"so the fascist subject strives to become something, literally some thing—part of a mob, a serious participant of a political movement, a devotee of a secret religion, an invincible, perfectly masculine warrior, a perfectly feminine woman, a member of a race or gender or historical civilization with certain immutable, permanent qualities, or the exponent of some kind of eternal, vital force"
It remains the case that I think Gamergate was a major--perhaps *the* major--inflection point for the modern right. I was one of the people who took the KYE guys to task for going easy on Hochman, and part of that is because I saw right through his act. And that's not because I'm particularly insightful, but rather because his act is so very familiar; anyone who's been very online for a decade or two knows exactly the type of guy he is. It wouldn't shock me at all to discover that a teenage Hochman spent most afternoons furiously posting to /r/kotakuinaction.
There's something grimly amusing about the fact that the big moment for the conservative movement was a misogynist backlash against women in video gaming cloaked by concern about ethics in games journalism, but that's where we are I guess.
Gamergate functioned as a 21st century Beer Hall Putsch. It didn't have the history-making consequences (yet), but the histrionic overreaction to a breakup ended up being a political consciousness for the modern right. In fact, the most profound effect was to transform the nature and values of the Republican Party. The GOP is "eternal Gamergate" in the way that AOL ruined the internet by causing "eternal September."
Eternal September is the phenomenon that when internet access was primarily institutional, like colleges and the military, there would be a small but manageable contingent of new users who would have bad etiquette but more veteran users would maintain norms and the new users would shape up or ship out (Usenet had the killfile, the equivalent of social media's block and mute buttons). AOL changed the nature of that, one by spamming magazines with free trial disks and offering internet gateways (particularly Usenet newsgroups), then in 1996 when it switched from a metered service that it billed users by hour to a monthly flat fee. The contingent of AsshOLes brought by those two events degraded the communications quality because of the sheer volume of activity and no way to stop the trolling, flame wars, shitposts and spam.
The Republicans, top to bottom, are like that now. The culture warring, the low-effort bigotry, degrading communications to mere memes and virality, the veneration of churlishness (coded as "free speech"). RationalWiki has a good timeline and terminology of Gamergate at https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gamergate . The best description of Gamergate is: "From the start, Gamergate was a village bicycle for any and every conservative and/or reactionary pundit who tagged along in order to attack feminists and "social justice warriors" (by which they mean people who aren't reactionaries), as well as to fool as many people as possible into joining what would eventually become the alt-right."
Totally agree Gamergate was a huge inflection point, less for what it was from a meaningful and righteous dissent standpoint. It’s hypocrisies and absurdities were more important and powerful than the boring facts. Rather, it was an epic demonstration of the power of a pseudo-anonymous internet mob fueled by mostly manufactured grievances playing to immature masculine and anti-intellectual impulses. It inspired a vector of psychological warfare many players seem to try to harness.
There is maybe an interesting vein to mine in the distinction between conservative thinkers like Buckley and Hochman who simply seem incapable of contemplating themselves or their own capacity to do evil, with the ones like Dreher and Hanania who look deeply into their own navels before coming to the conclusion that certain evils must be done and are, in fact, good actually.
The moral monster is the answer to Nietzsche's gaze into the abyss aphorism. If you think of the abyss as a force of evil, the only way it can be annihilated is by challenging evil on its own terms and overwhelming it. In order to end the monster, you must become the monster. If you win, you are the monster.
Wow John! This made my clunky wheels churn a bunch this morning. Thank you
This bit especially struck a chord in regards to mass psychosis and psychic epidemics:
“so the fascist subject strives to become something, literally some thing—part of a mob, a serious participant of a political movement, a devotee of a secret religion, an invincible, perfectly masculine warrior, a perfectly feminine woman, a member of a race or gender or historical civilization with certain immutable, permanent qualities, or the exponent of some kind of eternal, vital force. “
Jung having witnessed 2 world wars studied these and warned about becoming the archetype. Especially in times of confusion and upheaval, one must avoid becoming the archetypal figure. As tempting as it may be in tumultuous times when people are trying to latch on to something that makes sense, becoming that archetype leads to hubristic, uncaring, antisocial attitudes that may lead to atrocity. The opposite, individuation, which can only be realized individual by individual is what heals societies, according to Jung.
I think the criticism is mostly well-founded. Obviously we need to keep an eye on the right and they do a lot of good work on that (which is why I also subscribe to their patreon), but its necessary to do that without platforming people.
