Abbey’s Road

Everyone knows the numbers. If they haven’t read them lately, they know which way things are headed. But, to refresh: this past year, the average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeded 425 parts per million, a number that long ago eclipsed scientists’ warning thresholds for catastrophe (350 ppm) and which only shows signs of acceleration. Coral reefs bleach, permafrost melts, storms intensify. Mass migration is beginning. There have already been deaths. Action is necessary—everyone knows it. People protest. When marches fall on deaf ears, young people stage sit-ins, interrupt the speaking gigs of cretinous politicians, block roads. Lately they have been throwing soup onto Van Goghs, perhaps a sign of desperation: art can’t save us, nor can art’s destruction. For a person radicalized by the complete lack of movement from all centers of power, a Semtex vest might start to look appealing.

In a 2021 essay in the London Review of Books on the work of Swedish philosopher-activist Andreas Malm, James Butler began by asking, “Where are all the ecoterrorists?” Although there have been scattered acts of environmental sabotage in the last few years—for instance, those of Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, activists who clandestinely sabotaged the Dakota Access Pipeline until they called a press conference to raise awareness of their work—such acts remain rare. More visible in public in recent years are the aforementioned, more theatrical demonstrations of groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. Setting aside the effectiveness of these actions (Malm thinks they don’t work), only reactionaries and contrarian scolds would be inclined to call these “terrorism.” Terrorist, after all, is just what we call our enemies. Malm argues that activists should be willing to go further, to act aggressively and not fall back on public opinion to turn the tide. After all, support for change is supposedly already there; again, everyone knows the numbers. As environmental conditions degrade across the world in countless ways, and as mass politics fails for now to achieve significant results (the second election of Donald Trump all but ensures the jamming shut of the window), few are willing to escalate further. Even if there are more disruptions going on in the shadows than we’re aware of, on an existential scale the balance is off: if everyone believed what they read about a warming world, one might expect more, and more serious, revolts.

Perhaps more radical action is coming soon. In the meantime, the ecoterrorists are not out in there in the wild, but rather as a steady stream of representations in fiction and film. Authors and filmmakers have created legions of ecological radicals, almost as if they hoped to manifest them through their work. Take Daniel Goldhaber’s 2022 film How to Blow Up a Pipeline, loosely based on Malm’s book of the same name. It was much commented on that Malm’s text, a work of theory, was light on instructions to match its provocative title. The film is an attempt then to create an image of what it might be like to fulfill the book’s aspirations, as a (perhaps improbably) diverse group of young people meet and collaborate to sabotage a pipeline in Texas. Their goal is not just symbolic action, but instead to damage the economic system and disrupt “business as usual.” The film is tightly edited, keeping outside events to a minimum, granular in its focus of showing how the band gets the job done. The kids dig, haul, and sweat. They mix chemicals, they titrate, they prepare blasting caps, their hands shake. They plot and they doubt, but proceed anyway.

The film’s implicit question is one of identification: Could you, under the right circumstances, imagine yourself doing this work? Pipeline is a dutiful, at times grippingly well-edited, piece of propaganda. With more sympathy than most would permit, it affords the viewer a fantasy of identification with its bomb-builders. If it contains a note of radical chic, the film tries to overcome it with deep sincerity. In general, we’re numb to the idea that that art might seriously intervene in politics, much less the question of planetary survival. But ecoterror in fiction and film has from its inception occupied a unique place in the rift between culture and politics, weighing the idea of drastic measures as conditions continue on a downhill slide. As works about bombers and burners have flowered, these representations are perhaps the primary way that the public wrestles with questions of individual political action—an odd reversal of the old environmentalist reminder that we all must “do our part” (don’t forget to turn out the lights when you leave home). But why does reality lag behind the image?

It could be argued that the ecoterror novel was born in America with Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. Abbey is one of the great nature writers, though he disliked the term, avoiding the genre’s wide-eyed platitudes in favor of being “coarse, rude, bad-tempered, violently prejudiced, unconstructive.” A misanthrope with anarchist tendencies, Abbey rejected the literary establishment, spending years as a ranger in the national parks of Utah and other states, eking out a frugal living and writing about the landscape he believed was being destroyed by unchecked development. In his novel, a group of four Southwesterners—a manic ex-Green Beret, a doctor with a penchant for cutting down billboards, a polygamist Mormon river guide, and a Jewish New York transplant with hippie affinities—band together to cause as much mayhem as they can as they stalk the Four Corners area, with the authorities in hot pursuit.

