But ‘irony’ isn’t as subversive as this implies. Irony made Rick Astley’s records start selling again. It handed a popular icon to the alt-right. Irony makes unappetizing ideologies digestible. And while it offers an easy rationalization for trolls engaging in sexist or racist attacks – ‘I did it for the lulz’ – the effect of these attacks is the same as if they were sincere.

Gamergate empowered sadists and sexist provocateurs. It became a defining moment in the emergence of a new subcultural style of right-wing activism predicated on male resentment fused with trolling culture. Joining other subcultural streams, from ‘pick-up artists’ to ‘incels’ (the ‘involuntary celibate’), and adopting a reboot of 1970s anti-feminist activism, many Gamergaters became Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs). It is the MRAs, more than anyone else, who have taken their trolling into the real world with bloody consequences. Trolling, having been filtered through the machine, entered meatspace with a vengeance.

Incels, a subculture within a subculture, a bleak fraction of MRAs, share with their confederates a Planet of the Apes vision of female sexuality in which women have evolved to prefer physically dominant men. They think their unwilling celibacy, far from being a normal state of affairs, is a special punishment inflicted by fate. That their sexual frustration derives from genetic deficit.

Chad and Stacy are football jock and cheerleader, an American success story: and the success story is a superego ideal which taunts the incel. Worse, for incels it’s a form of sexual despotism in which they are an oppressed caste. Their equivalent of the ‘oppressive Tawaghit’ of Islamic State propaganda. A fantasy image superimposed on layers of agonized self-loathing, anguished world- and women-hatred, sadism, masochism and death drive.

And yet, perhaps the most chilling aspect of Minassian’s actions was the way he chose to announce his ‘rebellion’. His post, written in the stylized, ironic jargon of trolling, implied a frightening degree of detachment. If one didn’t know that the author was on the brink of mass murder, it would seem like a joke. It was as though the ironic folds had unravelled, revealing an ouroboros in which the ‘literal’ and ‘ironic’ existed on the same plane. He was a troll, in meatspace, and in the same move a vigilante murderer.

Trolling irony was never what it appeared to be. Never detached, irony was just a container for ambivalence. The core of irony is almost always a passionate commitment which can’t be expressed in any other way. To ironize about it, to make fun of it, is to allow it to be expressed while also reproaching it. In the case of the incels, irony tips over into passion, without losing the sense of self-reproach, or self-hatred.