Although it is now seen in a positive light, Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1448 often did more to increase distrust, suspicion, and hostility than it did to allay socially divisive sentiments. Movable type brought the volatile theological disputes of the Reformation to an ever-expanding reading public, vilifying the adherents of opposing confessions. Cheap, reproducible pamphlets illustrated with crudely engraved caricatures of witches, Jews, and heretics aimed to arouse fear and loathing, often leading to the persecution or murder of the feared Other.
Six centuries after Gutenberg, the invention of the Internet has had a similarly malignant effect on the public mind. Today’s Discord threads, Reddit chats, 4chan boards, and all of their endless, looping memes play the role of the woodblock prints. They distill complicated arguments into affective shorthand, training audiences to sneer, jeer, mock and applaud. And sometimes—maybe more and more at present—they drive people to violent action. From what we now know of Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, it appears that the nether reaches of Internet culture played a decisive role in shaping his dark and delusional outlook, eventually leading the once-promising young man to commit a heinous act of murder with the seeming insouciance of a gamer at play.
One of the basic principles of media theory held as true in the fifteenth century as it does today: Repetition breeds belief. People in the late medieval and early modern eras were conditioned to believe that witches rode broomsticks and kept cats. Inhabitants of Protestant countries were treated to countless variants of the Pope-as-Antichrist, while Catholics caricatured Martin Luther as the Devil’s bagpipe: Satan himself blows wind into Luther as he emits cacophonous heresies.
As it did half a millennium ago, political discourse conducted through image and meme collapses the individual into a type, using reductive visual representations rather than reason to mock opponents and merge their identities with the forces they are said to serve. The elated reaction to Charlie Kirk’s murder in certain quarters confirms that, for some, Kirk was no wholesome, all-American family man but, rather, a less-than-human mouthpiece for the dark and intolerant forces unleashed and even encouraged by an autocratic president.
Adopting the techniques of the Roman satirists Juvenal and Martial, Reformation-era propagandists relied on visual cues to ridicule their targets, exaggerating physical features or distinctive mannerisms. Long before his assassination, Kirk was subjected to similar treatment by online critics whose memes mocked his smile or the size of his face. And while few of Kirk’s hecklers were intent on committing physical violence against him, not everyone is able to distinguish between caricature and reality.
Robinson had this archive of images at his disposal, fueling his rage as, in his mother’s words, he “started to lean more to the left.” He did not invent the grammar of contempt; there was no need. It already filled the threads and memes that consumed his time. To live inside this digital economy is to experience individuality dissolving into type, over and over again. Subjectivity becomes objective. The meme does not record or even mock Kirk; it consumes him, defines him, makes him what he is. For much of the world’s population, the meme has become the Creator.
Walter Benjamin called the twentieth century “the age of mechanical reproduction,” but his contemporaries were still capable of distinguishing between a celebrity’s real personality and her image. The twenty-first century is the age of digital reproduction, and it forces us to ask whether the general public still possesses the capacity to recognize such a distinction. Tyler Robinson’s text messages discuss Kirk’s murder with shocking callousness, but Robinson was no psychopath. It would be less frightening if he was. The truly scary prospect is that his blithe indifference to the value of human life is becoming typical. We appear to have entered the realm of the “posthuman.”
In 1985 Donna Haraway published her “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” highlighting that the definition of humanity was being eroded on two different fronts. Evolutionary psychologists and Social Darwinists questioned the distinction between human beings and animals, while developments in cyber-technology seemed to herald a merger between human beings and machines. The concept of “the human,” which had dominated Western philosophy for five hundred years, was starting to lose its centrality and value.
Haraway described this as a liberating process, arguing that the human “subject” traditionally held up as normative reflected the interests and displayed the characteristics of the patriarchy that invented it. To deconstruct the dominance of the Western subject would therefore release an exhilarating range of pent-up energies, freeing women and subaltern subjects from logocentric oppression, challenging patriarchy by revising its most fundamental categories, finally freeing humanity from the constraints of nature.
