In the wake of the tragic 1999 Columbine school shooting, in which a pair of white supremacists with easy access to firearms murdered their classmates, it quickly became a common talking point that first person shooters such as Doom and Quake were responsible for training kids to become killers, and causing them to lose their grip upon reality. Take a look at this gameplay footage of the founding fathers of what are now called “boomer shooters” and let’s ask ourselves if this claim holds water:
This is an odd argument that falls flat on its face. Blasting demons in Hell with a “Big-Fucking-Gun 9000” simply doesn’t teach you how to load, aim, and otherwise operate & maintain a firearm in real life. “Circle strafing,” a common tactic for these sorts of arcade entertainment games, does not work in real-world tactical scenarios. This is all, quite frankly... quite silly!
As far as the argument that violent videogames cause children to lose touch with reality, this originates with the long-lost Tom Hanks film Mazes and Monsters, in which Tom plays a young man who loses touch with reality by playing a tabletop roleplaying game? Are there a few people who take this pastime too far? Certainly. You can find horror stories on Reddit quite easily.
Asking Tough Questions
It was much easier to blame videogames than ask the hard question of why these kids were radicalized into neo-Nazism, and had easy access to firearms to murder their classmates; a problem which has only grown exponentially worse in the decades that follow. The United States of America is the only nation in the world which bakes regular mass school shootings into their political “normalcy.”
When you grow up in a nation that has a history of murdering millions of innocent non-white people around the world since the conclusion of World War 2, amongst other atrocities, and this is considered by both major political parties to be “normal,” it’s not hard to cross that baseline into outspoken white supremacist beliefs. It’s long overdue that we need to shift our politics to a place where being anti-war is the reasonable, moderate position instead of written off as “bleeding heart radicalism.”
I’ve long made the argument that the influence of the 2004 massively-multiplayer online roleplaying game World of Warcraft had a major influence on those developing the gamified social media platforms of today. This fantasy treadmill of constant dopamine releases (damage numbers popping off of enemies, dressing up your character in new armors and weapons, and traveling across the world in fancy “mounts”) created an addictive feedback loop. People’s unhealthy attachment to World of Warcraft led to all sorts of unhealthy attachments, including numerous broken relationships and even babies dying of starvation.
Seeing that steady feed of hearts, shares, retweets, likes, etc. can give you an intoxicating feeling that you’re one of the smartest people in the world, even if it’s for all the wrong reasons. That’s when you start getting unplugged from tangible, objective reality. You start to feel the urge to feed into that feedback loop, over and over. In the history I’m in the middle of writing, that’s what you’ll see and even play out over, and over, and over again - and innocent lives who never got a say will pay the ultimate price as a result.
The COVID-19 pandemic is the first pandemic in history in which social media was involved. While medical myths have existed for centuries, this tool was like pouring kerosene on a gas fire. The public became bombarded with an unyielding torrent of utterly absurd nonsense, making it harder than ever to suss out factual and reliable information. America even exported medical disinformation.
Feeding the Beast
When we take a deeper look at the individuals who constantly produce and consume such junk data, it quickly becomes clear that they have completely lost touch with reality. They’re not even a little bit interested in facts which contradict their feelings. They’ve become Tom Hanks’ character, trapped in Mazes, battling Monsters, in which they’re the heroic adventurer vanquishing evil.
This is darkly funny, because they themselves wind up entrapped by a horrific monster that we shall call: The Content Behemoth. The Content Behemoth must be fed, and the only thing it will eat is... content. Only by producing social media content, no matter how worthless it is, do we feed our master, the Content Behemoth.
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, how many once widely respected doctors, scientists, academics, etc. have we watched become ensnared by The Content Behemoth, and end up losing their grip upon reality as a result? It’s truly shocking, harrowing stuff to watch. Worse yet, journalists in leading media outlets have repeatedly legitimized their absurdities.
Even worse, people who actually knew what they were talking about were hounded with abuse, harassment, and threats. The owners of social media platforms chose to empower those committing actual harm and engaging in censorship via unyielding abuse under the guise of upholding “free speech.” Encouraging frequent “engagement” above all else, this actively sabotaged the COVID-19 pandemic response - contributing to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.
After having compiled years of social media dreck from 2020-2024 in a single volume, I recently had to take a break from social media due to being overwhelmed with unscientific garbage. This colossal monument to willful ignorance is just too much to bear at times. We need a serious conversation about how to take tangible steps to right this ship before the next pandemic strikes - something that is at greater risk of happening sooner than later as a consequence of climate collapse.
You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.