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Today, we’re talking about the Luigi Mangione using the internet, plus who gets to determine what we all get to talk about.

Lots of people have been talking about Luigi, and with good reason. Not just because he’s attractive — earlier this week, the New York Times issued an edict to not show his face too much in case it “inspire[d] others,” per Ken Klippenstein — and not just because of the clear ideological message he sent before we knew who he was. He’s got the Triple Crown here, and by that I mean he was also a poster.

Through Luigi’s online history, we know he was active on TPOT, which if you don’t want to read this, is short for “That Part of Twitter” and is kind of a “post-rationalist with Debate Club tendencies” circle of Twitter. His reddit posts have told us that he had back pain and played Pokémon Go. His Goodreads account tells us he had positive-to-mixed feelings about the Unabomber manifesto, wanted to read Infinite Jest, and didn’t care too much for Matt Yglesias’s One Billion Americans (that last one is objectively hilarious). None of this makes him particularly weird for a 26-year-old male who was good at computer stuff — if anything, it makes him seem less extreme than people had originally assumed.

And yet, there’s always a rush to brand a high-profile murderer a certain way in the popular imaginary, to use their online presence to lump them in with one ideological group or the other, and for other members of that group to distance themselves and their ideology from the person’s acts. 

The mainstream media, either intentionally or not, has had trouble squaring Luigi’s online identity — but he was the type of guy you see online every day, very Median Voter style in that he had a grab bag of beliefs that didn’t add up to something you can put an easily understood label on. But our digital footprints aren’t, strictly speaking, who we are. They are characters we perform, consciously or not. They’re elements that we choose to foreground because there is only so much of ourselves that we can reveal at any given time. But because we put something on the internet, we create the illusion that we believe one thing more than others, simply by memorializing it. 

I want to be clear that I’m using this guy and his situation as an opportunity to make my point. This dude’s digital paper trail also doesn’t really indicate that he would have killed a guy, or even that he believed in one particular thing strongly enough to do much about it at all. Tim Urban, the tech-world brain thinker he seems to have been really into, is not exactly Ted Kaczynski. Though having said that, he was also kinda into Ted Kaczynski. But also, there are hundreds of thousands of kids who are super into Uncle Ted and they don’t ever do shit! This is a documented phenomenon, and anecdotally, I have a friend whose high school buddies used to write letters to Kaczynski back before it was a meme and all those dudes turned out fine. Rating the Unabomber Manifesto on GoodReads is no more an indicator of murderous potential than owning one of those Charles Manson reissues that noise people used to be super into.

Because of the rush to decode any high-profile shooter’s beliefs, and then, preferably, ascribe some sort of clear motive to their actions that happens to align with whatever the ascribing party happens to deeply dislike, a very funny thing has happened, which is that guys like Tim Urban — who, annoying as his work is, has some incredibly milquetoast beliefs — are freaking out and being like “uhhhh actually, rationalism / e/acc etc. is not about killing CEOs.” Given that guys like Urban effectively serve as court intellectuals for the Silicon Valley power elite, I don’t think this was ever in question. (Justice for Lindy Man, another Luigi fav, though, as he’s an important part of the posting ecosystem.)

There is part of me that, simply as a thought experiment, what the least charitable interpretation of the strain of thought Luigi seemingly subscribed to might be. Maybe some form of “Blackpill Effective Altruism,” in which doing the most good for the most people involved enacting politically motivated violence in the hopes of sparking a national conversation about healthcare costs? IDEK. But that’s not how these things work — people are not what they consume, and they’re certainly not what they post. As John Hermann at New York Mag pointed out, “For someone of Mangione’s age and background — a tech-savvy cuspy zoomer — the internet is, at least as much as other places you exist, where you want to act and look normal.” 

Meanwhile, this incident has reinforced something that has only become more and more clear over the past year or so, which is that freedom of expression is heavily regulated by an amalgam of capital, elite institutions, and the larger media apparatus that amplifies its views. We first saw this with the Gaza protests on college campuses, where the disconnect between the prevailing narratives and the actual sentiment on the ground was at times genuinely astonishing, and led to swaths of people getting fired from their jobs or kicked out of school simply for publicly being in step with popular sentiment. (Even Drake called for a ceasefire!)

Similarly, while everyone online, and most people I talked to IRL, viewed Brian Thompson’s death primarily in symbolic terms — or at least innately understood that for-profit healthcare in America is so fucked up that it was almost an inevitability that somebody was going to end up shooting an insurance company CEO — many in positions of power viewed it as an opportunity to shame those who celebrated it, an occasion to worry about the safety of other CEOs rather than an inflection point or a wake-up call. PA governor Josh Shapiro’s remarks on the matter were particularly telling. “In America, we do not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint,” he announced after Luigi’s arrest, as part of a larger statement that seemingly spoke directly to whatever impulses that led to stuff like this:

Contrast his anti-Luigi-fandom with how he handled public shows of solidarity with the Palestinian people, who were, as it just so happened, being killed in cold blood to resolve policy differences. Shapiro issued an executive order effectively warning state employees they’d be fired for speaking out against Israel, and worked behind the scenes in an attempt to influence the University of Pennsylvania — where Luigi matriculated, coincidentally enough — to forcibly disband the pro-Palestine encampment that had become an activist hub in Philadelphia. 

All of this is frustrating, for obvious reasons, and it’s also indicative of this entire discourse that exists outside of the mainstream, and may very well be on the verge of eclipsing it — that is, if it already hasn’t. It feels like we’re in a weird moment right now, in general. It’s easier than ever for public sentiment to cohere into consensus, yet the institutions surrounding us lack the ability to respond to that sentiment at corresponding speeds. We’re in perpetual misalignment, and I don’t think it’s going to get better any time soon.