Trending Towards Violence with Charlie Warzel

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Hello, everybody.

Welcome once again to the weekly show podcast.

My name is Jon Stewart.

We're recording on a Wednesday.

I'm even going to tell you around the time.

It's around noon.

I want to tell you the time because last time we recorded on a Wednesday, I thought, well, geez, something, you know, just let them know it's on a Wednesday and it'll be out on Thursday.

And obviously, by Wednesday night,

there was the horrific assassination and

not addressed it anyway in the podcast because of that.

So I'm preemptively suggesting that we don't know what happens in 24 hours

anymore in this general shit show of a society that we're working on.

Now, on a positive note, Colbert won an Emmy.

The late show.

Well-deserved.

Thank goodness.

It was lovely to see the response from the audience in Los Angeles and in the country showing much deserved love.

Much deserved, well earned.

And

it was really lovely to watch.

And I thought his words were perfect

and beautiful.

And

a little bit of a tonic in what is just a sad,

it's difficult to even muster

the kind of necessary

performative enthusiasm for these types of interims at some level.

One thing I

should mention is: I hope people realize that

shit posting after tragedies is not mandatory.

I don't know if people know that, that you don't have to

say the worst thing you can possibly think of to inflame the spirits of people who may be suffering.

You know, you don't, you can actually write it in a journal and put that journal under your mattress and

not demonstrate to all those around you that you really

lack lack humanity.

You could write it on a piece of paper and then chew it and swallow it.

Rather than,

it is not a mandatory.

You don't have to caveat.

You don't have to go out.

That's one of my least favorite.

You know, I don't agree with everything he said, but he shouldn't have been killed.

You know, just fucking don't say anything.

Because the truth is, this is, it's one thing.

It's this.

It's these individuals who believe themselves to be judge, jury, jury, and executioner,

who are a vigilante society is not a society.

And that's the part that cannot stand.

And ironically, they then

find themselves in the warm embrace of every entitlement that our legal system has to offer.

And as I'm watching all the sort of cable news go through all their you know, preordained steps and all that, I actually came upon an article in The Atlantic that I thought was really interesting that talked about less about like the individual

event and more about the system around it that we really don't know a lot about.

And it is an enigma to so many people and it's not talked a little bit.

So I wanted to bring that writer of that article onto the program.

So to have that conversation, which I think,

you know, could be illuminating to some extent, but man, oh man.

All right.

So we're going to, we're going to, we're going to get to our guest.

He is a staff writer at the Atlantic.

He's the author of the Atlantic's newsletter, Galaxy Brain.

Charlie Warzell is joining us.

Charlie, thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

Charlie,

in the week that has followed this terrible, terrible incident, I have read and seen and heard

pages of print, hours of chatter,

much of it circular, unhelpful,

much of it hurtful.

Your article on

this assassination was, I thought, one of the most interesting macro views

on,

you know, a lot of people are talking about, I'll liken it to something else.

A lot of people are talking about the weather.

You seem to be talking about the climate.

Everybody wanted to point fingers at a very specific point of blame.

You're talking about a cultural shift in

the atmosphere, the complexities of

this new communication world and how these individuals exist in the world.

Do you want to talk a little bit about that, Charlie?

Talk a little bit about the thesis of your article.

Yeah,

sure.

So, you know, this whole thing happened last week.

And

as usual, I think for most of us now, you watch this stuff unfold online.

You may be seeing stuff happening on cable news or wherever you are or however you're getting it, but these things play out over all of our different social feeds.

It's very fractured.

It's very confusing.

I happen for my job to be more plugged in probably than the average person,

but I think for anyone.

Explain your job very quickly to give a background.

Yeah, so I cover technology and media and politics, essentially.

So just how the internet weirds everything that it touches, right?

And been doing that for about 15 years.

The three horsemen of the apocalypse, as it were.

That's right.

That's right.

And so

I'm watching this play out.

And

the moment that I watched this video pop into my feed on, you know, wherever Blue Sky X, you name the thing,

watching essentially someone being murdered in front of your face and all the horror that comes with that, I felt this genuine, you know, roller coaster drop pit stomach feeling for a lot of reasons.

The first reason being it's horrifying

when to watch someone get murdered.

You immediately sort of think about who the person is.

I know who Charlie Kirk is, young, young family, young father, all of those human reasons why you feel horrible.

But the next reason I felt horrible was I knew exactly how this was going to play out.

You knew I was coming.

I have watched this happen for more than a decade on these different platforms, and the cycle only refines itself.

It only gets faster.

It only gets smoother.

The participants only know how to, you know, what their roles are in the production.

They only get better at it.

It's more efficient.

And what I believed was going to happen outside of the political ramifications of this or even the cultural ramifications, what was about to happen

was

an immediate, like the two, you know, polarized sides of our discourse.

were immediately going to take this and fit it into their ideological box like in one second.

And we saw this especially there is, and I'd love to talk more about this, but there is this, I think, a real asymmetry between the two polarized sides.

But, you know, I'm scrolling through my feed.

It's not clear what has actually happened to Charlie Kirk.

We don't have any information.

One of the first things I see is an Elon Musk tweet, you know, that the left are murderers, essentially.

And so he's not a very influential force on that platform.

So I don't imagine anybody saw that.

It's not like he owns it or anything like that.

And so

I started watching this.

I have

feeds that I've set up to monitor some of these shock jocks, some of these influencers, some of these pundits, whatever, people across this spectrum.

And it was very clear immediately that this was going to, this was war, essentially, especially for the far right.

Supercharged online

and performative.

Yeah, I mean, immediately pointing the finger of blame.

This is what happens.

No need for evidence.

I mean, when these types of things happen,

motives take a while to, you know, I mean, just physically, you need to go to, usually, to the person's house unless they've left like a note, you know, right there in the crime scene.

