead now but at it’s peak it was dumb troll comics and edgelord antics. Then all of sudden zoomers decided that our shitposts were things to model their lives around.
It’s like when I was a kid and we had convinced my friends little brother that if he held a battery on his tongue for long enough he could get mutant powers. like no dude, you’re not getting power and confidence, you just look like an idiot with a battery on his tongue.
i want to push back a little bit on this because while i believe some of us were joking there were tons who weren’t and are ultimately responsible for the chronically online zoomers we see today. young gen xers and older millennials built the culture of the late 90s and early 00s internet that became the blueprint for the mid 10s to now. we had some of the worst racism and bullying imaginable on 4chan and it spread to the real world on occasion in horrifyingly cruel ways, like taunting parents of recently deceased kids and shit. we weren’t all joksters, the cruelty started early and spread rapidly. we allowed the internet to be eroded by the destruction of anonymity and infiltration of corporate and political interests.
It’s the way disempowerment interacts with tribalism and a saturated obviously polarized media environment.
This is only gonna get stupider. The cure is giving people agency over their lives, authorship over their world. Make the things they believe actually fucking matter.
this country isn’t ready for what the youngest online male zoomers are like lol. i’m a millennial but i’ve been here the whole time watching cultures come and go and the memelord nihilist has been growing since ‘04. there are many variations and they range from sad and pathetic yet ultimately harmless to sad and pathetic and goddamn dangerous. these people can have a mixture of politics and usually prefer whatever has the most public condemnation so they can align themselves with immorality as a point of pride which becomes their identity. fuck having your own beliefs, just follow whatever gets the most negative response from society.
Agreed - I really hate doing this “next generation bad” thing, but this really is a different situation than what we’ve seen before. The way the Internet creates a feedback loop of extremism around every single topic is terrifying, and people are completely missing the profound effects this is having on developing brains - priming them for radicalization while critical thought atrophies.
When we grew up we had a set of influences which grounded us in reality. Even if we found subversive places on the Internet, we still spent most of our time with our parents and teacher and coaches, etc. This is completely inverted now. Kids traverse the internet like a dog sniffing out idiotic ideas, and when they find the validation they seek, there’s seemingly no way to pull it out of them.
i hear ya. i’m not one to participate in generation wars but zoomers were given access to the worst parts of the internet left behind by millennials and younger gen xers and it is doing a number on them psychologically. i feel bad more than anything. our government didn’t care and let these kids get ruined by their control of information through media and the internet.
I used to live in a house that was on a big circle, with all the back yards joining in the middle. None of the houses had fences, so it was just one huge field, with the occasional tree. If that had been my backyard as a kid in the 60s and 70s, that giant field of combined backyards would have been filled with kids every day. I would have known the names of every other kid, where they lived, and probably their parents, too.
But when I lived there about 10 years ago, I seldom saw a single kid out there. In the 5 years I was there, I saw kids playing maybe 3 times.
A couple years before we moved, one of the house on the circle sold to a family with kids. They put a giant fence up, and the kids played in their own backyard, with no contact with others.
as someone what has been online since '96…don’t these kids realize we were all joking? evidently not. They take it seriously when “back in my day” we would have ridiculed them for it. I mean I’m old enough to see the rise and fall of 4chan, it’s dead now but at it’s peak it was dumb troll comics and edgelord antics. Then all of sudden zoomers decided that our shitposts were things to model their lives around.
It’s like when I was a kid and we had convinced my friends little brother that if he held a battery on his tongue for long enough he could get mutant powers. like no dude, you’re not getting power and confidence, you just look like an idiot with a battery on his tongue.
i want to push back a little bit on this because while i believe some of us were joking there were tons who weren’t and are ultimately responsible for the chronically online zoomers we see today. young gen xers and older millennials built the culture of the late 90s and early 00s internet that became the blueprint for the mid 10s to now. we had some of the worst racism and bullying imaginable on 4chan and it spread to the real world on occasion in horrifyingly cruel ways, like taunting parents of recently deceased kids and shit. we weren’t all joksters, the cruelty started early and spread rapidly. we allowed the internet to be eroded by the destruction of anonymity and infiltration of corporate and political interests.
It’s the way disempowerment interacts with tribalism and a saturated obviously polarized media environment.
This is only gonna get stupider. The cure is giving people agency over their lives, authorship over their world. Make the things they believe actually fucking matter.
is that like “black-pilled”?