After watching the new movie from Netflix, Unabomber, about Ted Kaczynski, and experiencing, yet again, the dependable tendency of internet forums and social media apps to load and deploy random spite, I started to wonder about the nature of people who just can’t be nice to other people, especially in online situations. It felt like an interesting confluence of unrelated sources of inspiration, though maybe not so unrelated in the final analysis.
An internet forum, like a festering manifesto, can become a place where a person’s disappointment with the world hardens into a habitual posture. Someone who seems angry at reality may approach each discussion with a grievance already in place, searching for another example of what has gone wrong. Technological change becomes an especially convenient target because it makes the world’s movement impossible to ignore. New tools like A.I. emerge, people discover uses for them, and familiar arrangements begin to shift. For someone who experiences those shifts as a loss of control, another person’s curiosity can feel almost offensive. If they witness someone having a good time, oh boy, time to shore up some angst.
The underlying resentment may involve more than disagreement about technology. It can reflect a wounded relationship with change itself. A person who once felt knowledgeable or culturally secure may now feel displaced by developments they neither understand nor welcome. Their experience still matters, but it no longer guarantees authority. Instead of admitting uncertainty, they may convert discomfort into a judgment against the people adapting around them. Enthusiasm becomes evidence of gullibility. Experimentation becomes irresponsibility. A willingness to entertain possibilities is interpreted as a failure to recognize danger. And if you’re not entertaining them the way they want as they doomscroll, boom, you’re a zealot bootlicker with no reason to live.
What makes a person want to engage with others but only to stir up conflict?
Why are people like this? These are possible motives, not conclusions that can be established from hostile posts alone. Someone may oppose a technology for sound reasons, and an open-minded person can be poorly informed. The revealing feature is how the user handles disagreement. Can they acknowledge a reasonable argument without punishing its author? Can they distinguish a person exploring an idea from a person endorsing every consequence of it? When those distinctions repeatedly disappear, discussion starts serving an emotional purpose that exceeds its stated subject.
One possibility is that grievance has become part of the person’s identity. They have invested so much attention in certain social problems that those problems now organize their understanding of other people. Anyone who shares the concern appears perceptive; anyone who gives it less weight appears deficient. The demand gradually shifts from “consider my argument” to “experience the world as I do.” Another person’s refusal to remain equally alarmed can then feel like a personal rejection.
This helps explain the hostility such a user may direct toward people with more exploratory worldviews. Curiosity leaves questions unsettled. It allows someone to see promise in a development while remaining concerned about its costs. A grievance-centered outlook may have difficulty tolerating that ambiguity because it weakens the certainty on which the person’s position depends. If a technology can produce something useful or beautiful, their condemnation becomes harder to sustain. Dismissing the curious person can be easier than revising the argument. Being able to take potshots without any real consequences is a known aspect of many online activities. The ghost of the anonymous angry dude is only a new account away from arguing with himself.
What do such people do to the world?
The social consequences emerge in the texture of their replies. They may answer a tentative observation with an accusation, treat a question as a concealed ideological statement, or assign motives that the other person has never expressed. Over time, participants learn that ordinary conversation carries a disproportionate cost. They become cautious, disengage, or stop responding altogether. The hostile user may interpret that withdrawal as further evidence that people are shallow or unwilling to confront uncomfortable truths, without considering how their own conduct helped produce it.
Calling this “asocial” requires some precision. The person may actively seek company and post constantly. What they struggle with is the reciprocity that makes company worthwhile: allowing others to have different priorities, accepting correction, and showing interest without requiring agreement. They want an audience but may resist the obligations of being a fellow participant.
A forum offers repeated opportunities to speak while making it relatively easy to avoid repairing the relationships damaged by that speech. If you treat the food-service staff like this, they may spit in your food. Do it on a forum, and it may take a while for the various avatars and Bloodsucker557 usernames to register as actual people. Again, the anonymity of it all adds up like barnacles with carbuncles.
The medium is the message
The medium can reinforce this pattern. A cutting reply attracts attention, and agreement from a few sympathetic users can make contempt feel justified. Ah, yes, the like button is like an ejector seat for the unbrave—a temporary sense of safety floats them back to earth. Repetition gives the posture momentum. Eventually, the person may feel compelled to defend their established role as the one who sees through everything. A generous response would require a departure from the identity they have performed in public. The internet tough guy lurks within all of us.
The deepest difficulty may be an inability to let other people inhabit reality differently. The world continues to change, and others continue to find interests that do not revolve around the same disappointments. A healthier relationship with disagreement would allow criticism to remain specific and proportionate. It would also leave room for discovery. When anger becomes the price of belonging, a forum loses that room, and the angry participant becomes increasingly confined within the worldview they insist everyone else must share.