Like, you have to apprehend

the killer.

You have to know things, information.

And what we have in the aftermath of these big events is an information vacuum, right?

And the internet has become so good at filling that.

The internet abhors an information vacuum.

And it basically incentivizes all of these people through these different social media feeds to fill it, right?

And

there is this attentional incentive baked into that.

You know, Elon Musk is

performing essentially, whether he believes it or not, like, you know, whatever.

But what he's doing when he's tweeting when, you know, they still haven't probably moved moved Charlie Kirk's body to a hospital to be treated is this notion of, I am going to give this crowd what it wants.

And in some ways, give himself what he wants, which is the dopamine hit of that engagement.

Everybody online is

they're looking for those hits.

Charlie, is this based on

our brains?

How much of this is cynical?

How much of this is a biohack?

In the same way, I liken it to if you're a chef in a restaurant, right?

And you want people to eat your food, like you've got some hacks.

You'll throw in, you know, a little sugar into the marinara.

You'll, you'll put a little fat, a little oil, a little salt, a little something to get people lip-smacking good.

That's one thing.

But there are labs where people

work on ultra-processed food that's designed to hack your body's ability to stop you from eating.

That force you in some ways beyond your ability to control it to continue to eat.

Is that the insidious secret sauce that online is

ultra-processed speech?

It's a really interesting way to put it.

I think

I want to be careful with like terms like rewiring because there is this great debate that is going on about

how bad are the phones?

How bad is the internet?

How bad is, you know, what is it doing?

What is it doing to

kids?

What is it doing to adults?

I fall into the camp of it's very clear that something is going on here, right?

Like, I can't leave this thing

ever.

It's right next to me.

I'm doing a

freaking podcast with you.

For God's sakes, Charlie, we poop with it.

Yes, among other things.

And so there's clearly something going on.

There's something with

the dopamine, with the way, with the intermittent reward cycle, right?

Because you post something, you do something for this crowd, and you never know.

It's not reliable whether or not the world's going to shower you with the attention and the affection that you want, or whether the algorithms from these companies are going to do that.

So you have this, you're pulling the slot machine all the time.

What it's doing long term, I'm not exactly sure, but what is very clear is that it is

changing our incentives, like our behavioral incentives.

And I think it is turning us often into the worst possible versions of ourselves, right?

I think a lot about the way that tech companies and algorithms work with food as well.

But the way I think about it is if you, you know, if you said to somebody,

hey, I'm going to try a diet this year, right?

I'm going to try to eat well.

And part of that, and you know, get fit, whatever.

Part of that is every day at four o'clock, I'm going to exercise.

Seven days a week, I'm doing it, right?

I want to be a better person or a better version of myself.

And then every day, that friend at 3:57

slides you a donut

and says, And says to you, exactly, and says says to you,

you don't have to eat that donut, but it's there.

I mean, you could, you could, you could nibble it.

You know how much you like donuts, right?

Right.

And you eat the donut because it's been a long day, you're in a moment of weakness, whatever it is.

You just feel like, you know, you want to do it.

And then the way you feel.

Yeah, that's the thing, though.

I would say that they understand the biorhythmic changes in your day to know the exact right time to wave that doughnut under your nose.

That it's almost worse than just being a dick.

It's that it's, I mean, I was watching the trending topics, Charlie, like a horse race, hoping upon hope, like this is what's happened to us.

You're praying that it's not committed by somebody that the other side can weaponize.

And so you're watching, you know, trans

start to trend and then Groiper starts to trend and then this other thing starts to trend.

And

it's all, I don't want to say misinformation because you don't know yet.

It's

non-information, it's merely accelerants.

Right.

These are just accelerants.

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i think what what i struggle with covering this stuff is to know how much of this is an intended consequence like when when you say something like you know i there they're there's almost like a understanding like the biorhythms and things like that i think a lot of it is actually dumber than that I don't think that they, I think that these algorithms are optimized for engagement, just broad engagement.

They don't care whether or not that engagement is screaming to end the rights of trans people or that engagement is, like, look at this kitten.

It's, you know, it's furry and beautiful and, you know, LOL.

Don't you think they understand that outrage and fear travels faster than even adorability?

That

when you, when you monetize or maximize for that, don't you think they know?

I mean, I watch it on the evening news, man.

They understand that like if some, if a terrible crime happened in the Bronx and they've got video of it, that's what's going.

Like it's not, they always save the, and in America first,

tonight is always the last story where they're like, a girl sold a cupcake for, you know, adoption shelter.

Like

they know what drives the most engagement.

They absolutely do.

I'm not trying to let them off the hook, but I think the technology is dumber in that way.

I mean, some of them are more sophisticated.

I mean, TikTok, for example, is a genius, an evil, insidious genius invention in that you are giving it, every time you scroll to a new video on TikTok, you are giving it a signal.

It takes what that video is and it has it categorized.

50 different ways, right?

It's a sports video.

It's a music.

It's a band.

Oh, it's this clip, this sound clip, whatever it is.

And you're voting every six seconds or less.

If you flick off something really quickly, your algorithm changes.

And just an infinitesimal bit.

They say, oh, Charlie's not into that today.

Do you understand how these work, Charlie?

Are you privy in any way to

these algorithms?

No.

And

nobody is, really.

These are company secrets.

But how is that possible?

Think about it with food, right?

They have to tell us what's in it.

Now, they don't have to tell us that beaver anus has been substituted for strawberry flavoring, but there does have to be a chemical listing there.

How is it possible that

these programs, which have such an impact on our lives and certainly on the lives of young people, have no responsibility to the public to in any way deconstruct how the fuck they're put together and what they're doing to us?

