By Mark Peden
Troubling trends in violent extremism are emerging that challenge traditional frameworks of classification and ideology. Amid accelerating digital revolution, ongoing permacrisis, and increasingly apocalyptic media narratives, nihilistic and apocalyptic violent extremism (N/AVE) is on the rise, frequently driven by mixed, unclear, and unstable (MUU) belief systems that defy conventional categorisation.
Beyond ideological fluidity, these evolving typologies of violence often reflect a shift from strategic aims toward symbolic spectacle and affective resonance. What emerges is a broader performative turn in violent extremism: from coherent political objectives to symbolic acts of awakening, sacrifice, or annihilation, intended to rupture or reveal a world perceived as hollow, corrupt, or beyond redemption.
This violence is shaped by a sprawling cultural script infused with disturbing mimetic and memetic dynamics, embedded in toxic online spaces steeped in nihilism, misanthropy, violent aesthetics, and apocalyptic collapse fantasies. These digital subcultures do not merely amplify violent extremist ideas; they increasingly constitute the aesthetic and affective infrastructure through which N/AVE unfolds.
N/AVE represents more than a security challenge. In today’s hyperconnected world, it is deeply interlinked with broader cultural phenomena and profound societal shifts, particularly among younger generations increasingly accustomed to relentless instability, fragmentation, and crisis.
Nihilism, Apocalypticism, and Symbolic Violence
At the heart of N/AVE are two resurgent cultural currents with deep historical roots: nihilism and apocalypticism. Nihilism, in this context, refers to the belief that traditional structures and shared values have collapsed in an inherently meaningless world. Apocalypticism offers a dramatic narrative arc, heralding visions of coming cataclysms followed by redemption or rebirth.
Together, these concepts can generate a volatile mix of misanthropic ideas that condemn society and human existence itself, fuelling destructive potential for violent extremism. At the core is a deadly emotional logic: if nothing matters, perhaps destruction can reveal something, or impose meaning on a meaningless world.
N/AVE can broadly be understood through two typologies, which at times overlap:
Nihilistic Violence: Symbolic Annihilation and the Rejection of Meaning
This typology is driven by misanthropy, violent aesthetics, and a wholesale rejection of the ‘normie’ world and its values. Its targets often appear arbitrary and of secondary concern to the performative spectacle of violence itself, calibrated for maximum shock, virality, and notoriety. The perpetrator’s own death is often viewed as inconsequential, or even desirable.
Axel Rudakubana’s child stabbing in Southport and David Kozák’s mass shooting at a Prague university reflect this nihilistic logic in which violence functions primarily as symbolic negation. Online subcultures like the No Lives Matter network provide cultural scaffolding for these worldviews, glorifying violence not as a means to political ends, but as an end in itself, a performative rupture in response to perceived meaninglessness.
This is aestheticised violence for its own sake, where existential despair meets symbolic annihilation, an attack on meaning itself.
Apocalyptic Violence: Redemptive Violence as Awakening or Sacrifice
In this typology we find performative acts of violence framed as revelation, often emerging at the intersection of personal grievance or trauma, existential despair, and symbolic spectacle.
These undercurrents are evident in Max Azzarello’s self-immolation outside Donald Trump’s criminal trial in 2024, an act intended to draw media attention on imminent ‘fascist world coup’. Similar themes of doomer conspiracism and apocalyptic fantasy are identifiable in Luigi Mangione’s targeted assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thomson, and in Matthew Livelsberger’s suicide in a Tesla Cybertruck that exploded outside a Trump International Hotel.
These are social worlds transformed into all-consuming apocalyptic endgames, where self-destruction or sacrifice becomes the central act meant to spark a broader revolution. Their actions can be read as final acts of meaning-making, symptomatic of a hyperreal digital age where the line between fantasy and reality has become increasingly blurred and gamified.
The Digital Roots of Despair: Hyperreality, Fragmentation, and the Rise of MUU Ideologies
Recent trends in N/AVE must be understood within broader cultural and societal dynamics, as digital lifestyles transform perceptions of meaning, reality, and the very essence of being human in a digital age.
