The Online Life of Elliot Rodger

The Online Life of Elliot Rodger,” by Jay Caspian Kang.

For the past two years, I’ve had Google alert me whenever the phrase “school shooting threat” shows up on its radar. In early 2012, I spent several months reporting on a mass shooting in Oakland; since then, I have tracked the way these killings have been covered in the media. I get about five of these “school shooting threat” alert e-mails a week, and the reports are almost always the same: a young man makes a threat on an online forum or over social media, the school is shut down for a day or two, the principal makes a statement about the need to always err on the side of safety. In the days leading up to the shooting rampage that left six dead at the University of California at Santa Barbara, local newspapers reported on threats at schools in Louisville, Kentucky; Union County, New Jersey; Ligonier, Pennsylvania; and Albany, Oregon.

Elliot Rodger was not mentioned in any of these reports. By now, we have watched his YouTube videos, read the posts he left on PUAHate, a forum dedicated to hating pickup artists, seen the screenshots of the comments he allegedly left on bodybuilding sites, and read his lengthy manifesto. Like James Holmes, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Adam Lanza before him, Rodger’s life has been reverse-engineered through the images and words that he posted online. This seems to be the preferred method of discussing mass killers these days. Once the videos, Facebook photos, and tweets have surfaced, the game of associations begins. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, every single thing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev posted online was scrutinized by the media. When it finally came time to put him on the cover of a magazine, Rolling Stone chose an Instagram selfie. Before his name was released to the public, a cursory Google search of Tamerlan Tsarnaev brought up only a YouTube page and an article about his boxing career. On April 19th, the day the public learned the names of the Tsarnaev brothers, CNN, CBS, NBC, and countless other news sources ran stories about Tamerlan, the boxer. After James Holmes went on his own shooting spree in a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, the media, spurred on by amateur Internet sleuths, found Holmes’s scant online presence in the form of an online-dating profile and a video of a younger Holmes giving a lecture at a science camp in San Diego. That video became the subject of analysis, including a Salon piece titled “What does the James Holmes video tell us?” It examined everything from Holmes’s choice of clothes to his general affect to his habit of making eye contact, all to speculate on when Holmes might have turned into a killer.

It wasn’t always this easy to create a profile. Before Cho Seung-Hui went on his own shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, in 2007, he mailed a package containing video, photographs, and writings to NBC News, which broadcast excerpts of the horrific portfolio on its newscast. Rodger didn’t need to bother with the postage fee or with the editorial decisions of a news outlet to project himself onto the public consciousness. We found it all, and we shared it.

The Internet, in fact, not only found Elliot Rodger but almost managed to find him in time. A few days before the killings, a user on Reddit’s “cringe” forum submitted a video of Rodger expressing the deep misogyny that has disturbed the country. On Thursday, May 22nd, another user, named Dave Kawamoto, watched the video and wrote, “If this isn’t a troll, then I bet we find out this guy is a serial killer. I’m getting a strong Patrick Bateman vibe from him.” Since news of the shooting broke, Kawamoto’s comment has been “upvoted” (Reddit’s method of showing approval) more than three thousand times. Kawamoto told me over e-mail that when he first saw Rodger’s video he assumed that it was the work of an Internet troll who was trying to get an odd, dark laugh. But after looking through Rodger’s YouTube profile, Kawamoto saw other videos in which Rodger did nothing but drive around and listen to music. “One of the songs was Katrina and the Waves ‘Walking on Sunshine’ which, other than the general banality of Rodger’s gripes as well as his entitlement and materialism, was probably what prompted my comparison to American Psycho protagonist/antagonist Patrick Bateman,” Kawamoto wrote.

Much of the talk in the days following the rampage has been about warning signs, red flags, and whether we should have known what Rodger was planning. There have been questions asked of the sheriff’s deputies who visited Rodger’s apartment in late April at the behest of Rodger’s mother. There have been reams of online analysis of Rodger’s videos, his flat affect, his psychiatric past, his narcissism, his unbridled misogyny, and how all those things fit the profile of a serial killer. There seems to be a collective desire to gather up every known detail about Rodger’s life, to string them together into a definitive answer to a question that we still haven’t adequately processed. We want Kawamoto’s warning comment on Reddit to be replicable, accurate, and prescriptive.

On Tuesday, I spoke with Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist who has worked on a wide array of mass-murder cases, including those of Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore Kaczynski, and the Columbine killers. I asked him about the effect this reverse engineering might have on the people who read or watch news reports about mass shootings. “These instantaneous, off-the-cuff psychological autopsies have two giant problems,” Dietz told me. “The first is that nobody, in the midst of the news cycle, has all the data. The second is that most of the people who are performing these analyses are completely unqualified.” Dietz, who now runs a consulting firm that trains schools and workplaces on how to spot and prevent violent acts, said that all the wrongheaded analysis and the quick politicization of mass shootings leads to an instantaneous and ultimately harmful shift in priorities. “I give everyone the same warning: do not let the media set your priorities, because they will mislead you every time. Whenever mass killings become a matter of intense public debate, the issue shifts to the issue of the day rather than the more fundamental issue of how we can prevent these mass killings from happening.”

I disagree with Dietz on one point. The people, media members included, who are trying to analyze Elliot Rodger come to quick conclusions that can be misguided, but they do so as part of an effort to navigate something that, on its face, seems inexplicable and senseless. And it’s less the case that mass killings are politicized than that they are political. A conversation about mass shootings that does not mention gun control is as intellectually dishonest as a claim that Rodger’s online literature explains every last thing about his story.

But the lack of good options in the direct aftermath of the tragedy in California does not mean we should pick the least of the wrongs and piece together the profile of a killer from the fragments we find online. It’s certainly important and essential to confront Rodger’s deep misogyny and to spotlight how those sentiments go far beyond one deranged mind, but we should not be taken in by an alluring conflation and believe that a reverse-engineered Elliot Rodger could signal who, among the thousands of other young men who post disturbing videos and online comments, might one day pick up a weapon and attack their classmates. Rodger’s online horror show, sadly, remains opaque.

Still from Elliot Rodger’s YouTube account.