If the Covid Inquiry, which rumbles remorselessly on, is looking for anything else to add to its expensive agenda, it might reflect on this: how pandemic-era boys cooped up in their bedrooms got hooked on the worst of the internet – from porn to propaganda – ruining untold numbers of them in the process.
The most damaged among this generation have gone on to commit the violence they binge online. Over and over again it’s the same story: modern attackers who came of age during Covid, who have since been marinating their brains in internet bile or extreme porn, who lurk on platforms such as Discord or 4chan, finding consolation among other comrades-in-grievance.
Such as 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, the ‘quiet’, bespectacled nursing home worker who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump in Pennsylvania last year and was subsequently killed by the secret service. This month we learned of his disturbing online life: espousing political violence; searching for ‘muscle mommies’ (a warped sexual fetish of scantily clad cartoon characters with muscular male bodies and female heads); dabbling in the sub-cultures that lurk in the strangest corners of the internet.
One of Crooks’s profiles was on DeviantArt, a site notorious for hosting a community of ‘furries’, people who identify as human-like animals or who have a sexual interest in them.
While some simply like to adopt a ‘fursona’ and pretend to be, say, a wolf who walks upright and shops in Tesco, others fantasise about sexualised cartoon animals: Disney gone deviant.
Crooks’s online habits revealed fascinating parallels with Tyler James Robinson, another twenty-something dabbler in the furry movement who in September killed Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk at a rally in Utah. Robinson has yet to enter a plea and his preliminary hearing is set to start on January 16.
A furry fandom website features an account name matching one that Robinson used on his various gaming and online accounts.
And one of his shell casings was engraved with the words ‘NoTices Bulge OWO What’s This?’ – gobbledegook to most of us, but to the furry subculture a clear reference to the ‘bulge’ of a man role-playing as a cat.
Both assassins were born in 2003, meaning they were at a formative age when the pandemic hit. Like millions of teenage boys, they were coming of age – socially and sexually. Just as they were trying to make sense of their hormones, urges and identities, the internet emerged as a 24/7 seductress. And while being online for hours and hours a day might have seemed alarming in 2019, by 2021 a pandemic-altered world barely registered that a swathe of young people now spent their lives glued to the internet. Friends described Kirk’s killer, Robinson, as being ‘terminally online’.
A third young man born in 2003 was Payton Gendron, the avowed white supremacist who in 2022 killed ten people in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
According to his twisted online diary, the mental rot set in ‘when I first started to use 4chan [a notorious internet forum] a few months after Covid started’. Of the pandemic’s earliest days, Gendron wrote: ‘I lost myself and a bit of my sanity.’
In 2021, meanwhile, a 21-year-old attacker named Robert Aaron Long killed eight people in Atlanta – mainly Asian women – later blaming his addiction to online pornography.
Long had been so desperate to escape his round-the-clock urges that he even begged for his computer to be taken away. Failing to slay his demons that way, a twisted logic led him to try to kill people working in massage parlours, on the grounds that they were representatives of the temptation he had failed to overcome.
The world inhabited by young men such as these is entirely different from ours: a place with its own language, nihilistic in-jokes and references. To those living in these sub-cultures, we are ‘normies’ – ordinary people who struggle to understand the depths of their misery or the complexities of their personality. Their flesh and blood might be in our world, but their hearts and souls reside in another one entirely.
Crooks, Robinson, Gendron and Long are extreme examples, but they are just the most violent and visible tip of the iceberg. Put simply, the leap we collectively undertook around five years ago – from the internet as a nice place to while away an hour as somewhere to spend most of your life – has ruined a generation of young men.
Millions of males in their late teens and 20s are living half-lives, shut away in musty bedrooms with no horizon beyond the top of their monitor, no self-esteem, no desire to participate in a real world that is drab and dull by comparison, and in which they hold pitifully little power and agency.
While many young women are also snared by the internet, its lure – and its most extreme offerings – are particularly powerful and poisonous for young men.
Those who refuse to accept any hardwired differences between the sexes may quail at this, but the male psyche does tend to yearn for tribal belonging, adventure and adrenaline with a force that is less common in women.
When modern life denies young men these things, the sense of grievance can be acute. Enter the internet, which excels at consoling them with infinite varieties of distraction and depravity.
Take the hideous phenomenon known as ‘gooning’, a new kind of sexual kick gaining traction among this pornography-obsessed generation of men. Rather than seeing the act as a one-off, the gooner’s goal is to masturbate for hours at a time.
Thousands are in potential ‘gooncaves’ – sitting in rooms furnished with three, four or more screens lit up with extreme pornography as they livestream themselves to equally damaged individuals.
That this cult is alive and growing should shock, but frankly it doesn’t. If you have a generation of young people whose primary source of interest and excitement comes through an internet connection, then of course the ante must always be upped. There must be ever-inventive ways to get that dopamine hit.
Our feeling towards the Gen-Zs who lose months or years of their lives to chat forums – and even to those who become addicted to extreme pornography – should not be mere disgust or disdain, but also deep sympathy. Their round-the-clock access to highly addictive, soul-staining content has overwhelmed their ability to see what’s good for them, and what good they might achieve.
Aside from those who kill or do harm, I feel sorry for those whose social and sexual instincts have been warped thanks to years spent in these sub-cultures. My anger is reserved for the internet firms who make inordinate sums from facilitating these ‘communities’ – and the social media platforms that are grotesquely indifferent to the extreme content that is making them very, very rich.
You could call their stance defending free speech or free expression; you could also call it turning a blind eye while the seeds of misery – and, even, as we have seen, extreme violence – are sown.
Government after government seems incapable of forcing these companies to take action, too in thrall to Big Tech, too timid even to ban smartphones in schools.
It is now quite clear that, while teenagers were at that critical age during the pandemic, they got sucked online – some into its most violent, provocative and depraved corners. Many remain stuck there today.
Meanwhile, the internet giants shirk responsibility, politicians shrug their shoulders, and those who know better look the other way. When will we wake up to the harm being done?
