A sort of reverse online radicalization

“Was The UnitedHeathcare CEO Killer Milkshake Ducked,” And Other Pointless Questions

I spent most of the 2010s scouring the internet for the digital bread crumbs left behind by mass shooters. It’s not exactly fun work — and looking back I’m not sure any of it had any real value — but it can be fascinating. Like picking up a rock and seeing all the bugs underneath.

Following the 2012 movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, fans of the gunman James Holmes, who called themselves the Holmesies, got so mad I was digging around that they set up a Tumblr full of pictures of my face Photoshopped on to gay pornography. The void stares back, etc.

I lost a lot of my fascination with what killers leave behind online, though, following the 2019 Christchurch shootings. It was the first time it felt like a killer had purposefully set up a paper trail for reporters to find. A real Jake-Gyllenhaal-in-the-basement-scene-of-Zodiac moment for me. Of course, just because I had lost my taste for it didn’t mean the rest of the media, and the wider internet, also did. And so, now, once again, all of social media is scouring the web to piece together what exactly suspected UnitedHealthcare CEO killer Luigi Mangione was doing online leading up to this month’s attack.

Some of this has been actually very funny. Like NBC News writing a jaw-droppingly bad piece implying that Mangione playing Among Us with some friends on Discord may have somehow prepped him for the attack. Yes, murder is very sus. Thank you.

But we have found a lot of his seemingly very real digital artifacts. An X account purportedly belonging to Mangione is full of weird radical-centrist nonsense about Japanese birthrates, retweets of Elon Musk posts, and LinkedIn broetry about going to the gym. He was also a somewhat regular Goodreads user, a LindyMan reply guy, a big redditor, and reviewed The Lorax on Letterboxd. He also may have smoked weed once with this random user on the subreddit for the Red Scare podcast (and possibly slept with Caroline Calloway). In other words, he was a 26-year-old living in 2024, where every young person has a bizarre and incongruous data stream full of post-4chan right-wing gibberish and pop culture context collapse that has followed them around since birth.

The only interesting detail I’ve come across was one I had sort of laughed off when I first saw it. Like the Christchurch shooter, Mangione clearly did do some pruning before allegedly carrying out the attack, and the number 286 appears frequently across his various profiles and feeds. The X account associated with his name features a picture of the Pokémon Breloom, which is #286 in the Pokédex. And his account has 286 posts on it. Healthcare providers use “Code 286” for claim denials and the number also corresponds to a bible verse and one of those dumb angel numbers that seem to have some kind of connection. His manifesto, which was published this week by reporter Ken Klippenstein, is only 261 words long, though, so either some words got clipped or maybe none of this matters?

Which is a question that’s been asked this week in different ways by both Jason Koebler at 404 Media and John Herrman over at New York Magazine. And the answer is, of course, no. Good for fancams, I suppose, but it is simply not very interesting anymore that an alleged murderer would be using the internet. Lots of them do!

In fact, to hear his friends tell it, Mangione had a debilitating back injury and had basically fallen off the grid over the last six months — his most recent X post was in June. Which actually paints a much different different picture than the one we’re used to: A sort of reverse online radicalization. It is not so much that he was radicalized by what he was consuming online, as far as anyone has found, but by whatever went through his head during his time offline. And all of this ended very differently from what we’ve come to expect from someone like him. As writer Kylie Cheung wrote this week, “Whatever you feel about this you have to admit it's rare for a radicalized man who's frustrated or angry and ready to choose violence to actually correctly identify the source of their suffering, instead of just blaming and killing women and minorities.” Yes, it is rare and I don’t think it’s an accident. Like the redditors earlier this week that were ready to abandon the culture war for a class war after learning about Mangione’s attack, young people are desperate for answers to why they’re so angry and anti-woke slop can only satisfy them to a point.

Now, we just have to get the next angry young man to both unplug and also, idk, start a protest movement or run for office or do literally anything other than pick up a gun.

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This week’s Panic World is all about the weird gender stuff online right now. Girl dinner, man camps, Roman history boyfriends, girlie aesthetics — how did we get here and is it bad? Helping us get to the bottom of all that are the fantastic culture writers Rebecca Jennings and Luke Winkie. You can check out the episode on every single app that has ever existed and will ever exist or you can just click right here.

