It’s not vice-signaling because that’s only a tactic, same with ragebait. Nihilism is too broad and contradicts with the bible-thumpers that also engage in this. It’s like what Sartre describes in the “anti-Semites” excerpt. I really think there is a coherent phenomenon that encapsulates this. I think the best way I can describe it personally is ‘bloodsport politics’ but words are kinda failing me here. I might already know it even and could just be having a brain blip
I think a lot of people take the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” thing too far and don’t understand that a lot of chuds don’t actually care about being at the top because they defer to authority all the time (and is like the defining feature of their world view), it’s way more important that they have people below them to look down on rather than being on the top, necessarily, especially the more pessimistic lower-class types. Same thing with non-white racists who don’t care about being top-race, but more so align around hating blacks/Africans globally.
So a lot of the talk of harming themselves doesn’t matter because they don’t have any sort of objective worldview, only relative so as long as they’re above others they can at least be satisfied in some way.
There is something about it that is like a new formation of online socialization in a similar structure to hazing/initiation for hierarchical organizations. It is a very performative mode that shows fealty towards sadistic power for the sake of proving the existence of that power. It’s a super position of “got mine, fuck you” and “one day I’ll be wearing this boot”. So you end up with something like “fuck you, the boot has got mine” cheering on the sadism as vicarious redemption.