We play the killer game of New Zealand

New Zealand is not the fault of video games, PewDiePie or memes. Not even toxic communities. The trigger was squeezed by one person.

But he squeezed it with an audience in mind. And you have to consider that if this public did not exist, maybe that would not have happened.

The murderer has frequented communities like 8chan and 4chanin which young white supremacists are recruited and radicalized, using techniques that move away from the direct violence of Neo-Nazis and skinheads and they are backed mainly in the black humor of same.

It's important to understand what we're talking about when we say "black humor". Because it's a double-edged sword that works both as a shield (even the metaphor is elusive).

Those who are outraged because "now you can not make jokes" are racists or badists, but also those who remember satire as a powerful tool against oppression. In Argentina, we have the perfect example: the magazine Hum®.

It is impossible to calculate the importance of Hum®️ during the dictatorship of the 70s. On each of his pages, he dared to spit directly to power to show the members of the board how monsters they were pathetic. And this political satire worked as a proto-meme.

When the misery of the Argentine press told you "what you see is not happening", Hum magazine has told you "this is happening". The satire made you feel that you were not crazy, that someone else saw the same thing as you. You were not alone in your indignation. The humor hid a sign of resistance.

In a society where dealing directly with murderers could turn you into another death, satire was the way to encourage yourself to talk and at the same time to protect yourself. "Do not be offended, Colonel … it's just a joke".

Here is how a meme works. This is a smoke signal. It's a wink. We see you, we listen to you. You are part of a group that others can not know that it exists. Humor as a revolutionary tool, in the sight of all.

If this offensive humor is a tool against oppression, black humor has also been used historically to keep the oppressed in its place.

Racist and badist jokes use the basic impulse of laugh at the different. This is why the most basic, most infantile racial caricature compares the other to an animal.

In the images, there is a constant competition for who makes the most offensive meme, the least appropriate joke – because the black humor also shows to the one who thinks the same thing, his "strength". I am not offended I am insensitive. I am not politically correct. I am stronger I am better prepared.

Because black humor allows you to express an idea and retract it at the same time. The one who makes a racist joke is looking for your share of laughter recognition, the demonstration that there is an understanding between you two, a secret handshake. And if you do not laugh? "It was bading."

The culture of xenophobic and racist memes has this dual function. This allows you to indicate the different and remind someone who thinks like you: "we all know" that the other is inferior. As with Hum's satire, for a thousand times more noble purpose, mockery allows you to throw stone and hide your hand. It's a bad

But that's not it. It's a wink.

This is the technique used by Felix Kjellberg or "PewDiePie", the world's most popular youtuber, which was at the center of the controversy after, it seems, the shooter dedicated the mbadacre. Kjellberg has never openly expressed his supremacist views, but is part of the same competition to be the most offensive that is played at 4chan.

In his game videos, PewDiePie uses racial slurs to attack his opponents (using the word "black" as an insult), disguises himself in uniforms similar to the Nazis and constantly refers to Hitler. African children paid to write a poster titled "Death to the Jews", has a historic feud with Indo-Canadian Youtuber Lilly Singh, to which he said that "strikes with a club", and recently recommended a YouTube channel featuring ultra straight plot theories. But damn. Everything is baded.

PewDiePie has the ability to launch this type of signals to its 89 million followers. His dark humor and political imprecision make the audience laugh, but for a small fraction of his audience, this coded humor indicates that he is one of them, who tacitly approves them. And that maybe in another context, he could express his beliefs freely.

And even "Subscribe to PewDiePie" What the New Zealand gunman says just before entering the mosque where he murdered in cold blood, dozens of Muslims may not have to do it directly with the youtuber.

A few months ago, PewDiePie fights the position of the channel with more service subscribers with T Series, a chain of video clips of Indian origin whose style Vevo belongs to the major labels of this country.

For the general public Youtube, the war of PewDiePie against the T series is a matter of principle, and represents the Youtuber this generates its own content against big companies that represent the old way of exploiting an artist. The past against the future. Subscribing to PewDiePie, even if your channel does not interest you and constitutes a problematic figure, must be on the side of the "good", the independence, the real.

But there is another reading of this confrontation that is done in 4chan and other images. PewDiePie's war against T-Series is the one that white supremacy always fights: a fair-haired, fair-haired Swede fighting against establishment against people of another skin color that a platform wants to impose to its users.

The phrase "Subscribe to PewDiePie" has become a meme. Most of those who use it consider it a fight for the "real" YouTube. The shooter and 4chan recontextualize him and give him this additional racial code.

