It is the internet

And it is tearing us apart.

I was a few minutes away from sending something else, and then they caught the guy. They caught the guy and found his gun and bullet casings, and they were inscribed with memes.

We all know what happens next: We get busy with the proof. We scrape through his past, parse his posts, and interpret his hieroglyphics, not to understand him, but to position him. Because, be honest, is that not what most people think, the moment they hear of some distant political killing? Whose side is he on? I hope it was one of them who did it.

But that is how we are now. Polarized, and posting about it. And it is that very thing, it seems, that made every aspect of this ugly moment. Charlie Kirk got famous on the internet, by being (or playing, to the extent that there is a difference) a hideous character on the internet. He did it in support of a president who became president by commanding the same internet in the same way—by engineered outrage, through memes and online melees. And then some teenager spent too much time on that internet, got eaten by it; boiled alive by its toxicity and tribalism; by its thrashing, convulsing nonsense; by its recursive jokes; all compounding into a spiraling dump of self-referential symbolism and slop; a tightening gyre coiling into itself; hotter and hotter, until his reality was incinerated, melted out of his ears, and he bought a gun and shot someone else in the head.

Perhaps this is not new. There have always been provocateurs. We have always had gory politics. America has always been knee-deep in the blood of its own: It was fertilized by the bodies of its natives; by the teeth of its enslaved; by brothers killed by one another and by citizens killed by those they paid to protect them. Still, something feels different—about our hopeless polarization; about the reckless abandon of our political discourse; about its scorched-earth absolutism; about the mundane regularity of suicide missions launched by one-man militias of poisoned madmen, ready to take their country back. We have always been like this, but have we always been like this?

We haven’t, many will say; and it is the other side’s fault. I would say the same, and I would mean it. But that is a lazy answer. Both sides have always had the other side to point to. Even if they are the problem, why are they the problem now?

From Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing about people who speculated what they might have done if they lived in the antebellum South:

It is comforting to believe that we, through our sheer will, could transcend these bindings—to believe that if we were slaves, our indomitable courage would have made us Frederick Douglass, or if we were slave masters, our keen morality would have made us Bobby Carter. We flatter ourselves, not out of malice, but out of instinct.

Still, we are, in the main, ordinary people living in plush times. We are smart enough to get by, responsible enough to raise a couple of kids, thrifty to sock away for a vacation, and industrious enough to keep the lights on. We like our cars. We love a good cheeseburger. We'd die without air-conditioning. In the great mass of humanity that's ever lived, we are distinguished only by our creature comforts, and we are, on the whole, mediocre.

That mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook—but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson. …

If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity. The first rule is this—You are not extraordinary. It's all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it's much more interesting to assume that you wouldn't have and then ask, "Why?"

This is not an impossible task. But often we find that we have something invested in not asking "Why?" The fact that we—and I mean all of us, black and white—are, in our bones, no better than slave masters is chilling. The upshot of all my black nationalist study was terrifying—give us the guns and boats and we would do the same thing.

There is a corollary to our present moment, that is somehow both hopeful and desperate: It is not us, or them, that is the problem. It cannot be. Because we are, en masse, all the same as we always were. There is nothing constitutional in people today that is better or worse than it was before. We are all as mediocre as ever.

But the facilities around us are not. Now, we can build a giant machine that encourages us to indulge in our worst tendencies. We can design that machine so that those who use it can mainline its most toxic and addictive chemicals. We can ask the machine to tell us we are right, and use it to meet other people who will also tell us we are right. We can drive ourselves mad by living in the machine—posting to it, fighting on it, and, eventually, murdering for it.

Sure, think more civil thoughts and pray for lower temperatures. Declare that we can overcome this awful habit. That’s all fine and good, I suppose. But it’s much more interesting to assume that we won’t, and to ask “Why?” And the answer seems as obvious as it is uncomfortable—nobody is in charge of the thermostat anymore. It is set by the invisible machinery of the internet and social media, and machinery can only turn the ratchet in one direction.

We all want all of this to stop. But keep giving us the internet and we will keep doing the same thing.