The Spectacle of the Slaughter
Mass killings had become a media event long before some asshole decided to live-stream his rampage through a New Zealand moss. A killing of sufficient size or novelty is good for at least a day of twenty-four hour media coverage. There are the grizzly details, the long helicopter shots outside an otherwise ordinary building, the reheated arguments about gun control. Last year’s ratings bonanza was the Marjory Stoneman Douglas killings, where the students’ post-event activism failed to motivate gun control legislation but was successful in allowing media outlets to play out a drama of innocent youth against corrupt politicians (or bratty millennials trying to take away your rights, depending on your choice of channels) for months later.
Watching this particular bit of mass murder unfold felt different for me — or perhaps similar, but heightened to an uncomfortable degree. There was the video, which everyone talked about only to assure you not to watch, like something out of a horror movie. The real-time unfolding of events meant that the social media takes and arguments were happening even as bodies were dropping. And the killer himself seemed to be a monster formed out of the darkest corners of the Internet, glibly spouting memes in a way that even the hackiest Law & Order screenwriter would probably have rejected.
The killings were a media event that everyone could take part in. It was an opportunity to show how steadfast you were in your hatred of racism. It was another example of why your enemies should be banned from Twitter. Within sixteen hours the killing of fifty people had been subsumed into the great culture war, and somehow people were arguing about Chelsea Clinton and college activists like they do every Friday.
I won’t pretend that I’m above the fray — I fired off a couple of glib tweets, in a hope that maybe I would get that dopamine rush of a notification. To me, like the other commenters, perhaps like the killer himself, the deaths weren’t quite real — another TV show, something to pass the time in between Disney movies. And how could they not be, when the tragedy was so obviously theatrical and intertextual, so immersed in all of the Internet’s stupid crap?
From its start, the online far-right has been based on trivializing pain and suffering to the point where it was just another media image, something corny that could be satirized and rejected (“Triggered, much?”) For the most part, these people (and it’s important to remember that it’s a relatively small group) don’t believe in the racism they spout enough to kill people over it. It’s just a game, a way to spite the nags and censors. But for those who harbour violent hate in their heart, such communities must seem to be fill of fellow travelers. And for the psychologically unstable young men looking for a purpose, they can be literally deadly.
The theory behind terrorism (not all mass shootings are terrorism, but what happened in Christchurch certainly was) is that small groups without resources or popular support (like, say, 8chan racists) can use spectacular acts of violence to amplify their message, inflate their importance, and draw the type of overzealous response which helps fuel their movement. The modern media ecosystem, where any item of interest becomes multiplied a hundredfold through the proliferation of articles, tweets, posts, videos, and the rest of the great mass of Content, seems like an instrument specifically built to make terrorism more effective.
There have been various studies that show how the wall-to-wall coverage of mass shootings cause them to replicate. The images spur similarly unbalanced people on, and make one thing clear: the fastest way to get your message, your own personal struggle, taken seriously by the world is to kill a bunch of people. But despite this, news media continues to give killers and their actions heavy coverage. No matter how negative, there are those who will think it is better to be thought of by the world as a villain than to not be thought of at all.
I don’t know the solution to any of this. People are naturally curious and discursive, especially about the unusual and the spectacular. We can hardly demand that people be silent about hate crimes. Online censorship of far-right media, which has been suggested by many, could help, but I hardly trust tech companies to be able to implement such a policy fairly and consistently. Most likely, the discursive cyclone will continue to whirl, picking up speed until it crashes into another unexpecting community.
