We Did It All For The Lulz

The Internet, What We Mean When We Say Things, and Donald Trump

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (by which I mean the early 2000s) the internet was still a relatively new thing, and people were earnestly trying to understand it.

If you were alive at the time, or can remember it – which seems like a dicey proposition, because one of the most fascinating things the internet has done is transmogrify everything into an eternal present, a long strange twilight of repetition and reboot and recrudescence without beginning or end – if you can remember that time, you will remember how new and inexplicable it all felt.

You could access the internet…with your phone!

There were strange basement-dwelling people out there on…message boards! ­

You could use Limewire to rip MP3s, allowing you play music on an iPod…without paying for it!

There were rumors about people mining Bitcoin by leaving their laptops on overnight…but who would ever do something so annoying for made-up money that was basically just a scam?

Another new and wacky thing was the lingo the kids were using. I was working in a video store in Missoula, Montana sometime around the turn of the century when another one of the clerks declared how old-fashioned it was to write "LOL" because now people were coming up with cool things like "ROTFLMAO" (rolling on the floor laughing my ass off), the knowledge of which was a sign of essential cultural relevance.

During those halcyon days, one of the phrases that people were desperate to decipher was "the lulz."

The tenor of this tremulous self-anthropology is nicely captured by a 2011 article in Wired about the hacker collective Anonymous, which at that point seemed like it might be able to shove some actual rebellion into the face of the life-denying, power-driven nightmare that our culture was fast becoming. (Spoiler: they weren't able to.)

The lulz (a corruption of LOL, online shorthand for laugh out loud) is the most important and abstract thing to understand about Anonymous, and perhaps the internet itself. The lulz is laughing instead of screaming. It's a laughter of embarrassment and separation. It's schadenfreude. It's not the anesthetic humor that makes days go by easier, it's humor that heightens contradictions. The lulz is laughter with pain in it. It forces you to consider injustice and hypocrisy, whichever side of it you are on in that moment.

As a wise man once said, "So full of shapes is discourse about the internet / that it alone is high fantastical!"

If I take the Wired writer's meaning, I think the point in 2011 was that the lulz was a way of using laughter to wrestle with despair. It was an acknowledgement of how distressed and distressing the world was, and at the same time an assertion that things could be changed, the horror resisted, if only by furiously exempting ourselves from its control.

That this sentiment is only fifteen years old and already seems so terrifically anachronistic seems to me significant.

And tragic.

In our moment, the lulz is still about a certain kind of “humor,” broadly defined.

But the most important thing to understand about it – at least today, because fifteen years from now. . .who knows? – is not that it covers up some anguished sincerity over the real state of the world that everyone out there is just dying to express.

Instead, these days, lulz is about how quickly and completely sincerity, and thus reality itself, is being drained from our interactions.

As an example, take the responses to the assassination of the health insurance executive Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione. If you'll remember – and again, I know this seems like ancient history, but folks this was just over a month ago – following the assassination, there was a flood of people posting things showing both oblique and direct support for Mangione.

And, boy, were people's reaction to these posts revealing.

A typical example was an article in the New York Times called "Three Columnists Wrestle With the Lionizing of Luigi Mangione." Perhaps a better title would have been "Three Columnists (And One Moderator) Demonstrate They Are Tragically Out of Touch With the World."

Zeynep Tufekci opened up the festivities in the Times article with a rather banal observation:

I was struck by the broad outpouring of the sentiment, “I don’t condone murder, but I understand why someone might be so angry at a health care insurance company.”

In other words, she seemed to be surprised by exactly what she and her fellow columnists were about spend their entire confab saying.

Not to be outdone, Michelle Goldberg upped the ante with the pithy,

I was more struck by the number of people who do condone murder!

In response, the moderator Patrick Healy, jumped in with a heartfelt cry of despair:

Mangione keeps getting called a 'folk hero' – I understand it, but assassinations perpetuate a culture of violence and fear. Why are so many people still talking about this shooting as if it’s justifiable, which 'folk hero' seems to imply?