I think there's two reasons.

I think the first reason

is simply that the

way that regulation works, the way that any, you know, to get all this going works so much slower than these companies work.

So any time they're tried to be put in a box by lawmakers,

things change, right?

The whole paradigm changes.

You make a rule to govern Facebook after the 2016 election, say, which didn't happen, but like, say, you did that, and then

ByteDance Dance from China comes up with TikTok, and there's this whole new way, there's a whole new thing.

There's a little of that going on.

I guess maybe there's three things.

There's also a lack of understanding,

very clearly.

Like Congress has gotten slightly better, right?

But there's a lack of understanding.

And third, I think, is the horrific, you know, it's the same problem we were just talking about, polarization of all this stuff.

There is from the left this desire desire of, hey, you know, we have clearly a neo-Nazi problem on some of these, you know, websites and platforms and these harassment problems and these things of, you know, targeting real human beings, swatting them, doxing them, getting them in trouble with their job, getting them fired, all these, all these actual real-world harms.

These are not necessarily like, you know,

vague speech harms.

These are real-world harms and things that are happening.

And you have, that is sort of the perspective that, you know, progressives come to this fight with it.

And then on the right, you have

this sort of, you know, free speech maximalist in theory idea, which is

if anything is, if you try to do anything to these platforms whatsoever, you are putting your finger on the scales.

That's right.

It's cloaked in this idea of free speech.

Doesn't talk about the fact that

there's a line from

this researcher, Renee D'AResta, who who is great on all these topics.

And she has talked about freedom of speech and freedom of reach.

And these platforms,

with their algorithms, are about reach.

It's not about speech necessarily, right?

You can say a lot of stuff on these platforms and it gets through.

Or, you know, now a lot of these platforms don't care about content moderation.

But the whole part of the algorithm is what is it boosting?

What is it sending out to more people, right?

You know, it's different than standing in the town town square and speaking versus standing at it and having a bullhorn that reaches you know entire municipalities or or whatnot right or or knowing in the town square when you're going to show up and then following you because they also do that there's notification you know if if right if somebody on your list puts something out there you know they're in the town square and you can run and harass them Right.

Or waking you up when you're asleep, you know, and telling you, oh, you got to listen to this, right?

Right.

And so you have this argument that is coming from the right, which is basically any attempt to shut down some of this political intimidation, some of this, you know,

some of this,

some of these communities that exist to harass and

belittle and

cause this like physical world violence, that is immediately seen by the right as this.

putting the fingers on the scales of who gets to speak and who doesn't.

Or it was like until a week ago, and now it's not.

Or until.

Or until it's not convenient and they want to get somebody else off there.

Until they get power.

Elon Musk's whole reason, supposedly, for buying Twitter, which is now X,

was this idea of restoring free speech, right?

That Democrats have censored conservatives forever.

So he buys the company.

He reinstates people like Alex Jones, a couple of neo-Nazis, you know, just a whole slew of people who've been banned not because of their speech, but because they broke the rules, right?

They broke the rules of environmentalism.

It's a platform.

It's not the government.

Right.

And does all this and very clearly has put his fingers on all kinds of different scales there.

Yes.

I mean,

Mecca Hitler would say.

The one that we know about.

He's turned Grok into, yeah.

And that's what I'm saying, though.

It's completely obscured.

You, you can't see into it.

Right.

And so this also causes regular people, and this is, I've been watching this happen for over a decade, to become conspiracy theorists about what happened to the thing that they posted or said, right?

There are so many people I know who are totally just regular, not public figure type people who have, you know, said, I think I'm being shadow banned.

I think I'm being shadow banned by X or Facebook or whatever.

And I'm like, you're probably not on their radar, you know, like if you're just a regular person living your life.

But because these things are so opaque, because we don't know what is happening, we create these different stories for why this post didn't go viral or why I'm not getting followed as much as I think I should or

why X, Y, or Z is happening.

But the reality is, too, that there is stuff happening, right?

These companies are tweaking these things.

I mean, Elon Musk.

of course it's not free speech it's ultra processed speech an algorithm it's one thing look the fact that it links you to other people the fact that it drives comments and the comments drive more engagement is what turns it from free speech into ultra processed speech it is designed to pull you further and further into the platform and further and further down the rabbit holes.

There is gravity.

There is

inertia.

There are forces that are at work, that are not at work

in normal free speech settings that are manipulating the dynamics.

One of the sort of most sobering stories of this that I covered right after the 2020 election, right after January 6th, was

I was looking at different people who had stormed the Capitol and, you know, looking through their social media presences.

And there's one guy who was a kind of small-time right-wing influencer.

And I went back, we downloaded his whole Facebook account to look at like a decade.

And it was very clear that starting in like 2014, 2015, he was trying to get, he was just a guy who was trying to get some attention, right?

He was, hey, like, look at my, look at my stand-up comedy thing.

No, that's not working.

Okay.

Open Mike Night.

And like all these different, you know, here, here's my startup, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

all these things nothing catches on

and then sometime

during covid

he posts something about vaccines just not even not even that just sort of like i'm kind of skeptical of this thing

the post he was getting you know maybe one or two likes on every single post

250 likes the next post

a little further he goes just a little bit further with it right yeah cut to six months later this guy's storming the Capitol

and, you know, vlogging himself doing it.

And it's like, that's it right there, you know?

Do you think this is that it's that the difficulty here is you're creating a kind of army of nihilist influencers

because you have to get the dopamine hit.

Look, we've all, anybody out there who's, who's done drugs,

me being one of them, understands that like part of the problem with drugs is like to get that same hit like you got to go further like that's kind of the issue that it it it goes very quickly from uh i feel a part of something to i need this somewhere that my nervous system

has overtaken this that the pleasure is now not pleasure it's desperation and i think the worst part about all of this, though, is that for some people, right, I think that that's accurate how you're describing it.

