As soon as the identity of the suspected United Health Care assassin was revealed—26 yr-old Luigi Mangione—it began that grim ritual, the scouring of public social media profiles for clues about his political character. Unsurprisingly, apparent contradictions lay in every direction. Laudatory posts about Elon Musk and laudatory book reviews on Goodreads about the Unabomber’s manifesto. Posts boosting both Jonathan Haidt’s tech anxiety and Peter Thiel’s tech imperialism. A high school valedictorian and Ivy League computer science grad who hails from what appears to be an elite Republican family, who espouses right-leaning tech guy politics online, and who will now forever be known for gunning down a CEO of a health insurance company to the cheers of radical populists.
But the stakes felt higher this time, because the assassination itself targeted not, say, *just* some kids at a school that thoughts and prayers could be issued over without disrupting any socioeconomic hierarchies, but a member of the ruling class who presided over a particularly malicious and widely despised industry. And because of the reaction online. Which has been wild and openly and almost unanimously aligned to some degree with the premeditated murderer.
As tech culture writer Ryan Broderick wrote, “the overwhelming response to Thompson’s death online could be summed up as ‘lol, lmao even’.” He notes “it’s possible this is the most aligned America — well, aside from the folks in its highest tax brackets — has been about a news story since the invention of the internet.” Taylor Lorenz noted that: “Within seconds of the news breaking, people online began celebrating. A Facebook post by UnitedHealthcare about the CEO's passing was met with over 23,000 laughing emojis before it was taken down.”
There were some predictable attempts at tsk-tsking the unwashed masses in august publications, but the fury was and is ultimately irrepressible. Almost everyone understands on a gut level the awfulness of the modern insurance industry, its perverse financial incentives, and that its executives profit while ordinary Americans are routinely denied coverage and care and get sick and go bankrupt and die. Too many have personal horror stories. Few in the schadenfreude-filled comment boards support actual organized murder of executives, but almost everyone can feel the pain and the reasoning behind it. The rage transcends politics, and coalesces around injustice.
Which is why I was surprised only for maybe a minute or two reading Mangione’s gushing review of Ted Kaczinski’s deeply reactionary Industrial Society and Its Future, before being able to reconcile it all pretty easily with all the shoutouts to the Andrew Huberman podcast, anti-woke posts, and his interest in AI.
Details are emerging of Mangione’s struggles with back pain, and how it appears to have consumed him. There’s a manifesto floating around of dubious provenance, so I won’t quote from that, but even without it, it’s not particularly hard to imagine how great personal pain and anger and a sense of injustice over the healthcare industry’s treatment of him could have combined with an undercooked strain of rationalist thought embraced by the right-leaning tech set to yield a conclusion like the one a disturbed Mangione seems to have made; that a reasonable way to strike back at the suffering caused by insurance industry, was in fact to strike at one of its chief executives. Rage transcends politics.
But that’s all speculation, and the picture is sure to be complicated by further details. What remains most notable is that response and how it united so many Americans in violent scorn, and how that scorn has been received by fellow members of the executive class.
First, it’s worth noting that another health insurance company Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield [sic] that was already facing a backlash over an unpopular decision to revoke coverage during the time of the assassination, reversed its decision. Of course, the insurance company did not say the assassination had anything to do with it, but well, yeah. Second, despite that, publicly, little has been done to address the outpouring of vitriol at the health insurance industry—instead, there was a reported uptick in executives scrambling to commission security details.
Because of course there has, this is the way things have been going, the rich becoming ultra-rich while conditions deteriorate for most other folks until a survivalist mindset kicks in; so much so that Doug Rushkoff wrote a whole book about it. Hell, the same week that the UHC assassination took place, the Washington Post’s Nitasha Tiku had a great and chilling story about a new startup called Sauron (yes, named after the all-consuming evil villain of the Lord of the Rings books) that sells itself as a home security service for the tech elite. The startup will turn wealthy customers’ homes into fortresses, deploying state of the art surveillance and even airborne drones to ward off unwelcome visitors.
The startup was inspired by the founders’ brushes with intruders—apparently someone rang the doorbell to one of their homes in a gated, affluent community, late at night, and his previous security system did not alert him. So, “by incorporating technology developed for autonomous vehicles, robotics and border security, Sauron has built a supercharged burglar alarm,” Tiku writes. “The concept has resonated in Bay Area tech circles, where crime in San Francisco is a constant subject on tech podcasts, social media and executive group chats.”1
The booming fortunes of the tech sector has of course turned the Bay Area into one of the wealthiest and most inequitable places to live, with sky high rents, housing shortages, and vast swaths of city that are unaffordable to all but the rich. This level of inequality is bound to lead to social strife and suffering, which is exactly what has happened, but rather than address any of the systemic causes, many tech elites would rather build bunkers and send in the drones. Here’s Tiku again:
At tech dinner parties after the Great Recession, Hartz said discussion sometimes turned to best practices for fleeing the United States. In a scenario where someone acquired citizenship and a residency in New Zealand and had a pilot fly them there to safety, “people were talking about whether or not you kill the pilot of your plane because the pilot could harm your family,” he said.