A Poignant Snapshot Of Our Current Moment

And, yes, there’s video.

OpenAI Finally Released Sora (The video model, not the kid from Kingdom Hearts)

OpenAI launched their video-generating AI model, Sora, this week. Well, sorta. They had to close signups pretty quickly due to high demand. Sora, from what I’ve seen, is not exactly good, but it’s also not awful, either. It seems to be better at replicating video environments, but worse at camera movements. But if you’ve ever used any other video generators, like Runway, you’re probably pretty familiar with what it can and can’t do.

Writer Ed Zitron, who I think can be a little too positive about AI (jk), wrote that the rollout of Sora does not reflect well on OpenAI’s long-term health as a company. “This rollout, by the way, was the easiest way to tell if OpenAI was in trouble,” Zitron wrote. “If they had let everybody use Sora as much as they liked, then I'd believe they had a shot. They're washed. Sora is too expensive to scale and not good enough to make them money. This is a pale horse.”

And I’m inclined to agree. The existential threat to the entire AI industry right now is that it is still too expensive to not be consistently revolutionary. As in, if they can’t keep rolling out products that shock and awe their users, they won’t be able to afford to keep going. And it does feel as if we’ve already entered an era of many little adjustments and upgrades, rather than big developments.

Neo-Nazis Tried To Bridge With Bluesky

Far-right and right-wing groups have become fixated on Bluesky over the last few weeks, following the platform’s huge uptick in new users post-election. For the most part, these groups are getting suspended immediately (save for one deeply pathetic anti-trans columnist that everyone hates). So extremists are trying to figure out more insidious ways of getting on to the app.

Users noticed this week that a bundle of accounts from a domain called nazigamingclan tried to bridge with Bluesky at the protocol level. The domain name goes to a site full of anime girls dressed like Nazis, obviously. As for what bridging with Bluesky means here, they’re trying to connect their server to the relatively open protocol that powers Bluesky. You can read more about how servers can do this here.

But the point is that extremists have realized the eyeballs they want to get in front of and the discourse they want to subvert cannot be found on X anymore. Here’s hoping Bluesky is ready for all the attention.

Funko Pops Vs. Itch.io

Itch.io, the indie game-making platform, said this week that Funko Pops tried to take their site down. And even tried calling Itch owner Leaf Corcoran’s mom.

The takedown appears to have been triggered by a AI-powered software called Brand Shield that “detects and removes online threats facing companies.” What it did to Itch was identify a page a user had made that looked like a real page managed by Funko Pops, and generated a phishing report to get Itch in trouble with its registrar.

In a statement to Polygon, a representative for Funko Pops said, “Recently, one of our brand protection partners identified a page on itch.io imitating the Funko Fusion development website. A takedown request was issued to address this specific page. Funko did not request a takedown of the itch.io platform, and we’re happy the site was back up by this morning.”

So, like, did the AI call Corcoran’s mom too?

The Lily Phillips Stuff Is Getting Extraordinarily Dark

British OnlyFans model and pornstar Lily Phillips is currently gearing up to break the world record for most sexual partners in one day. She announced that she is planning to sleep with 1,000 men in 24 hours and to, uh, practice for that, I guess, she’s slowly working through higher and higher amounts of men. In case you’re curious, the record for most amount of sexual partners in a single day is currently held by Lisa Sparks, who got to 919 partners.

This is all very icky, of course, but has begun to feel even darker thanks to a new YouTube documentary released this week by Josh Pieters, an infamous South African creator, probably best known for pranking far-right columnist Katie Hopkins back in 2020.

Pieters’ video, which follows Phillips during a viral stunt where she slept with 100 men, is a hard watch. Specifically, the interview Phillips gives after the stunt.

But the big takeaway for me is how chaotic and disorganized it all seemed. Specifically because pornography has been consumed by the creator economy, so rather than some semi-professional production company running things, it’s Phillips acting as both performer and manager.

A Good Post

Some Stray Links

• “Death by a thousand substacks”

• “He Mocked the Rich on TikTok for Fun. Now He Can Get $30,000 Per Post.”

• “Was This Half-Billion-Year-Old Wrinkled Sack With No Anus, Previously Believed To Be Our Earliest Ancestor, Actually A Baby Penis Worm?”

P.S. here’s a four-year-old Tumblr post that seems to be going viral this week for some reason.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***