Some people get rewarded and figure it out.

And I mean, I just, if you sort of look at the political situation that we have in the aftermath of the Kirk stuff,

we have an influencer who was assassinated.

The Trump administration sent two podcasters who just happened to be working for the FBI to Utah to investigate that.

You're talking about Cash Patel and Dan Bungino, who are now

the headset.

Sent two

other influencers, like people who've made their bones using all these platforms to create these audiences and continue to sort of, you know, ratchet up the takes that they put out.

And the vice president of the United States hosted the influencer show,

you know, posthumously or Kirk's show.

I mean, you just have like these influencer dynamics because the show must go on, right?

That's really important.

But don't you think some of that is because power understands, look, propaganda and information, whoever controls that has a huge advantage in terms of political power.

And so they're just understanding how to weaponize these various platforms.

And everybody is trying to do that to, you know, whatever aim it is.

You know, every medium that came before it had the same problem.

I've never seen it supercharged in this manner.

It's not that people didn't, you know, Father Coughlin loved radio.

You know, once radio hit, his propaganda was supercharged.

Television had the same thing, man.

Everybody remembers, you know, Morton Downey Jr.

That wasn't so much political or Jerry Springer, but it was

a ratcheting up of dopamine hits to watch something.

And you saw those things aren't sustainable.

They start to spin out of control into caricature.

That,

even though it's done that online, it hasn't been a detriment to the purveyors of it.

All right, guys.

These days, every headline feels like it's been engineered to make you either furious, terrified, or both.

It is, it's honestly maddening.

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You can't read it.

You can't deal with it.

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That's like the big difference, right?

Because if you are, again, like what I was saying with the, you know, with the stuff on TikTok and the scrolling and giving that the micro feedbacks to tailor everything to your interests perfectly, right?

There are a lot of people who are coming to any influencer who is polarizing, whether it's Charlie Kirk or, you know, whomever.

They're coming to them in the exact right way, right?

It's not like a clip of the influencer saying something that they might disagree with.

It's them talking about the subject that they care about, that they like, right?

They're finding like

influencers will spend a lot of time on air, right?

Or a lot of, and they will clip up these things in all kinds of ways because they're also trying to find as broad and diverse an audience, right?

They'll talk about

cancel culture and Netflix specials or whatever, right?

Or the movie of the week that matters, the little thing.

And then they'll talk about sports.

And the aggregators at the larger media companies will find the most explosive clips and they'll put that out.

Every, I mean, the one thing that I want to say is everybody's playing the same game.

And that is to join in in this new kind of

everything is content economy.

And an assassination, I think the thing that has been so jarring is that an assassination

is content

is another driver

of everybody's, you know, I picked up these followers, I did that, you know, people shit posting, people posting horrible things about a family that's just lost a father,

you know,

all of this.

And you know what's interesting to watch?

Cable television sort of displaying its own kind of

vestigial uselessness.

That, you know, they're going back and forth as though they might be the issue when they're not even part of the game right now.

They're following.

And by the way, this kid,

he's on Discord

or some other platform.

Why you would name your platform after like

argument, you know, it's Discord, it's shittiness.

But

who even knows the ecosystem that he's swimming in?

We don't know any of this.

Doesn't look, doesn't look like it was a great one, honestly.

How could it be?

Right.

But so the

charging document or whatever, whatever we're calling it of the shooter.

First of all, I don't want to name the shooter because that's also a part of all of this, right?

Like this is the

these mass shooters now

are showing us with each of these killings that they are absorbing all of this.

They're absorbing how you and I talk about it, how I write about it, how cable news portrays it, all of these things.

So, in that charging document, the shooter inscribed a bunch of different hyper, very online phrases on the bullets and stuff, right?

Right.

And was texting with...

the roommate right after or right before the assassination.

The roommate or the boyfriend or or girlfriend, like

I don't know, they're in a relationship, I think, it seems.

But again, maybe.

Who knows?

Right.

And said,

I can't get it like directly quoted, but it's something like, if I see whatever the phrase is on Fox News, like, I'm going to lose it, right?

Essentially saying, like, it's a troll.

Like, the bullets, these people.

Oh, my God.

You're saying they're saying, oh, if you do that and you get on Fox News, like, you win the day on the internet.

Like, you've won.

So these people are like assassination influencers, like murder influencers.

You know, there was

on the very same day, there was a 15-year-old kid who

shot up his high school in Denver, right?

And again,

hasn't really received the coverage because I don't think it fits as well into the algorithms engagement model.

But apparently, this kid was involved in a whole other subculture

online that is a

public murder subculture, if that's to use the wrong phrase.

But do you know anything about that subculture as well?

Or is it all part of the same weird thing?

So it's...

It's very amorphous, right?

Like online communities tend to be this way.

I mean, some of them are very rigid, but generally, you know,

the best thing and the worst thing about the internet, right, is that if you are somebody who feels very alone and has some really niche things, right?

Like I

love whatever this trombone player.

I'm growing up in Iowa.

You know, I feel like I'm a weirdo.

I'm an ostracized by whatever.

You can go on the internet and you can find the 11 other people who like have that strange hobby, that strange weird thing, and you can find each other.

And there's great stories there, right?

Like that's, it's a wonderful thing.

The exact same thing works with people who love and are really interested in the Columbine shooting, and not because they think it's an interesting historical thing, it's because they idolize the killers.

The internet puts these different communities together, and then

not quite exactly the same as, you know,

Netflix is, if you liked this show, you might be interested in, but organically, there is this sort of referral thing, right?

Where, oh, you're involved with this very kind of messed up subculture.

