The Eleven-Year History of the Media-Fiction Effects that Underpin Participatory Nihilistic Violence
It is the intention of this article to highlight and examine the socio-cognitive media affordances at play when online participatory myth-making turns to offline action. Though the media myth effects at play have existed for as long as the Internet has been established, a stabbing in Wisconsin in 2014 highlights how participation and myth can drive offline action. This article is split into two parts; the first uses the aforementioned attack to explore these complex effects; then, with a solid understanding of the media effects, we can map how they impact and shape the participatory dynamics of the contemporary landscape of radical nihilist violence.
1. Setting the Scene
In 2014 in Waukesha Wisconsin, twelve-year-old Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser took their friend and classmate, Payton Leutner, to a nearby woods and stabbed her 19 times. The girls claimed to have done this as a way of participating in a myth they read about online called “The Slender Man.” The Slender Man is a form of creepypasta - a type of collaborative fictional social-media fiction designed, in part, to appear as posts by real people online. The girls stated that they claimed they did this to become proxies, or acolytes, for the Slender Man - believing him to be a real entity who they could summon. The stabbing signaled the end of the “golden era” of Creepypasta and sparked a familiar moral panic around what media children can access on screens unsupervised.
The investigation and trial following “the Waukesha Slender Man Stabbing” revealed that Geyser suffered with early-onset childhood schizophrenia, and both she and Weier were found not guilty by mental disease or defect. Geyser remains committed to a forensic psychiatric hospital while Weier remains under supervised release, her Internet usage strictly monitored with no use of any form of social media. Following the attack, the Waukesha Police Chief warned parents that the Internet is “full of dark and wicked things” that lurk to drive children to stab their friends at the behest of fiction and narrative.
In the years since, there has been a steady stream of mass-casualty attacks predominantly (though certainly not always) in North America, emerging from the infinite recombination of “dark and wicked” communities and ideologies found online, from militant accelerationists obsessed with total societal transgression to more ambiguously motivated attackers with a bricolage of influences (of which the most well-known of which is called 764 and collectively are referred to as ‘The Communityʼ or ‘The Com Network’). In the wake of each of these attacks, a familiar routine is followed, examining what media the attackers were consuming online and what social groups or networks they were participating in.
Though there is merit and utility in categorizing these attackers based on their consumption of different flavours of the digital dark and wicked, this approach, much like the post-Waukesha warnings around Slender Man and creepypasta, misses the forest for the trees in how medium and narrative influence offline behaviour. Instead, it is my hope that through understanding how media shapes behaviour via participation in online myth and how it bridges to offline action, we can begin to develop more robust pathways for intervention.
2. The Medium is the Monster
Many online from the mid-aughts to mid-teens will be familiar with the monsters, memes, and creative output that fell under the umbrella of creepypasta. However, to demonstrate the link between Waukesha and contemporary mass shooting attacks and related violence, we must first explore what The Slender Man and creepypasta actually is. In a nutshell, creepypasta is an emergent form of horror fiction told through the socially networked internet across message boards, forums, and social media, and that derives its horror-affect through that medium.
The “golden era” of creepypasta roughly began with the 2001 Angelfire dread of Tedʼs Caving Page going viral on Bodybuilding.com, through to the variety of participatory stories on 4chan.org/x/, and, of course, The Slender Manʼs origin on Somethingawful.com up until the distinctly offline spillover in the tragic events in Waukesha. This was a wildly productive time for participatory horror stories.
The monsters of these stories were varied, some genuinely creepy, others (many, if weʼre honest) far less successful at being a scary concept. These were spun out into a kaleidoscope of sub-genres and crossovers. However, underneath all the dead Squidwards, tulpas, goatmen, and Rakes, the true horror lurked in its mode of delivery.
Creepypasta is a type of digital fiction since it is, undeniably, fiction that is written online (digitally). The Digital Fiction International Network definition of digital fiction is “fiction written for and read on a computer screen that pursues its verbal, discursive and/or conceptual complexity through the digital medium, and would lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from that medium”. That is to say, you cannot remediate creepypasta. Think about the film adaptation of The Slender Man or the Channel Zero series. These donʼt retain the same experience as reading these stories first hand. This is because networked social spaces online are integral to the stories.
