Recently Mark Steyn and Scott Adams have both offered very interesting analyses of Nasim Aghdam's YouTube Shooting, which I think are worth serious consideration.
First, from Mark Steyn's post, The Grand Convergence:
The San Bruno attack also underlines a point I've been making for over a decade, ever since my troubles with Canada's "human rights" commissions: "Hate speech" doesn't lead to violence so much as restraints on so-called "hate speech" do - because, when you tell someone you can't say that, there's nothing left for him to do but open fire or plant his bomb. Restricting speech - or even being perceived to be restricting speech - incentivizes violence as the only alternative. As you'll notice in YouTube comments, I'm often derided as a pansy fag loser by the likes of ShitlordWarrior473 for sitting around talking about immigration policy as opposed to getting out in the street and taking direct action. In a culture ever more inimical to freedom of expression, there'll be more of that: The less you're permitted to say, the more violence there will be.
Google/YouTube and Facebook do not, of course, make laws, but their algorithms have more real-world impact than most legislation - and, having started out as more or less even-handed free-for-alls, they somehow thought it was a great idea to give the impression that they're increasingly happy to assist the likes of Angela Merkel and Theresa May as arbiters of approved public discourse. Facebook, for example, recently adjusted its algorithm, and by that mere tweak deprived Breitbart of 90 per cent of its ad revenue. That's their right, but it may not have been a prudent idea to reveal how easily they can do that to you.
What happened yesterday is a remarkable convergence of the spirits of the age: mass shootings, immigration, the Big Tech thought-police, the long reach of the Iranian Revolution, the refugee racket, animal rights, vegan music videos... It was the latest mismatched meeting between east and west in the age of the Great Migrations: Nasim Aghdam died two days before her 39th birthday, still living (according to news reports) with either her parents or her grandmother. She came to America at the age of seventeen, and spent two decades in what appears to be a sad and confused search to find something to give her life meaning. But in a cruder sense the horror in San Bruno was also a sudden meeting of two worlds hitherto assumed to be hermetically sealed from each other: the cool, dispassionate, dehumanized, algorithmic hum of High Tech - and the raw, primal, murderous rage breaking through from those on the receiving end.Next, from the transcript of yesterday's Scott Adams' Periscope broadcast:
01:55
we won't know her exact thinking at the
01:57
moment but given her YouTube videos
02:00
which by now you've probably seen she
02:04
was here the things you know about her
02:06
she was an artist yeah you could argue
02:10
whether her art was
02:12
what you'd like to say I don't mean to
02:16
make light of this but when the the
02:19
first clips of the shooters youtube
02:23
channel started coming out and I looked
02:26
at a few and maybe you have a different
02:30
opinion but I couldn't stop looking at
02:34
them I know what you're gonna say you
02:40
can say that's not ours that's just
02:42
crazy random stuff she's got chickens
02:45
and different backgrounds and crazy
02:47
clothes and there's nothing to it except
02:49
randomness and insanity
02:51
well you know there's a there's a fine
02:53
line between art and insanity and I'm
03:01
just speaking for myself I couldn't tear
03:03
my fate I couldn't tear myself away from
03:05
the videos they are weirdly I don't know
03:12
not provocative but they're they're
03:15
interesting in a way that you can't
03:18
really explain yeah somebody used the
03:21
phrase performance art here and one of
03:26
the things you can't you can't
03:30
completely rule out at this point is
03:33
that even the murder wasn't her mind art
03:39
now I don't want to I'm not trying to
03:43
glamorize this alright it was just a
03:45
crazy person with a gun is is the way we
03:48
should remember this but I wonder if in
03:51
her mind this was performance arts
03:55
because it shouldn't look like it you
03:59
know it was there was a point to it you
04:03
know because she had been allegedly
04:04
throttled on on YouTube I don't know if
04:07
that's true but I guess she was
04:09
concerned about that and so there was a
04:12
there was a societal point to it she did
04:17
it in a a welcome let's say a considered
04:21
way meaning she went to their
04:22
headquarters
04:23
she brought a gun which was
04:25
you know for a woman bringing a gun for
04:29
a mass murderer is so out of the norm
04:32
that that's sort of what makes it
04:34
performance art if she had just done a
04:36
normal thing in a normal way it's not
04:38
really art so I don't want to glamorize
04:41
this but in terms of looking for a
04:44
motive you have to wonder if this was
04:49
sort of a a mentally ill expansion of
04:55
just what she thought was art you know
04:57
it was sort of the the ultimate
04:59
conclusion of it she we know this you
05:04
wanted attention that's why you have a
05:07
youtube channel she you know that she
05:09
cared about how many people saw it you
05:12
know that she had a point about yeah
05:14
about meat and about veganism
05:17
and killing human beings is sort of
05:23
consistent with her story that she's
05:25
more Pro animal than pro people I
05:28
suppose you could spin it that way so it
05:31
does feel a little performance arty in
05:34
the worst possible way so you know the
05:39
the simple summary is still she was
05:41
crazy and she had a gun and that simple
05:45
summary will explain pretty much all of
05:47
it
05:48
but there is that interesting in a bad
05:51
way interesting element of she was an
05:54
artist all right
You can watch Scott Adams' broadcast here:
In addition to these considerations, I thought the YouTube shooting was reminiscent of the assassination of British Labour MP Jo Cox in the run-up to Brexit, which, although carried out by a lunatic, turned out to reflect deeper feelings of more normal people that led to a Brexit win...additionally, the YouTube attack was a reminder of the death by seppuku of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, which appeared to serve as a publicity stunt for the writer and his oddball ultra-right causes, roughly comparable to veganism and animal-rights issues in the case of the YouTube gunwoman.
YouTube policies of censorship and demonetization have apparently not only endangered the company's reputation and bottom-line, they have seemingly also physically endangered YouTube's personnel and corporate headquarters by triggering at least one disgruntled YouTuber (no trigger warning?).
In an older and more normal world, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki might have lost her job over such a fiasco, but will nepotism, which was once considered evil, prevail in this case, as the CEO is also Google co-founder Sergei Brin's former sister-in-law?