Well, you know, there's some people on the outskirts who are part of that, and they'll help introduce you.

And so there are these.

There's Terrogram, which is basically like

a terrorist subculture, like public acts of terrorism, but not, you know, joining ISIS or whatever.

Like it's just like regular people who are fascinated by this and want to take up a political cause.

There's, you know, this far-right, the neo-Nazi kind of stuff that's very real and actually, you know, bigoted.

Luigi Mangion

has an entire subculture of

supporters

for

vigilante assassins.

Right.

Like, it's,

and, and I don't know if that's

the thing you don't know is: are they part of those communities or are they

lionized by those communities, but were separate from that?

Like, is there, we, what's

we have some evidence in certain

instances.

So, um,

there was, I'm probably going to get the, the particulars wrong, but there, there are two recent school shootings from last year and early this year in Nashville and in Madison, Wisconsin.

And I'm going to confuse which is which,

but they, there was, there's reporting, investigative reporting that shows that they crossed paths online.

The two shooters separately knew each other

on the internet.

On the internet.

On the internet.

On the internet.

And it's not that they were best friends or anything like that.

But when the first shooter

committed the act of violence and murder and

that other, the second shooter, I'm just trying to not name names here because I'm sticking to that.

The second shooter was like, oh my God, I know her.

By the way, it was a young girl.

It was a 15-year-old, I believe, girl.

That is something that is also changing.

The threat profile of this is, you know, experts who I've spoken to who study this stuff have said it's democratizing because

There are mass shooter online fandom communities that exist.

Some of them are around like specific instance, like Columbine.

Some of them are are just simply, you know, there's the Christchurch shooter who is lionized.

There was a shooting that I wrote about, and I think it's like two weeks now, but it feels like 20 years.

Jesus.

At a church in

Minneapolis, and the shooter had inscribed all these like other shooters on their gun and all these online memes and phrases.

And that was very clearly, very, very clearly

just

fan service, essentially, to this community, saying, I'm going to do it.

I'm going to be the next guy, and you're going to write my name on the next gun.

And that's what it's about.

Oh, Jesus.

So it's the fucking, it's, it's the, you know, cinnamon challenge.

It's the kind of thing that goes viral online, but to the extent of depravity and murder.

Is that sort of similar?

Yeah, I mean,

essentially, yes.

Like, very truly, like, these dynamics.

The thing about the internet is the specifics are always very different, and the specifics certainly matter, but there are a lot of very similar dynamics that happen.

You know,

when I talk to these, some of these analysts and researchers who spend time in these, you know, at great psychological pain in these subcultures or around them,

what they describe essentially is like a kind of love bombing that these groups have.

So someone will kind of wander in, right?

Maybe they're just interested in true crime and they're pretty depressed and they're pretty upset

and they see this subreddit or whatever, not subreddit, but some community, online community that is

interested in school shootings.

And they don't know exactly what they're getting, but the people there know how to groom them.

They know how to bring them into the movement.

They know how to treat them, give them something they're not getting anywhere else.

And a lot of times the people who end up, you know, going way down the rabbit hole tend to feel extremely alienated from their communities or from their families or personally alienated, you know, by their

own life choices in whatever way.

There's this

way that these communities pull them in and know how to do that and get better at doing that and give them a essentially a safe space.

Like a cult.

That's how cults operate.

They love bomb you and bring people in who are searching for something and bring them into these smaller subcommunities,

offer them.

But the question then always becomes like, what is the radicalizing factor?

And can they take somebody from neutral?

Like, do you know, I know you did like a blank a slate user thing on x what what what happened then like how did that what was the dynamic of that for you so what uh yeah when i did that uh that this was right around right around the uh 2024 election and uh

my personal experience and the experience i was having you know doing research and reporting was that the site was getting worse, right?

I was starting to see like straight up neo-Nazi content in my feeds without showing any affinity for that myself.

I'm always like, when your for you page shows you that, you're like, what have I done to make you think that that's for me?

And, and that's the thing, right?

That's the sort of, you know, quote unquote, an invisible algorithmic hand that you're sort of saying, well, okay, is this, is this Elon Musk?

Is this whatever?

So what I did is I created a new account, you know, got a different browser, whatever, so it didn't know who I was, created a different account.

And I can't remember exactly precisely the things that I said I was interested in, but I think it was like technology and sports, right?

Like very, very blank.

Like, this is like, I'm a person, I have some interest.

Yes.

Yes.

I'm not going to tell you what.

I didn't follow anyone.

First thing I see when I open up the new, you know, for you feed, because I'm not following anyone,

eight Elon Musk ones, you know,

tweets.

Well, that's just like

a welcome from the.

Of course, from the

neighborhood and somebody brings over the big basket of fruit.

You've joined a community.

Yeah.

I'm trying to see what else.

I got it here.

Okay.

Musk post was the first thing.

A post from Donald Trump.

A tweet from an account called MJ Truth Ultra, which offered a warning from a supposed FBI whistleblower that said, vote, arm yourself, stock up three to four months' supply of food and water and pray.

After that was a post from a magazine.

Wait, whoa.

Nothing tripped this up.

You're in a clean bra.

Does it think, because is there something suspicious maybe

about not having any

data history that makes it think like, oh, this, this is an experiment or a Russian bot?

Like, is there, was there something to the fact that you were a clean slate that seemed suspicious?

I mean, if that is the case, I don't know why you'd be serving a supposed Russian bot would like

vote and arm yourself and suck up.

Wouldn't a Russian bot enjoy

destroying the fabric of the United States?

The answer to that is that I can't be sure.

But I also, again, these things are not

that savvy.

Like they're just trying.

This is a number.

All these platforms are numbers games, both with engagement, but also with users.