The pushback to that is that the audience is smart and discerning and that shining a light on people will just reveal their flaws which is completely clueless about what platforming is. Its a process of social credentialing people who have some of the basic aesthetics of intellectuals as Serious Thinkers who have to be Engaged With. The audience being smart has never actually produced an outcome of avoiding burnishing someone's bona fides and in fact is precisely counterproductive to that. Nor is it true, if their clownish defense that he didn't know what the sonnenrad is is any indication.
Profiling new conservative writers, especially as part of a general trend, is good although its better if you can avoiding the cringing journalism tropes of "disobedient cowlick"s. Inviting them on to speak is not. Furthermore these people are trolls. Their representation of their own beliefs to a non-groyper audience is of very low value. The entire reason Know Your Enemy is good is because it filters through the right's internal discourse and pulls out some actual information.
Is there some unjust criticism? Sure, that's how the internet be but it was a bad decision, people told them it was a bad decision at the time, its become incredibly evident that it indeed was a bad decision and so one gets one's turn of chastisement. One would hope that it would blow over faster if they would actually say that they fucked up, they're sorry and they won't do it again. Either way anyone who's still harping about this after the present moment, those people we do get to say are excessive.
And you know this may be a function of what part of the discourse you're running into. What I've seen is fairly restrained, patreon comments expressing disappointment are only going to be so harsh.
That aside I do kind of struggle with how you get to said opinion. "They're All Like That" after all. I thought your responses to Hochman were good even though they were engaging him and of course setting him up for responses in turn and even though we all knew they were in some direct sense a waste of time. I mostly think the original new republic piece was a good idea. I would have had no objection to an episode of their about Hochman. Having him on is just more similar to letting him write a guest post to a substack than the former.
Hochman (and his type) present a real challenge to any academic/journalist/etc because what he's doing is fundamentally orthogonal to what the interviewer(s) are doing. The latter are hoping to have a conversation that is illuminating and will result in the audience coming away with a greater understanding of the interview subject. The latter is (more or less) taking advantage of the interview to propagandize.
I think in this situation it puts the interviewer in a tough position. It's fair and reasonable that the KYE guys didn't want the interview to descend into shouting "no, U!" at one another and that this would be unlistenable. But the flip side of that is: if pushing your subject to be truthful is going to cause that kind of situation, should you really be interviewing this person in the first place? What is it you're actually trying to accomplish, and what are you actually accomplishing?
I remember first recognizing this dynamic way back when in an early episode of The Ezra Klein Show, when he interviewed Grover Norquist. Norquist is a congenial guy who is also a hardcore GOP activist and every answer he offered to Ezra was packed full of five or six falsehoods. Ezra could push back on one, but he couldn't push back on them all and have anything resembling a conversation. Norquist knew this! What's more, he also knew that for anyone who wasn't sufficiently sophisticated the falsehoods would slide on by and settle into their consciousness. I--an economics Ph.D. student at the time--met that sufficiency bar and so I could recognize just how full of shit he was. Undoubtedly many listeners were not.
I don't know what the right thing to do here is, honestly. But I do think there's a legitimate tension, and it's not one that the KYE guys (or John) fully acknowledge. "The listener will recognize they're full of shit" is kind of a cop out; if their full-of-shitness is that self-evident then why are you interviewing them in the first place?
Sitman and Adler-Bell are a total class act, but there’s also something to be said for simply accepting that the Hochmans of the world are a hostile force, and it kind of makes some sense to disengage from them directly and just get on with trying to make the good side stronger. They are parasitical and need a host, and that host is the squishy, antifascist libs taking them on good faith.
In the postmortem, the KYE guys themselves pretty much acknowledge the futility of it, or at least recognize that if you’re conflict-averse or simply courteous, the fascist interlocutor exploits that vulnerability and ends up setting the terms and calling the shots. More importantly, these characters simply lie a lot and, as John says, never really own either the provenance or implications of their beliefs. The result is you’re interviewing a kind of impersonator or imposter.
At least in part, it’s tempting to see this as a technology driven issue. It’s the internet, it’s practically free, might as well talk to fascists too. Worth emphasizing the historical novelty of this. Gramsci wasn’t going to argue with Malaparte about the philosophical merits of despotism. Read his books, critique him, sure, but forget the rest.
“Echo chamber” has become a pejorative, but disparaging like-minded people talking to each other and trying to refine and elaborate their understanding of how power operates - this in itself seems like a right-wing manipulation. Again, the historical novelty of seeing direct intellectual non-engagement with fascists as a bad thing jumps out.
