Charlie Warzel writes:

More and more, it seems, I pull to refresh a feed or open up a new browser tab and encounter something that makes me feel as if I’ve sustained a head injury.

Recently, the culprit has often been the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security is putting out white-nationalist dog whistles on X. President Trump posted a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The subtext of every egregious shitpost from the administration is the same: These people are in charge now, and the old rules don’t matter.

A great deal of what I find myself scrolling past exudes a threatening, almost anarchical aura. Just before New Year’s, my timeline offered murmurings of a livestreamer who appeared to have run a person over with his Cybertruck. A week later I would come to know this man as the 20 year-old “looksmaxxer” who goes by the name Clavicular. He hits his face with a hammer to strengthen his jawline and pals around with the white-supremacist streamer Nick Fuentes. Last month, the men were recorded in a club—with other charming manosphere personalities, such as the alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate—enjoying Ye’s song “Heil Hitler.” (Tate has denied the allegations against him.)

This was trolling, but it also sent a message: “We have enough status and influence to literally get them to play fucking the most—like you can’t even find the song on a single platform,” Clavicular said on a stream after the fact. Brazen displays of status and influence are, of course, what influencers have always been about, but something different is happening with Clav, with Trump and DHS, and with so many other, nonpolitical accounts on social media today. “The reason for the tariffs is the same reason Clavicular hits his face with a hammer,” Aidan Walker, an online-culture researcher, told me recently. “It’s to get attention. It’s to mobilize the base; it’s to prove a point that there’s no rules anymore.”

Social-media platforms—and especially X—have loosened their grip on moderation at the same time that AI tools have allowed for the easy proliferation of slop; never before has there been so much cynical, cruel content and trolling. When Clavicular records himself breaking his body, spouting the N-word, and reveling in anti-Semitism, he’s participating in what Walker dubs “nihilism by default,” an ideology where “the only sources of purpose or profit are the self and the social media machine.”

This dynamic is everywhere now. It exists in political memes and propaganda. It drives broad swaths of popular culture. A kind of post-ironic fatalism that was once endemic to seedy message boards has bled into the broader culture, changing how people communicate. Nihilism is now the lingua franca of the internet. [Continue reading…]