People are expressing surprise and confusion about Alek Minassian's apparent 'Incel' affiliations. Incel hostility to normal society is rooted in anger over the failure of 'normies' to recognize (or even notice) the Incels' efforts to participate in the battle of the sexes.
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Hypothesis: high, frequency, low-payoff interactions in online social groups consisting of peers with a perceived common status deficit promotes extreme boundary policing and radical action to maintain, defend, or expand those boundaries.
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As a general rule, all online fora are contested territory in an information warfare 'battlespace' with strong analogies to concepts like strength gradients or biological competition, albeit with significant nonlinearities as a confounding factor.
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One can also consider online spaces as markets in which participants seek to earn social currency/capital, but these models usually omit deliberate use of zero- or negative-sum transactions that seek to displace one form of currency by another, so I prefer the military analogy.
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Bringing it back to reality. Alek Minassian is incarcerated (probably permanently) and pitied or despised by normal people. But a cult of celebrity is forming around him right now, and his carceral status will be treated as perverse proof of his 'superiority', Get used to this.
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