With the site settling down to normal conditions, the torrents going strong and everything being stable, I think now is the time to unbottle some of my thoughts on this. I haven't really said much at all since it went down.
What is pretty shocking about this guy is that I think he pulled off the shooting a lot of people think about. A lot of /pol/ posters probably imagined something exactly like this. A manifesto with intentionally misdirecting language, casting blame on people arbitrarily for humor value, featuring an upfront thesis explaining exactly what intent is in black-and-white before writing a bunch of nonsense you know will be quoted out of context as ammunition by ideologues. A little something for everyone. Everyone's happy (or rather, happy to be angry) with what they feel is a silver bullet towards rivalries.
The same day, the government plans to disarm people further. The government begins to censor people. ISPs crack down on Internet access trying to find the videos. YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook especially have egg on their face. All of these platforms are going to promise to 'do more' and fuck over innocent people trying to enjoy the Internet. Sterilize things more. Make it less accessible.
The whole point is to make people hate each other, drive retaliatory action, give media exactly what they want so they frenzy over it, give platforms a reason to be even more advertiser friendly, all while turning the act of murder into nothing more than another meme with references to shit all his old Internet friends know and love already - because he was 'one of the boys' and he definitely at least knew of me, if only indirectly through my work on 8chan. We all speak the same language of stupid bullshit Journalists don't understand.
What he wanted to do was make the world a little bit worse than it was when he was free, and he accomplished that. Make the Internet such that it is no longer a pacifier in the mouths of tens of millions of adult children. Make things so fucking boring that getting up, going out, and killing people is more entertaining than spending another second on Twitter dot fucking com.