(One wonders whether, given the question he poses at the end, it's really so plausible that Healy does "understand it" as he claims to at the beginning. But I digress.)

And eventually, Tressie McMillan Cottom, nodding along wisely, added this informative tidbit:

Criminals have been celebrities since the dawn of mass media. Public trials are some of the earliest forms of celebrity culture.

On and on it went, each of them attempting to outdo the last in expressing shock, outrage, and old-school attempts to “read” the internet as if it was a text in grad school, made of paper with words on it that stay the same no matter how many times you read them.

Perhaps, as a nod to fairness, we should note that they are just people trying to react cogently in more or less real time to a rather shocking event. But it is also fair, I think, to wonder whether or not they've entirely missed the most important point.

How seriously are we supposed to take anything someone posts on social media and, by extension, any public statement that people throw out in the chum of public discourse?

To try to understand this, it seems worth thinking through the experience of sending a missive like a twitter comment, or creating one of those videos that people make of themselves in their cars, giving you their heartfelt opinion on some current event.

(By the way, why do you do this in your cars, you ridiculous people? Do you think we actually believe you were just driving along and had a thought that was so important you had to pull over to deliver it? Do you think we're not aware you did ten or twelve takes to get it right? Do you think we can't see that you're parked in your driveway? My god, how strange we humans are.)

The defining psychological principle of the internet is solitude. When you are on it, you are alone.

It gives you the illusion of there being other people out there, but in reality (if reality can still be said to exist) it is YOU and your DEVICE. This is both the source of, and gives shape to, an enormous amount of the "transgression" that occurs in this medium.

If, for example, you are in the physical presence of Brian Thompson's widow and kids, my sense is that it's less likely you will say something like, "Hey! I think the guy who shot your husband in the back is a hero who, and won't a clever image of Tony Soprano make people smile wryly and think I'm smart and funny?"

But the privacy of your device allows you to indulge in those sensations – be they anger, indignation, or narcissism – to your heart's content. And it does not just allow you to do that, it rewards you for doing it.

For the internet operates on the purest rat-pressing-the-lever parts of our brain. Everything one puts out onto the internet is, by definition, an attempt to get someone else to look. It is in competition with an innumerable number of similar attempts form other people.

And you win that competition, you get the reward of the most valuable currency in our culture: attention. Likes. Going viral. The feeling of tens or hundreds or thousands or millions of people adulating you.

You will note the operation here: first the internet isolates you, reducing you to an atomized human with a device. And this isolation creates an insatiable need for connection and recognition which, the internet assures you, only it can provide.

Thus the feeling, the experience, of posting something is the feeling of being alone and yet wanting to be seen. Of wanting desperately to join the flood. Of wanting to participate in the chorus, and even, if the Gods of Virality so decree, of having the chorus turn its eyes on you and assure you that you are seen and liked and listened to.

This is one of the main reasons the reward system of the internet is primarily based on outrage and outrageousness.

Upping the ante is a way of ensuring more attention, and thus, of stroking one's own ego. If someone else says that Luigi Mangione is cool, the natural move is to insist that he's more than cool, he's a "folk hero," instantly making take that he's "cool" look tepid. And if someone's take is that he's a "folk hero" the next natural move is to up the ante again and add a clever picture of Tony Soprano. Because then the takes that don't have clever visuals in them seem tepid.

So what a social media post does not tell us is anything definitive about what people actually think. Its connection to reality is tenuous at best.

What it does tell us is that the tidal shifts of the internet have created an opening in which those clever mammals we call humans, in the splendid, protected isolation of their devices, can post things to draw a giggling or outraged reaction from a horde of strangers, for the purpose of drawing attention to themselves.