But it's clearly not agnostic, it's it's pointing you in a very particular direction.

Yeah, I mean, there's there's a thing, there was a like a couple of posts from libs of TikTok, there was a

post from Benny Johnson and Jack Pesoba.

All right-wing content, all of it, all of it, yes, and you've not engaged with any of this yet, no, nothing.

This is just the first scroll, just the first scroll.

That's your starter kit, yeah, no, truly.

And, you know i i let it kind of

marinate you know i checked back in a few times and it essentially was like it devolved into like videos from

you know like the manosphere influencers like andrew tate there was a lot of mma stuff it was a very like stereotypical like

version of of a user, which happens to be the core user now.

Young male.

Technology sports.

So they just think like if you're into technology and sports you're one of us you're in the bro sphere and we're gonna we're gonna give you that stuff that just massages that reptilian part of your not quite formed brain right and

and bring you in

yeah i mean it it like

it's it's kind of It's kind of mind-blowing.

Because there's, you know, like you said, well, okay, what was the catch there?

Like, when I was performing this experiment, I wasn't expecting to just be able to like copy and paste that into an article and be like, well, there you go.

Like, I thought I was going to have to work a little for it, right?

Right.

You're going to have to work to join the Manosphere.

Right, right, right.

Now, what would that have been, if I can ask, what do you think that would have been on a different social, like either Instagram or Blue Sky?

Like, does Blue Sky immediately bring you to like Lilith Fair?

Like, what, like, what's

the difference?

I don't, I,

Blue Sky is not really algorithmic in the same way.

It's, it's sort of an experiment to try to do the internet in a different way.

It has its own polarization issues, it has its own, you know, that people have been bullied off or whatever.

But it is, it is a,

it's kind of a different experiment.

It's trying to be right,

not

speedrun all the mistakes of, of, of, of Twitter.

Threads is like,

threads is like you have like REI and Johnson Johnson tweeting like, what's up, baby?

It sounded like you were going down to like RC Cola.

You're like, well, there's Coke and there's Pepsi.

You know, RC Cola is, yeah, that's fine.

It's, you know, no, it's like, it's like brands mindlessly tweeting.

Like, you know, it's like Starbucks saying to Burger King, like, you up, you know, like,

like, it's just, it's bad.

Very, very kind of dead inside.

Radicalizing the Burger King.

But again, like,

TikTok is,

again, the most sophisticated version of all of this, right?

Because you open that up, it's going to throw you really popular posts.

And sometimes those will be political, right?

But a lot of times those will be

silly dances

or what have you.

The thing is, it gets real good at.

Like

there is a situation where in my reporting, all sorts of people have gotten in trouble with their spouses because they stay too long on a video of a buxom woman and then TikTok's like, oh, he's a perf.

Got it.

Okay, let's give him.

Oh, my God.

Let's give him boobs.

Right.

And so you just end up with

this for a while.

They've got to try and game their own feed, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Come on, Tyson.

Let me get some astrophysics in there.

We got to get the boobs out.

And yeah, but like, this is also something that, you know, not to, not to overgeneralize like for a generation, but younger people,

early millennials, Zoomers, whatever the other generation's called, I don't remember,

they're very good at kind of speaking to the algorithms in this way.

Like they know that they are being perceived, right, in this way.

And they're, you know,

they're good at sort of trying to,

you know, clean up their timeline or do whatever, right?

Or try to get out of it something.

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The thing that struck me, if

the communications are to be believed, is

the utter sort of lack of understanding that you've ended a life.

The

impact

of that seemed

completely bereft of consequence, like did not understand

or did not care.

Yeah, I mean, I think I think some of that, you know, it's that is beyond my

my scope when it comes to like the psychological issues of

depression or whatever.

But the thing that I really can understand, and I actually think the thing to take away from most of these violent acts is this sort of irony-poisoned nihilism that is sort of like the lingua franca of the internet.

That there is this like lol, nothing matters kind of feeling.

The only thing that really matters is, you know, getting a rise out of different people performing for your people.

Like this Minnesota, minneapolis shooter

people

this is the church or this is this is i mean here's how horrible this is i'm like are you talking about the church or the guy who went and killed uh melissa hortman i mean that's no sorry yeah no i know right sorry this is the church that happened like two and a half weeks ago this person had

all kinds of awful stuff like you know like racist, white supremacist, anti-Semitic stuff scrawled on his guns and his magazines, right?

he also had weird stuff about like you know

exxon like down with exxon and down with blackrock like all these weird things he had all the shooters sort of that extreme left and extreme right meeting it's that everybody talks about that that sort of extreme left extreme right meeting in sort of this weird place but i think it wasn't that i think the point is they knew when they did this that it was going to make news, that it was going to be picked apart, that he was going to be treated like a puzzle to solve by the media, by you and me.

And that's why there is all this stuff that is on there that is actually ideologically incoherent.

So, in some ways, you're saying that

the idea behind all this is nothing more than murder fame in your online group, and also

now let's all sit back and watch the world burn.

Yeah.

Are we already behind

on all of it?

You know, we're discussing it in terms of the algorithm on social media.

Have they already found other deeper caverns where they're living that aren't even touched by those algorithms?

Are these people even on,

you know, Instagram?

Or are they living in

under, is it subterranean from that even?

So

these communities,

a lot of them will exist in

like chat spaces, which aren't really algorithmically driven.

You know, like some of the some of the.

So what does chat space mean?

So like

there are WhatsApp groups, there are Telegram.

Telegram is a is a messaging service that is infamously it doesn't moderate.

Like it took the European Union and the Department of Justice a lot of work to get them to try to get rid of ISIS content, right?

Like they do not moderate for anything.

They're free speech maximalist

platform.

Right.