A host of thinkers followed Haraway’s lead, ranging from the cautious extrapolation of Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman to the wild speculation of Ray Kurtzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines, both published in 1999. They reinforced increasingly radical revisions of canonical philosophy, including Aristotle’s distinction between “nature” (phusis) and “custom” (nomos). The polarity between “male” and “female” seemed ripe for deconstruction; it no longer exhausted the subjective possibilities that nature had objectively curtailed. Now, many people experience nature as a hostile force, imprisoning them against their will in a fleshly jail not of their making. They want to redesign their bodies, and today’s technology increasingly frees them to do so. Popular versions of such posthuman plasticity ought to resonate with people like Robinson, whose romantic partner Lance Twiggs is undergoing gender transition.
Kirk’s murder should alert us to the fact that the posthuman is not a philosophical future. Thanks to omnipresent virtuality, it is already the lived aesthetic of the present. A meme is a posthuman idea, as it flattens the subject and erases the artist. Like most medieval woodcuts, memes are mostly anonymous. They circulate without clear origins, mutating as they move. What matters is not authorship but replication. Online subjectivity dissolves stable identity and is shaped more by algorithms than by consciousness. The face of a politician, a cartoon frog, a corporate logo, even a financial “coin” can all coexist in the same sign.
As cognitive science researchers Carmen Mossner and Sven Walter explain in “Shaping Social Media Minds: Scaffolding Empathy in Digitally Mediated Interactions?” (2024), the “media-empathy paradox” ensures that technologies designed for connection corrode the very faculty they claim to foster. Tyler Robinson embodied this paradox, dismissing the murder he committed as “mostly a big meme.” His bullet casings bore inscriptions stamped into metal—the one belonging to the bullet that killed Kirk read: “Notices bulge OwO what's this?” apparently a refence to a meme from the “furry” subculture, another challenge to normative categories that Haraway envisioned. But investigators will search for their meaning in vain. Like Macbeth’s “tale told by an idiot,” the memes that saturate Internet discourse signify nothing at all.
Indeed, their lack of meaning is their meaning. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the murderer Smerdyakov is questioned about his motive. He doesn’t have one, apart from the vague sense that “if there is no God, everything is permitted.” Smerdyakov does not kill for a reason but because he has no reason not to. It may turn out that the same is true of Tyler Robinson.
But even if he lacked anything resembling a traditional motive, it is not difficult to discern the meaning of Robinson’s act. The idea of a motiveless meaning would once have been paradoxical. All significance was held to originate in the human mind. Today, however, the author is dead. Meaning does not derive from the conscious intention of an author; it is thrown up randomly by the algorithmic machinations of a network beyond human control. Tyler Robinson did not have ideas; he experienced memes. He did not see human beings; he saw images.
This also is the new normal. Studies of online culture show how profound, long-term immersion in social media fosters dissociation. As Agata Mirowska and Jbid Arsenyan argue in their 2023 paper “Sweet Escape: The Role of Empathy in Social Media Engagement with Human versus Virtual Influencers,” users often seek a “sweet escape” from their daily lives, only to find themselves overwhelmed by digital discourse.
Within the same thread that contained such memetic heartlessness, Robinson wrote tenderly to his transgender partner, whom he called “my love,” apologizing for the dragnet of consequence and worrying what fate awaited him. It seems that Robinson’s love and his hatred ran on parallel tracks, with hatred expressed in the context of para-social Internet interaction and love reserved for real-life relationships, until the tracks finally got crossed.
The split in the personality is stark. On one hand, Robinson’s statement of his motive for “taking out” Kirk is unambiguously unforgiving: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Yet a few texts down, he reveals that he planned to keep his murderouss act a secret “till [he] died of old age.”
This astonishing blend of cruel cynicism and childlike naivete is our age’s characteristic attitude—the hallmark of Gen-Z’s simultaneous nihilism and helplessness, both of which are brought on by total immersion in cyberspace. Sadly, history will recognize Robinson’s cohort as the lab rats on which twenty-first century social media technology was tested. But how many more lives will be lost to this toxic experiment?