Perhaps people out there endorse murder. Perhaps they don't. Perhaps they have actually thought about Luigi Mangione or Brian Thompson for longer than the span of time it takes to see someone else posting something that vaguely titillates them and jump on board with their own post. Perhaps they haven't.

These are all shades of gray, unknowns that lie beyond the realm of the actual.

The humor, the performance, the lack of empathy, the "I'm worked up because I'm posting from my car, don't you see, but it's also the funny and artificial thing everyone else is doing, wink, wink," the titillating cruelty – these are the constants. These are our new reality.

This is the lulz.

Which brings us back to our benighted New York Times columnists.

In commenting on what happened, they feel like squares, like nerdy anthropologists trying to report on what they see as the the denizens of some other, slightly less sophisticated tribe.

They fell as though they are entirely unaware that they're missing, or misreading, one of the dominant forces of the culture around them.

What they're missing is the game of it all. The dance of posting something "transgressive" or "outraged" or "incendiary," in order "to be" those things without actually having to be them in any non-internet sense.

And most importantly, they are missing the single strongest impulse behind the lulz.

When you outrage someone or titillate them, they are under your control. You have bent them to your will, made them react to you.

Alone in front of your device, you have used the lulz to feel, and perhaps even become, powerful.

Every like, every comment, every mention in an outraged counter-post: all of this is power.

Which brings us to Donald Trump.

Although he's a decrepit old man, Trump, as well as virtually all the people he surrounds himself with – the people he's co-opted, the people who have preemptively surrendered to him, the people who have followed him in trying to pass off self-serving provocation as enlightenment, from Stephen Miller to Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk to Joe Rogan – are creatures of the internet.

The internet has formed them more deeply than any other single element of their lives, including whatever experiences to which they want to attribute the things they claim are their political "convictions."

The dominant mode of communication of our time has sunk into them so deeply that it has become them. They are the assault, the joke, the provocation, the meme, the wink.

And it is all in service of their own power.

Anything that can be said to draw a roar of approval from the foaming mob at their backs, and a cry of dismay from everyone else, will be said. But those words do not mean – in the sense that you and I might think of words meaning something – what they appear to.

When these people open their mouths, it is the exact equivalent of someone posting a meme one the internet.

When they speak, what actually emerges is a howling void filled with a terrible voice intoning a single phrase: Give me power.

So Trump declares he will decide the TikTok ban, a law passed (whether wisely or not) by Congress and declared constitutional by the Supreme Court: Give me power.

So Trump declares that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country": Give me power.

So Trump decrees a hundred executive orders on his first day in office: Give me power.

So Zuckerberg declares he wants more "masculine energy" in the corporate world: Give me power.

So Elon Musk, who has made, and continues to make, more money off the U.S. government than anyone who has ever lived, is now heading up a secretive agency dedicated to “reshaping” that government: Give me power.

So Pam Bondi, who will be our next Attorney General, perjures herself by declaring that she "wasn't familiar" with everything from Trump's attempt to overthrow the last election to his calling people convicted in the aftermath of that attempt "hostages" of the federal government: Give me power.

So Pete Hegseth, an alcoholic talk-show host whose own mother called him an "abuser of women" and who will be our next Secretary of Defense declares that everything from his addiction to his inability to not to bankrupt every organization he’s ever been put in charge of means nothing because "All glory to Jesus Christ": Give me power.

And on and on and on.

They are creatures of the lulz.

Everything is performative. Everything is said with a sly wink to people in the know.

Everything is meant to be taken seriously (I believe we should be murdering healthcare execs, goddammit!) unless it’s not (isn’t this picture of Tony Soprano clever, and doesn’t it show you that I’m kind of half joking but not really but also a little bit?)

They are all creatures who have been produced by and know how to wield the terrible destroying isolation of our age, in which we are atomized and made ineffectual and at the same time yearn more than anything else to be seen.

And what will we hear, those of us with the ears to hear it, every day from now on?

Give me power.

Give me power.

Give me power.