And so

that, like, there, there are communities there, right, on Telegram.

Right.

terrorism, white supremacy, these school shooter fandoms, these, you know, whatever.

There are, you know, Discord, as you mentioned, is a platform that does moderate, but is sort of, you know,

locked in this

whack-a-mole game.

Right.

You were mentioning with cults and leaders.

There's no leader to a lot of these things.

Right.

It's an amoeba.

Right.

It's the Borg.

It's, it's this weird.

It's headless, yeah.

It's, it's, it's a headless network.

You know, I, I, I wonder sometimes, this is where we're at now.

AI is going to supercharge this, I'm assuming.

It's going to supercharge the algorithms.

It's going to make this worse.

Do you have a sense, though, of

are other countries facing this issue?

Why is America seem to be, I mean, other than our unbelievable access to the weapons of death, is that the only thing that

supercharges this in this country?

Because Europe, for all its problems, doesn't seem to have this one.

It seems like it's probably like the original sin when it comes to

taking

online violence and chaos and nihilism and making it physical.

Like, you know, it's just pretty easy.

But it doesn't seem to happen in other places.

Certainly not as often

and as constantly as it does here.

Yeah.

I mean, I think the closest thing that you see globally is terrorist organizations, right?

Like fringe, radical, and terrorists.

But I think we have an ISIS disaffected fucking high school students and college students.

Behind it.

Wow.

Wow.

I mean, that's deep, man.

That's, that's.

But there's, but there's not, but there's not an ideology really behind it other than this.

I mean, again, I think like when I go back to watching like one of the things that was so frustrating, whether it was this church shooter in Minneapolis or the stuff with Kirk and the bullets, like this, you know, the first thing that came out was that like ATF

unsourced or one sourced Wall Street Journal report that said there were, there was transgender ideology on the thing.

And it's like,

when I see that as someone who's spent a lot of time trying to wrap my head around this stuff, I go, oh man, whoever that person was who wrote down that report, I don't care if they're politically motivated or not, and maybe they are, maybe they're not, but I know for damn sure they have never spent time in these communities.

If you don't just say words like that, that

we are jumping to conclusions that favor whatever our narratives are when that's the exact point of these people is to be enigmas, to be puzzles, to have people not understand.

Or maybe some of them go that way and some of them are much clearer about their political aims.

But it's the certainty that you you see in legacy media creates more misinformation and uncertainty is kind of the point.

And the chaos.

So like if you go into these, if you go into these communities, right?

Like, so one that's, you know, like we hear a lot about 4chan, right?

If you go into one of the sort of political message board, political message boards on 4chan,

part of what you're seeing.

is just a lot of chaos, right?

Just a lot of people, you know, insulting each other, but they don't really mean it, or they do mean, like, it's just like, there's, it's just, it's kind of nuts.

And

there is a way in which like these communities have, have this feeling.

And by committing this act,

by murdering a bunch of people, they see it as a troll.

Like they are trolling everyone because just you watch Donald Trump's going to get on Fox News and say something, right?

Or MSNBC is going to do this, or these lawmakers are all going to point the finger.

Oh, God.

They're playing the response.

I mean, truly, that's like,

I feel sometimes like I'm,

again, over-generalizing when I'm looking at this, right?

Because it's hard to have any conversation without overgeneralizing.

But every person's, you know, got their own motivations, whatnot.

And then you read the charging document of Charlie Kirk's shooter, and it says, man, if if I see this on Fox News, I'm going to have a stroke.

That's the quote.

And I'm like, well, there it is.

Like,

that's it.

That's one of the things is they want to see the reaction from the so-called normal world or whatever.

And wants to see the normal people not be able to understand it.

They want the reporters, the journalists, the lawmakers, the investigators to try to solve their puzzle and fail because they and that's when you think about it, that's so so human, right?

They, they, they want to try to be understood, but they also want to be seen as

unendingly completely.

I've got no sympathy

for the misunderstood, you know, miscreant that's like, I just want to be seen.

And you're like, there's, man, fucking take a painting class.

Like, get good.

I'm certainly not defending it.

No, no, no.

But that's what it is.

I just meant, yeah, yeah.

I get what you're saying.

Do you think, look, anything that can be constructed can be deconstructed.

Are there tools

that can give us a better sense

of

when these things are going to break into real life?

And

are we going to have to understand how to utilize those?

Is that the way out of this?

I mean, I don't know.

I don't want to be like the kids and the underground subreddits, but you know,

let's face facts, like the overwhelming majority of it, it's pretty harmless.

Right.

But is there some way to crystallize where the real peril is and how to find our way out of it?

I think that there's a, there's such a

number of ways you could go with all of this, right?

Like one of the things that when I talk to a lot of these researchers, they all sort of like

put their head in their hands because they're like, what I'm going to say to you sounds so naive and like so pie in the sky.

And like, you know, you're going to dismiss me immediately.

But they're like,

We, we need more like third spaces and community spaces.

And, and, like, like, the, we need the infrastructure that's not digital.

We need the physical infrastructure.

God, the answer is midnight basketball.

Yes.

The answer is a community of people who care about and

keep people who are showing these types of tendencies from,

you know, driving themselves or running into the arms

of these other people, right?

Like, you know, the one thing that

this one researcher at University of

Boulder, Alex Newhouse, told me, is that

you can see from these people

a receding from

the physical world when they start to really go down these paths.

Like,

they're not going to school, right?

Like,

they stop they stop going to these things and they start spending all but this kid didn't seem like that at all no oh he's having dinner with his parents he's going to work he's going to school he's doing the whole thing like

and that's why we don't know right whether we we still don't really even know he's not being cooperative you know he he may he may fit into this other box but it's very clear there are a few little things that signs and things that he left that he thought would either be nihilistically funny or or what or whatnot But there is like a like a physical thing.