The internet, as a networked social space, is primarily designed to promote and facilitate interaction and participation between users. These users are, to a greater or lesser extent, agreed to be ‘realʼ people, represented as text, avatar, username, and profile. This online social contract comes in the form of an informed sincerity. In his book, Digimodernism, cultural philosopher Alan Kirby zeroes on this agreement as the “apparently real” a state that is “the outcome of a silent negotiation between viewer and screen: we know itʼs not totally genuine, but if it utterly seems to be, then we will take it as such”.
To become semi-fictional, to become digital text online, is the price of entry to participate collaboratively online; we all know it, but we all move through the medium with little interrogation of this fact as long as everyone behaves above the threshold of authenticity. As Kirby frames it, “being in a chat room is a loss of self and an infinite expansion of selfhood; no longer you, you become the text yourself. Your thoughts and feelings become text, and in turn create who you are; othersʼ likewise. Thereʼs an ebbing away of human content and a seeping of the human into the textʼs ontology.” This blurring of ontology is the default setting for online participation and behavior, but it particularly well describes the closed Discord and Telegram communities maintained by The Com network, where individuals build themselves up to mythic status through abhorrent acts, all normalised by participation through the platform as a social setting (see more in section 3).
Unlike horror in film or literature, where the medium acts as an explicit or implicit separator between storyworld and reality, when first-person accounts of encounters with paranormal entities exist alongside apparently real posts from apparently real people (up to and including peers you know offline), one is presented with a choice of how sincere they should be in receiving those posts… and in turn all posts.
Creepypasta, therefore, derives its horror by complicating this social contract and pointing out that the medium on which it is written is ontologically flat. This - ontological flatness - is a state when real users and their responses, and the fictional story they are reading and responding to exist in the same textual space without borders, implied hierarchy, or explicit indicators of fictionality in the text.
Social media users, then, are not just readers or audience members. They contribute text, image, audio, and video to social media platforms; they navigate through platforms, following hyperlinks and keying in URLs; they interact with existing content, either that of other users or web pages; they spread and share existing content to other users across and between platforms. Users can, through social media, reach out and participate as a projection of themselves online with no difference in whether they are participating in fact or fiction.
The plot and attack by Geyser and Weier in Waukesha, then, is perhaps the inevitable conclusion of narrative participation on a medium built on both and the semi-fictionalization of the real and real-izing the fictional. Myth constructed through online first-person accounts of (fictional) real-life encounters easily spill over and become actual offline enactments - The Slender Man merely functioned as the skin worn by the medium.
Online networks such as the Com network and 764 leverage the media affordance of real-izing and dereal-izing to great effect, by inserting fictional accounts, fabricated images, and other community fabulations alongside authentic experience, gore images, torture, and extreme pornography. By fostering environments where accounts that create the horrors coexist with genuine interactions, these networks make it increasingly challenging for users, especially minors, to discern reality from fiction. The consequences of this effect are examined below.
3. Just Another Post
The phenomena that played out in May 2014 in Waukesha have significant resonance with the dynamics of contemporary mass shooters. Specifically, a resonance can be found in the kind of attack that emerges from a confluence of transgressive Internet social currents that are downstream of more ideologically coherent known groups such as Order of Nine Angles, Atomwaffen Division, Tempel ov Blood and other organized networks that blend what has become known as ‘militant accelerationismʼ with neo-nazism and satanism.
Unlike those forebear groups who have a clear and stated ideological mission, this loose collection of networks (of which the most well-known of which is called 764 and collectively are referred to as ‘The Communityʼ or ‘The Com network’) is composed primarily of minors and teens, collaborating and participating in a collective narrative of transcendental nihilism and ‘evil. This narrative is in part informed by the mythic image of O9A, AWD, Terrorgram Collective and peers as “satanic terrorist neo-nazis who worship evil”, and the fandom dynamics of true crime/”Columbiner” culture that have an internal hierarchy of obsession and performance of devotional knowledge, and lionize and encourage document and artefact collection based around mass shooters and serial killers.
While there are absolutely those within these networks that seek to extort, manipulate, and radicalize with a specific agenda in mind, the broad strokes of the network are children performing acts that fit within this shared narrative of evil to one another - resulting in a muddled mix of coercion, social climbing, performance, and fandom.
