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.)
[Read: Why MAGA likes Andrew Tate]
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.”
[Listen: The manosphere breaks containment]
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.
Not so long ago, the most toxic elements of the internet bubbled up on 4chan, a forum that was filled with self-consciously transgressive posts and media including revenge porn, offensive cartoons, and lots and lots of slurs. As Dale Beran wrote in his 2017 history of the site, “4chan defined itself by being insensitive to suffering in that way only people who have never really suffered can—that is to say, young people, mostly young men, protected by a cloak of anonymity.”
Beran further explored the topic in his book, It Came From Something Awful, pinpointing how trolling became a game for disaffected kids with nothing better to do than kill time online. 4chan mutated from a site called Something Awful, which launched just before the turn of the millennium: “90s nihilism endured well into the 2000s, longer than most youth cultures,” Beran wrote. “Like wine turned into vinegar, it could decay no further. Both culture and counter-culture taught new generations to be so wary of being deceived and manipulated, it was best to hold nothing in your heart at all.”
In the mid-2010s, Steve Bannon, then the chairman of Breitbart News, began to see these people as a viable political constituency. The trolls weren’t just telling bad jokes; through Gamergate, they began to understand that they could attract mainstream attention, generate outrage, and mobilize like-minded people. Their preferred version of reality could be foisted onto anyone. “You can activate that army,” Bannon told the journalist Joshua Green in 2017. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”
[Read: “All we wanted to do was play video games”]
This culture didn’t care about old norms and institutions, obviously—in fact, it actively tore them down. Understanding this is essential to understanding the MAGA political project: You can see it in DOGE’s attempts to strip bare the federal government, for instance. But it is also key to understanding other elements of chaos in our culture: This same logic drove the “memestock” moment back in 2021, when Redditors banded together to inflate GameStop’s stock price and manipulate hedge funds into bad positions. (One fund was forced to take a $2.75 billion bailout to survive.)
Today, you can feel the same thing throughout online culture. You can see it in the way that 9/11 memes have become normalized. This week, I saw an altered version of a famous image from that day—an agent whispering into President George W. Bush’s ear about the attacks—captioned with the words “Sir, a second frat leader has brutally frame mogged Clavicular” (a reference, I explain with deep regret, to a viral clip of a jacked Arizona State University student stepping into Clav’s shot on stream).
The process of abstracting huge news events into memes has become much faster. In July 2024, when Trump was shot in the ear, ironic memes popped up just minutes later. (One of the first ones showed a photo of him bloodied, surrounded by his security detail, with the caption “do NOT get your ears pierced at Claire’s.”) Similarly, moments after Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University, an eyewitness recorded and posted a TikTok video that went instantly viral. “It’s your boy, Elder TikTok!” he shouted. “Shots fired!” Before signing off, he asked viewers to subscribe to his page. His knee-jerk reaction—to use the shooting of Kirk for content-creation purposes—was a sign of what would come. Within days, memes featuring Kirk’s face were plastered everywhere in photos—onto celebrities, rap albums, the World Trade Center on 9/11, video-game characters, FBI Director Kash Patel, the faces of random people. The process became known as “Kirkification.”
Arguably, peak Kirkification came in November, when people on social media discovered “We Are Charlie Kirk,” a song—possibly AI-generated—by the artist Spalexma. The over-the-top ballad was paired with countless AI edits and lip syncs on TikTok, Instagram, and X. One of the most popular videos featured an AI-rendered J. D. Vance belting the song to a packed concert hall. By mid-November, the song had hit No. 1 on Spotify’s viral-songs chart, both in the U.S. and globally.
Ironic nihilism appears also to have motivated Kirk’s suspected assassin to etch a bunch of niche memes onto the casings of his bullets. In the days after Kirk’s death, politicians, law enforcement, and many media outlets tried to parse the meaning of the assassin’s inscriptions—to find a motive or assign blame. But there was little meaning to be found. Kirk’s suspected shooter, like many other modern killers, was performing for an imagined audience. Shortly after the shooting, he allegedly texted his partner, “The fuckin messages are mostly a big meme, if I see ‘notices bulge uwu’ on fox new I might have a stroke.”
[Read: Something is very wrong online]
This is what I mean when I use the word nihilism to describe this phenomenon: Memes flatten any event, shrinking it down and making it indistinguishable from the rest of the slop and ephemeral content in a person’s feed, and they also become their own motivation for action. The 4chan logic that turned even the most hideous news and ideas into empty entertainment pervades everything on the internet now—more proof that lol, nothing matters.
This, of course, brings us directly to the Epstein files. On January 30, the Department of Justice released the latest tranche—millions of pages of searchable documents devoid of context or explanation. A constellation of screenshots spread via journalists, influencers, and random accounts. Also, ample fakery: For every genuine Elon Musk email I saw in the files, I saw another that had been fabricated to appear more damning than the originals. On X, Infowars’ Alex Jones posted an AI-generated image purporting to show New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his mother hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein when Mamdani was a child. (The photo was obviously fake; Mamdani’s mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, was mentioned in one email in the Epstein files, which suggested that she had attended a party at the townhouse of Ghislaine Maxwell.)