Abbey takes an almost childlike delight in chronicling destruction, from pulling up survey stakes to incapacitating bulldozers to blowing up bridges. Abbey didn’t have to imagine too much, sabotage-wise, as he admitted to performing many of the same actions as his characters, and the painstaking detail of his descriptions strongly implies that they are also a thinly disguised handbook for application in real life. When you get into the bulldozer, Abbey wants you to know how to disengage the clutch. While occasionally sloppy, the novel is also great fun, a defiant challenge to the serious navel-gazing of serious literature. Abbey’s vision, while not without its flaws (those misanthropic tendencies also included racist and xenophobic views), follows the joy of people taking action, whatever the odds, a contrast to the sense of hand-wringing fatalism that laces so much environmental writing today.

A case in which literature really did prompt direct action, the influence of The Monkey Wrench Gang was ultimately more political than literary, becoming a major inspiration for the activist group Earth First!, who were friendly with Abbey and who became well known for acts of “monkeywrenching” (i.e. environmental sabotage) drawn from the novel’s pages. Abbey’s great dream had always been the destruction of the Glen Canyon Dam, one of the largest dams on the Colorado River, the mechanism for the creation of Lake Powell (in his view, a stagnant graveyard for houseboats). In his first and best-known book of essays, Desert Solitaire, Abbey describes the beauty of rafting down Glen Canyon, writing with the melancholy knowledge that he was one of the last people to experience its beauty. Accordingly, one of Earth First!’s inaugural (if symbolic) actions was to unroll a massive black tarp down the side of the Glen Canyon Dam, creating the image of a crack running down the side of the massive concrete edifice.

Of course, Abbey raises the question of whether environmental sabotage can accurately be called “terrorism” at all, especially if the intention is to harm property and not people. The label, of course, falls in with the thinking of state control. Abbey frequently expressed the idea that the people and corporations who wished to destroy unpeopled nature were the true terrorists. His ideas were in many ways anti-humanist, even anti-human, and perhaps they help explain the affinity of environmental radicalism with solitary acts of destruction: valuing nature at least as much, or more, than human desires will never be a majority position. Despite its flaws, the “deep ecology” thinking of late-twentieth-century radical environmentalism anticipated the failure of public opinion on climate to slow rapacious destruction—even if lone wolves haven’t managed to accomplish much either.

If humanity is not aligned with nature’s needs, it is natural to try to look back to a greener, fuzzier past. Environmental thought is frequently caught in the paradox of recognizing people as both part of nature and at the same time radically separate, to the point of being able to destroy it. In Abbey’s novel, George Hayduke, the ex-Green Beret, has a fantasy that leans into the long view of history:

When the cities are gone, he thought, and all the ruckus has died away, when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of the forgotten interstate freeways, when the Kremlin and the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for generals, presidents and other such shitheads, when the glass-aluminum skyscraper tombs of Phoenix Arizona barely show above the sand dunes, why then, why then, why then by God maybe free men and wild women on horses, free women and wild mean, can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom—goddammit!—herding the feral cattle into box canyons, and gorge on bloody meat and bleeding fucking internal organs, and dance all night to the music of fiddles! banjos! steel guitars! by the light of a reborn moon!—by God, yes! Until, he reflected soberly, and bitterly, and sadly, until the next age of ice and iron comes down, and the engineers and the farmers and the general motherfuckers come back again.

Abbey doesn’t quite endorse Hayduke’s cyclical view of civilization, but the novel embraces the mentality of a noble but lost cause. In Abbey’s era, environmental activism was focused on particular places that people believed deserved protection, particularly the idea of a wilderness that remained unspoiled by modern life. The environmental direct action that Abbey helped popularize emerged from the American West because it had been less touched by development. Abbey and Earth First! saw the signs of manmade imposition: the damming of the Colorado River, the cutting of new roads into the desert, the extraction of coal and its toxic burning on the Navajo reservation to provide energy for the coastal grid. Into the 1990s, action focalized in the Pacific Northwest, as massive redwoods and other old-growth forest became charismatic flora and a cause célèbre.

