Bros and Death and Information, Oh My.

Yeah, more politics. My brand of anti-tech bullshit is right down the tubes.

Max Read who you should all be umm, reading (look, it’s not my fault his name is Read. Take it up with his parents) has a good look at the world-view of the UnitedHealthCare shooter:

What does this add up to? I’ve seen some people suggest that Mangione’s politics must be “insane” or “incoherent” or “irrational,” and that may be true in some abstract sense, but I think the cultural and ideological portrait painted by his Twitter account is actually a fairly common and intelligible one, and would be pretty familiar not just to anyone who spends a lot of time on Twitter but to anyone who works in tech or frequents a gym weight room. It’s a loudly non-partisan, self-consciously “rational” mish-mash of declinist conservativism, bro-science and bro-history, simultaneous techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, and self-improvement stoicism--not left-wing, but not (yet) reactionary, either. The basic line is something like: The world is getting worse and phones are killing us; politics won’t save us but technology might; in the meantime, lift weights, take supplements, listen to podcasts.

This tracks to me. It is a personality that I am familiar with as I do work in tech (not FAANG or Silicon Valley, but most tech takes place outside those confines, something that I don’t think is especially well understood). I know this worldview and it’s fairly common. I also wonder if it’s why when he had his break, he veered toward violence and not something else.

Now, all I am about to say is of course speculation. And maybe that is not fair, either to people reading or to the shooter. So take all this with that in mind — I have no deep insight into the shooter, and people who do this kind of violence are not usually acting out of a coherent worldview and usually, though not always, have had some kind of mental break that pushes them towards actions that the large majority of people would never seriously consider.

There are three things now known about the shooter that could have been, either by themselves or working together, triggers or symptoms of triggers. His parent’s business was apparently being stressed by moves UnitedHealthCare was making. He had back surgery that inserted seven pins into his back and likely led to some degree of constant pain, and he seems to have disappeared from his friends’ lives about six months ago. That last might — and I want to emphasize might — indicate some kind of mental health crisis.

Assuming — and this is a big assumption — that the shooter’s actions took place because of something in his life, his worldview primed him to do something individualistic. Looking at the people he associated with, they are all (with one exception) disdainful of the idea that politics or collective action means anything. They prefer to believe that you are an island in a tumultuous sea, so you’d best look after yourself, because no one else is coming to help. All of his problems could be solved with political action, but he was primed to believe that such action was not possible. An entire generation of people, especially men, have been raised in an information environment that teaches them that lesson. If we ever want to have a better world, that has to change.

Changing it does not mean that Democrats merely have to deliver policy success. The Biden Administration had plenty of policy successes. Part of the problem was that few people heard of them. Part of the problem was that the successes were largely not transformative, or at least not publicly transformative. Since about 2000, the elites in this country have failed very publicly in significant fashion. The Iraq war was based on lies, the 2008 Great Recession was caused by elite failure and led to no punishments for said elites, modern social media demonstrably harms most people, and nothing is done about it. Very little in this country works for most people.

Any attempts at incremental changes are fighting both the information environment and almost twenty-five years of intuitional failure. It is interesting to me that the one real left person he follows (Ezra Klein is not left. He is a centrist of the we cannot make anything better because we might annoy someone, especially a CEO, so let’s just follow the polls variety) is AOC. She is known for both wanting to change the institutions at their roots and for being good at what we call alternative media but what most people in her generation just think of as media. That the shooter, amongst all the bros and politics is bad and tech maybe might save us but maybe might wont, paid attention to AOC is telling, I think. It might mean that his people are reachable.

But the Democrats and the left are going to have to focus on changing the information environment in order to reach them. The shooter, and people like him, marinate in an information environment that recognizes things are broken in many ways, but offers up either scapegoats (feminism, trans people, and the “woke mind virus”) or pushes people toward believing that collective action is silly and useless. No amount of small effective government is going to change that. The information environment must be changed and/or the changes must be so large — like ending out of pocket health care costs for all people, for example — that it breaks through the noise. Combining both is likely the best route to breaking this mindset.

Again, I could be all wrong about the shooter’s motives and mindset. But I do think that he is of a type, and I do think that type is cognizant that things need to change in the world. But almost every bit of media they encounter, political or not, tells them that collective action is a sucker’s game and that they can only help themselves and only themselves. Almost none of them will shoot CEOs, but almost none of them will vote to reign in the power of CEOs either. Changing that last is both one means to helping make the world better, and requires a much longer, harder, more comprehensive strategy than “be more mean to minorities”.