There’s an elephant in the morgue with killer Elliot Rodger, and its name is social media.
From what we can glean from Rodger’s YouTube videos, Facebook page and 141-page “manifesto,” he was in many ways the perfect embodiment of the kind of creature our digital age has hatched: a navel-gazing loner incapable of social and romantic connection, despite repeated attempts to gain validation through technological channels.
From Rodger’s lingering digital footprint we can learn a lot about what makes a monster tick. Chillingly, it’s not that different from what drives the rest of us in the digital realm.
Rodgers used YouTube to carefully craft and disseminate his messages of sexual frustration and hatred. In his final video, he framed himself artfully in honeyed light, a nimbus-like spray of palm fronds behind him.
Elliot, 22, was the son of film director Peter Rodger.
That he grew up in the culture of Hollywood is not insignificant — for Hollywood, like cyberspace, is what the late French post-structuralist Jean Baudrillard called a “simulacrum”: a simulated world replete with symbols that no longer refer to concrete physical phenomena.
To the extent that we edit our online personae, leaving the unflattering bits on the cutting-room floor, we all direct our own movies, our own simulacra. Rodger’s Facebook page was Simulacrum Central, stocked with selfies that promoted an impression of glamour and allure.
In one picture he sips champagne in the “upper class” cabin of a Virgin Atlantic airliner. In another, he stretches his legs luxuriantly on spacious, flat-bed seats. He poses variously behind the wheels of his father’s Mercedes and the BMW his mother gave him (the car he drove during his May 23 rampage). The caption: “Damn, I look good.”
This shouldn’t shock us.
It’s the exact brand of braggadocio we see every day on our friends’ Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, maybe even our own: photos of new cars, sexy spouses, smiling children and scrumptious-looking food. It was hardly a surprise when a 2013 study by researchers at the University of Michigan concluded that Facebook and Twitter encourage egotism and superficiality.
Elliot Rodger had plenty of both. In his manifesto of misogynist rage, he referred to himself as “a polite, kind gentleman” who was also “intelligent,” “beautiful,” “magnificent,” “superior” and “a powerful god.”
With metrosexual flair he touted his “new Gucci sunglasses” and “flashy new shirt from Armani Exchange that made me feel particularly fabulous.”
Recalling a birthday celebration at “an upscale restaurant in Encino” during which he gorged on buffet food, he hastened to qualify: “I had a very fast metabolism, so I could eat as much as I wanted without getting fat.”
Above all, he coveted “beautiful girls,” “hot girls” and “pretty blond girls,” never mentioning the possibility of smart girls or, heaven forbid, smart women.
Like so many of his generation, he whiled away uncountable hours in the simulacra of video and role-playing games such as “Halo” and “World of Warcraft,” the latter of which he likened to “stepping into another world of excitement and adventure.”
Beyond “World of Warcraft,” his most significant online interactions centered around PUAHate.com, a noxious forum for men who feel sexually stymied by women. It was here that he spewed racist invective against African-American, Indian and Asian men for the offense of dating women while he languished in prolonged virginity.
Here, then, was a young man who couldn’t make meaningful interpersonal and romantic connections; who sought visibility by projecting an image of high status and conspicuous consumption.
One who glossed over the considerable advantages he had in life in favor of obsessing over the possessions and experiences he lacked — especially the hypothetical girlfriend he spoke and wrote about not as an individual, but a commodity.
Unfortunately, this complement of isolation, materialism, envy and entitlement isn’t an anomaly; it’s a dominant motif of our era. It fuels Facebook and Twitter, not to mention OKCupid, eHarmony and Grindr.
We are all complicit in its proliferation to the degree that we click “Like” instead of picking up the phone or driving across town to visit someone who used to be an actual friend. As other people become less real and more theoretical, we are more apt to cast them as straw men (and women) for our failings and prejudices, as Rodger did.
In short: Part of the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in our selfies.
Richard Speer is an author and art critic based in Portland, Ore.