Every guy has an “edgelord phase”. I think it starts during our “long hair phase” and extends on for years, in many cases never actually ending at all. Edgelords are men who like to be edgy and provocative, because it seems fun to be different and stand out from popular culture. It scratches the iconoclastic itch latent in each us. Edgelords use offensive humour to shock people, thinking that we provide a value to society simply by engaging in unnecessary debates – debates often built on the backs of ridiculous strawmen.
I think this phase starts in high school and accelerates in college, when we’re exposed to an unfiltered cascade of new ideas (and other, more powerful edgelords). Your idiot 14-year-old nephew who thinks that 9/11 was a hoax because he watched a YouTube documentary is an edgelord. Your 40-year-old uncle who asks every year, without fail, “why don’t we have men’s history month? Or a straight pride parade?” - yeah he's an edgelord.
Edgelords live among us, their oily neckbeards
embodying the spirit of this cartoon in every Whatsapp group and dinner party:
This week, we heard the collective guttural screeching of
the internet’s cringey edgelords reach a new crescendo, as they celebrated the
Johnny Depp thing and then raced over to racially abuse a black actress cast in
the new Star Wars. Research shows that over 97% of men are affected by Cringey Edgelord Syndrome (CES) and vaccines are yet to receive FDA approval.
But where do edgelords get their ideas from? Who replenishes
their weekly bile repositories? Edgekings. Edgekings are the high priests of modern
toxic masculinity, supercharged by vast, garish social media followings that
they in turn endow with Right wing talking points, conspiracy theories, misogyny,
and more. I’m talking about the Joe Rogans, the Jordan Petersons, the Piers Morgans, the Arnab Goswamis of this world.
I remember being a supple, young edgelord and hearing ideas
from the edgekings of the late 2000s that challenged my Left / liberal upbringing.
They spoke with such ferocity and they seemed to call out things that didn’t
make sense to me. But then I would read one article about the topic and realize they
were actually completely wrong and, actually, full of shit. Nevertheless, the desire to be
edgy stayed with me for many years.
Though I think I have outgrown by cringey edgelord phase, many would argue – probably rightly – that I am in fact still a fucking idiot. As part of my penance, I would like to therefore lay bare my most embarrassing endorsements. Here are three occasions where I quoted, defended, or even supported truly awful edgelords. I’m so, so sorry.
1. Nigel Farage
Yes. I can’t believe it either.
It was 2012, I had just finished undergrad in the UK and returned
to India feeling like a failure because I wasn’t able to get a job/visa to stay
on in England. Somehow, I had come across a YouTube clip of Nigel Farage
berating the European Parliament for something. He said the EU was bloated and
inefficient, that Brussels was eating up billions in taxpayer funds to produce very
little of substance. It was a perspective I’d never heard and I was fascinated.
I too had no idea what the European Parliament actually did
or how the EU worked – and I was a student of international relations in
Europe! Mostly, I liked how direct Farage was and how boldly he criticized the bumbling, red-faced Eurocrats sitting opposite him. But I didn’t care enough about European
politics to actually spend time learning about it. I just like how he talked.
It was probably August 2012 when I flew from Bangalore to
Bombay for a job interview with an international relations think tank. Like the
idiot I was, I wrote a full suit for the entire journey, even though I would
have had time to change into my suit in Bombay. No one wears suits in India,
especially not when you travel. But remember, I was 21 and more importantly, I
was a fucking idiot.
So I show up for this interview and the guy is asking me who
my favourite global affairs thinkers and scholars are. I quoted Mary Kaldor,
whose work I’d studied extensively at university. And then I said that I liked
Nigel Farage because of “how he talks”. The interviewer looked up at me with a strange
expression.
I did not get the job.
2. Ben Shapiro
It pains me to say it, ladies and gentlemen. But once I took a girl – a lovely, kind, intelligent, beautiful woman – on a date to a Ben Shapiro talk. It must have been 2016 and Ben Shapiro had come to Yale to give one of his usual lectures railing against liberals and progressive culture. Ben Shapiro is a Right wing radio host who has made a name for himself by shouting slogans like “Facts don’t care about your feelings” at college students and viciously berating various marginalized groups. He’s famous on Twitter and if you don’t know him, it’s because you have led a sensible and happy life and you’re not extremely online. Please don’t look him up, it’s not worth it.
