All the Sad Young Terminally Online Men

Political violence is like a lightning bolt: sudden, surprising, seemingly random, yet always emerging from a local weather system. Do not forget that we all make the weather.

Photo by Majestic Lukas on Unsplash

Charlie Kirk’s assassination was a terminally online event, in every literal and tragic connotation of the term. The living record of Kirk’s work extends across the internet, where he has amassed millions of posthumous followers. The recorded moment of his death was grotesquely inescapable on social media. The killer’s bullets were engraved with gaming references and Discord memes. The political reaction was not only on the internet but also very much of the internet: negative, emotional, fixated on the worst examples of out-group commentary, collectively determined to demolish one’s faith in humanity. The far-left accounts cheering political assassination and prominent right-media personalities calling for civil war¹ against “the party of murder” were engaged in a mirrored cosplay, both play-acting as violent revolutionaries from the comfort of air-conditioned rooms with WiFi. How can something like this happen in America? is an important question to ask, but not a difficult one to answer. To see what we are doing to ourselves, you only had to do the easiest thing: log on.

We don’t know the full story of Tyler Robinson, the suspect arrested in Kirk’s murder. Early reporting by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times paints a sadly familiar picture of a smart young man who fell off the path and slid into some digital gutter whose subterranean corridors led to hell. Robinson was a college dropout who “lost contact” with his friends, devoted much of his life to video games, and “lived much of life on the internet.”

Everybody arrives at a news story with the biases they’ve already accumulated, and I’ve made my bias known on this subject: I believe that this is the anti-social century and that rising American solitude that funnels life onto the internet is the most important social fact of our lifetimes. Most socially isolated people do not become political terrorists, and it would be reckless to suggest otherwise. But most mass shooters are socially isolated young men, and it would be foolish to ignore the connection. One study of 177 mass shooters found that social isolation was “the most important external indicator” prior to the attack.

It is not isolation on its own that is radicalizing. The information that people consume as they cut off the physical world also deserves our attention. In the Friday episode of Plain English that I recorded on the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the last question that I asked my guest Adrienne LaFrance, the executive editor of The Atlantic, was this:

Political violence is akin to a lightning strike. It is somewhat random, and it’s rare. But lightning emerges from a local weather system. And we all make the weather. The political and media climate is co-created by all of us. So, what can we do?

I spent a lot of time over the weekend thinking about “the weather” we make and the climate of digital media that seems to have, at least in part, contributed to last week’s bolt of political violence. I found myself returning over and over again to four ideas.

1. Young Men and “Sedentary Leisure Alone”

The rise in solitude is especially real for young single men. A 2024 analysis of time use led by Liana Sayer at the University of Maryland looked at how men and women spent their downtime in "sedentary leisure" (e.g., watching TV, looking at your phone, playing video games) versus "active leisure" (e.g., playing sports). The group with the most "sedentary leisure alone" was single men without kids—by far. This group also has the fewest hours of social leisure time, active or engaged, of any group. On a typical day in 2023, for example, single men with no kids have more than four times the amount of sedentary leisure alone time as mothers with children.

Source: Sayer et al

One might fairly ask: why is “sedentary leisure alone” a bad thing? Surely, many young guys spend a lot of time watching TV, playing video games, and fiddling with their phones and don’t commit political atrocities. In fact, some of them might feel perfectly content with life. But as Sayer points out, several papers—Gee 2019; Venn & Strazdins 2017; Anezaki and Hashimoto 2018—have found that more time in sedentary leisure is associated with negative physical and mental health. But this association demands the answer to a further question: What’s so bad about so much time online alone and on the internet?

2. The “Four Dark Laws” of Online Engagement

Online is not just a separate world. It is a foreign planet as far as group-psychology dynamics go. Jay Van Bavel, a psychologist at New York University, has run several studies on the character of online conversation and how it differs from physical-world hangs. In a conversation with him last year, we discussed his work, which I summarized as “dark laws” of online engagement.

