The Ned Ludd Radio Hour
Luigi Mangione and the Gray Tribe
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Episode notes
A couple of weeks ago, Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old American, allegedly shot Brian Thompson, the CEO of a major health insurer in the US. Suddenly, a lot of the ideas I’d be gently noodling with on this show were being discussed as potential sources of violence. Was Mangione a Luddite? Someone who felt that technology had atomised a generation? Or was he, in fact, an accelerationist who believed that artificial intelligence would expand human capability? And, ultimately, did any of this matter?
Now, disaffected young men pick up guns with shocking frequency. They perpetrate violence with shocking frequency. They veil this horror under the cloak of ideology with shocking frequency. In a way, Mangione is no different.
But, in another way, he is very different. Just look at how the violence has been received. For days, Mangione was on the run, seemingly shielded by an American public whose anger over an exploitative healthcare industry was spilling over. He became a pin-up, for a moment, of a generational anxiety. There were echoes of how the Unabomber, Ted Kaszynski, was received by some climate activists. Violence might not be an answer, but sometimes it make a point. In big capital letters.
But looking at Mangione – and his digital footprint – only confused me more. This didn’t feel like a revolutionary left-winger lashing out at a social evil. In fact, the more I saw, the more I felt like I was seeing someone quite familiar. Basically conservative, intellectually ambitious, in thrall to the technological structures that they also blamed for our ills. Is this just the modern aspect of the age-old libertarianism that has been a constant companion in tech circles?
To discuss all these things – at Ned’s suggestion – I dialled up Io Dodds, a British journalist based in San Francisco, who’s currently a Senior Reporter at The Independent. She had written on Mangione and, in particular, his relationship with an ill-defined movement called the “grey tribe”. In this episode, we’ll try and unravel some of that and put together a definition, however boggling, of what could be a very consequential movement.
Music: Internet Song by Apes of the State
Artwork: Tom Humberstone
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