re: The perpetually online...all of the mass shooters...their brains have been rotted

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While the underlying premises are accurate, I disagree with your conclusion. Our brains designed these systems. Our brains can absolutely devise ways to control, defy, ignore them, if we wish. We are also still 100% capable of discernment, if properly trained and practiced.

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Could you not say the same thing about cigarettes? Or high fructose corn syrup? Or fentanyl?

The fact that it’s possible to recognize and avoid (or quit) does not mean that the vast majority of the public is particularly likely to do so. There’s a pretty blurry line between designing for “maximum engagement” and designing for addiction.

The tricky thing with social media (and the modern internet in general) is that the negative aspects are extremely subtle for the user. You don’t get lung cancer, or get fat, or die from an OD. Instead, you get small changes to your worldview over time.

The other thing is.. it’s not just the effect on one person that creates a real problem. It’s the herding of large numbers of people into progressively more extreme echo chambers. At some point it’s not the nebulous “social media” bogeyman telling someone to become the next Ted Kaczynski. It’s other like-minded humans, whose views have been warped over time and amplified.

I don’t know what the big-picture solution is. It’s a complex problem. On a personal level, I try to stay grounded by focusing as much of my mental effort as possible on my own life, friends, and family. But we’ve reached a point where the constant bombardment of outrage over something has spilled over into real life for many people, making it nearly unavoidable even if you delete all accounts (I am not talking about outrage over this specific incident, to be clear). I can try to raise my kid the right way and make sure she stays grounded, but even if I do a perfect job that’s one life out of billions.

I certainly don’t think social media is the entire problem. We had ideologically-motivated psychopaths long before Twitter existed. But I do think that social media is largely responsible for the state of political discourse in this country.

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K. Keep blaming others.

Blame social media not bad parenting for your fat and stupid kid.

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Way to miss the point again, bud.

100%. I understand why the discussion devolved the way it did, since Kirk was a prominent conservative advocate and the shooter is another chronically online, nihilistic, leftist loser.

But now that more details about the shooter have come out, I hope people realize that the catalyst for this kid's transformation from quiet harmless nerd to deranged murderer was spending his whole life on the Internet and not connecting with anyone in the real world. He glommed onto leftism and that definitely informed his choice of target, no question about it. But the common thread with all these lunatics is that they got radicalized online because the Internet is a fricking cesspit, those radical politics became their whole personality because they had no life outside their insane corner of the Internet, and then they go murder innocent people in the real world because of it.

Free speech and open debate in the real world with real people is a cornerstone of our democracy and has to be protected if we're going to make it as a country. Violence against people for their politics is horrible. Doesn't matter what those politics are.

Defeat them with words, not bullets. Just like Kirk set out to do. I didn't agree with him on much, but we agreed on this, which is the most important principle of all, IMO.

None of the rest of it matters unless you start from the principle that we're all Americans just trying to figure it out. We're on the same team.

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Didn't miss it buddy.

But ppl blaming the Internet and social media as the issue are idiots. Ppl got radicalized other ways long before the Internet.

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Based on this reply, yes, you did.

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his isn't an Internet problem.

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Garbage in, garbage out.

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Not that I disagree that social media has detached people from reality, but there were mass murderers prior to the public internet.

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Yeah isn’t crime actually down? Although it does not feel like it

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the common thread with all these lunatics is that they got radicalized online because the Internet is a fricking cesspit

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Agreed.

You know what else is a common thread with these lunatics . . . guns.

Guns definitely hurt people the second most after the internet.

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Yeah isn’t crime actually down?

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Because places are safer or because kids don’t leave their houses unsupervised anymore?

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Obviously the "from the Internet" part necessarily limits it to around the 2000s onward. But to the extent there were pre-Internet equivalents of this stuff, they were extraordinarily rare. The closest pre-Internet equivalent that comes to mind is the UT tower mass murderer, and the going theory is that he had a brain tumor that screwed him up.

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2000s onward also captures the expiration of the federal assault weapons ban in 20005 and a proliferation of automatic weapons ever since.

That was well thought out. Can’t really disagree with much of that. I will just add:

1. Whenever absolutist take over a position, I think society is in trouble. On the topic of guns, the right has largely embraced a position with zero compromise. People have a right to own guns. I have no issue with that. Allowing anyone to purchase AR-15 style weapons, at any time, without any meaningful restriction is lunacy to me. We pay the price for that with mass shooting events. It’s a false choice to believe you have to have that to achieve the policy goals of the second amendment.

2. I would add 24 hour cable news and smart phones as the other two legs to the internet’s melting of our collective mind melting stool. We have taken every quiet moment available to us, every opportunity for reflection, creation and interaction, and filled it, largely with argument, controversy and violence. It has warped the brains of young and old alike.

Taking to strangers makes humans happy. We don’t do it anymore. Not in the check out line, not in the airport, not in the elevator. Talk to the person next to you.