Welcome to the Weekly Scroll, your guide to the most interesting things that happened online this week. In this post we’re breaking down the cryptic, meme-ridden messages left by Charlie Kirk’s shooter, the social media-led revolution that overthrow a government in Nepal, the backlash to BlueSky, Roblox, AI copyright cases, and one extremely cool purse. Join as a paid subscriber - support the blog and get access to every post!
Meme Murderers
Friday morning in Utah, police took into custody Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old student alleged to be Charlie Kirk’s assassin. Almost immediately the internet began doing what it does best: rushing to find details about the case they can use to score points against their political enemies. Different groups, left and right, waited to see if the shooter would fit any of the ideological or identity markers that allow them to attack their opponents.
The blame game that inevitably happens after these events is horrifically depressing in a variety of ways. First, because we’re not even very good at it - so much information is muddled or just flat wrong when it’s first released. The Wall Street Journal released a report that the shooter’s bullet casings were engraved with ‘transgender and anti-fascist ideology’, but that report turned out not to be fully true - it appears that someone misidentified the manufacturer’s mark ‘TRN’ as a reference to trans people. Second, because it’s awful that this happens so often that each ideological camp has a fully fleshed out playbook for how to respond to best blame the other side. Third, because of what it says about how broken our politics are. We can’t even unify for a minute before the loudest and worst people on the internet are informing you who’s really to blame for the tragedy. Was the shooter trans? Antifa? A straight white male incel? A Trump supporter? A communist? Spin the wheel of misery and find out!
As of right now, the shooter’s full motivations are still unknown. Robinson, like most high-profile shooters in America, was a young man. He came from a white, conservative, Mormon family in Utah, but reportedly disliked Kirk intensely. The Guardian reported that a friend called him “leftist”, but then retracted the report. By far the most interesting information we have so far is what was engraved on four bullet casings:
*notices bulge* OWO what’s this?
Hey fascist! Catch! ⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️⬇️
Bella Ciao
If you read this, you are gay lmao
If these seems like extremely weird messages to you, congratulations on being a normal, well-adjusted human being. There are people online, as you read this, fighting about whether these messages indicate the shooter was an alt-right Groyper or a leftist. But reducing Robinson’s beliefs to just a left-right paradigm misses the important thing that’s actually happening. More than being left or right, Robinson was a deeply internet-poisoned individual.
The ‘notices bulge OWO’ comment comes directly from online furry culture. The arrows in the “Hey fascist! Catch! ⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️⬇️” message are a reference to the video game Helldivers 2, where the arrows are a code to detonate the largest bomb in the game. “Bella Ciao” is an old Italian anti-fascist song, but it’s popular enough that it’s now used by many communities - it’s in Groyper playlists, is a reference/meme from the Hearts of Iron 4 video game, etc.1
Crucially, these references are so interlaced with memes and irony that it’s impossible to tell what specific ideological angle they’re coming from. “If you read this, you are gay lmao” sounds like it comes from an conservative troll, but it’s also something an irony-poisoned dirtbag leftist might say. Calling Kirk a fascist is certainly something you could hear from the left, but it’s also something that fans of Nick Fuentes say about Kirk because of their intra-right feud.
Robinson isn’t the first heavily online meme-inspired murderer. The Christchurch massacre in 2019 was livestreamed and the shooter kicked things off by telling viewers to ‘subscribe to PewDiePie’. The shooter in a 2022 mass murder in Buffalo said that he was ‘shitposting IRL’ - he also livestreamed his shooting and was found to have planned it on Discord. A teenage school shooter did the Nazi-adjacent ok sign2 in a post before their shooting, and a month later another teen who egged them on did the same thing as they shot up their own school. In August a mass shooter in Minneapolis scribbled messages like “I’m the woker, baby, why so queerious?” on their gun.
