Inside the mind of Luigi Mangione

The news that UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Brian Thompson, had been killed sent an immediate shockwave across America, prompting quick assumptions about the assassin’s motive. Early chatter on platforms such as BlueSky speculated that the shooter, who is now suspected to be “tech whiz” and UPenn graduate Luigi Mangione, might be some kind of anti-capitalist folk hero. As details emerged, these hypotheses began to fall apart. Mangione, who was taken into custody Monday, was skeptical of “woke” culture, followed several right-libertarian figures online — and curated a GoodReads list heavy on Silicon Valley self-help, futurism, psychedelics and advice on treating chronic back pain. 

The tidy ideological script many anticipated did not materialize. Why would a “centrist tech bro,” as someone described him, one who loved Tim Urban and enjoyed books like Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, assassinate a healthcare executive? 

Mangione’s modus operandi appears to have been a broader discontent with modernity, artificial intelligence and social media in particular. It’s a natural arc for the tech bro: what you once loved you become disillusioned with. 

Disdain for the present is not uncommon among violent actors, either — in the past, I’ve reported on how mass shooters often express nihilism toward the contemporary world — but Mangione’s dissatisfaction had a different inflection. He gravitated toward “traditionalism,” a term gaining traction in certain media spaces as shorthand for a certain right-tinged longing: for older aesthetics, more formal courtship rituals, seemingly more authentic ways of life. Thinkpieces abound about this niche of right-coded thought, which seeks permanence and depth beyond what the digital present seems to offer. 

Mangione’s digital footprint — his reading habits, the influencers he followed — suggests he found an intellectual home in these ideas.

He also, at least at one point, lingered on the edges of the tech world’s intellectual currents. He appeared both intrigued by artificial intelligence and uneasy about its implications. His personal struggles may have intensified this ambivalence. Mangione reportedly suffered from debilitating back pain and dabbled in psychedelics. As people try to fit Mangione into a neat box, many are left at a loss. Those hoping for an anti-corporate martyr had to abandon their initial assumptions. Others tried to taunt the right, questioning what it means that Mangione is a “centrist tech bro.” Still others were shocked to learn of odd personal overlaps — Caroline Calloway claims to have slept with him, Mangione was ostensibly a fan of “LindyMan,” also known as Paul Skallas, and I myself once moderated a Discord server where, as it turns out, Mangione participated. 

Mangione drew intellectual influence from thinkers such as Jonathan Haidt and Freya India, who warn that social media corrodes empathy and encourage more thoughtful engagement. He also followed creators like Chris Williamson, who critique digital noise and promote intentional living. None of these voices advocate for violence — nobody in their right mind would call them “radicals” in any sense of the word — but their emphasis on deep-rooted cultural malaise likely struck a chord. Mangione’s worldview, to the extent we can piece it together, wasn’t pinned to a standard left-right axis. The closest thing we have is that he seemed convinced that technology and modernity had led us astray. His GoodReads reviews displayed an admiration for Ted Kaczynski’s critique of industrial society, the best clue we have.

His alleged act — the targeted killing of a single figure — suggests that it’s possible he believed removing one “linchpin” might compel society to reckon with deeper systemic failures. That these ideas could be dismantled; society fixed. This is where a new and unsettling trend may be emerging. We’ve long associated American violence with mass shootings: nihilistic eruptions of despair often entwined with self-destruction. But Mangione’s alleged assassination attempt aligns with a more deliberate logic, however twisted, one that might imagine you can change the world by taking out a key player. Perhaps there has been a different sort of vibe shift: one where the cultural script is shifting from “nothing matters” to “something must be done.”

Both mass shootings and assassinations are abhorrent. If we are indeed moving from indiscriminate massacres to targeted killings, we face a different kind of darkness: violence as a misguided bid to restore a supposedly lost order. In this scenario, the spiritual emptiness of our hyper-technological era is the real villain — the real foundation on which the culture war rests upon — one the killer believes can be confronted by revolutionary acts. 

Perhaps Mangione was mentally ill, or perhaps not. Maybe his alleged violence stemmed from personal vendetta, or maybe from an ideological confusion. Maybe he was angry that UnitedHealthcare used AI to deny claims. Maybe they denied him access to medicine to treat his chronic pain. Maybe it was totally random, the act of a schizophrenic mind.

Whatever the case, we are at the dawn of a new era. We have argued endlessly over left versus right radicalization, but this case nudges us to think along a different axis: between faith in technology’s promise and despair at its hollowing of the human spirit. Beneath the endless streams, apps, and feeds, something essential is slipping away. 

My sense is that we’ve arrived at the beginning of the real culture war: techno-optimism versus techno-pessimism. In this world, may we all become techno-realists.