I agree that "no, U!" is bad, and actually I'd say that the calls for more strenuous objections are the main genre of criticism I don't think is reasonable.
That said losing track of stuff because of sheer quantity or making a pragmatic call that they won't give you anything else and you might as well move on is also really frustrating as a pure listening experience. One doesn't love doing that oneself in a conversation, its much worse hearing someone else do it.
This really doesn't seem that difficult an issue to manage to me. We've inherited an aesthetic appreciation for the idea of rational discourse, but aesthetics is all that is. There's no actual reason why we have to privilege conversation between people with different views in our intellectual life and we've actually steadily accumulated over the ages a number of serious challenges to its usefulness.
I think people running for political office is somewhat different because you need a ton of people to acquire the information to make decisions and a performance of calm civility that sets the other person up to show themselves to be totally deranged can sometimes let the public work through their own reaction to someone. But the only reason Hochman is at all relevant is because he writes and he does political work and you can respond to either without speaking to him in public.
Its equivocation to say KYE's relationship with Hochman was just amicable. Sitman called him a friend ("I'm not going to tell him he's not my friend anymore") and read a heartfelt passage ruminating on friendship by whatever guy (don't remember, don't care) they first bonded over. That is a whole never level than someone you have a collegial discussion. Feels like I recently read a substack confessing to the pitfalls of this!
Excellent piece, great writing, good analysis and great quotes (Sartre and Arendt are favorites)! The groyperfication you name, the atmospherics and dramatics within movements that blinds their adherents, is ubiquitous right now on the right and the left, so suffuses the culture. It's the material realization of highly polarized politics in the age of mass media + 2-way universal feedback from The People. The changes to culture read to me like a quickening, accelerating some of the historical statist and authoritarian patterns you point out. When mixed into a brew with tech leverage, rapid information feedback, growing population and an atmospheric system which is in a highly-perturbed equilibrium with the human population, chaotic conditions are all but certain. Turbulence ahead, buckle up!
This is terrific. But the "Know Your Enemy" episode on the Hochman affair seemed to me just tedious--like a substantial part of current left discourse has turned into not change-the-world-for-the-better, and not understand-the-world-better, but be-morally-praiseworthy-in-the-face-of-evil. which is dull.
Recently in italy we had Italian army general who wrote a book where he expresses some extreme right views, like gay people are not normal, and how black Volleyball star Paola Egonu doesn’t look like Italian. She is black italian and complained in the past how italy is racist country. The scandal of his book made him become popular in the country. Now more people are reading his book and his ideas will expand more. Italy needs to have more discussion about racism but this won’t help. His success may even open him door for politics. Extreme right people aren’t happy with moderate side of Meloni, and they might in near future create another extreme party if she continues to be moderate. Fascism idealogy will have always people that will make them look normal.
Your essay brought together several observations I’ve made about young men over the past few years--they are rebelling against the status quo. In my day, ahem, we were leftist rebels, but culturally today that simply wouldn’t provide the satisfaction, the thrill, of behaving transgressively. We should be more worried about this, especially the far right presence in congressional staffs.
Isn't it funny when that nice white, middle class Dr Jekyll starts playing around with his social chemistry set, Mr Hyde always turns out to be a Nazi? I think the nihilism to self-objectification pipeline described, is persuasive as far as it goes. But it doesn't explain why its always the same "edge" the edgelords want to play with. Yes, the empty posturing of inconsequential play can lead to the realisation that maybe the emptiness inside, the lack of self-value, is a reflection of ones own inconsequence, and the way out is seizing on a pre-given role and inhabiting it (rather than figuring out what true self-actualisation would look like). But it doesn't explain the "dark modelling" aspect - why does it always have to be the most thanatic stereotype in the cultural cliché handbook?
In it, the boys are engaging in the vile yet extremely superficial, unthinking if not altogether unintentional, behavior (in this case, creating and posting racist and cruel memes) you describe here--this despite identifying as, if not liberal, at least progressive and "not racist." What's somewhat interesting is that these boys (not all of whom were white) mostly did not target strangers on the internet, but rather peers (exclusively female, especially Black) with whom they had grown up and were nominally friends.
