For more than a week now, a 26-year-old software engineer has been America’s main character. Luigi Mangione has been charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the middle of Midtown Manhattan. The killing was caught on video, leading to a nationwide manhunt and, five days later, Mangione’s arrest at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. You probably know this, because the fatal shooting, the reaction, and Mangione himself have dominated our national attention.
And why wouldn’t it? There’s the shock of the killing, caught on film, memed, and shared ad infinitum. There’s the peculiarity of it all: his stop at Starbucks, his smile caught on camera, the fact that he was able to vanish from one of the most densely populated and surveilled areas in the world with hardly a trace. And then, of course, there’s the implications of the apparent assassination—the political, moral, and class dynamics—followed by the palpable joy or rage over Thompson’s death, depending on who you talked to or what you read (all of which, of course, fueled its own outrage cycle). For some, the assassination was held up as evidence of a divided country obsessed with bloodshed. For others, Mangione is an expression of the depth of righteous anger present in American life right now, a symbol of justified violence.
[Read: Decivilization may already be under way]
Mangione became a folk hero even before he was caught. He was glorified, vilified, the subject of erotic fan fiction, memorialized in tattoo form, memed and plastered onto merch, and endlessly scrutinized. Every piece of Mangione, every new trace of his web history has been dissected by perhaps millions of people online.
The internet abhors a vacuum, and to some degree, this level of scrutiny happens to most mass shooters or perpetrators of political violence (although not all alleged killers are immediately publicly glorified). But what’s most notable about the UHC shooting is how charged, even desperate, the posting, speculating, and digital sleuthing has felt. It’s human to want tidy explanations and narratives that fit. But in the case of Mangione, it appears as though people are in search of something more. A common conception of the internet is that it is an informational tool. But watching this spectacle unfold for the past week, I find myself thinking of the internet as a machine better suited for creating meaning rather than actual sense.
Mangione appears to have left a sizable internet history, which is more recognizable than it is unhinged or upsetting. This was enough to complicate the social-media narratives that have built up around the suspected shooter over the past week. His posts were familiar to those who spend time online, as the writer Max Read notes, as the “views of the median 20-something white male tech worker” (center-right-seeming, not very partisan, a bit rationalist, deeply plugged into the cinematic universe of tech- and fitness-dude long-form-interview podcasts). He appears to have left a favorable review of the Unabomber’s manifesto on Goodreads but also seemed interested in ideas from Peter Thiel and other elites. He reportedly suffered from debilitating back pain and spent time in Reddit forums, but as New York’s John Herrman wrote this week, the internet “was where Mangione seemed more or less fine.”
As people pored over Mangione’s digital footprint, the stakes of the moment came into focus. People were less concerned about the facts of the situation—which have been few and far between—than they were about finding some greater meaning in the violence and using it to say something about what it means to be alive right now. As the details of Mangione’s life were dug up earlier this week, I watched people struggling in real time to sort the shooter into a familiar framework. It would make sense if his online activity offered a profile of a cartoonish partisan, or evidence of the kind of alienation we’ve come to expect from violent men. It would be reassuring, or at least coherent, to see a history of steady radicalization in his posts, moving him from promising young man toward extremism. There’s plenty we don’t know, but so much of what we do is banal—which is, in its own right, unsettling. In addition to the back pain, he seems to have suffered from brain fog, and struggled at times to find relief and satisfactory diagnoses. This may have been a radicalizing force in its own right, or the precipitating incident in a series of events that could have led to the shooting. We don’t really know yet.
Our not knowing doesn’t make the event any less revealing, cathartic, or terrifying. And it doesn’t stop the speculating, the evidence-marshaling, and the search for meaning. As my colleague Ian Bogost remarked in a post on Bluesky this week, the morass of social-media posts and news articles often felt empty. Our search for a motive, for sense-making, wasn’t going anywhere. And yet we were still pursuing it. “We’ve reached the end of the internet as an information system,” he wrote. To many, the shooting felt significant in a way that similar acts of violence generally do not. On social media, people began calling the shooting an assassination before anything close to a motive was established. The urge was understandable: Powerful, wealthy men aren’t shot in Midtown Manhattan very often. Many observers apparently wanted to view it as a bellwether for further violence against the rich and powerful, or as the inciting event that might awaken people to the scale and extent of the populist rage in the country toward broken bureaucracies such as our health-care system.
Yet perhaps the most uncomfortable outcome for the millions following along is if the meaning machine fails and the shooting doesn’t provide any greater resolution. Mangione may be not a Trumpist or Marxist folk hero but just a male tech worker of a certain age with reasonably common views among his hyperspecific online subculture. He may not have been radicalized by a book or a video game or even a conflict with his insurance company. If Mangione refuses to be claimed by an ideology, or if he reveals himself to be a well-adjusted kid who became deeply mentally unwell, that may end up being more unsettling than if he is a calculated operator or fringe radical.
When Mangione was caught, he had with him a note or manifesto of sorts, less than 300 words long. Near the beginning, it offers the following: “This was fairly trivial.” The phrase is cold, detached, and haunting. It might merely be the garden-variety bravado of a gunman. But the sentence also conjures a possibility that is much harder to sit with (and for the internet to latch onto). Of all the possible outcomes available, the least shared, argued over, and considered is one that the shooter alludes to himself—that what feels to all of us like an era-defining event may ultimately be unremarkable in its brutality, in its inability to effect change, and in how quickly everyone moves on.
