Digital Dissociation Disorder, nihilism, and the post-ideological mass-shooter

orthogonal planes of radicalization and analog fiction as a reality-tether

‘Cyberpsychosis’ as depicted in the anime Cyberpunk 2077

One of my favorite things in science fiction is the world-building around the evolution of disease and mental health. The notion that biological illnesses evolve is obvious when you think about it, but, from a human timescale, it’s rarely a change that we would notice. In fictional worlds like Cyberpunk 2077, these illnesses are technologically-mediated (“cyber-psychosis”), but just as often, they are not—they’re merely organic extrapolations from our broken present into an even more broken future.

For the future to be presented as a realistic universe, our pathologies must also be evolved in their representation.

I can’t remember where I read this first—surely it was on Twitter—but at this point it appears obvious that the internet (and especially social media) have the capacity to incept novel forms of mental illness in people who would otherwise never have been afflicted with it.

The paradigmatic example, as

Katherine Dee

has pointed out, is Tumblr in the early aughts, a kind of accelerated time-chamber where various online psyhcoses underwent an extraordinary hyperbolic acceleration.

Let me explain.

Consult any first-year psychology textbook, and it will tell you that mental illnesses are definitionally formed by the fusion of organic processes and social construction. Molded by the convergence of the biological with the environmental, they are, as a rough heuristic, 50% determined by things that happen to your brain and 50% determined by your brain’s ‘default’ settings (genetics).

Circling back to Tumblr, we can think of the internet is the ultimate environmental supertimulus. The memetic weight and speed of the internet is like a generalized accelerator function for cultural evolution, and because all mental illnesses are (partly) socially constructed, anything that affects the arc of cultural evolution must necessarily also inflect the arc of mental diseases.

Even something as seemingly fundamental as depression is translated through an endogenous cultural framework of understanding—the disease is literally different in different sociocultural contexts because symptoms are invariably culturally interpreted. This is because ‘symptoms’ are just items on the DSM-V checklist and those items are emotions and emotions are partly culturally constructed (think something like Sapir-Whorf here).

The pandemic pushed this process to an absolute maximum by locking people in their homes and attaching them to their screens. We can see its effects in various ways on Tik Tok with the proliferation of amaetur auto-diagnoses, “Dissociative Identity Disorder” and the like.

One of the most incisive commentators on this subject has been Katherine Dee of the ‘Default Friend’ blog, and one of her most interesting theories is about the role of detachment/dissociation in modern mass-shootings.

Because I’m a writer (and maybe even a science fiction one), I’m going to put a name to the loose theory she’s been developing: Digital Dissociation Disorder.

Let’s imagine how we might define this in more detail.

DSM-VI: DIGITAL DISSOCIATION DISORDER (D.D.D.)

Digital Dissociation Disorder (DDD) is defined by an excessive perceptual shift into the world of the digital to the detriment of the physical.

It is characterized by (A), (B), and one or more of the four sub-criteria of (C):

(A) Excessive time spent on internet-connected devices coupled with a constant need for digitized hyperstimuli (social media, notifications, messaging, violence, pornography).

(B) Persistent derealization and/or depersonalization as a human being living in the physical world (“e.g. this world isn’t real,” “e.g. I’m not real”).

(C) Persistent indifference around significant non-digital events in the physical world, which was not an issue prior to persistent screen-use, as manifested by:

• (i) Failure to empathize with the physical and/or psychological suffering experienced by others, up to and including grievous injury and death.

• (ii) Failure to respond to major life events or crises, either positive or negative, with the expected degree of emotion (e.g. birth of a child, witnessing a death).

• (iii) Failure to calibrate actions in reality to the expected consequences, expressed as a general carelessness or indifference around day-to-day decisions and interactions.

• (iV) Violent and harmful actions inflicted on others as a result of generalized indifference as noted above.

If I was a grifter—sadly, I’m not—this is how I’d open my TED talk.

“But ARX-Han, arent’ you just arguing that the internet is driving people insane? Isn’t everyone already saying that?”

