I’ve found a story of how the deepest prejudices in a society can take purchase in new settings due to technology - transforming not only online spaces but real lives and potentially even the trajectory of our politics. What I’ve found is more than just a community twisted into a grotesque parody of its original shape. I’ve spoken with more than a dozen current and former incel forum posters, including two site administrators, and acquired logs of an incel chat room from around the time of the Toronto attack. In the year since Toronto, I’ve followed the incel movement closely, reading its websites and subreddits regularly. “Rage,” ReformedIncel says, “has completely taken over.” Some posters even celebrated Chung’s killer the day of the attack, calling for other incels to follow up with “acid attacks” and “mass rape.” What was once an open-minded support group had degenerated into a place where praise for mass killers was tolerated, even normalized. Today’s incels are almost entirely men and boys who pollute their online forums with posts blaming women for their sexless lives. The van’s driver was a self-described incel - but the community today would not be recognizable to those who built it decades earlier. Chung was one of 10 killed So was one of 16 wounded. On the way there, a van hopped the curb onto the sidewalk and slammed into pedestrians. It wasn’t a short walk - the subway would have been faster - but Chung and her roommate, So Ra, wanted to enjoy the sunshine.Ĭhung and So never made it to the library. In April 2018, about 20 years after the early incel community coalesced, a college student in Toronto named Sohe Chung decided to walk to the library. It was, he told me, “kind of an SJW community.” It was a welcoming place, one where men who didn’t know how to talk to women could ask the community’s female members for advice (and vice versa). The teenager, now a man who uses the handle “ReformedIncel” to keep his internet history out of his offline life, recalls the online incel world of the 1990s and 2000s fondly. The group eventually became a community, one that began using a phrase to describe their romantic troubles - “involuntary celibacy.” Later the term would get shortened: “incel.” There he found friends: other people who were awkward in real life, particularly when it came to sex and dating. He was a shy kid, too introverted to feel fully comfortable in the real world, and he logged on to the early internet’s bare-bones web forums for a sense of connection. In the late 1990s, a lonely teenager on the West Coast fired up his dial-up modem to find someone to talk to.
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