Right.

Or or was like, this person is a hateful person and I've decided to be the judge, jury, and executioner.

Like it could simply be that.

Right, truly.

And

I wrote this in the in the last piece, but

the thing that

most,

I think unnerves people the most is this idea that there might not be an ideology to pin it to.

Like it's not even, like I think a lot of people were like, oh, I hope it's not my side, you know, who, who did this.

I hope that person's not on my side because I don't want to have to answer for that or, or whatnot, or that's going to make things worse for me somehow.

But I think even more unnerving to people is this.

What made them do this, right?

What, like, where, where was the, what fail-safes, you know, didn't work.

Sure.

No, it takes you back.

I think in some respects, you say, okay,

we've seen assassinations before in our history.

We've seen

times of volatility and, you know, insecurity and generally revolved around either, you know, Vietnam War or

racial issues or, you know,

different things.

This feels like Clockwork Orange.

This is a whole other

sort of subculture that, like you say, it is, you know, it has its own language.

it has its own mores, and

it's, yeah, it's why, it's why the Manson case created such a hysteria back when that first surfaced.

Yeah.

I mean, I think it's really interesting.

People have brought this up.

And again, this is a little outside of my zone of expertise, but I think it's interesting, you know, we don't really have like a serial killer.

problem in the same way that, you know, historically we had, but we do have this mass shooting problem, right?

And it's interesting yes it's it's it's interesting is this a different expression of a type of violence of a type of thing you know instead of right like are we seeing the same things but they're you know

it's being sort of transformed by our current culture our current media our current you know whatever a nihilism that's always been with us supercharged by technological advances and again that's a little that's a little beyond my my scope but i think it's i think it's certainly fascinating.

I think it's good to keep in perspective with this because you can immediately sort of go into the doomer territory with all this.

It's very easy to do.

But I do think that

this isn't the common experience of being online.

No, I know.

It's one of those things where you're like, but think of all the people who aren't shot.

Like, it's one of those like, okay.

All right.

No, totally.

But I think, like,

I think

when you're trying to address this,

I think one of the biggest issues,

there's obviously like the technological issues.

I think like the government needs to

really start taking this even more seriously.

Oh, well, they apparently are going to on the left.

Apparently, they're not going to do it.

Right, right.

And apparently, George Soros is going to jail for this one.

Right, yeah.

No, that's

not going to make anything better.

Yeah.

But

I think

the Biden administration sort of right at the end designated this terrorist sort of online group, Terror Gram,

as a

domestic threat, which

puts it in a different category and allows

the actual law enforcement agencies to sort of take this more seriously to

monitor this stuff.

Again, that gets into conversations about surveillance and what are we doing, surveilling our kids.

And are our kids going to get caught up in this thing because they're ironically posting about whatever?

It's not a coincidence that these communities are all cloaked in 85 layers of irony because it also makes it a little harder to track and understand what is actually going on until it might be too late.

But

I also think, I think one of the biggest things here is that I see in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination is that people

need to start taking the internet much more seriously.

Like, I have, I've had journalists that I have seen who have sort of glibly and proudly been like, well, I don't, you know, I don't know about like those spaces or those types of things.

And what I would say is, like, if you are trying to cover politics in 2025,

you need to know what a Discord room is.

You need to know how these things operate.

You need to understand, I'm not saying you have to be, you know, drive yourself mad or anything like that, but you have to understand these things because what we are doing right now

is we're very clearly as like a broad media and political system, cultural system, is we are playing into the hands of these people.

who are doing this.

We are giving them what they want.

We are performing for the internet.

And you see this after

Charlie Kirk's assassination.

You're watching internet desidents perform with either shit posting or thing.

You're seeing cable news certainly perform all of its, you know, our prayers and other things.

You know, they're going through all the stages of

how a story is in some ways put through the refinery of our modern,

media outlet.

There's very little

insight and a lot of performance.

And maybe that's the exact wrong thing to be steering into.

I have no idea if this would have as much of an effect as I think it would.

But if the media stopped naming these shooters,

I think that that is like such a small thing that actually goes a bit of a way.

Because again, the thing that I think was so chilling about the Minneapolis church shooting is that they wrote all

these names of other mass shooters on the gun.

Right.

The shooters, you know, that was very clearly a

Christ church.

I want

whatever media storm those people had.

I want that.

Precisely.

I want to be the next name on the gun.

Hey, listen, man.

I know you got a lot going on and I appreciate you spending the time with us.

I got to tell you, you, I made my bones in this business spending hours and hours watching cable news.

It was a corrosive experience.

I can't imagine

because I think you're doing the same, but in an even

more

difficult and acidic environment.

You're with the atmosphere of Venus.

You know, we were still on Earth, but you're in a whole other area.

So much appreciated.

Charlie Warzell, staff writer at the Atlantic, author of its newsletter, Galaxy Brain.

Thanks very much for talking to us, Charlie.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Wow.

So it is, I have to say, it's sort of what I thought it was, this sort of strange,

unregulated Wild West culture where the worst version of yourself is not just in any way

visible, but encouraged,

cultivated, fertilized.

It is exactly the kind of environment that we need to aerate

if we are to move forward in non-nihilist fashion.

Yes.

That is for sure.

But I do want to thank Charlie for taking the time.

And I also, as always,

want to thank all those that work on this podcast who do such a great job week in and week out.

The not unsung heroes, sung, they are the sung.

We should sing their praises more often.

Our lead producer, Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mamedovic, producer Jillian Spear, video editor and engineer, Rob Vitolo, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce, and our executive producers Chris McShane and Katie Gray.

We will see you next week under hopefully more pleasant circumstances.

Bye-bye.

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