Luigi Mangione's online life reveals so much without answering one key question

• The accused United Healthcare shooter, Luigi Mangione, has a large online footprint.
• It shows he might have been a certain type of guy. It doesn't show why he might have shot someone.
• Online history can only tell us so much — but our reactions to it tell us a lot about society.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Luigi Mangione's internet footprint is that there's so much. Surprising to me, at least, since I've noticed that young people — those who grew up with the knowledge that things you post can come back to haunt you —often have very minimal publicly available information online.

As soon as police announced Mangione's arrest, people found his X account, Instagram, Goodreads, and other internet debris. Each seemed to show something new and intriguing: His Instagram had shirtless photos (of particular interest to those making thirsty jokes about him). His X account showed what kinds of people he followed — a lot of pop science/intellectual types (Andrew Huberman, Ezra Klein) and some other big Substackers and authors.

His Goodreads was particularly interesting because it included a review of the Unabomber's manifesto. (It also included popular self-help books.)

My colleagues have reported a fuller picture of Luigi Mangione that's come to light in the last few days: a smart, seemingly affable young man from a privileged background who suffered a serious back injury and became disenchanted with the health system.

These dribblings of Mangione's online life came with a tinge of disappointment for anyone who hoped he'd be some left-wing folk hero. For being accused of committing an act that seemed to be politically motivated in some way, his political alignment seemed kind of obscure. Maybe right-leaning, but … not exactly? (If you have an interest in going deeper on this, I recommend this assessment from The San Francisco Standard that suggests he triangulated into the "TPOT" niche.)

I suspect his online profile isn't unusual for 26-year-old men these days. This election, young male voters drifted right in ways that people are still trying to untangle. The neat boxes we've used in the past to imagine how young men vote — a scarf-wearing pajama boy or an alt-right undercut guy — don't really work anymore. This especially plays out in the online world Mangione was engaging with: Everyone's proudly heterodox now. You can make some decent guesses about someone's leanings based on vibes, but good luck painting a full picture.

Max Read's newsletter, I think, has the clearest analysis of what Type Of Guy he was: Who's the kind of guy who reads the type of stuff Mangione was reading, who follows the accounts he followed?

I think the cultural and ideological portrait painted by his Twitter account is actually a fairly common and intelligible one, and would be pretty familiar not just to anyone who spends a lot of time on Twitter but to anyone who works in tech or frequents a gym weight room. It's a loudly non-partisan, self-consciously "rational" mish-mash of declinist conservativism, bro-science and bro-history, simultaneous techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, and self-improvement stoicism--not left-wing, but not (yet) reactionary, either. The basic line is something like: The world is getting worse and phones are killing us; politics won't save us but technology might; in the meantime, lift weights, take supplements, listen to podcasts.

I should say here that I don't want to speculate on Mangione's mental state — and I definitely don't want to suggest that following certain accounts or reading certain books makes a person prone to violence. Of course not. There's also so much we don't know about this situation.

Still, it's interesting to look at Mangione's online footprint to at least glean what we can.

Reddit posts show he was apparently frustrated with the US healthcare system when it came to his injured back, and deleted posts show skepticism of doctors. But if the outpouring of horror stories about the healthcare industry that's come over the past few days is any indication, he's not alone in his frustration.

In 404 Media, Jason Koebler wrote about the futility he felt while attempting to track down Mangione's old GitHub: "In fact, dissecting random accounts from many years ago does not just not inform the public, it muddies the waters about what actually happened and why."

I sympathize with Koebler's frustrations — trying to make sense of this online trail doesn't seem to get us any closer to a potential motivation for why he went from someone who was frustrated with the healthcare system — like nearly all of us are — to being accused of 3D printing a gun and shooting someone to death.

John Herrman, for New York Magazine, points out that sometimes these online excavations do yield something meaningful: signs of political extremism, an obsession with guns or other mass shootings, or signs that a person was clearly unwell.

But Mangione's online trail doesn't seem like that at all. "The internet, in other words, was where Mangione seemed more or less fine," Herrman writes. The piece that's missing is clearly whatever was happening in his real, offline life. Perhaps the most notable clue was a sign he had gone offline: a friend's tweets trying to get in touch with him about attending a wedding.

I suspect that in the months to come, Mangione may end up having a sad personal story — and that he won't be seen as the liberating folk hero that many people online have been cheering for.

Tina Brown described the act as an "era-defining" crime that touched a raw nerve for Americans: "It makes the conclave of tech titans, overpaid CEOs, and Wall Street Gilded Agers in Trump's new court at Mar-a-Lago seem even more discordant."

Still, I find looking at Mangione's digital life fascinating for the broader reason that the killing — and the online reaction to it — says a lot about us.