Yes, but how the internet is doing this matters.

Anecdotally, one of the trends I’ve seen pointed out is that this current crop of mass-shooters appear to less ideological than their predecessors. It’s mutated into something more akin to a non-specific murder-suicide ritual (spreading via social contagion effects) and often appears to have no ideological component (or, at most, it has a highly disorganized, incoherent, ideological component—Hispanic “white supremacists” come to mind as an example).

It feels as if these people don’t care about ideas or political movements or even revenge in the way that they used to—in a way that would still be disturbing, but, at minimum, somewhat coherent.

I’ve read about radicalization for quite some time, and a couple of years ago I started to feel as if the character of these mass-killers had shifted away from the ideological and in the direction of something more bizarre. Geoff Schullenberger, for example, has likened the epidemic of modern mass shooters to a sort of decentralized death cult.

The idea of a “vibe shift” in the psychology of the modern mass shooter really dialed in for me when I saw clips of Robert Crimo’s bizarre music videos. They felt too orchestrated to be the product of someone who was simply deranged in one of the traditional ways that you might expect. And yet, they were deeply unsettling—demonic, even—in a way that I couldn’t immmediately articulate.

This is where Katherine’s analysis of ‘digital detachment’ clicked for me.

Crimo’s music videos—and him, as a person—felt dissociated, detached in way that felt historically novel. That is not to say that he didn’t have a pertinent mental disorder at the time of the shooting, only that the nature of his mental disorder’s expression felt categorically novel and tethered to sphere of the digital.

Where I think this idea gets more interesting is how it maps onto the meaning crisis that all young men are living in.

What if, for example, all this talk about the ‘simulation hypothesis’ is a psychiatric symptom of a phenomenon that we are all experiencing?

Here’s Katherine in a piece she wrote about the psychology of mass shooters:

The real reason for our mass shootings—hear me out—is that we have a nihilism problem. 

By “we,” I mean the huge swaths of American society consumed by hopelessness, rage, and fear reflected in our politics, tribalism, social media, and even language. Many of us seem incapable of containing our furies, even as we are unsure what we are raging against—or for. Violence begets violence; all have become desensitized to the sound and fury of riots from Washington to Waukesha. In the swirl of confusion, nothing has meaning. Meaning is elusive. Nihilism—the rejection of the possibility of meaning—is the water in which we swim and the darkness that has enveloped our way of life in ways we haven’t even begun to comprehend.

Digital dissociation and nihilism go hand in hand: they complement one another in a positive feedback loop. We turn away from the physical, a world deficient in meaning, to the hyperstimuli and the simulated meaning of the digital. In so doing, what little meaning the real world holds diminishes even further, and the spiral spins even faster.

Like anything cultural, this phenomenon has already found its way into literary fiction, but I think this next generation of novelists are really going to explore this thematic axis with much greater depth because of how bad it’s getting.

Here’s an excerpt from my novel, INCEL, describing the relationship between internet pornography and depersonalization:

In the moments prior to the immediacy of your orgasm you open a thumbnail into a tab of another scene: one of an entirely different girl that bears no resemblance to this one. Yet her face, familiar, hurts in its resemblance to the one you loved so dear. Demure, she sits on a black couch in a pink miniskirt and a white cotton crop top, smiling and twirling the strands of her bleach-blond hair. A terrible nostalgia clicks in your brain when she tilts her head to the side and smiles, downloading another copy of the same mannerisms already burned into the memory of your hands. This triggers a sudden dislocation—a violent re-entry from a dissociative fugue-state, which hurtles me back into my own body, ruining my orgasm into a purely mechanical reflex.

Improvements with AR and VR are going to radically accelerate D.D.D. and our tethers to analog, physical reality will be further weakened.

I believe that literary fiction—literally, reading paper books—can act as a reality-tether, dampening our slide into the detachment of the digital. Even though I love my e-reader, I make a consistent effort to read my favorite works in analog form, to sit in cafes (without my laptop), and to ingest the world through eyes that were not meant to be enslaved to pixels.