We've seen this template before. After the 1997 Heaven's Gate suicides the cultists' Web-design work was seen as natural for a bunch of loons. The Oklahoma City bombing saw an obsession with militia material online and a near-identical AOL user-profile hoax for Timothy McVeigh. And you know where it goes from here: The killers deployed sophisticated bombs requiring extensive explosives knowledge, and we all know where that comes from. Rest assured, of course, that although authorities also determined that the killers used such low-tech paraphernalia as cooking fuel and nails, few authorities will step forward in the coming days to question the ethics of the Hank Hills of the world or to ask you to consider monitoring your child's frequenting of hardware stores.

The Internet isn't taking the rap alone. In fact, the phenomenal thing about this case is that it wraps up so many subculture bugbears into one dripping package, a screwy mélange of Marilyn Manson, Hitlerphilia, Gothicism, anarchism, role-playing games, Eurorock and gun culture (a Goth musician on CNN's "Talkback Live" said the suspects "sounded about as Goth as Johnny Cash"). There was even the trench coat, for which the San Francisco Chronicle offered a grand-unification theory: "a symbol for everything from Hitler and the Nazis to mass murder to suicidal fantasies." This bizarre potpourri of signifiers might suggest to anyone assessing it that, just possibly, these oddly matched usual suspects attract already-troubled kids instead of creating new ones.

Popular culture and technology mavens should perhaps be flattered by the importance that the media accord them here. And in fact, there were interesting uses of technology in the crisis, such as the live cell-phone calls from students trapped in the high school; Garrick Utley of CNN called the shooting "our first interactive siege."

But clearly there are deeper fears at work. We are eternally concerned with what technology will do to us -- how it will change our minds, change our lives, affect our livelihoods. In this sense -- apropos of the "Web cult" talk -- technology is like religion: We adulate and fear both, we consider both potentially destabilizing and so we adopt taboos moderating how seriously we are allowed to take them. In our broadly but shallowly religious society, there are two people we distrust intensely, the atheist and the deeply religious, and we've applied the same principle to technology. The Heaven's Gate cultists were seen as somehow dangerous not just because they made a suicide pact but because they designed Web pages; Ted Kaczynski was crazy not just because he blew people up but because he spurned technology.

Any society that didn't want to explain what happened in Littleton would be a society of dead souls. We want to identify the one bad gear that we can replace and make everything right. So we look for it. But the simple truth is, some disturbed people can now use a tool they didn't have before. Students can watch their own potential last moments on classroom televisions, can hear themselves calling out live on cell phones. And ... and what, exactly? The far-flung, Zeitgeisty elements of this story tantalizingly hint that there must be some common thread, some tangible difference in the way we live and kill today. But good luck finding it. The only lesson to be drawn so far is this: From broadband to print, wireless to cable, we now have myriad forums in which to be left speechless.
salon.com | April 22, 1999

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