Terrorism is getting weirder. On Saturday, a bomb exploded outside a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California, and authorities are calling the event “an intentional act of terrorism”. Reports were soon circulating on social media that the motive for the attack was “efilism”, also known as “promortalism” — a fringe internet ideology Katherine Dee described in these pages two years ago as asserting that sentient life itself is harm, and therefore the best way to minimise harm is to extinguish all sentient life.

Though its authenticity hasn’t been confirmed, a website making efilist statements appears to have livestreamed the attack. The website states that “religion is retarded, but that there is objective value in the universe, and it lies in the harm being experienced by sentient beings”. From this it follows that life, a “zero sum game causing senseless torture”, should simply be scoured from existence. The website describes how the precipitating event was the death of the alleged perpetrator’s friend, also an efilist, who killed herself by inducing her boyfriend to shoot her as she slept.

Terrorism, as the term is generally used, tends to refer specifically to violence motivated by ideology: that is, people who are inspired to commit extreme acts by some “higher” aim. Terror has been used by groups as diverse as the “Weathermen” and the IRA to advance ideological aims. But where in recent years “terrorism” has generally come to be associated with a coherent programme, often Islam, the ideological space appears to be growing rapidly more diverse.

Earlier this year the “Zizians”, a group which coalesced within the Silicon Valley “rationalist” community, was linked to multiple murders. The pressure cooker of extremely online subcultures, anti-authoritarian resentment, economic pressures, and an ambient atmosphere of oncoming AI-driven apocalypse seems to have hardened into murderous fantasies which were eventually realised.

In the bowels of the internet, where subcultures brew, cross-pollinate, and compete to become ever more extreme, others have flourished too. Numerous arrests were made last month within the “764” online cult, a group with Satanic affiliations that recruited vulnerable children online from self-harm websites and coerced them into creating sexual exploitation and animal abuse content which was then shared online in secret groups. The group has been linked to numerous violent events including stabbings, a school shooting, and the 2022 murder of a woman in Romania, as well as being implicated in suicides by victims.

It’s obviously difficult to draw a clear line between terrorism and violent mental illness. Perhaps that line doesn’t really exist. But if this weekend’s bombing is authenticated as motivated by “efilism”, then Dee’s recent warning may turn out to have been prophetic. The proliferating strangeness of this new, internet-enabled subtype of terror points, Dee suggests, to endemic, spreading despair: as she puts it, efilists are canaries in the coalmine.

But beyond this, too, the pattern of anti-moral negation common to these subcultures evokes what social critic Aaron Renn has called “Negative World”: the nature of contemporary culture as not simply neutral on the question of religion, but institutionally hostile to Christianity. Each of these digital cults feels much more coherent when understood in these terms. Efilists style themselves as “anti-life”, a term that seems implicitly to encode the strong Christian connotations of its antonym, “pro-life”. Indeed, 764 is explicitly Satanist, and its exploitation content turned on deliberate violation of broadly Christian taboos concerning, for example, cruelty to the weak or the sexual innocence of children. And if the Zizian fixation on existential AI risk had a strongly millenarian flavour, its adherents consolidated a group identity around willingness to take actions forbidden within normal society.

Arguably, the emerging online subculture of pluralistic terrorism only opposes contemporary culture in the sense of taking it to socially unacceptable extremes. The misstep these terrorists made, in other words, was not embracing “Negative World” but simply taking its precepts too literally.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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