1. Negativity bias increases clicks. Every negative word that publishers put in their headlines and posts seems to increase the likelihood of click-throughs. An analysis of 105,000 different variations of news headlines found that "for a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate” by more than two percentage points.

2. Extreme opinions increase sharing. Van Bavel and his lab have found that the group-psychology dynamics of the internet often amplify the most extreme opinions and downplay normie takes. On Twitter/X, 97 percent of political posts come from the most-active 10 percent of users. These users often grow their audience by expressing the most extreme opinions and by “nut-picking” the most outrageous opinions of the other side. Given the disproportionate share of total online attention that’s represented by the most extremist loud-mouths, the “moderate middle” of users is typically under-represented on the internet. In the aftermath of the Kirk assassination, for example, partisans on both sides seemed highly familiar with the most lurid posts of their political enemies, but there weren’t a lot of accounts going viral by screenshotting typically calm opinions of ordinary people behaving ethically and expressing simple remorse.

3. Out-group animosity increases engagement. Shit-talking the other team might be the single best way to go viral, Van Bavel and other researchers found. A 2021 paper using Facebook and Twitter content found that “posts about the political out-group" were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group.” Each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67 percent. Out-group language—especially if it was derogatory or expressed animosity—was “the strongest predictor of social media engagement across all relevant predictors measured,” the researchers found. By the rules of algorithmic conversation, out-group animosity is rising online for the same reason that three-pointers are increasing in basketball: People do it more, because it’s just worth more.

4. Moral-emotional language goes viral. Finally, Van Bavel and his co-authors have found that framing ideas in high-arousal, highly moral, and highly emotional language makes ideas viral within our own networks but unappealing to ppl who disagree. So, the righteous tone of much online conversation essentially fortifies the walls of our echo chambers.

Source: Van Bavel, et al

In sum, when young people swap physical-world relationships for the interior life of the internet, they’re not just spending more time inside (although they’re definitely doing that). They are participating in a different species of conversation, whose texture is more high-arousal, negative, extreme, and morally outraged. Spending time with people in the world of cells and atoms requires that we work out in-person disagreements without coming to blows, while online spaces permit rhetorical violence, as there is no immediate threat to moderate our most extreme statements. The internet allows people to cosplay as militant revolutionaries in rooms with carpets, locked doors, Cheetos, and Honeywell thermostats. Ironically, it is the physical safety of online dialogue that makes a certain kind of violent rhetoric more appealing to cowards; even as, at the extreme, an ecosystem of violent rhetoric might, like a local weather system, create a lightning bolt of actual violence.

Indeed, when socially isolated people spend lots of time marinating in social circles that nurture grievous intolerance, things can get very bad …

3. The ‘Need For Chaos’

I have spoken to many political scientists over the last few years, but the political-science conversation I come back to more than any other is my interview with the Danish researcher Michael Bang Petersen about his work on conspiracies and extremism. In 2018, a group of researchers led by Petersen asked Americans to say whether they believed false rumors about politicians on the left and right, including Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. including Trump and Hillary Clinton. “We were expecting a clear pattern of polarization,” Petersen told me, with conservatives exclusively sharing conspiratorial memes about Clinton and liberals doing the same for Trump. But that’s not what they found. Instead, many participants in the study were eager to share any anti-elite conspiracy theory. This group tended to agree with dark pronouncements, such as “I need chaos around me” and “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’ ” Petersen and his colleagues came up with an unforgettable term to describe this group’s psychology: “The need for chaos.”

When Petersen looked for the factors that predicted need for chaos, one variable that jumped out was social isolation. Lonely people typically seek social connection; in fact, desiring more social connection is part of the definition of loneliness. But a core of my anti-social century thesis is that too many Americans today are experiencing something strangely close to the opposite of loneliness; they’re constantly alone but not interested in fixing it. “What they’re reaching out to get isn’t friendship at all but rather recognition and status,” Petersen said of the need-for-chaos cohort. As I wrote in my cover story:

For many socially isolated men in particular, for whom reality consists primarily of glowing screens in empty rooms, a vote for destruction is a politics of last resort—a way to leave one’s mark on a world where collective progress, or collective support of any kind, feels impossible.