With a few exceptions—like Jim Harrison’s A Good Day to Die (1973), another dam-buster that slightly predates Abbey—ecoterror remained off the radar of literary fiction in the decades following Abbey’s novel; presumably it was too nakedly political for “sophisticated” tastes. Don DeLillo, the great chronicler of terrorism in our time, only glanced at it; his clearest foray into environmental questions, White Noise, is, presciently in its own way, more a satire of academic and middle-class complacency (the “airborne toxic event,” as freshman students have been told, is as much a metaphor as anything). But in the 1990s, the “eco-thriller” was born in mass-market fiction, presumably ripped from the headlines of FBI investigations into arsonists, tree-spikers, and other monkeywrenchers—not to mention the spectacle surrounding the hunt for Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber. The Earth Liberation Front, an even more extreme offshoot of Earth First!, grabbed headlines for a series of arsons and other acts of sabotage both in Europe and in the Pacific Northwest. Michael Crichton’s State of Fear and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six both cast environmental radicals as cynical and dangerous villains that must be stopped by virtuous pro-government forces (in Crichton’s novel, the ELF are the culprits). Soon after, America’s most aggressive environmental movements began to fall to police crackdown. Perhaps the most concrete reason ecoterror is less widespread today is the concentrated effort the U.S. government put into suppressing it through the 1990s and 2000s. After 9/11, counterterrorism laws intensified, and the FBI and other agencies used their new powers to aggressively prosecute members of the Earth Liberation Front, delivering suspected arsonists to lengthy jail sentences.

The mass market eco-thriller novels, predictably, have no sympathy for environmentalists—they are as villainous as can be. But there certainly is a lot of action, from giant tsunamis to species-threatening viruses; even as mouthpieces of consensus, denialism, and the state, these books intuitively understood the scale of the conflict. Coming from American ascendancy in the 1990s, they were able to still float the idea that climate change was uncertain (State of Fear contains an afterward that lays out Crichton’s “research” in which he predicts that global temperatures will rise by less than one degree in the next century, a number we’ve already surpassed), but a sense of unease and looming crisis rumbles beneath them. The arrival of global warming—on time with surging globalization—as the omni-environmental issue had changed the emphasis, creating a struggle that seems to have fronts both everywhere and nowhere.

Alongside this, the diffuse genre of “climate fiction” was slowly born, spanning a huge range of works from Octavia Butler’s prescient Parable of the Sower (1993) to blockbuster disaster films like Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004). As serious literature or as schlock, dystopia has dominated. In its typical holistic framing (a rhetoric that accentuates the idea of “humanity’s” responsibility), climate change concerns everyone, and so provides a large canvas for ambitious artists. After all, climate change is a perfect subject for a writer who fears their own marginality. In the last few years, ecoterror has become a more prominent subject for film and literature exactly because of this new, diffuse scientific and political reality. If climate disaster is not portrayed as an overall condition, as in dystopian fiction, then artists gravitate towards individual actors. An arsonist or a dam-bomber has a narrative concreteness that can’t be matched by telling you the parts per million of CO2 accumulated. For a certain kind of liberal artwork, ecoterror becomes the release valve of climate anxiety, activating the sense that something ought to be done, but ultimately resolving and soothing—drastic action is, in the end, either too unethical or doomed to failure.

Having struggled with it, a certain reader thinks, might make them virtuous enough. The ecoterrorist as a position of identification can be flirted with and then discarded. Accordingly, even a subject like Kaczynski can be novelized and neutralized, as in Maxim Loskutoff’s recent novel Old King. More concerned with narrating the inner lives of people living in the hardscrabble Montana town near Kaczynski, Old King works itself backward toward daily life and ordinary subjectivity. Ted’s there, yes, but he is no more important than a guy stealing a microwave from his ex-wife. Larger questions become a kind of meaning inflation, suggesting high stakes as way of propping up the usual.

One of the most ambitious recent novels of ecoterror is Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. Instead of the familiar locus of “small town America,” Powers opts for the other end of liberalism’s shtick—“humanity” viewed from dizzyingly distant heights. The novel weaves together multiple narratives of people who live alongside and love trees in some way, the sprawl of the novel again invoking that classic humanist idea that we’re all connected: ecologists, modest suburbanites and even video game designers (Powers’ essential nerdiness always shines through). But its most dynamic strands revolve around a group of climate activists who, beginning with tree-sits, are eventually drawn into attempting arson at a prospective ski resort. Predictably, their attempt at destruction goes awry, resulting in the death of one of the members of the cell. This is the central tragedy of the novel, and in many ways the heart of its vision, determining the lives of the other members and inscribing the idea that radical action is ineffective. The novel’s huge scope, filled with encyclopedic information on the wonder of trees, has at its center little to say about how anything really works or changes, relying instead on cribbed psychology of “cognitive blindness.” Under the meticulous canopy, lush and detailed, is a pat fatalism.