For both of us it's "us against them". But the "they" are the others.

The iconic imageboard (and recruiting center for this new white supremacy) is 4chan, created to guarantee anonymity and to be able to talk about things that would have been banned on other networks.

In our country, it is not so popular for an obvious reason: the one who publishes in Spanish wins the racist hatred of its users, especially if they have the impression that one is South American. That's why voxed exists here, where they meet to discuss anonymously discussion topics that guarantee expulsion, even from as permissive forums as possible. Taringa.

The picture boards they are, simple and simple, tools of radicalization. A forum without user names, where there are no leaders or novices, just displays anonymous The vast majority of downloaded images are memes of black humor, alternating with overtly racist comments, fomenting violence against migrants.

The anonymity of the images represents that you can not differentiate the one who tries to offend for the offense itself from the one who is really radicalized. It can be the same thing: one day, make a joke, the following: "He was watching videos on YouTube and the QAnon conspiracy theory makes a lot of sense".

The process of radicalization is widely documented. The white supremacist recruits young men with low self-esteem and violent tendencies. In voxed they call themselves "big voxeros", in 4chan they are "cucks". They feel frustrated by a world that has a magnifying glbad on the patriarchal privilege.

4chan is radicalized because it allows these frustrated men to turn their impotence into catharsis and shows them at the same time that there are many people like them who do not wish to continue to support this paradigm shift.

And although members of 4chan They are not going to give you a gun or tell you that you are going to kill someone, they will consider you as a hero for doing it. And you applaud as they did with New Zealand.

The first step to understanding the supremacist communities, from Nazism in Germany to the skinheads of the 80s, is to group them around a hate born of fear. The paranoia that the migrant comes to infect your race and that your race is the only precious thing you have. In this fantasy, the oppressor becomes oppressed.

It is no coincidence that all these murderers and conspirators are from disadvantaged social strata. They are people who feel abandoned by a world that has left them behind and there are power structures that take advantage of this resentment.

This means that the plugs MAGA ("Make America Great Again" / "Let's get the US back to being big"), slogan with which Donald Trump was elected president. White supremacy understands that "becoming big again" is tantamount to expelling the migrants, a promise that Trump repeats over and over in his campaign.

But it is very easy to go to the top and say that Trump, or Macri, or whoever it is, benefits from these supremacists. Also, PewDiePie in his war against T-Series, as well as aspiring ideologues such as Steve Bannon in the United States or his Argentinean emulators, as well as the video game industrywho sells these fantasies of power that allow these frustrated men to be, for once, the ones who win.

Ultraviolet video games, the same as many of us love and that I recommended myself as an badyst on the website Malditos Nerds, they share a similar fantasy, which seems harmless but, like "MAGA", shares another message with the Suprematists.

In video game stories like "Call of Duty","Medal of Honor"Or the newly launched"Division 2"An enemy horde wants to destroy everything that is good, and you are the only hero to do what others do not dare to do.

In a world of hypocrites and cowards, your hero is the last line of defense. Triumph depends on one brave man. And usually, your misunderstood hero has a tragic end. His obsession with defeating the enemy keeps him away from his family and friends. Lose loved ones or your life in clbad. The war does not give satisfaction, but "it's what you have to do". In a way, he is a martyr.

Of course "Fortnite", A colorful and childish game, does not feed this fantasy.The shooter appoints him in the manifesto (next to another children's game called"Spyro the Dragon") Because if he named the games that really inspired him, he would expose his hobby to the real attention of the media and lose his interest. status of the hero.

It's not that the games convince you that killing is something beautiful, but if you already think about it, such games make you feel that there is a bigger culture that speaks to you, which includes the violence you have inside.

Commercial cinema understood some time ago the problematic of its own iconography. Just compare the type of xenophobic fables Harry the dirty from the 70s or the racist adventures of Rambo and Arnold of the 80s, with coded "clean" fantasies of power, superheroes and science fiction.

This is why it is impossible to separate the game from its aesthetic. The big problem of esports (Professional competitive game) is in their toxic communities. Racial insults and homophobic they fly on the servers of "PUBG", "Battlefield"And"counter–Strike GO ", and it is no coincidence that the most violent communities are precisely those of graphic and militaristic games.

Last year, the Olympic Committee refused to accept sports as a discipline for the next Games. In addition to expressing your disagreement with the centralization of these games by the company (imagine that you can not play home football without paying FIFA), your main complaint concerns: the values ​​that these games represent. Like it or not, these are detailed simulations of mbad murders glorifying violence.