"so the fascist subject strives to become something, literally some thing—part of a mob, a serious participant of a political movement, a devotee of a secret religion, an invincible, perfectly masculine warrior, a perfectly feminine woman, a member of a race or gender or historical civilization with certain immutable, permanent qualities, or the exponent of some kind of eternal, vital force"
It remains the case that I think Gamergate was a major--perhaps *the* major--inflection point for the modern right. I was one of the people who took the KYE guys to task for going easy on Hochman, and part of that is because I saw right through his act. And that's not because I'm particularly insightful, but rather because his act is so very familiar; anyone who's been very online for a decade or two knows exactly the type of guy he is. It wouldn't shock me at all to discover that a teenage Hochman spent most afternoons furiously posting to /r/kotakuinaction.
There's something grimly amusing about the fact that the big moment for the conservative movement was a misogynist backlash against women in video gaming cloaked by concern about ethics in games journalism, but that's where we are I guess.
Gamergate functioned as a 21st century Beer Hall Putsch. It didn't have the history-making consequences (yet), but the histrionic overreaction to a breakup ended up being a political consciousness for the modern right. In fact, the most profound effect was to transform the nature and values of the Republican Party. The GOP is "eternal Gamergate" in the way that AOL ruined the internet by causing "eternal September."
Eternal September is the phenomenon that when internet access was primarily institutional, like colleges and the military, there would be a small but manageable contingent of new users who would have bad etiquette but more veteran users would maintain norms and the new users would shape up or ship out (Usenet had the killfile, the equivalent of social media's block and mute buttons). AOL changed the nature of that, one by spamming magazines with free trial disks and offering internet gateways (particularly Usenet newsgroups), then in 1996 when it switched from a metered service that it billed users by hour to a monthly flat fee. The contingent of AsshOLes brought by those two events degraded the communications quality because of the sheer volume of activity and no way to stop the trolling, flame wars, shitposts and spam.
The Republicans, top to bottom, are like that now. The culture warring, the low-effort bigotry, degrading communications to mere memes and virality, the veneration of churlishness (coded as "free speech"). RationalWiki has a good timeline and terminology of Gamergate at https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gamergate . The best description of Gamergate is: "From the start, Gamergate was a village bicycle for any and every conservative and/or reactionary pundit who tagged along in order to attack feminists and "social justice warriors" (by which they mean people who aren't reactionaries), as well as to fool as many people as possible into joining what would eventually become the alt-right."
Totally agree Gamergate was a huge inflection point, less for what it was from a meaningful and righteous dissent standpoint. It’s hypocrisies and absurdities were more important and powerful than the boring facts. Rather, it was an epic demonstration of the power of a pseudo-anonymous internet mob fueled by mostly manufactured grievances playing to immature masculine and anti-intellectual impulses. It inspired a vector of psychological warfare many players seem to try to harness.
There is maybe an interesting vein to mine in the distinction between conservative thinkers like Buckley and Hochman who simply seem incapable of contemplating themselves or their own capacity to do evil, with the ones like Dreher and Hanania who look deeply into their own navels before coming to the conclusion that certain evils must be done and are, in fact, good actually.
That makes Dreher and Hanania moral monsters.
The moral monster is the answer to Nietzsche's gaze into the abyss aphorism. If you think of the abyss as a force of evil, the only way it can be annihilated is by challenging evil on its own terms and overwhelming it. In order to end the monster, you must become the monster. If you win, you are the monster.
Wow John! This made my clunky wheels churn a bunch this morning. Thank you
This bit especially struck a chord in regards to mass psychosis and psychic epidemics:
“so the fascist subject strives to become something, literally some thing—part of a mob, a serious participant of a political movement, a devotee of a secret religion, an invincible, perfectly masculine warrior, a perfectly feminine woman, a member of a race or gender or historical civilization with certain immutable, permanent qualities, or the exponent of some kind of eternal, vital force. “
Jung having witnessed 2 world wars studied these and warned about becoming the archetype. Especially in times of confusion and upheaval, one must avoid becoming the archetypal figure. As tempting as it may be in tumultuous times when people are trying to latch on to something that makes sense, becoming that archetype leads to hubristic, uncaring, antisocial attitudes that may lead to atrocity. The opposite, individuation, which can only be realized individual by individual is what heals societies, according to Jung.
https://academyofideas.com/2021/02/mass-psychosis-greatest-threat-to-humanity/
I think the criticism is mostly well-founded. Obviously we need to keep an eye on the right and they do a lot of good work on that (which is why I also subscribe to their patreon), but its necessary to do that without platforming people.
The pushback to that is that the audience is smart and discerning and that shining a light on people will just reveal their flaws which is completely clueless about what platforming is. Its a process of social credentialing people who have some of the basic aesthetics of intellectuals as Serious Thinkers who have to be Engaged With. The audience being smart has never actually produced an outcome of avoiding burnishing someone's bona fides and in fact is precisely counterproductive to that. Nor is it true, if their clownish defense that he didn't know what the sonnenrad is is any indication.
