The day after Charlie Kirk was killed, I was reading Ryan Broderick's newsletter Garbage Day, which is about life online.

And there was something he wrote that I haven't been able to get out of my head since.

He described the killing as the logical end point of 21st century America.

If you break it down into what happened, he is an influencer who was shot and killed at a school surrounded by a sea of smartphones.

And if I had to summarize what life is like in 21st century America, I can't really think of a darker, more accurate portrait.

Ryan's been writing about the Internet for roughly 15 years.

And in his posts since Charlie Kirk's murder, he has been reckoning with how little American institutions,

law enforcement, government, the media, seem to understand about the places our kids and teens and young

adults are spending their days. And especially where that intersects with violence.

Writing about school shootings, he said,

we have created a culture where kids grow up seeing them as a path toward fame and glory.

Another consequence of how thoroughly the internet has flattened pop culture, politics, and real-life violence. All of it now is just

another meme you can participate in to go viral.

Ryan wrote that before Tyler Robinson was arrested for Kirk's murder. And when I got him on the line, I wanted to know if he still believed it.

I mean, in the Discord chat logs that were released by law enforcement, Robinson explains why he

wrote memes on the bullets.

And he says, it's all a big meme.

I think he says, I'll have a stroke if Fox News reads them on air.

And to me, that is very in line with what I wrote, which is that someone who's, let's say,

Robinson's age,

is 22 years old, has always lived in this America.

And that doesn't just mean that they've always lived in an America with lockdown drills at schools.

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