Political science studies don’t necessarily represent the real world. But in the case of need-for-chaos, it’s not just polisci nerds who are observing a change in the nature of politics and extremism. It’s the cops, too.

4. ‘Salad Bar Extremism’

For much of modern history, political violence in the U.S. and throughout the West had been group-based, organized, and ideologically legible. The anarchists of the 1910s had a specific complaint and a cause. The militants of the 1960s had organizations with names and known leaders.

But in the last few years, the FBI has found that modern assassins are more isolated, more disorganized, and more driven by a mosaic of views that defy easy categorization, because they emerge from texts, posts, and tabs, rather than from institutions and movements. “One of the things that we see more and more in the counterterrorism space is people who assemble together in some kind of mish-mash, a bunch of different ideologies,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in Senate testimony in 2020. “We sometimes refer to it as almost like a salad bar of ideologies—a little bit of this, a little bit of that—and what they are really about is the violence.”

Salad-bar extremism is a variety of radicalization that befits this anti-social age. Rather than belong to an institution or organization that radicalizes its followers toward a cohesive goal, salad-bar extremists are more likely to be isolated, psychologically unwell people, who backfill their chaotic and violent tendencies with stories grabbed from any corner of the internet. Some examples include Frank James, the 2022 New York City subway attacker, whose online postings combined Black nationalism, far-right racism toward other minorities, and nihilism; and Zale Thompson, the "axe attacker" of 2014, who seems to have been a militant Islamist, a Black separatist, and a far-right survivalist.

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As I said at the top of the essay, I consider political terrorism and assassinations to be akin to unpredictable lightning bolts that emerge from describable local weather patterns. This essay is my attempt to describe the political, social, and attentional climate that I see surrounding the murder of Charlie Kirk by an isolated and extremely online assailant. The ideas named above—leisure time alone for young men, the dark laws of online engagement, the need for chaos, and the age of salad-bar extremism—are listed in a specific order, because they build on each other. As young single men have dramatically increased their time alone and online, they’ve marinated in a unique attentional environment that is more charged with extremist ideas and emotional negativity. Political scientists have found that social isolation increases the risk that young men develop a “need for chaos,” and law enforcement officers have independently confirmed that modern political violence is more likely the result of isolated lone wolves who stitch together a bespoke ideology of hatred that is disconnected from any formal organization.

I don’t know how to stop political violence in America. The First and Second Amendments exist, and the U.S. will always have many bad opinions and guns. A murderous few walk among us, and it is not easy to bring their numbers to zero. But I refuse to believe that we, the non-murderous many, are powerless to improve our lot. The reason that I find Jay Van Bavel’s dark laws of online engagement so compelling is that it helps to to understand a system’s rules if you want to know how to break them. I want to believe that some other form of online communication is possible, which responds to cataclysms like last week by seeking the opposite of negativity bias, extremism, out-group animosity, and cheap moral-emotional language. The internet that drives some to insanity drives others to inspiration and could drive more to something more constructive than a life of isolation and chaos. This assassination was drenched in the digital consciousness that is co-created by you and me and everyone we know and everyone we don’t know. We cannot stop each lightning bolt, and yet we are the weather.

1. While I did see terrible things said about the Kirk assassination on both ends of the political spectrum, I think it’s important to be clear that the handful of no-name or anonymous accounts on BlueSky saying truly terrible things about Kirk’s death does not feel commensurate to Elon Musk and other prominent conservative commentators talking about civil war or calling the millions of left-wing Americans a “party of murder.” The most important thing to say here is that extreme language in the aftermath of a political assassination is inflammatory and uncalled for, no matter its political goal.