Much in the same way that creepypasta invites participation with myth and fiction as yourself alongside others doing the same, the digital-only mediation of The Com network allows a similar blurring. Pseudonyms and closed access aid in group semi-fictionalisation and “ostension” (the process of personally acting out a legend or myth narrative to ‘liveʼ it); the ontologically flat digital medium real-izing ‘being evilʼ and de-realizing offline action, thus muddying the boundaries between posting and action offline.
There are, however, differences in the participatory affect achieved through the collaborative digital medium. Creepypasta aims to disrupt social media usersʼ perception of the “apparently real” by appearing as an account of paranormal interaction alongside the posts of real users who then have the choice to engage with it sincerely or not, providing an entertaining frisson of the possibility of monsters and the paranormal.
By comparison, the narratives and myth collectively engaged with by The Com network actively encourage some of the most awful sadistic abuse imaginable, and are intended largely to be participated in and sustained by the group rather than to spill out to the “surface” web. The Com network actively recruits, grooms, and brings the vulnerable into its fold, preying on youths and appealing to their misanthropy with a mythic promise of transcendent nihilism.
This is a promise made easier as todayʼs teens have never not known an online/offline distinction and identity-finding – difficult enough as it is during puberty – is inherently shot through with always/already auto-fictionalizing both through social media and among peers. Ontological flatness, then, paves over the moral terrain that would discourage ostension and participation in acts such as recorded self-harm, sextortion of peers, and live streamed assault. All is posting, all is social, all is just as real as it isnʼt and thus provides an escape from the trials of contemporary teenagerdom.
This action recently spilled over in Wisconsin again on December 16, 2024, as fifteen-year-old Natalie Rupnow opened fire at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, killing a student and teacher before killing herself. It was revealed that she had participated in Discord channels and group chats linked to The Com network. This included seventeen-year-old man Solomon Henderson who planned and executed his own attack at his school in Antioch, Nashville, on January 22, 2025.
Rupnowʼs manifesto was suffused with nihilism towards humanity as a whole rather than ideological hate, and praised other shooters for the act of shooting rather than for furthering a goal.
Henderson’s manifesto illustrated a similar dynamic; praise for previous ideologically disconnected killers for the act of killing with an accompanying “score”, furthering emphasis on participation; a bricolage of subcultural aesthetic signifiers; and a nihilism resulting in a broad-spectrum hate for numerous demographics.
In both cases, the distinction between participatory online myth-making and kinetic offline action is collapsed. A mass shooting attack is simply one last post from someone who existed between online and offline; the ultimate form of participation in the collective myth of radical, transcendent nihilism guaranteeing that they will, themselves, become mythic by being referenced in manifestos to come.
The minors of The Com network arenʼt the only ones affected by the ontologically flat nature of digital spaces. The wider online reaction to the news of Rupnowʼs attack serves to illustrate how news of the shooting was metabolized as posts first, tragedies second. Within hours, there were memes, riffing, and fictional manifestos aimed at disrupting and remixing the event to suit different audiences. All these reactions were forms of participation and show how the de-realizing effect of collective online creates unintended risks for us all. The dangers here are plentiful: information manipulation as investigators attempt to establish facts; new entry points for recruitment and siphoning of rubberneckers into the Com network; the mainstreaming of material, symbols, and discursive points from these networks that lead to wider exposure; and of course, the normalization of glib and nihilistic reactions to nihilistic violence.
For Rupnow, Henderson, and others like them, the Com network and their myth of transcendental nihilism acts as a source of twisted comfort just as The Slender Man did for Geyser and Leutner. Their offline action is an act of participation in a narrative delivered without ontological boundaries, rendering all activity another entry into the collective myth to be consumed as content by those that follow. Just as instructional manuals from Terrorgram Collective, Maniacs Murder Cult, and No Lives Matter (cited and circulated by Henderson) explicitly encourage readers to carry out an act of mass violence, the online nature of these networks and the effects of the medium itself serve to normalize such violence as simply more participation in the network’s collective myth of transcendent nihilism.
Joe is an OSINT investigator and SME on: semantic threats; the online extreme right; & foreign interference. He holds a PhD in digital narratology & how interaction shapes our relationship to fiction. You can find him at https://bsky.app/profile/theondrakguy.bsky.social