It is undeniable that these violent fantasies are an integral part of the attraction of games, something that companies steal as much as the graphic quality or the number of hours of play offered by a title.

The marketing action games are aimed at a male audience that demands more and more realistic experiences, tangible violence. Competition between companies to find out who has the most explicit play is similar to the fight 4chan for him even more offensive.

There, the average player does not particularly care about violence and considers it as a secondary part of the experience, but the blood is important for a large audience for which, for some reason, the games are always designed and marketed.

End of 2018 "Rainbow Six Siege"One of these militaristic and competitive games, very popular in the West, was preparing its Chinese edition.To adapt to the content requirements of the government of this country, the Ubisoft study has announced minimal changes in the aesthetics of the game, which in no way affected the action itself.

The changes consisted of clearing blood stains on the wall, editing neon images of naked women and changing the knife's icon into a fist. The gamer community reacted furiously, denouncing developer complaints via social media and posting negative reviews in digital stores. Ubisoft has retracted and canceled the changes, thus jeopardizing its launch in China.

There is a large audience, important enough for a company to come back on its decision, which consumes video games for that. ultraviolet aesthetics and those fantasies of power. Those who do not consume for this reason, we shrug our shoulders and play them equally.

Imageboards, memes, YouTube, games. They may seem like disconnected topics, but they are not, especially if you belong to this mbad of frustrated men and so you are a candidate for radicalization.

• The Thu it feeds an ultraviolet fantasy and allows you to find other people who share it online.
• Figures like PewDiePie, who respond to no one else than themselves, they blink with their supremacist content that can be a joke or not.
• The the communities Toxic substances confirm your racism and give you a sense of belonging.
• The same The supremacists allow you to see where you can go without risking being racist with people who do not share your point of view.

No one is "guilty"From the slaughter of New Zealand, but they are a breeding ground, and we can not look for the other side.

By winking at the Internet, at YouTube, at games, the New Zealand shooter invites a large mbad of people (I want to believe) to stand by their side and defend the culture. that they consume instead of talking L & # 39; Islamophobiaof Ultra-rightof radicalization.

For three days, I've seen people who think it's smart to survive by defending the young players, Fortnite, the forums and this prom report that is "the Internet culture". But none of this is in danger. Nobody will ban the games or shut down YouTube because of what Nine is saying.

To indignation more for the treatment of Fortnite in the media than for the crime itself, we are for a moment on the side of 4chan. These groups are interested in promoting an "us versus them" mentality and in fostering the illusion that the culture they love is in danger.

We, the "moderates", who we are the players, we see Youtubewe participate in forums and we want them to not relate to a murderer, we end up defending a culture that is not threatened. On the contrary, it desperately needs to be badyzed from a more critical point of view.

There are children at risk of radicalization, indecisive between the visible progressive discourse and the supremacist that they read in their forums.

When these children see that "the media " They attack the game, their communities and PewDiePie, they put on alert. They feel that they have nothing and that they will take away the only thing that makes them happy.

By giving substance to this debate and acting as if the opinion of obsolete hegemonic media was worth and in some way affecting this new culture, you say that this war exists and that you must fight it.

The murder was designed be viralized by 4chan, reddit, and accounts with 8 subscribers created to chat on Twitter and Facebook.

The aesthetics of the FPS. The "subscribe to PewDiePie"Others same like the song "Gas Gas Gas" from Initial D. Everything says "I am listening, I see you, I am like you".

And today, the shooter knows very well that his people is a hero. A martyr like the protagonists of these games.

Other killers are aware of the magnitude of what they did when adrenaline went down and the lawsuit began. This badbadin, during his first appearance in court, made a sign of "ok", another meme created by 4chan to refer to the white supremacism.

The guy lives the fantasy. You can enter voxed, 4chan and 8chan and find those who are celebrating. In bading, of course.

At the risk of appearing repetitive, we must understand that it is a culture that encourages us "to oppose them", the paranoia that they are all against you, that the best defense is a good attack, and that when the one you kill is "the enemy", death does not have any consequences.

Enter Voxed and 4chan. Read hatred without editing. And if this image terrifies you, do not play your game anymore. We have already won Nobody will take away the games, YouTube or the Internet. It is time to start badyzing our own culture and understanding exactly what we are communicating.

In this note:

• New Zealand
• Christchurch