Profiling new conservative writers, especially as part of a general trend, is good although its better if you can avoiding the cringing journalism tropes of "disobedient cowlick"s. Inviting them on to speak is not. Furthermore these people are trolls. Their representation of their own beliefs to a non-groyper audience is of very low value. The entire reason Know Your Enemy is good is because it filters through the right's internal discourse and pulls out some actual information.
Is there some unjust criticism? Sure, that's how the internet be but it was a bad decision, people told them it was a bad decision at the time, its become incredibly evident that it indeed was a bad decision and so one gets one's turn of chastisement. One would hope that it would blow over faster if they would actually say that they fucked up, they're sorry and they won't do it again. Either way anyone who's still harping about this after the present moment, those people we do get to say are excessive.
you're entitled to your opinion, i don't share it
Evidently!
And you know this may be a function of what part of the discourse you're running into. What I've seen is fairly restrained, patreon comments expressing disappointment are only going to be so harsh.
That aside I do kind of struggle with how you get to said opinion. "They're All Like That" after all. I thought your responses to Hochman were good even though they were engaging him and of course setting him up for responses in turn and even though we all knew they were in some direct sense a waste of time. I mostly think the original new republic piece was a good idea. I would have had no objection to an episode of their about Hochman. Having him on is just more similar to letting him write a guest post to a substack than the former.
Hochman (and his type) present a real challenge to any academic/journalist/etc because what he's doing is fundamentally orthogonal to what the interviewer(s) are doing. The latter are hoping to have a conversation that is illuminating and will result in the audience coming away with a greater understanding of the interview subject. The latter is (more or less) taking advantage of the interview to propagandize.
I think in this situation it puts the interviewer in a tough position. It's fair and reasonable that the KYE guys didn't want the interview to descend into shouting "no, U!" at one another and that this would be unlistenable. But the flip side of that is: if pushing your subject to be truthful is going to cause that kind of situation, should you really be interviewing this person in the first place? What is it you're actually trying to accomplish, and what are you actually accomplishing?
I remember first recognizing this dynamic way back when in an early episode of The Ezra Klein Show, when he interviewed Grover Norquist. Norquist is a congenial guy who is also a hardcore GOP activist and every answer he offered to Ezra was packed full of five or six falsehoods. Ezra could push back on one, but he couldn't push back on them all and have anything resembling a conversation. Norquist knew this! What's more, he also knew that for anyone who wasn't sufficiently sophisticated the falsehoods would slide on by and settle into their consciousness. I--an economics Ph.D. student at the time--met that sufficiency bar and so I could recognize just how full of shit he was. Undoubtedly many listeners were not.
I don't know what the right thing to do here is, honestly. But I do think there's a legitimate tension, and it's not one that the KYE guys (or John) fully acknowledge. "The listener will recognize they're full of shit" is kind of a cop out; if their full-of-shitness is that self-evident then why are you interviewing them in the first place?
Sitman and Adler-Bell are a total class act, but there’s also something to be said for simply accepting that the Hochmans of the world are a hostile force, and it kind of makes some sense to disengage from them directly and just get on with trying to make the good side stronger. They are parasitical and need a host, and that host is the squishy, antifascist libs taking them on good faith.
In the postmortem, the KYE guys themselves pretty much acknowledge the futility of it, or at least recognize that if you’re conflict-averse or simply courteous, the fascist interlocutor exploits that vulnerability and ends up setting the terms and calling the shots. More importantly, these characters simply lie a lot and, as John says, never really own either the provenance or implications of their beliefs. The result is you’re interviewing a kind of impersonator or imposter.
At least in part, it’s tempting to see this as a technology driven issue. It’s the internet, it’s practically free, might as well talk to fascists too. Worth emphasizing the historical novelty of this. Gramsci wasn’t going to argue with Malaparte about the philosophical merits of despotism. Read his books, critique him, sure, but forget the rest.
“Echo chamber” has become a pejorative, but disparaging like-minded people talking to each other and trying to refine and elaborate their understanding of how power operates - this in itself seems like a right-wing manipulation. Again, the historical novelty of seeing direct intellectual non-engagement with fascists as a bad thing jumps out.
I agree that "no, U!" is bad, and actually I'd say that the calls for more strenuous objections are the main genre of criticism I don't think is reasonable.
