There is a fairly large subculture out there of utterly miserable lonely young men who lack any kind of sex or companionship. Some of them have never held someone’s hand. Never hugged anyone. Never touched. So a few of them—not many, but it does happen—pick up guns and fire at random into crowds of people. They would like to feel the sense of dumb animal contentment you get when another warm and living human being touches your skin, but they can’t, and so they kill. This makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is the fact that overwhelmingly, these people make no effort whatsoever to meet other people. They say they want love and touch, badly enough to go on shooting sprees about it—but not badly enough to try. Much weirder territory here (View Highlight)
It makes sense to think of social problems in terms of people not getting what they want. This is the little engine that’s powered all of human history, from the dawn of agriculture until the day before yesterday: the uneven distribution of the surplus. But now, we’ve broken out of history and into something else, and the true nature of our problem is something much slipperier: not the repression of desire, but its disappearance. Hard to escape the conclusion that the incels don’t actually want sex at all; what they want is what they’re getting, which is the pleasure of being aggrieved. Not undesired, but undesiring: screenblasted, subsisting off Twitter and porn, like some deep sea sponge, feeding on the plankton of simulated sociality that snows down from above. Their murderous agony is that they are, secretly, perfectly content. And when they kill, it’s because it’s easier and more comfortable than peering into that vast calm absence of desire that swells where a living subject ought to be. (View Highlight)
I do not think the incels can ever adequately describe their own condition, because their condition is a screen that obscures what’s really at stake. Similarly, I don’t think any Swiftie can ever hope to adequately understand their idol. Taylor Swift is the formless crisis of the present and the void over which all things are spun. But all they can do is talk about her music, and her boyfriends, and her costumes, and her hair: things that simply do not, in any meaningful sense, exist (View Highlight)