When I read Robinson’s messages, I don’t see some kind of clear ideological commitment. I see a kid so thoroughly mindfucked by 4chan, Discord, and gamer culture that he doesn’t even know what he believes, a kid for whom memes and meta-ironic references have taken over the space where rational thought used to exist. Hell, Robinson dressed up as the 4chan squatting slav meme for Halloween one year. Most of these shooters feel like they’re variations on the same person. They’re almost universally young men who got radicalized in the dark corners of the internet, had easy access to guns, and as Charlie Warzel puts it, are putting on a performance for one another.
Because this is America, there was a school shooting in Colorado on the same day Kirk was assassinated. And that killer is a perfect example of the memetic melting pot creating these kids:
The ‘WRATH’ shirt is a tribute to the shirt worn by Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine shooters. The 90291 is a reference to the Manson family murders. The shooter in this case also shared images of Natalie Rupnow (another shooter) and various white power/neo-Nazi imagery.
Trying to slot these killers into a mainstream political ideology entirely misses the point. What’s really happening here is much stranger than that. And most of our institutions, dominated by Boomers and Gen Xers, are simply not capable of understanding this stuff.
Tyler Robinson is only 22 years old. That means that he, like a large and growing percentage of kids today, spent his entire adolescence marinating in algorithmic slop. Pretty much as soon as he could read he was plugged into a machine that directed him to nihilistic edgelord communities built around racist trolling, incomprehensible 4chan memes, video games and fantasies of violence. If you understand this context, the picture below might be one of the most tragic things you’ll ever see.
If you’re not a 20-something hyper online edgelord, the dynamics here will you pass by totally unnoticed. School shootings and political assassinations are now just another form of meme. They’re another way to get clout in niche internet communities, which is the single most powerful motivating force in the world. More than half of teens want to grow up to be influencers, and violence is now just another pathway to online fame.
Roblox
If toxic, 4chan-inspired Discords are the thing that Boomers won’t ever understand, Roblox might be the Gen Alpha equivalent that Millennials find incomprehensible. I often point out that Roblox is the most influential-but-undercovered thing happening on the internet, so every once in a while I like to check in on what’s happening on Roblox:
Again: corners of the internet you don’t follow and can’t really understand are turning shootings into a form of irony-laced meme culture, and it’s even happening with preteens on Roblox. ‘Experiences’ are the user-created content that makes up the backbone of Roblox game play, and I’m not surprised at all that within hours of Kirk’s murder users on Roblox were recreating, remixing and memeing it like it was a pop song. This is where youth culture is being created today, because however big you think Roblox is, it’s actually much bigger than that:
Welcome to the actual Metaverse.3
Nepal
On September 4th, Nepal banned 26 major social media platforms including Facebook, X, Reddit, YouTube, Signal and Snapchat for not complying with a new set of regulations.
On September 9th, amidst massive protests and street violence between protestors and riot police, the Nepalese government collapsed and the prime minister resigned.
This is being covered in some media as a story about a Gen Z backlash to the attempt to ban social media, but the reality is more complex. The official government line is that the new regulations were in place to modernize tax collection from digital services. But it’s widely believed by Nepalese youth that the regulations were a pretext for a ban due to a very popular social media trend in the country exposing nepotism in the country’s ruling elite.
Searching #PoliticiansNepoBabyNepal on TikTok shows a deep undercurrent of anger in Nepal at the corruption among elites. They’re outraged by ‘influencers’ like Shrinkhala Khatiwada, a former Miss Nepal and daughter of the former national health minister who openly flaunt wealth while most Nepalese lack any real economic opportunities. Nepal’s GDP per capita is only about $1,500 USD and youth unemployment is 20%. And that almost certainly understates the problem, as hundreds of thousands of Nepalese youth leave the country every year to seek employment abroad. Remittances from those workers abroad make up more than a quarter of GDP. So for Nepalese Zoomers, watching a politician’s kid on social media show off their designer handbags, luxury watches, and million dollar properties is particularly enraging.
In this context the social media ban was the spark that lit the flame, but the underlying fuel was a deep sense of dissatisfaction with the country’s political system. And flame is the right analogy here - protestors burned down the Parliament building, the Supreme Court, and the homes of the prime minister and several other high level government officials.