That said losing track of stuff because of sheer quantity or making a pragmatic call that they won't give you anything else and you might as well move on is also really frustrating as a pure listening experience. One doesn't love doing that oneself in a conversation, its much worse hearing someone else do it.
This really doesn't seem that difficult an issue to manage to me. We've inherited an aesthetic appreciation for the idea of rational discourse, but aesthetics is all that is. There's no actual reason why we have to privilege conversation between people with different views in our intellectual life and we've actually steadily accumulated over the ages a number of serious challenges to its usefulness.
I think people running for political office is somewhat different because you need a ton of people to acquire the information to make decisions and a performance of calm civility that sets the other person up to show themselves to be totally deranged can sometimes let the public work through their own reaction to someone. But the only reason Hochman is at all relevant is because he writes and he does political work and you can respond to either without speaking to him in public.
Its equivocation to say KYE's relationship with Hochman was just amicable. Sitman called him a friend ("I'm not going to tell him he's not my friend anymore") and read a heartfelt passage ruminating on friendship by whatever guy (don't remember, don't care) they first bonded over. That is a whole never level than someone you have a collegial discussion. Feels like I recently read a substack confessing to the pitfalls of this!
so what?
Excellent piece, great writing, good analysis and great quotes (Sartre and Arendt are favorites)! The groyperfication you name, the atmospherics and dramatics within movements that blinds their adherents, is ubiquitous right now on the right and the left, so suffuses the culture. It's the material realization of highly polarized politics in the age of mass media + 2-way universal feedback from The People. The changes to culture read to me like a quickening, accelerating some of the historical statist and authoritarian patterns you point out. When mixed into a brew with tech leverage, rapid information feedback, growing population and an atmospheric system which is in a highly-perturbed equilibrium with the human population, chaotic conditions are all but certain. Turbulence ahead, buckle up!
This is terrific. But the "Know Your Enemy" episode on the Hochman affair seemed to me just tedious--like a substantial part of current left discourse has turned into not change-the-world-for-the-better, and not understand-the-world-better, but be-morally-praiseworthy-in-the-face-of-evil. which is dull.
Recently in italy we had Italian army general who wrote a book where he expresses some extreme right views, like gay people are not normal, and how black Volleyball star Paola Egonu doesn’t look like Italian. She is black italian and complained in the past how italy is racist country. The scandal of his book made him become popular in the country. Now more people are reading his book and his ideas will expand more. Italy needs to have more discussion about racism but this won’t help. His success may even open him door for politics. Extreme right people aren’t happy with moderate side of Meloni, and they might in near future create another extreme party if she continues to be moderate. Fascism idealogy will have always people that will make them look normal.
I looked that up. Crazy story in that he published it while commander of the Folgore paratrooper brigade.
He's just been fired https://www.euronews.com/culture/2023/08/21/italian-general-roberto-vannacci-fired-after-homophobic-and-racist-remarks-in-book
You can't allow active duty officers to be popping off political screeds.
Your essay brought together several observations I’ve made about young men over the past few years--they are rebelling against the status quo. In my day, ahem, we were leftist rebels, but culturally today that simply wouldn’t provide the satisfaction, the thrill, of behaving transgressively. We should be more worried about this, especially the far right presence in congressional staffs.
Isn't it funny when that nice white, middle class Dr Jekyll starts playing around with his social chemistry set, Mr Hyde always turns out to be a Nazi? I think the nihilism to self-objectification pipeline described, is persuasive as far as it goes. But it doesn't explain why its always the same "edge" the edgelords want to play with. Yes, the empty posturing of inconsequential play can lead to the realisation that maybe the emptiness inside, the lack of self-value, is a reflection of ones own inconsequence, and the way out is seizing on a pre-given role and inhabiting it (rather than figuring out what true self-actualisation would look like). But it doesn't explain the "dark modelling" aspect - why does it always have to be the most thanatic stereotype in the cultural cliché handbook?
I know you focus primarily on the right (formerly prefixed with alt-) here, but this entry also made me think of a recent article making the rounds among liberal Substacks, Dashka Slater's https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/magazine/california-high-school-racist-instagram.html
In it, the boys are engaging in the vile yet extremely superficial, unthinking if not altogether unintentional, behavior (in this case, creating and posting racist and cruel memes) you describe here--this despite identifying as, if not liberal, at least progressive and "not racist." What's somewhat interesting is that these boys (not all of whom were white) mostly did not target strangers on the internet, but rather peers (exclusively female, especially Black) with whom they had grown up and were nominally friends.