Like Kirk, Epstein has become an all-consuming meme across platforms. Long AI-slop videos of Epstein show him as a kind of conspiracy-theory Forrest Gump, influencing every bit of recent world history. In one clip, Epstein is visited in his jail cell by … Charlie Kirk, who gives him a Monster energy drink, which causes him to enter a portal to a snowy fantasy realm. In all of the renderings, Epstein is depicted as more handsome than he was in reality—a typical AI glow-up—and some edgelord types seem to have become enamored with him. “I’m tired of pretending he didn’t have aura,” one alt-right Groyper account posted on X recently.
If the Epstein files were intended as an act of government transparency and accountability, then it seems that they have mostly been a failure. Extensive redactions and scattershot releases have not shed much light on the most heinous of Epstein’s crimes, and the files have not resulted in any arrests or legal consequences here in the United States. Nor have Epstein’s victims gotten the justice they deserve.
[Read: The most ████ administration ever]
What’s happened instead is even more corrosive: The public has gotten just enough of a look into Epstein’s life to see that he remained influential, connected, and even seemingly respected long after becoming a sex offender. The world has gotten a glimpse of the fawning, skeezy shamelessness of his famous hangers-on, but not enough to criminally implicate them. The files have become yet another data point suggesting a deep rot inside of many American institutions. The result again is a pervasive nihilism, where the truth of what’s being discussed matters less than the fact that it is being turned into content, the reaction to which will also become content.
The memes, the trolling, and the Epstein video slop are all a cultural defense mechanism amid a crisis of impunity. The files are more proof that elites of all persuasions seem plenty comfortable saying the quiet part out loud or engaging in egregious, shameless behavior, banking on a culture that has given up on demanding consequences. When faced with evidence of the worst kind of sexual deviancy and conspiracy and no consequences, who could blame a bystander for choosing to hold nothing in their heart at all?
A convincing argument I’ve seen for the prevalence of nihilism, especially politically, is that younger generations have mostly known only political and economic dysfunction.
Five years out from the GameStop ordeal, you can see a similar dynamic shot through the economy, in cryptocurrency speculation and graft, in vapid meme coins and an obsession with gambling and prediction markets. These elements—described as financial nihilism—are especially prevalent in younger generations, who feel that the path of predictable progress (homeownership, access to a thriving job market out of college) no longer exists. “Faced with that reality, taking a gamble on Fartcoin or betting how many times Elon Musk tweets in a weekcan feel strangely rational,” the Gen Z economic writer Kyla Scanlon wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
Scanlon further argues that this kind of nihilism is “an attempt to find personal agency in a system that’s increasingly denied it to them.” Online, young people wrap their humor in so many layers of irony that figuring out what they’re talking about can seem like a wild goose chase. The posters want people to research and agonize—it only serves to drive more attention to the joke. And so you get nonsensical memes (“six-seven”) and brain rot as Oxford University Press’s word of the year in 2024. The president of the publishing house’s dictionary division justified the choice by noting, “There’s a sense that we are drowning in mediocre experiences as digital lives get clogged.”
[Read: The case for brain rot]
American politics has been a nightmare since before the youngest voters were even conscious of politics. The youngest members of Gen Z were 3 years old when Trump came down the golden escalator to announce his run for president. “Why is Gen Z so obsessed with looks? With wealth? With online virality/attention?” the writer Jasmine Sun posted recently on X. “These values were learned & inherited from the literal most powerful man in the world.” Sun also argued that the broken, sclerotic nature of American political institutions means that the very concept of saving or restoring democracy can feel almost foreign. “Gen Z didn’t experience what there was left to save,” she wrote.
It’s a tidy explanation, but also somewhat believable. Trump’s rise was a signal to many that shamelessness is a market inefficiency in the 21st century—a superpower. That logic was adopted by opportunistic influencers and shock jocks in the initial Trump years. Platforms rewarded it handsomely with attention, money, and power. Many people have grown up and internalized that lesson.
This is not to say that influencers such as Clavicular deserve no blame for their choices—only that they have come of age in a media environment where fealty to an audience and online performance seem so second nature that they adopt the logic of the attention economy by default. Making content becomes one’s only belief structure. The Claviculars of the world are outliers, sideshow performers, which helps explain their (often fleeting) popularity. But this type of nihilism is contagious, and it leads only to destruction: Clavicular breaks his body, while the Trump administration breaks the norms of democracy.
Our culture hasn’t yet been fully subsumed by nihilism, but you can also see it everywhere in different forms: in the mass shooters who seem to care about nothing other than performing for others online. In the influencers Photoshopping themselves into Epstein-file photos to get likes or promote their SoundCloud account. In the overnight viral sensations who become brands and try to hawk a predatory meme coin. In the Super Bowl ads for gambling apps. In a culture of AI slop and brain rot, and in an administration that prioritizes propaganda and graft over governing. It threatens to rip us apart for good if we let it.
The post The Internet’s Nihilism Crisis appeared first on The Atlantic.
