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Archives for September 2014

The Free Press and Motive

September 14, 2014 By Mark 1 Comment

This post is part of a series exploring the idea that storytelling, gameplay or entertainment of any kind may precipitate acts of violence in the real world. First post here.

Still reeling from the realization that the motive for murder (or any other act) can never be reduced to a predictive certainty, you decide that getting the word out about your discovery is critical to finding solutions that will prevent violence. Because you are well connected you place calls to several prominent reporters and news outlets, all of which express universal disinterest in what you have to say. The reaction is so consistent that at first you think you must not have explained yourself clearly, but after several more not-for-attribution conversations and a good deal of cogitation it becomes abundantly clear that you’re not the problem.

Leveraging Responsibility
When it comes to exploiting the blood of innocent victims you have learned there are two ways to profit from the question of motive. You can plausibly ascribe motives to others because those motives can never be proven false, and, you can plausibly deny motives ascribed to you because those motives can never be proven true. While most parties opt for one strategy or the other given the rhetorical nature of charges and counter-charges, there is one stakeholder perfectly positioned to turn the usual back-and-forth about motive into a salable product itself. In fact, in the United States the right to do so is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, which reads as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Not only does the First Amendment preclude the government from telling you what you can and cannot say as a citizen, if you are a member of the press it gives you the right to tell the citizenry anything, even when the government would prefer you kept quiet. Whether a noble journalist concerned with truth or tabloid trash trying to make all the money you can by broadcasting insane ideas or outright lies, the First Amendment allows you to claim that you are being responsible and fair and objective and balanced without any fear of contradiction. Even if you are intentionally fomenting righteous indignation, fear and anger in your audience with the intent of converting those emotions into cash through advertising agencies, you have the right to do so. (Such arms-length transactions also allow you to claim that your mercenary editorial practices are entirely separate from your mercenary business practices, as if such a distinction was meaningful.)

Imagining yourself in the role of a money-hungry reporter eager to pervert the protections of the First Amendment, you realize your first objective would be identifying a real-world event that would draw interest — like, say, a mass killing. Assuming you were fortunate enough that such a crime took place, you could then attempt to fuel the story by providing what is euphemistically called coverage. From an entrepreneurial point of view this aggressive reporting would be aimed not at informing the public but at trying to give the story legs so it did not become just another moment in history. While ostensibly the result of consumer demand, such lucrative continuing interest would in fact be largely dependent on your reportorial ability to turn the tragedy into a marketing opportunity for you, your employer, and for the story itself.

If the story did develop legs you could then freely engage in what’s euphemistically called analysis, which is in fact little more than water-cooler-grade speculation if not outright editorial propaganda. If you were fortunate, cunning or both, you could use analysis to tie the real-world tragedy you’re milking for money to a long-running real-world debate that will never be resolved, thereby opening the door to profits in perpetuity. For example, if someone goes berserk and murders a dozen people, while you’re ceaselessly reporting what few facts you know during wall-to-wall, twenty-four-hour, live, multimedia coverage, you can also use the killings as a springboard to raise questions about, say, the easy availability of weapons, the inadequate state of mental health screening and treatment, or any other causal factor you believe to be good for your bottom line. Because you are under no legal obligation to be informative or accurate, you are constitutionally free to shape your analysis in whatever way proves most entertaining, engaging, infuriating or traumatizing to your audience, and most profitable to you.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: ~ Tangents Tagged With: entertainment, journalism, motive, news, violence

Real-World Violence and Motive

September 1, 2014 By Mark 1 Comment

This post is part of a series exploring the idea that storytelling, gameplay or entertainment of any kind may precipitate acts of violence in the real world. First post here.

The Killer’s Motive
Fortuitously, not only do we happen to know that the mass murderer we have in custody is guilty beyond any possible doubt, but because the killer is still alive, has waived counsel, has been deemed lucid by a battery of experts representing every conceivable psychological and psychiatric discipline, and is articulate and willing to answer any of our questions — which they will always respond to honestly due to an incurable compulsion for telling the truth — we will not, as we must when a murderer is dead, insane, or less than truthful, have to guess as to motive. Indeed, after a protracted interrogation we have extracted all the information we possibly can from the murderer, and at first blush it does seem as if we understand what the killer was thinking. As heartless and unconscionable as their behavior was, we can see a certain internal logic to their decision making. Even better, not only do we find no loose ends or inconsistencies in their statements, but when we look at similar crimes perpetrated by other murderers we see some factors that seem to correlate with such violent acts. Included are various forms of entertainment which demonstrate or dramatize violence eerily similar to the violence our killer unleashed, further tightening the apparent correlation between motive and murder.

In the end we are convinced that we understand why a dozen people were killed, and we are hopeful that this information might aid us in preventing such tragedies in the future. Unfortunately, the night before we are to turn in our findings we find ourselves in a dingy bar having drinks with a couple of strangers, and as the conversation wends its way toward dawn we discover to our horror that one of the people we are talking with shares not only the same perceptions of the world as our incarcerated killer, but they play the same violent computer games and watch the same violent movies and listen to the same enraged music. The overlap is so complete — so eerily exact — that in a moment of foggy panic we have the bar patron arrested on a trumped-up charge because we are convinced they must also have killed a dozen people.

As it turns out, however, the patron not only has no criminal history, they have an airtight alibi across the entirety of their life, leaving no possibility that they committed any crimes, let alone homicides. By every available metric they are indistinguishable from our killer, yet they have not killed anyone. While we can’t shake the feeling that the bar patron may at any minute go berserk, that unease pales in comparison to the devastating realization that some critical information is obviously missing from the motive both we and the killer ascribed to the killer’s actions. Where we thought we knew why a dozen people were dead, it turns out there is at least one other person in the world for whom all the relevant factors hold true who has not committed a crime, meaning we do not actually know what caused the killer to kill.

As an anecdotal test we run our analysis of the killer’s motive by a hundred people, explaining it step by step, and to a person they all agree we must be right. Yet we know we are not right because that same combination of environmental and personal factors applies to the bar patron as well. The motives we’re attributing to the killer sound plausible and reasonable and compelling to everyone, yet we know there is another person in the world — who has not killed anyone — for whom all of our purported causal attributions apply. Which leaves us with a choice to make, and because we have a conscience it’s a choice that makes us extremely uncomfortable.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: ~ Tangents Tagged With: entertainment, motive, violence