Yuen: ‘Adolescence’ is a troubling glimpse into toxic online subcultures

The six Emmy wins for the Netflix series “Adolescence” — including one for 15-year-old Owen Cooper, the youngest male ever to receive best supporting actor — couldn’t have happened at a more relevant time.

The four-part fictional series tells the story of a schoolboy named Jamie, played by Cooper, who is accused of murdering a female classmate. The misogyny and toxic masculinity that Jamie discovered in online communities fuel his radicalization toward violence.

Most internet communities are not inherently dangerous, and yet it’s fair to ask whether a specific online culture could have influenced the assassin who gunned down conservative activist Charlie Kirk. It is a culture, cultivated on social networks and messaging platforms, where killing seems performative and where human life has no intrinsic value.

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The left and the right will continue to point fingers at the other side as a way to explain the violence. Immediately after Kirk was killed, President Donald Trump immediately blamed the “radical left” for dangerous rhetoric, without addressing the political extremism Kirk espoused. Nor did Trump mention that attacks by right-wing extremists are more frequent and deadly. Minnesotans are well aware that the suspected killer in the assassination of former DFL House Speaker Melissa Hortman, after all, was an evangelical Christian with anti-abortion views.

The left speculated without evidence that Kirk’s shooter must have been a Groyper, a follower of a far-right movement known for its white supremacist and Christian values that targeted conservatives like Kirk for being too moderate.

We gravitate toward partisan blamestorming because it gives us a framework to help us make sense of the unthinkable, especially if a shooter’s full motivations remain unclear. Politics becomes our reality, which then reinforces our biases and shapes our calls to action. Throw in a frayed mental health system and the wide accessibility to guns, and it’s not hard to see how our country can produce so much violence.

But what if there was yet another factor under our nose that could help explain this sickness?

The FBI has created a new category of domestic terrorism called “nihilistic violent extremism,” which is motivated by a disdain for society and an impulse to wreak destruction just for the sake of it.

The shooter charged in Kirk’s assassination was apparently steeped in online culture. A bullet casing found at the scene read, “Notices bulges OwO whats this?,” an apparent internet reference to the furries subculture. Another bullet nodding to the video game Helldivers 2 reads, “Hey fascist! Catch!” He seems to be playing us, the media and the public, rather than pushing a clear ideological agenda, although court documents say his mother noticed him moving to the left before the shooting.

Intentionally incoherent

To outsiders, the messages make no sense — and that’s the point, said Pete Simi, a sociology professor at Chapman University in California who has studied political violence for about 30 years.

“Part of the aspect of online internet culture is that it’s almost intentionally incoherent,” Simi said. “The fact that it is incoherent makes it in some ways more attractive to the folks within the culture, because to people on the outside, it makes it even more indiscernible.”

The person behind the Annunciation Catholic Church shooting in Minneapolis posted YouTube videos expressing admiration for other mass shooters, who are glorified in some online communities. The shooter wrote in secret diaries about “watching so many mass shooting videos online that she worried about being placed on a Federal Bureau of Investigation watch list,” the New York Times reported.

We journalists try to squeeze meaning out of manifestos and digital footprints, but news coverage of the killers’ ramblings helps sustain the notoriety that they seek.

So let’s zoom out.

For many parents, “Adolescence” was a slow-burning horror show that kept us awake at night. The brilliance of the series is that you initially empathize with Jamie, a seemingly normal 13-year-old boy who hails from a normal family, until it dawns on you that there is no question of his guilt. Bullied on social media by kids at school, Jamie found a network of online communities that portrayed men as victims and faulted women for male loneliness.

When our own adolescent boys consume short-form videos on their screens, we as parents may suspect it’s not purely harmless. It may start with clips about fitness and Fortnite, each click sending kernels of demographic data to the tech companies. I’ve been appalled by the content my son has been exposed to on his school-issued iPad, everything from swastika jokes to sexual humor that denigrates girls.

Simi said his own son, as a teen, briefly flirted with right-wing ideology after streaming platforms fed him content based on his viewing habits.

“He’s a gamer and interested in MMA, mixed martial arts, and that’s enough right there,” Simi said. “You’re going to get targeted with the algorithm that is going to start sending you far-right stuff.”

Simi said his son, who’s now 26, grew out of that phase. Children will be more susceptible to online threats if traumas or hardships in their real lives haven’t been dealt with, he said. Simi advises parents to stay connected with their kids, openly discuss what they’re consuming online, and seek mental health treatment if their children would benefit from it.

“That’s what parents are trying to do: build as many protective factors as possible,” he said.

Gut punch

Much of the last episode of “Adolescence” is trained not on Jamie, but on his parents. They’ve come to terms with the heinous act committed by their son, who is now incarcerated, and are starting to question their parenting decisions.

“He never left his room,” his mom says, recalling the times Jamie would be on his screen until 1 in the morning. “Should we have done more? I think it’d be good if we accepted that maybe we should’ve.”

“Adolescence” is a fictional show that speaks the truth about the anxiety entwined with modern parenthood. Jamie’s mom is right: We all could do more to protect our children, but we are up against some dark and powerful forces.

The series is a gut punch and a wake-up call for parents to focus on real-life connection with our kids and to recognize a cry for help. Otherwise, the algorithms may step in for us and feed them something dangerous.