Film, too, has become a rich storehouse of imagined militants, including Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves (a loose adaptation of Monkey Wrench Gang), Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, along with Pipeline and others. First Reformed is one of the most successful works of art that brushes against environmental terrorism, perhaps because of its uncompromisingly bleak attitude toward the future. Ethan Hawke plays Ernst Toller, a lonely priest radicalized after meeting a troubled member of his flock who is plotting something. When the man dies, Toller gets drawn in, sympathizing with his cause. Isolated from his community, drinking away his life, Toller’s dark night of the soul appears as though it may culminate in action: a planned suicide bombing attack against the CEO of a major environmental polluter. Schrader’s film has no theory of change, nor could it, but it is searing in its understanding of atomized despair, mixed with a belated solidarity. As opposed to all-too-expected platitudes of time running out—a vague fear we can ultimately compartmentalize—the film sees with an austere vision the desperate state of affairs and gives its audience no space to lie to itself. Even as a successful work of art, it raises the question of what portrayals of terrorism can do except honestly reflect the failure of our collective effort to save ourselves. If Malm and his film offshoot suggest that more can be done, the spark of a Monkeywrench-like jump into reality is slow to arrive.

A new entry to the annals of ecoterror fiction arrives with Rachel Kushner’s acclaimed novel Creation Lake. Kushner’s novel marks a departure from the recent crop of ecoterror novels swamped in liberal bromides. It is not narrated from the perspective of any would-be radical. Instead, we inhabit the voice of alias Sadie Smith—we never learn her “real” name—an undercover agent tasked with infiltrating and entrapping ecoterrorist groups. The reader meets Sadie driving through rural, southwestern France, drinking heavily on her way to meet Pascal Balmy, the leader of a back-to-the-land commune and a childhood friend of the filmmaker she has seduced in order to secure the meeting. Instead of identification or sympathy, this is an opposing cynicism, a voice that assured in the rightness of the paycheck, of getting one’s own and getting over on the dreamers.

Pascal’s outfit is called Le Moulin, a group of anarchists suspected of sabotaging TGV lines and earthmovers. Sadie is a cipher, a window into their world, and she takes pains to remind the reader how little they know of her background. What we do know is that she is an American, formerly a grad student (her disguise is would-be translator of Le Moulin’s philosophical writings), and more recently a cop tasked with attempting to induce a young American man to commit sabotage: “This drive to prove that eco-activists were terrorists was so strong and so relentless that I began to feel that I had no choice but to plant the idea of violence in the boy’s head, since he was doing a poor job of coming to it on his own.” This echo of the FBI’s investigations into American ecoterrorists is a curious wrinkle—a trace of the American origin of a writer who has chosen to export her material into a European struggle perhaps more seductive from afar. Unfortunately, a jury has seen through Sadie’s efforts, and she has been cast out of law enforcement and into private enterprise, those faceless, corporate interests that are less concerned with the law’s strictures. The book draws on the form of the spy novel, as Sadie, weapons and satellite link at the ready, schemes to enter Pascal’s inner circle and see what he and his cadre are up to. Meanwhile, she drinks more, ignores her boyfriend’s calls, and begins a sexual relationship with one of the commune’s members.

Le Moulin seems like a cross between the so-called Tarnac Nine—the alleged authors, as The Invisible Committee, of the Semiotext(e) classic The Coming Insurrection—and more recent hardline ecological movements like Les Soulèvements de la Terre, a group that has performed its own acts of sabotage and aggressively protested the “megabasin” projects (in effect, artificial reservoirs for big agriculture) that Kushner’s communards object to as well. Kushner has always sampled freely from the annals of radical politics, from the Cuban revolutionaries in her first novel, Telex from Cuba, to the Italian futurists and autonomists in her second, The Flamethrowers. Her previous novel, The Mars Room, contains excerpts of Ted Kaczynski’s diaries, offering a counterpoint of grim solitude to the prison narrative at the novel’s center and a foreshadowing of the author turning her whole attention towards ecological crisis. Creation Lake is another treasure hunt of references for the clued-in, from Tarnac to Guy Debord to a writer with a striking resemblance to Michel Houellebecq. A pair of would-be radical castoffs, wearing Mao-style caps, are christened “Mao I and Mao II” by Sadie, a brief nod to Kushner’s spiritual forefather, Don DeLillo.