Jonathan Haidt argues that the introduction of smartphones and social media fundamentally rewired minds from the early 2010s, marking a cultural inflection point that has particularly shaped the childhood of younger generations, as embodied socialisation and development were increasingly displaced by screen-based interaction.
Haidt outlines a psychosocial landscape increasingly marked by social isolation, fragmented attention, emotional dysregulation, and a deepening crisis of meaning. These conditions echo Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality, in which hyperconnected, media-saturated environments generate endless simulations that steadily subsume the real, rendering meaning, authenticity, and reality itself increasingly elusive.
In these conditions, violence increasingly becomes just another form of endlessly circulated and recycled content, staged, aestheticised, and consumed by digital audiences. Acts of terror become performances, calibrated for maximum virality, spectacle, and symbolic resonance.
Toxic Digital Subcultures and the New Semiotics of Violence
The rise of N/AVE and the turn towards MUU ideologies appears to lie at this intersection of transformed social worlds and information spaces prone to meaning implosion and existential overload. These trends converge with a proliferation of toxic online subcultures linked to chan culture and the ‘black pill’, which drift in increasingly dark, edgy, and destructive directions, catering to misogynistic incels, ecofascists, accelerationists, and others across a sprawling, networked MUU milieu.
Perhaps most disturbingly, N/AVE increasingly overlaps with mass shooter culture, sustained by a feedback loop of cumulative mimetic and memetic ‘propaganda of the deed’ effects. This dynamic fuels a seemingly endless stream of violent actors who contribute to a contagion of veneration, emulation, and attempted escalation.
This convergence of N/AVE and MUU ideologies, digital aesthetics, and performative violence can be understood as digital existentialism manifesting in its most destructive forms. Not only has meaning collapsed, but increasingly erratic and aimless violence has become the final language left to speak to that collapse.
The Crisis of Meaning in the Digital Age: Addressing the Void
N/AVE is not merely a new typology of threat; it appears to reflect a deeper cultural and existential crisis exacerbated by the conditions of digital life. What emerges are forms of post-ideological violent extremism, intimately interlinked with online subcultures where violence becomes both medium and message.
Through piecemeal appropriation of violent ideologies and the use of coded online messaging, N/AVE actors construct fluid and adaptive belief systems that are difficult to categorise, monitor, or disrupt. Their hybrid nature, embedded in memetic culture and symbolic performance, challenges conventional counter-extremism frameworks. Traditional models that rely on identifying ideological indicators are ill-equipped to address actors whose violence is expressive rather than strategic, and whose ideologies are less coherent than affective.
If we are to respond effectively, we must recognise N/AVE not only as a security issue, but as a symptom of a broader crisis of meaning. As Nietzsche, one of nihilism’s most prominent theorists, warned in his declaration that ‘God is dead’, the collapse of societal structures and shared values demands a reconstitution of meaning, not its abandonment. Sherry Turkle’s call to reclaim conversation and human connection in an age of screens is instructive here. Meaningful responses must include practical measures that support digital resilience and social reconnection, such as digital literacy, tech-free spaces, youth engagement, and community-building, as part of a broader public health approach.
Addressing the symbolic and emotional logics that make N/AVE narratives so compelling requires more than regulation. It calls for renewed efforts to foster empathy, belonging, and shared meaning in an increasingly disorientated and disembodied world.
Mark Peden is a PhD researcher in the School of Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Sussex. His research focuses on nihilism, digital existentialism, doomerism, social media, online subcultures, and violent extremism, in a context of permacrisis and digital revolution. This blog is based on a forthcoming book chapter on Nihilistic and Apocalyptic Violent Extremism for the Routledge Handbook of Online Violent Extremism, and a related conference paper presented at the Society for Terrorism Research 9th Annual Postgraduate Conference, hosted by the Handa Centre for Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St Andrews.
IMAGE CREDIT: PEXELS
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