Negation Aspiration vol. 174

What is a “doomer?” A character archetype first fleshed out on 4chan last year, the doomer is a depressed, purposeless 20-something usually depicted smoking a cigarette and wearing a beanie. The doomer isn’t necessarily a NEET — that is, a basement-dwelling, unemployed loser “not in education, employment, or training,” as the acronym suggests. He simply doesn’t believe he, or his society, or, for that matter, the planet have much of a future. He has, to use the 4chan phrase, been “black-pilled” into nihilism and despair. This deep, black-pilled despair — plus the doomer’s lack of faith in the ability of contemporary liberal-democratic politics to give him a future — plus also the fact that he’s probably a weird guy who spent too much time on message boards in high school — is why, at least in some incarnations, the doomer turns to highly reactionary or hard-left revolutionary politics,  inwardly fantasizing about a catastrophic restructuring of society even as he goes through the motions of participation in society at large. Out of their nihilism, doomers construct barely coherent fusion ideologies, some of which are listed in the artist Joshua Citarella’s study of Politigram. What is this ambiguously ironic, endlessly shifting kaleidoscope of abject nihilism and new or forgotten world-remaking political tendencies? The many claimed ideologies of the most vocal doomers can seem less like proper visions of an ideal society, and more like, as Citarella observes, the performances of highly individuated identity you’d find in “the identity politics culture of Tumblr.” My sense is that “Libertarian Neo-Monarchism” and “Dharmic Eco-Reactionaryism” (to pick out two examples) aren’t really two different philosophies, but two manifestations of a broader ideology —  a “doomerism” that’s recently taken root in the internet’s weirder, darker corners.

Is Andrew Yang the Doomer Candidate?