I was excited to go see Ben Shapiro because I was feeling a
bit out of place at Yale. When I arrived, I thought I was a Left liberal. I
considered myself a progressive, an ally to marginalized groups, an opponent of
bigotry, colonialism, etc. I thought I was woke. Oh… my god. I was not ready
for Ivy League wokeness. Apparently, Yale was an “white supremacist institution”,
according to some fellow students. Halloween costumes were apparently "hate speech". I saw
lots of White Americans proudly hating themselves and their country and I found
it all bewildering. So I did what any self-respecting edgelord would do: I played
devil’s advocate.
Ben Shapiro’s lecture was about how “White privilege is fake”
and some other “Leftist myths”. Again, I was fascinated, but not actually in agreeance. In the lecture hall, instead
of the usual crowd of 18-22 year old Yale students, it was mostly middle aged
locals from the city of New Haven and surrounding towns. They were here to hear
the “other side”. And boy did they get it. Ben Shapiro railed for like 45 mins,
using cherry-picked anecdotes that don’t stand up to real scrutiny, and rattling
off strawman after strawmen to “win” debates against the handful of Yale college
students who dared to take the floor mic against him. It was quite a spectacle. An orgy of hurtful, Right wing talking points.
Afterwards, my date and I discussed Shapiro's arguments. She
explained carefully and soulfully why she felt hurt and attacked by him. I saw her
point, but still felt like her's was a perspective too far Left/liberal for me. I wasn’t
ready to accept that Ben Shapiro’s arguments are just vapid abstractions that
don’t hold up to any kind of scrutiny in the real world, and that real human
beings suffer real pain because of the very injustices he tries to laugh off.
I see how profoundly wrong I was. I truly, deeply hate Ben Shapiro. I can’t believe I even breathed the same air as him, sitting there in that cruel auditorium. The very thought fills me with sickness.
3. Martin Shkreli
You know the “well, actually…” guy who chimes in to provide
a badly-researched “contrarian” view that annoys everyone? I was that guy. Many
times. But one occasion sticks out in my mind. I wish I could erase it from
space-time, but it is permanent. An inerasable disaster. It can never be undone.
Like Demonetization.
It was towards the end of grad school and I was in a class on behavioural economics or something. It was a class at the Yale School of Management. Around 50 other students were crammed into the amphitheater-style lecture room and we were talking about moral hazard, adverse selection, tragedy of the commons, and so on. The topic of price gouging in pharmaceuticals came up and it led to an interesting discussion.
“If we stop pharma companies from maximizing
profits, will they still invent the vital drugs we need?” – or something
like that. The professor put up a picture of disgraced pharma investor Martin
Shrkeli, who had risen to notoriety for increasing the price of a life saving
drug by 5000%. He became the pale, sneering face of Wall St excess – even for a
hedge fund manager, he was repulsive. The incel’s incel. He was later convicted and jailed
for securities fraud but is now back on the streets, probably looking to sell
heroin to puppies.
Anyway, yours truly had recently seen an interview with Shkreli
where he described why he was being framed by the media and why his raising the
price 5000% on that life-saving medication was actually the morally right thing
to do. He had justified it quite well, from my memory. What I hadn’t remembered
though, were the specific details of why raising the price was in the interest
of patients who needed that drug.
And so, right after the professor put Shkreli’s face on the
screen, I chimed in with a “well, actually, this whole incident was a red
herring and the 5000% increase was misnomer, because… uhh..” and then I could
feel the piercing gaze of all the men in the room and I would see all the women
rolling their eyes in disbelief. The professor glared at me too, as I stammered
and I spluttered my limp retort out into the middle of the lecture hall. It was
like Frodo stunned in the gaze of Sauron’s great eye. The professor allowed my
answer to just hang there in the air in the middle of that lecture hall, like a
pathetic, dying Karp writhing on the floor of a fishing boat.
Why did I have to answer? Why couldn’t I just confine my
stupid, uncooked, edgy little thought to the dungeons of man-brain where they
belong? How many people in that class went to Reddit right after and complained
about me? Oh god. What was I thinking?
I’ve tried to learn, in the years since grad school, to keep
my mouth shut, to remember that edgy ideas are edgy for a reason – that far
more erudite minds than mine have wrestled with them and found them unworthy of
further examination. That some Tweets are better left as drafts. That most hot
takes are bad takes. I’m sorry again for being a contrarian dick and for
trying to constantly “provoke a response” out of people who just want to
chill. I will do better, I promise. If you see me being a edgelord, please tell
my sister and she will Whatsapp me saying “Shravan shut up” and I will.
