(I am still working but I need to remove this thought from my head to make space for work thoughts)
Following up on this, I’m realizing that the term “edgelord” may mean something in my head that is not exactly what it means to other people
My mind’s concept of “edgelord” is not “says ‘politically incorrect’ things to piss people off,” it’s “talks like a supervillain and/or Nietzschean ubermensch and/or fascist dictator”
Often people do both of those things, but the latter is a lot more general – for me it’s not the politics that make an edgelord, it’s the Nietzschean pettiness, the “everyone who I don’t like is a Lower Kind of Person, and the Lower Kinds of People will be killed or enslaved when the future arrives, starting with that loathsome worm of a barista who took too long to make my coffee this morning" attitude
Maybe “edgelord” isn’t the word for this but it’s definitely a thing
To my view the latter is just a more extreme version of the former.
I guess I’m mentioning this because there are left-wing (or ostensibly left-wing) people who do the exact same thing, and I don’t see the similarity get brought up
Like, remember that person I was once mutuals with who would talk about which people would have to be killed during the revolution for being reactionary, and I asked them once if some trait made me belong to this category, and they were like “well I like you and hope I wouldn’t have to kill you but maybe I would,” and then there was a kerfuffle about it? Well, then they started to creep me out and I blocked them, after which they started posting about how me and a lot of my tumblr friends definitely were reactionaries and should be killed to purge the earth of our kind, and this was because we were acquainted with another “reactionary,” by which they meant @multiheaded1793 (!).
And they’d talk about this in this very jokey “tumblr humor” way but would also keep asserting that no, they Literally Believed every word of it. And this was someone who was very SJ-literate and would never use slurs or anything.
This might seem like someone with their own specific deal who’s not representative of anything, except I see stuff like this all the damn time. “This internet sub-sub-subcultural clique who pissed me off the other day is reactionary and will be eliminated when we smash capitalism.” It’s not even like I’m offended by this sometimes targeting me or my friends – because it’s not like these people are a real threat – but it just seems like … well, like, um, appropriation of rhetoric meant for actual struggles with well-defined oppressor classes. It’s one thing if your kind is being systematically oppressed by another group and you think violence is the answer. It’s another thing if you are struggling with the oppression of “nostalgebraist blocked me on tumblr” and you think "killing nostalgebraist and, like, his friends? who are sort of vaguely oppressive, maybe?” is the answer.
And what this all makes me think of is stereotypical teenagers listening to Slipknot and fantasizing about being ruler of the world and how that’ll really show those people who were totally their friends in 8th grade and then just weren’t in 9th grade, like, what the fuck? Life is bullshit, dude. Burn it all down.
Which is the mindset I’m trying to gesture at here (although “edgelord” is probably not the right wong).
I know am/people like this and would categorize it under “enjoys the fact that some of their opinions are offensive, then leans in on it in an obnoxious way” (first category) rather than “thinks of oneself as a Nietzschean Spiritual Aristocrat” (second category,) which I’ve only ever seen on the right, at least personally. But of course I could be misinterpreting you!
The standard Tankie stuff would only be “first category,” since the opinions leaned on there are mostly about large-scale, often historical questions (”was Stalin good?”), where the arguments aren’t likely to be affected by what happened to the speaker in the last day or week.
Where I’m seeing “Nietzschean Spiritual Aristocracy” is in leftists who not only want a revolution or other profound change in society, but seem to see themselves as avatars of the spirit of that change – they imagine an uprising of the many which inevitably supports their own aesthetics, their own taste in people, their each and every little moral judgment.
This obviously isn’t “Nietzschean” in any strict sense – they don’t hold the common herd in contempt. But the effect is kind of the same: “I don’t give a fuck what you say, because you’re just one person, while I am The People.”