All the Sad Young Terminally Online Men
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
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Online RadicalizationYouth CultureViolence
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Online Radicalization
Youth Culture
Violence
The article 'All the Sad Young Terminally Online Men' explores the potential link between online culture and violent behavior in young men, sparking a discussion on the role of the web in radicalization and the representation of violent acts in media.
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Sep 17, 2025 at 11:39 AM EDT
4 months ago
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ID: 45277159Type: storyLast synced: 11/17/2025, 4:02:53 PM
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Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
Here’s one place to start some research https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combating_Cult_Mind_Control
And bear in mind that 99.9999%+ of online young men are not suddenly going out and killing people. Sadly, humans' obsession with rare violent acts leads journalism into providing us with an extremely unrepresentative worldview.
(And imagining the Kirk killing to be part of some huge nefarious liberal plot is just a "politically useful" conservative delusion.)
And also that young men were occasionally doing political-looking violence - for random-, crazy-, or idiotic-seeming reasons - long before there was a web. Once the facts came out, John Hinckley Jr. was not an ideological actor. Nor an enemy agent. Nor part of any conspiracy. Just a sexually obsessed lone nut job.
The wiki seems to indicate thar this, too, preceded the internet
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
But is the online talk a meaningful cause of real-world bad stuff, or a symptom or side-effect?
I'd say that Accelerationism was (in effect) a real-world thing for over century before the ~1970 thinking that Wikipedia cites as its background. Just look at the staggering social and technological upheavals from 1850 to 1950. At the start, a sail-powered wooden warship, capable of 10-ish MPH and using gunpowder to fire small balls of iron, was still pretty much state of the art for a major nation projecting military power. At the end, that state of the art was intercontinental bombers dropping atomic warheads.
And no techno-capitalist ideology was needed to force those changes. Nations which wanted to be (or stay) on the world's A List had to change, invent, and industrialize as fast as they could, just to keep up. Nations which couldn't, or didn't, faded into obscurity.