This one internet subculture explains murder suspect Luigi Mangione’s odd politics

Almost as soon as news broke that Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old suspect in the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had been arrested at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, sleuths started poring through his social media profiles, looking for clues to the ideology behind the murder. 

While many initially suspected the shooter would be a Bernie Sanders-style leftist, Mangione’s social media feeds reveal an Ivy League-educated tech bro who disavows “wokeism” and venerates Elon Musk; a former fraternity member equally as dedicated to AI as he is to psychedelics and self-improvement.

And so began the quest to label Mangione, to pin him down. Is he a tech accelerationist? A Dimes Square neo-trad fascist? A dirtbag anarchist? One subgroup seems to have come out on top: TPOT — an acronym for This Part of Twitter — a loosely defined internet subculture whose members most regularly define themselves as “ambitious nerds” obsessed with self-improvement and personal agency. 

While members of the TPOT (pronounced “teapot”) community struggle with whether to embrace Mangione as part of what they call “the ingroup,” other extremely online commentators insist he has to be a member of the scene. “Tried explaining that the shooter wasn’t a far left radical but actually a right wing tpot adjacent ted k reading lindyman following, rfk pilled upenn grad and got kicked out of the family group chat,” said one popular post on X.

TPOT is commonly cited as an offshoot of rationalism, a popular Silicon Valley viewpoint popularized by thinkers like computer scientist Eliezer Yudkowsky and psychiatrist Scott Alexander that suggests all aspects of life should be decided based on rational thinking. Members of the TPOT community are often referred to as “post-rationalists” — former adherents who became “disillusioned with that whole scene, because it’s a little culty, it’s a little dogmatic,” said journalist Allegra Rosenberg, who wrote about the subculture for Dirt. 

The rejection of dogma is central to TPOT, whose members pride themselves on political and ideological diversity. Members range from former frat bros like Mangione to psychedelic shitposters to founders and CEOs, and the TPOT-curious are encouraged to expect rigorous debate of their opinions. (Participants sometimes refer to themselves as part of the “gray tribe,” outside of the traditional red/blue political divide.) 

“The ingroup doesn’t have a unifying theme or explicit purpose,” wrote Jacob Falkovich in the rationalist blog LessWrong. Rather, it “is based on who you read and who you’re friends on Twitter with, with the fuzziness and porousness of boundaries this implies.”

Still, those in the subculture tend to share a few common interests and values: a fixation on technology — specifically, artificial intelligence — and an interest in self-improvement through diet, exercise, and meditation. Members speak often of exercising personal agency or free will in order to change their lives. (The term “agentic” is heavily employed in TPOT spaces to mean someone who exercises a high degree of personal agency; members encourage one another by saying, “You can just do things!”) Certain corners of the subculture embrace the use of psychedelics for self-help, and others, according to Rosenberg, adhere to pronatalism, the belief that a high birth rate is crucial to human survival.

As one member of the space, who asked to remain anonymous, described it to The Standard: “TPOT is simply a large landscape of technical, academic, or autodidact intellects who want to discuss problem-solving.” The conversation, this person added, “leans to practical — squats, eat protein — but has metaphysical corners.”

While the community started as just a bunch of people talking online, it has spawned in-person meetups, a summer camp, and even a dating directory. Rosenberg got her crash course in the subculture while living in a commune of TPOTers in Brooklyn, from which members launched an “alternative university” where they taught clowning, civics, and freestyle rap.  

While much of X seems eager to slot Mangione as a TPOTer, some in the community are reluctant to embrace him. As one popular poster said (in a tweet that required a greater-than-average understanding of the subculture to comprehend), “‘You can just do stuff’ doesn’t go far enough, imo. If the only solution you see is the antisocial one, you aren’t being agentic enough.” 

Others suggest Mangione is more aligned with effective altruism, the similarly rationalist ideology that had a heyday in tech spaces before its chief promoter, Sam Bankman-Fried, was convicted of federal crimes.

Still, Rosenberg noted at least one other similarity between Mangione and the TPOTers: a penchant for overly long tweets.

“It’s a very verbal culture. People really love to have long-form discussions, state their opinions,” she said. “Really, just people who like to talk a lot.”