While Kushner has drawn on the energy and glamor of revolutionaries, she often has chosen to narrate them from the periphery—she is more likely to take the perspective of, say, an ex-Nazi or the son of a sugar plantation owner, as she did in Telex. Kushner doesn’t believe that it’s the novel’s job to model virtuous behavior for us, political or otherwise, opting instead for the frisson of the revolutionary moment, the instant where it seems like, in the words of The Invisible Committee, “It’s about to explode.” Kushner may risk radical chic, but one ultimately can’t fault the choice to write about interesting things instead of mundane ones. At the same time, there is the secondary risk that interest is external to the novel’s art. The subjects are cool, yes, but is it enough to hold them up and revolve them in the light? Creation Lake is full of feints about its intentions. Teasing its reader for thinking of taking things too seriously, the novel seeks to sidestep the ethical and emotional questions of environmental action altogether. Sadie describes herself as someone you can project your desires onto, attractive but easily forgettable. Kushner provides the unsubtle hint of Sadie’s frequent reference to her large and fake breasts: “Are my breasts real? Did it matter?” This most unreliable narrator is a guide on a journey of skepticism, looking in on the strong and misguided (male) attitudes of other characters.

Creation Lake owes something to the French tradition of the roman noir, the hardboiled crime novels perhaps best exemplified by the author Jean-Patrick Manchette. Manchette’s novels like Fatale (about an unknown woman who infiltrates a small town in order to scam its prominent citizens) and Nada (about a group of revolutionaries whose plans go awry) feature characters that have personality but little interiority—a bourgeois indulgence. It’s often quoted that Manchette believed the crime novel to be “the great moral literature of our times,” and while this is ultimately dubious, it offers a helpful critique of typical ideas of what the novel can do. There is no manufactured sentiment, no belief that empathetic reading will make us better, more virtuous people. In other words, no bullshit. Accordingly, Sadie’s voice is designed to be a jolt to credulous pieties, and maybe is in some sense a necessary one. After all, if climate catastrophe is the paramount moral issue of our times, it is also shot through with plenty of pretense and sanctimony, particularly in fiction. Tender feelings in novels, Kushner suggests, is where real thinking goes to die.

But Sadie’s attempts at espionage are only one half of the novel. More of her time is spent reading emails between Pascal and a reclusive intellectual named Bruno Lacombe (drawn partly from the French philosopher Jacques Camatte), who lives near the Moulinard commune and whom the radicals consider a spiritual guide. The once-revolutionary Lacombe has long forsaken revolution, telling his pupils that “trying to dismantle capitalism from within capitalism is a dead end.” Instead, he prefers to think backward, writing long disquisitions about the superiority of Neanderthals and the pleasures of hanging out in a cave—something not too far from Hayduke in Monkeywrench, spiced with post-Marxist theory. Like Sadie, Bruno’s perspective is also amusingly unreliable, as he praises the brainpower of the “Thals” and waxes poetic about the absolute dark of darkness of the abyss, and so on. As Sadie reads on, she becomes increasingly gripped by Bruno’s reflections, culminating in a frenzied search for him. In some ways, Lacombe is closer to a being a traditional protagonist—he has a backstory (down and out in postwar Paris, a brush with Debord), loss, even trauma. But he, too, has little faith in the ability of individuals to alter the landscape.

What to make of these two lobes? Perhaps they are two visions of the novel in competition: on one hand, recourse to genre fiction in order to bypass the played-out categories of the supposedly-high-literary. On the other, a parody of the essayism that we associate with certain newer contemporary fictions: a lyrical flirtation with nonfiction and philosophical ideas. While Kushner shows herself capable of executing both styles, they remain heterogenous in the novel. The result is a collection of attitudes, notions, and gestures, but no way to organize or activate them further. Against the backdrop of environmental devastation, Creation Lake could most charitably be said to be about this gap between our awareness of the crisis and our slack and selfish behavior toward it. But if it is an anti-novel of omissions and negations, what is left over? Stuffed with facts and impotent philosophies, it’s a slow starter for a spy story (in Manchette’s Fatale, for instance, someone gets shotgunned in the first page or two), reaching the commune of Le Moulin about halfway through the novel. Lacombe’s prehistoric fantasies swell in the pages and crowd out action—as the remaining pages count down, expectations that much will happen dwindles in turn. Once the reader reaches Le Moulin, Sadie continues her double-crossing, finding divisions in the group and its hangers-on and wedging her way between them. The novel’s climax feels like afterthought, concluding with an act of violence that is more accidental than intended. The idea of a novel’s “stakes” can seem like a curdled leftover of MFA thinking, but both genre and subject matter—climate catastrophe and potential revolution—invite us to read for them. In effect, the drying up of narrative mirrors the feeling of climate paralysis.