The social media ban ended up being completely ineffectual, of course. Nepalese protestors simply moved to sites like Discord, where there are now hundreds of thousands of Nepalis debating what the new government should look like. There is one giant Discord server proving so influential that the discussions there are shown on Nepal’s nightly news. “The Parliament of Nepal right now is Discord” proclaims the New York Times, and they’re not wrong.
If you’re interested in a man on the street perspective, I highly recommend travel YouTuber wehatethecold, who ended up in Nepal right as the protests really heated up and turned into a sort of gonzo journalist by accident.
Sticking to the somewhat grim theme of this post - it’s just one more entry in the ‘Discord is where Gen Z culture is created’ ledger. The country has calmed down in the past day or two, the army has successfully negotiated with protestors to name Sushila Karki (a former Supreme Court Chief Justice) as interim prime minister who will oversee new elections in the next six months. And where did the protestors come to a consensus that Karki was the best choice for an interim leader? On Discord.
Nate Silver vs the BlueSkyians
Recommending two very good posts on BlueSky here from friends of the blog Nate Silver and Noah Smith.
Silver writes that ‘BlueSkyism’ is a particularly toxic force in left-of-center American politics, and defines BlueSkyism as:
Smalltentism - Aggressive policing of dissent, censoriousness, self-reinforcing belief in the righteousness of the clique
Credentialism - Appeals to authority. Centering of the suitability of the speaker based on his or her credentials and/or identity characteristics.
Catastrophism - Humorless, scoldy neuroticism. Personal anxiety as a substitute for political activism, with expressions of weariness and pessimism signaling virtue and/or savviness.
I could summarize more of Nate’s argument, but I won’t do a better job than he did so consider going and reading it over at Silver Bulletin. I’ll just add that I’ve seen numerous BlueSky types getting really, really angry at Nate for this post and displaying these exact characteristics while they’re angry. And frankly, BlueSky just isn’t fun the way I thought it might be when it was on the rise. Probably why it seems to be in terminal decline right now:
Links
Shot and chaser - First, click this old parody of the CEO of Venmo. Second, this news that trading app RobinHood is creating a social network where “all posts by traders will be required to include a trade of equities, options or other assets”.
Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5 billion to authors in a copyright lawsuit. The core of the case is that Anthropic has to pay up because they pirated the books, not because training on AI is copyright infringement. “You can train AIs, but you have to pay for the content you train on” seems like a reasonable middle ground to me.
Silksong, the sequel to the wildly popular game Hollow Knight, caused such a surge of interest that it briefly crashed Steam.
YouTube was caught using AI to subtly edit some creators’ videos without permission.
“I Hate My AI Friend” - a great takedown of how terrible the user experience of wearable AI is.
SFGate, WIRED, and Business Insider all pulled articles from the same author after it was discovered the author was actually an AI.
Posts
Comedian attempts a set immediately after the Kirk shooting (slightly dark but very funny)
I’ve also seen it used in the popular Spanish series Money Heist, in the video game Far Cry 6, and as a minorly popular song on TikTok
Yes, I hate that something as universal as the ok sign has been co-opted, it’s very dumb. But at this point school shooters taking photos with the ok sign know what they’re doing. The train’s already left the station on this one.
Theory - Mark Zuckerberg failed so badly at the Metaverse because his version is a heavily regulated, moderated experience built around mature, corporate sensibilities while Roblox is dominated by pre-teens and has a ‘fuck it, whatever’ attitude towards moderation and content.
Man, I don't want to raise Luddites, but reading this definitely makes me even more leery of letting my kids spend time online. It is NOT a fun thing to navigate as a parent, especially when so many other parents seem to just drop a screen in front of their kids and call it good.
Japanese users are still important to Xwitter, but they seem to know Bluesky as the place that can't afford to hire mods to enforce Japanese law, so they basically just use it to post uncensored nudes.