America has long been known for its cultural exports of Hollywood movies and rock 'n' roll and the all-American cool that went with them. But as the whole world seems to lurch towards the abyss, our cultural products seem to be changing. Sure, we're still cranking out 14 Marvel blockbusters a year. But it increasingly appears we are creating and spreading the aesthetics of modern fascism via an intricate web of siloed online communities. Since Gamergate, toxic ideas have popped into the Internet ether in the guise of ironic memes or nihilistic trolling and linger there until they become real in the minds of far too many. It also seems we're spreading our national disease: the mass murder of innocents at the point of a gun.

Authorities in New Zealand say a man in his late 20s walked into two mosques in the town of Christchurch on Friday and started firing. He killed 49 people—41 at the al Noor mosque across from the sprawling Hagley Park, and 7 more at the Linwood mosque. There were more murders in New Zealand on Friday than there were nationwide in all of 2017, and gun homicides are normally in the single digits annually.

A victim is stretchered into an ambulance. Mark Baker/AP/REX/Shutterstock

The previous track record is a blessing for a country that seems to own guns on an American scale. According to the Small Arms Survey via The New York Times, there are 1.2 million registered firearms in New Zealand, a nation of 4.6 million people. Anyone 16 or older with "an entry-level firearm license" can keep as many common rifles or shotguns as they want. However, there are requirements in place that the U.S. does not have. Gun purchasers are subject to a background check by New Zealand police that considers considers criminal, mental health, medical, addiction and domestic violence records. You must undergo a gun safety course and pass a test. Two people must vouch for your fitness to own a firearm during the process—a "character reference." You have to renew your license, proving your fitness to keep a gun, every 10 years.

"New Zealand is almost alone with the United States in not registering 96 percent of its firearms, and those are its most common firearms, the ones most used in crimes," Philip Alpers of GunPolicy.org told the Times. "There are huge gaps in New Zealand law even if some of its laws are strong." This is after laws were strengthened in response to a mass shooting in Aramoana, New Zealand, in 1990, where a man responded to a dispute with his neighbor by shooting 13 people dead with semiautomatic rifles—including two 6-year-olds. Now, "military-style" semiautomatic weapons can only be bought one at a time with a special license. Imagine that—responding to mass murder with a weapon of war by changing your laws around how people can obtain weapons of war.

But it is still remarkable that there have been no mass incidents since. The question is whether this one is a spread of the contagion from the United States, where there is a long-established record of previous mass shooters—particularly Columbine—inspiring other murderers. According to the Times, the shooter's social media posts featured photos of "weapons covered in the names of past military generals and men who have recently carried out mass shootings." Like with movies, other countries have mass shootings. The U.S. simply produces them on another scale entirely.

Police patrol the scene. Mark Baker/AP/REX/Shutterstock

Certainly, it's clear the shooter got inspiration from the dark and fetid corners of the Internet—places where the sun does not shine, and ideas bounce around the echo chamber of obscure forums like 8chan until they become more than irony-soaked gags and memes. In a sickening twist, the shooter filmed the attack with some sort of head-mounted camera, evoking a video-game aesthetic, and posted it on Facebook. (Clips of it popped up on YouTube in the aftermath, as these networks demonstrate in real time they are unable or unwilling to stop the spread of violent and hateful content.) This, unfortunately, is not the first murder spree live-streamed on Facebook.

The murderer mentioned gaming in his manifesto, which experts on this culture, like NBC News' Ben Collins, have been quick to point out is laced with irony traps meant to trip up "normies" in the news media and delight his fellow travelers in the abyss. Often, online extremists communicate with in-group jokes and memes that are superficially ironic, but which link participants in a very real movement. The blend of irony and deadly serious ideology is a mark of our age. The aesthetics and attitudes of the Internet, once thought to be a radical force for good through the democratization of information, have exploded out into the physical world, often in the ugliest ways.

Often, these crossover experiences are both real and surreal, simultaneously. Last week, I watched as professional gamers walked a red carpet before they were drafted into an eSports league, their online lives downloaded into reality in a way that drove home the fact that these days, what happens online is reality.

Survivors are seen gathered outside. Mark Baker/AP/REX/Shutterstock

The social media algorithms driving what we see are creating fissures in society and closed epistemic worlds for people to live in—worlds that other people can't recognize, and that make it increasingly difficult for us all to live together. There are people right now getting sucked into a YouTube wormhole by its recommendation algorithm, jaunting down an increasingly dark path until, in the model of the self-fulfilling prophecy, all they see is the dark and twisted stuff they've been seeing. The algorithm has deduced, in its programmatic nihilism, that they like this stuff—that they want to see more of it. Never mind that the algorithm introduced them to it in the first place.

Increasingly, many observers believe the history of this era will begin with Gamergate, the online revolt from the darker corners of the gaming community that eventually morphed into a vehicle for disaffected young men to lash out at a world that was denying them what they felt was theirs. This is now the world of "incels" and the peculiar brand of white nationalism that fueled the alt-right and, yes, Donald Trump. The shooter used language about invasions and replacement by nonwhite immigrants that echoed the white nationalism that has risen to prominence in America, including at Charlottesville, where marchers chanted, "Jews will not replace us."

The extremism bounces around the darkest corners at first, but then it makes its way onto YouTube and Twitter and, ultimately, Facebook, where it seeps into communities of older people who did not grow up on Internet culture and ultimately will never fully grasp it. The Russian interference in the 2016 election was successful because it played on existing fissures in society, fissures that manifested and were exacerbated by these platforms in a way they have never really acknowledged or taken responsibility for. Eventually, the ideology is embraced by political elites. Trump did not just say there were "very fine people" who marched alongside Nazis in Charlottesville, he shared a meme during the election peddling disgusting propaganda about black-on-white crime. And here was the response to Friday's slaughter of Muslims from an Australian elected official:

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This is an official press release from an elected senator in Australia. Today. pic.twitter.com/CwqHjmAmqp — Susan Carland (@SusanCarland) March 15, 2019

The question facing us now is whether the current model of information dissemination in our society is workable in the long term, or whether it will destroy us. We have abandoned the traditional gatekeepers—news networks and magazines and newspapers—in favor of Silicon Valley profit machines whose only metric is engagement and clicks, whose nihilism towards the truth and the impact of misinformation mirrors the 8chan trolls. The average person is not equipped to vet all the information they are bombarded with on a daily basis now, whether because they have not been trained to or because of the sheer volume of it. If you throw someone in an incomprehensibly massive library, where most of the books are full of crap and some percentage of that is Nazi propaganda, you will not like the results.

In short, we once heralded the Internet as a liberating force for human kind. We must now ask if it's creating a million little monsters, bucking at the edges of the virtual world and occasionally bursting out to wreak havoc in the physical one. We must now ask what we're prepared to do about it.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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