Edgelord

An edgelord is a pretentious poseur on the Internet who tries to impress or shock by posting edgy opinions such as nihilism or extremist views.[4][5][6]

Artist Jordan Wolfson produces work which The New Yorker described as "edgelord art".[1][2] Such provocative artists are known as avant garde and enfants terribles.[3]

The term is a portmanteau derived from "edgy" and "shitlord" – a person who "basks in the bitterness and misery of others".[7]

Merriam-Webster gave the following example:

We decided to watch It's A Wonderful Life and my dad said, “Every year I wait for Jimmy Stewart to jump off that bridge but he never does it” - merry Xmas from the original edgelord.[8]

Edgelords were characterised by author Rachel Monroe in her account of criminal behaviour, Savage Appetites:

...internet cynics lumped the online Nazis together with the serial killer fetishists and the dumbest goths and dismissed them all as edgelords: kids who tried to be scary online. I thought of most of these edgelords as basement-dwellers, pale faces lit by the glow of their computer screen, puffing themselves up with nihilism. An edgelord was a scrawny guy with a LARP-y vibe, possibly wearing a cloak, dreaming of omnipotence. Or a girl with excessive eyeliner and lots of Tumblr posts about self-harm. The disturbing content posted by edgelords was undermined by its predictability...[9]

It is frequently associated with the forum site 4chan.[10][11][12]

See also

References
  1. Dana Goodyear (6 March 2020), "Jordan Wolfson's Edgelord Art", The New Yorker, Condé Nast
  2. Bollmer, Grant; Guinness, Katherine (20 April 2020), "Empathy and nausea: virtual reality and Jordan Wolfson's Real Violence", Journal of Visual Culture, 19 (1): 28–46, doi:10.1177/1470412920906261, ISSN 1470-4129, S2CID 218792679
  3. Ashleigh Kane (5 May 2020), "A new doc asks: is art enfant terrible Jordan Wolfson actually a bad guy?", Dazed
  4. Jeannerod, Marinette (2019), "Les stéréotypes mis à mal sur la Toile", Hermès, La Revue (83): 212–222, doi:10.3917/herm.083.0212, S2CID 201536274
  5. Nilan, Pam (10 May 2021), Young People and the Far Right, Springer Nature, p. 4, ISBN 978-981-16-1811-6
  6. Poole, Steven (3 October 2019), "Edgelord", A Word for Every Day of the Year, Quercus, ISBN 978-1-78747-859-6
  7. Holiak, M. S. (2019), "The usage of neologisms characterizing people in feedbacks to online English news", Literature and Culture of Polissya (96): 162, doi:10.3165/2520-6966-2019-13f-96-159-168 (inactive 3 January 2023){{citation}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2023 (link)
  8. "Words We're Watching: Doing the Work of the 'Edgelord'", Merriam-Webster
  9. Monroe, Rachel (2020), Savage Appetites, Scribner, p. 205, ISBN 9781501188893
  10. Goldsmith, Kenneth (2019). "Zoë and the trolls". In Colombo, Gary (ed.). Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins Press. p. 293. ISBN 9781319056360.
  11. Bissell, Tom (5 January 2021). "The Uneasy Afterlife of "A Confederacy of Dunces"". The New Yorker. Retrieved 21 July 2022.
  12. McHugh, Calder (26 April 2022). "Why progressives hate Elon Musk". Politico. Retrieved 21 July 2022.
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