The result is farce, but an ambivalent one. Part of the joke seems to be that the so-called terrorists aren’t up to much. They can barely keep their own farm together, and their vision of a new society is unsurprisingly retrograde as women take on all the domestic work. Sadie’s unknown backers supply the final spark when they attempt to assassinate a minor French bureaucrat at a local agricultural fair. The idea that the rich, corporations, and states working to consolidate their already formidable power are the “real” terrorists seems true, but also familiar enough to have been written in 1975. The result is mostly cold water: the revolutionists have stopped for orangeade, and change is far more elusive than we think even in our most optimistic and imaginative moments. But one might wonder what the purpose of the eco-thriller is if there are so few thrills. In a wide-ranging interview with the literary magazine The Drift, Kushner asserts that “the novel as a form is not an occasion for taking a political position.” Artists can make a “retreat” from their marginality; maybe, she ventures, this aloofness has its own political value. But there’s something suspiciously settled about so clean a division between life and art, perhaps even complacent. Why voluntarily abandon the polemic? No shots are fired in Creation Lake, save one: a sick cow put down by a veterinarian in a passing scene.

In Mao II, DeLillo’s most extended meditation on terrorism, the reclusive author Bill Gray is drawn out of years of hiding and silence (as Bill’s assistant asserts, “The withheld work of art is the only eloquence left”) to, absurdly, help mediate a hostage crisis in Lebanon. In conversation, Gray floats the idea of a zero-sum game between fiction and terror:

What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous . . . In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. . . . Everything else is absorbed.

Written in 1991, before the first attack on the World Trade Center or the Oklahoma City bombing, there is a prophetic aspect to Gray’s musing—compared the shocks of the following decades, what novel or film could really be dangerous, even as, in the case of the ecoterror novel, it courts maximum importance? It’s possible to see much recent work as a kind of residue, “speaking to the times” but having lost faith in any real point of contact with the world. Even Pipeline, distributed by the “prestige” film studio Neon, retains the shine of a glossy product, safe from threatening anyone. In the case of Creation Lake, the novelist can reject empathetic pieties, or take up signifiers and push them around, but creating something that might feel like it shifts the balance remains far more difficult. We may be entering a period in which art’s political role is increasingly put to the question, but if there is disappointment in art’s power to spur change, there is no less a persistent failure in the political realm that it duly reflects.

DeLillo’s comparison was intended to provoke, and still does. Yet, in the aftermath of the war on terror, maybe the flesh and blood terrorists have less influence than DeLillo might have predicted. With the spread of social media platforms that seek to colonize every hour of our lives, is there not an image regime of “content” far more pervasive and powerful than the effect any individual terrorist could hope to achieve? We watch with numbness the latest school shooting, the latest atrocity perpetrated in Gaza, and few find the resources in themselves except to keep on scrolling, waiting for the next dose of low-grade horror. Morbidly, terror has become part of the “blur and glut” too.

The end of the year 2024 was punctuated by the most talked-about act of political violence in years: the alleged assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione. Carried out with a partially 3D printed gun and suppressor, according to police, Mangione’s vigilante act felt more contemporary than any novel I know. An unexpected sentiment emerged into public life: thousands of people felt extrajudicial violence was justified. Once Mangione was identified, internet sleuths immediately began combing through the killer’s online footprint—unsurprisingly, he was a poster. In many ways he was a typical twenty-six-year-old computer science major, feeding on the bro-podcast culture of Andrew Huberman and Tim Urban.

Perhaps it made sense that middlebrow self-improvement intellectualism could influence such an action, forgoing the shades of nuance that might be at home in a respectable work of art. Perhaps murder for health care justice sparked more approval because of the multitude of personal experiences with America’s broken and byzantine health care system, compared to the “slow violence” of climate change. On his Goodreads page, Mangione had left a four-star review of Kaczynski’s manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future, writing, “It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic . . . But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.” The pangs of identification were out there, bubbling up without warning. Would Thompson’s assassination lead to any change? Several days later, it was reported that at least four TV specials about Mangione were already in production.