Think about this for a second. The tech execs are cosplaying an apocalypse scenario in which social upheaval is consuming the nation—again in no small part because of trends they have themselves helped accelerate, but I digress—and debating whether or not they would need to murder the person that just personally helped them escape. This is psychopathy. It certainly does not apply to every tech executive in existence, but attitudes like this, which rhyme with programs to leave Earth behind for a colony on Mars, and with, say, Elon Musk’s social media attacks on migrants and the unhoused, are becoming the loudest and most prominent in Silicon Valley.
I bring all this up in part because a reader sent me this story from Bloomberg’s Ellen Huet, about the epidemic of people smashing self-driving Waymos on San Francisco city streets, and digging into why it’s become a trend. Huet, who, I am contractually obligated to note misconstrues the Luddites in a brief mention (they were not afraid of the looms, they knew that smashing valuable capital equipment in organized strikes would deal a blow to the factory bosses degrading their working conditions) talks to a robotics ethicist and an IT professor who argue it may be a fear of the unknown future. I have another theory to add.
The VC crowd got mad at me earlier this year for suggesting ire towards Silicon Valley well may be a factor in the vandalism and destruction of Waymo cars, but I think it’s dumb to dismiss it. One man specifically targeted multiple Waymos for tire-slashings. Others have singled them out for smashing, spray-painting, and burning. And it’s more pronounced in San Francisco, even though there are plenty of Waymos in LA, where I live, because SF is, perhaps, more linked to their genesis. In other words, smashing a Waymo car might at least make someone feel like they’re fighting back against big tech and Silicon Valley billionaires, towards whom anger seems to be growing by the day.
Of course, lighting a Waymo on fire will address Silicon Valley’s acceleration of inequality about as much as murdering an insurance company CEO will address the systemic injustices of the healthcare industry. But the rage transcends organized politics. Our institutions are failing far too many of us. Healthcare is bankrupting people who need care. Homelessness is rising to sickening heights.
In an attempt to dismiss the widespread rage expressed online, one right influencer mockingly wrote, “This shit reads to me like ‘The rage on January 6 proves we need to reform our election system.’” And yet! It’s not how he meant it, but faith in democracy *is* in fact by some counts at an all time low and our trust in institutions has eroded precipitously. J6 was based on a lie, *both* of Trump’s campaigns were based on a wild architecture of lies, and yet neither are possible without the failures of institution after institution, from the media to healthcare to Congress to Silicon Valley, and, yes, the rage at the incapacity that’s left in its wake.
What’s made all the more clear by the outpouring of relative solidarity for a right-leaning tech guy who gunned down an executive in broad daylight is that we are sitting on not just one but an expansive and overlapping constellation of powder kegs right now. The Trump administration has only promised to further calcify the state’s anti-democratic tendencies, restrict its ability to respond to the populace in ways that might ameliorate suffering, and embark on brand new authoritarian projects like orchestrating mass deportation, firing competent bureaucrats to replace them with loyalists, and gutting the Department of Education; significant rage generators all.
There is murderous rage, there is vandalistic rage, there is wanton rage, and, of course, there is the sort that arose after the killing of George Floyd; righteous rage, with millions pouring into the streets to pointedly confront legacies of injustice. But too little changed, again. The rich merely have better and more weaponized fortresses, and more riches, and the nonrich have more of their rage.
The entrepreneur and tech thinker Anil Dash made a comment in passing on Bluesky that caught my eye: “It is good, at least, that so many disturbed young men will have learned, finally, that true infamy and endless online thirst posts don’t come from school shootings.”
This made me think of a few stories I wrote years ago, about a system designed by a radical anarcholibertarian from the first dot com era named Jim Bell. It was called an Assassination Market, and the idea was that once workable digital cryptography was invented, you could build anonymized marketplaces where people could bid on the execution of public figures. This, he believed, would be one of the only reliable ways to check politicians’ and public figures’ power. Bitcoin emerged as a workable digital cryptography, and oh ten years ago someone built one as a stunt. Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke, then the head of the Federal Reserve, were listed as targets, and someone paid up some bitcoin to make it seem real, and then nothing happened and all the bitcoin disappeared. Since then, a couple more iterations have popped up; some people entertain vague fears that such a market could, with the right conditions and proof of concept, tip into reality.
I’m not so worried about that, as much as the broader state of a society that has arced towards realizing something resembling an assassination market without much cryptographic engineering at all. The almost-plausibility of a world where killers select targets that will earn them the most online clout, if not crypto outright, and where people cheer in fury because their institutions have so utterly failed them and it is all they can do, that’s bad enough. Of course the politics of the enraged are not always coherent—read any post-election Trump voter exit interview, and that’s clear enough. But these recent targets have coalesced, somehow, nonetheless around the avatars of injustice. There are many more powder kegs lined up, and who knows which hand will set the spark.
Also worth noting, from Tiku’s story: “While statistics from the San Francisco Police Department from October show that property crime and car theft has dropped in 2024 and that the homicide rate sits at a five-year low, the data has done little to appease the public’s fears.”
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Just ringing someone's doorbell make you an intruder? Boy, these people are fragile.