When the identity of Luigi Mangione, the alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter, was revealed on Monday, the online search — a reporting process that’s become a collective online ritual — began. It turns out he left a lot of information online: an active account on X, an Instagram, a Facebook, a Goodreads, a Reddit account, and maybe even a Tinder profile. The dossier came together fast.
Reporters and social-media users noted possible red flags, strange and eerie fragments of information, and small ironies. On Goodreads, he had posted a contrarian riff on Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto. Was it evidence of violent tendencies? He also reviewed a couple of books about back pain. On X, he posted about AI superintelligence and followed some anti-woke pundits. Had he tumbled down a slippery slope? Was he blackpilled? Some sort of accelerationist? On Reddit, he posted about backpacks and spinal injuries. Had he been hiding in plain sight all along?
In isolation, with the hindsight that they were posted by someone who went on to allegedly assassinate a health-care CEO, these accounts, and some of these posts, assumed new meaning, which is reasonable and understandable: It’s a crazy story that people want to understand, and the way social media has been processing it more broadly is unprecedented in about six different ways. But what’s most striking about Mangione’s extensive online dossier is that, had it been studied before the shooting took place, it wouldn’t have raised much alarm. You can spend hours reading these posts, sifting through his follows, and looking for clues about what Type of Guy he is, but the supportable theories are pretty thin: Mangione had an online profile consonant with his identity and context. He shared and posted and followed like a 20-something striver with a foot in the tech industry, listened to Rogan, and considered himself a rationalist or at least unusually rational.
His media consumption — wellness podcasts, a dash of “heterodox” punditry, tech personalities on X — might have placed him near some worrying ideological tendencies, but no more so than millions of other young men in his social milieu; on digital paper, he’s a bit like one of those young male swing voters that dominated post-election recriminations, albeit with an Ivy on his LinkedIn. If a dating profile led you to these accounts, you might wonder if he was going to talk at you about AI or if he might be sort of socially awkward. You might wonder if he’s a bit of a pod bro, or an RFK guy, but you’d also see a lot of stuff that looks — again, without future context — if not normal, then demographically typical. You wouldn’t have wondered if he was planning an assassination. You’d probably have assumed he was friendly! Now, everyone’s looking for the online trail that leads directly the sidewalk in front of the Midtown Hilton, but they haven’t quite found it. Nor, in 2024, should they expect to.
For years, the internet has been the place to look to find the story behind the story, where suddenly notorious figures stashed secrets and left clues about what they’d really been thinking and planning all along. The pre-social web was an opaque place full of pseudonymous people speaking freely, where people felt relatively invisible to the real world and even to other people online. In 1999, investigators found valuable information in paper diaries kept by the Columbine shooters; by 2009, it was MySpace posts about the Columbine shooters you were looking for. In the 2010s, the “online trail” was an expected feature of stories about people who had spectacularly killed or been killed. The guy who shot Gabby Giffords left behind worrying (if inscrutable) posts and videos. The man behind the 2011 Norway student massacre left behind a bunch of blog and social-media posts that fit the profile of a raging neo-Nazi with a desire to put his beliefs into action.
This was, for a while, a niche form of reporting, often done by amateurs and eventually professionalized by new media organizations with young employees. It promised revelation from the dark corners of the web: While reporters were on the street getting quotes from neighbors about how the killer was “such a nice boy, and quiet,” a compilation of violent or alarming posts, made in secrecy or obscurity, would tell the real story. In practice, it wasn’t always so fruitful. The younger of the Boston Marathon bombers maintained a couple fairly boring social-media accounts. What was still notable in 2013, other than the fact that he posted a few times on Twitter after the bombing, was that that they existed at all; the process of their excavation still suggested getting closer to some sort of truth. I remember working with colleagues at BuzzFeed to find the Sandy Hook school shooter’s online footprint. He had edited Wikipedia articles about mass shooters and posted about weapons on forums; we found a gaming profile under which he’d logged thousands of hours on a niche first-person shooter. It was morbidly interesting, millions of people were morbidly interested, but it didn’t explain much.
Faith in the existence of meaning in the “online trail” started waning when social media achieved full ubiquity. By the mid-2010s, the sorts of evidence you’d find in the aftermath of a shocking news event tended to be either hidden in places like 4chan — intentionally inscrutable communities within a fully mainstream internet — or left behind intentionally to be found and shared in the form of a manifesto, an archived Discord channel, or a recording of the act itself. These revelations could still be illuminating or at least shocking — the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter left a trail of posts on the right-wing social-media site Gab, for example — but in recent years, the post-news deep-dive, which has become a messy and fraught spectacle unto itself, wasn’t producing much in the way of understanding. Mostly, if you were planning a dramatic crime, you knew better than to post about it. If you wanted nobody to see you, or suspect you of anything, you simply didn’t post about it.
Mangione’s stubbornly normal online footprint, and the way the media and public have feasted upon it, marks the closing of this circle. Online, he was a guy with unremarkable niche interests and a serious appetite for boring productivity books. The reflexive assumption that his digital trail must contain essential, decodable truths about his motives has produced less in the way of insight than of fandom, which is constructed online through a similar process of breathless driven data aggregation. It’s also produced some incredibly strange coverage:
In some ways, the roles of “the internet” and “real life” have been swapped, here. Mangione exchanged messages about health care (and a range of other topics) with a Substack blogger earlier this year, but the conversations were friendly — when the news of Mangione’s arrest broke, the writer, Gurwinder Bhogal, wrote, “I hope there’s been some kind of a mix-up, because this doesn’t seem like him at all.”
The internet, in other words, was where Mangione seemed more or less fine. The image of a door-knocked neighbor shaking her head wondering about how such a nice boy could have done such a thing has been replaced with posts from Substackers and popular X accounts sharing more or less the same sentiment. For someone of Mangione’s age and background — a tech-savvy cuspy zoomer – the internet is, at least as much as other places you exist, where you want to act and look normal. It’s where people see you! So if something changes, and if you start to think about doing something extreme, you probably just leave.
As far as we can tell, that’s what he did. Mangione was caught with a 3D-printed gun, fake identification, and a brief handwritten manifesto that, granted our limited knowledge of his state of mind, seems much more direct about what he did and why he did it than anything people managed to scrape from online feeds. “My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there,” he wrote, before saying something completely unlike the character he presented online for his entire adult life. “I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.”
More on the UnitedHealthcare Shooting
- Luigi Mangione Charged With Terrorism in Killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO
- The Bigger Vigilante-Worship Problem Is Happening on the Right
- Luigi Mangione Has a Fan Club at Pennsylvania Prison
