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This is too dank to believe, and I don't believe it, but it is what my Twitter feed wants me to believe, and I'm sharing it on that basis.
The combination of the messages on the cartridges is best explained by Robinson being deep into gamer culture
Where does this end up? If Robinson was deep into HoI4 online culture, his browser history will be full of both Wehraboo and Antifa material. And if he got into the chans or the other online cesspools where large number of gamers hang out, then they are going to find all the bad stuff. So the people who want to believe that he was a leftist will find enough evidence to believe that, the people who want to believe he was a groyper will find enough evidence to believe that, and the people (like me) who want to believe that he was just a Thomas Crooks-style very online loser who shot a politician because in the current year it is more memetically badass than shooting up a school will find enough evidence to believe that. So the assassination will become a super-scissor. And, to add insult to injury, a wholesome hobby that I and many other Motteposters enjoy a lot (namely Paradox grand strategy gaming) will become tied in the mind of normies to political violence.
Way back in the 90s, there was a popular freakout about video games making young men into killers. And then it kind of mostly faded; if I had to guess, I think it's because gaming became so overwhelmingly popular (and made so much money) that it became difficult to suggest there was some casual arrow between games and individual acts of violence. There were too many peaceful gamers, and (crucially) too much of the audience that would need to be persuaded politically played games, too, as games became much more popular and lucrative.
In retrospect, it's tempting to say that that argument ("Video games model and normalize doing actual physical violence, so video games cause violence!") had the quality of being a little too easy to understand and just directly wrong on the merits, and I think that's still true...
...but, well, meanwhile, I worked in video games back in the late 1990s and into the early 2000s. In particular, I worked on a few popular first person shooters. I had come out of the early Quake community. I watched mod makers I was following get snapped up by Valve before anyone cared about who Valve was. I watched the rise of SomethingAwful, and I had a friend get interviewed publicly by LowTax in the persona of JeffK. I worked on a game that had to take a low profile for a while after Columbine happened. I took to the internet like fish to water in the mid 90s myself, and was very influenced in the arc of my life by those early internet communities, and so I still had one foot in that culture when I started working on games.
I'm saying all that to say that, even then, it was very clear that the popular gaming cultures, while having a lot of charms and creativity and camaraderie, were really fucking up some young men socially, or were at least enabling them to get really fucked up. I can't really know if they might have gotten as screwed up without those communities, of course. But the worst part of my audience was already, even then, legitimately somewhere on the spectrum between exhausting and mildly terrifying (specifically in terms of their general public impulse regulation problems, their obsessions, their lack of any sense of proportion, and their melting down of old norms about provocation and treating really evil violence lightly, as though they were verbally characters out of Natural Born Killers, Pulp Fiction, or a Jhonen Vasquez graphic novel or something). I saw an observation once that it took until the rise of Gen-X to get movies like Pulp Fiction, because they were the first generation after movies showed up to have so little first hand experience with violence (specifically in war) that they could explore it aesthetically without it having any meaning at all, in a very postmodern sense. That observation has stuck with me.
Anyway, in retrospect - and here I'm just kind of musing theoretically - I think the real issue with that new online video game world was less about the things represented, and more about screens and disembodiment and representation itself. The rise of the always-on, ubiquitous internet makes it really easy and convenient to spend less and less of your time with people in their real, mortal, inconvenient bodies, dealing with the ever-present pleasures and pains of real physical mortality. And so more and more, you live in your head in overt and simple abstractions - character strings on forum posts, image macros on message board posts, game rules encoded in Turing complete languages inside a game artifact, decontextualized video clips on TikTok. It's all fingers pointing at the moon (or fingers pointing at fingers pointing at fingers pointing at...), and often no moon at all. It's obvious real in some important way, but that doesn't mean it's real the same way that interacting with other people in their real, non-discretized bodies is real.
There's an old line from, I think, William Gibson - "The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed". I've seen, I can't remember where, an observation that there appears to be a deep philosophical link between both transgenderism and transhumanism. And lurking in the background, with both of them, is the deeper reality that many of us (I certainly include myself here) are spending more and more of time as floating eyeballs attached to brains with floating fingertips, living mostly in the screen. And in that context, it's not so clear what being a woman or a man or even a human body even means, to some extent - you're more and more post-body from a certain point of view anyway.
Late Wittgenstein, I believe, came around to this notion that many of the problems of philosophy were, ultimately not problems at all. Rather, they were language confusions. They were the end result of staring at the highly fallible, faulty fingers pointing at the moon rather than the moon itself. One can squint and almost see that old chestnut of wisdom reasserting itself... "touch grass".
I don't think any of this evolution is unique to gaming culture, and I don't think it's new. I don't intended to single it out. The first massive psychotic flame wars arose between academics almost immediately after e-mail became widespread and seem to be something about e-mail itself. And that never really ended; my academic partner noted in the last several years that her insane grievance-mongering hair-trigger-offended colleagues, set off by the smallest thing in e-mail, were generally productive and pleasant in person and managed to function like normal decent humans in conversation. There's persuasive arguments that much of the pathologies of young western women were incubated in Tumbler in the early 2010s. Hell, even the 30 Years Wars followed the invention of the print press.
I was actually really quite down on the worst parts of gaming culture for quite a while, even after I left game making. And I do still have deep concerns and misgiving about a lot of it, although really more because I came from that culture, and so I have more natural sympathies towards people who participate in it. I think there are a lot of wounded people out there who aren't happy with where they find themselves. And at this point, I really do think it's more about screens and disembodiment than games specifically - games just happen to be a space that draws in young guys, and so it'll naturally be gaming culture where screwed up young guys work out their problems publicly for good and ill... and young guys do some dangerous things some time, and society is clearly particular wary of young guys. It's actually what ultimately broke me free from being too down on my former audience - by around 2014, I was noticing more and more (as the old saying goes) that even if only a very small minority of the gaming audience is legitimately screwed up and scary, there are really important broader social movements that are quite willing to throw anyone else they disagree with in the same pit with the screwed up young guys, despite being in many cases just as screwed up themselves. And that experience was, well, clarifying.
I came across this idea in the last few years and the implications are terrifying. The way it was out was that when you are online and invested in your online persona, you are essentially projecting your consciousness, your soul, out of your body and into a different dimension, a dimension where there is zero distance between you and all manner of hostile and corrupting influences. Other people, of course, but also alien artificial minds and egregores many times more powerful than you. And perhaps other emergent entities that we still do not yet understand. Since the space feels so "real" and meaningful to many, the online persona can often feel more real than the meatspace persona, and so the online persona, the one subject to an unknown array of corrupting forces, increasingly dominates and directs the actions of the meatspace persona. This is not just a long-winded way to say "people get radicalized online." It's not "radicalization" in the same way that visiting the wrong mosque might get you caught up with Al Qaeda or whatever. It's a much deeper andore profound psychological transformation.
Sounds like the kind of space where one could use some Gellar fields.
Scrolling your phone with one hand in the grass.
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