Desensitization Is The Algorithm’s Victory Condition

Originally Posted On Jon Hall’s Apocalypse Diaries

On Monday night, a gunman took an AR-15 into a skyscraper in Midtown, NYC and started a rampage, resulting in the death of a police officer and three others.

According to reports, the 27-year-old gunman (who will remain unnamed) began to indiscriminately fire as soon as he entered the lobby of the building.

Authorities revealed the gunman had a “documented mental health history”.

As he moved through the lobby, he reportedly sprayed the area with gunfire and shot a woman hiding behind a pillar. The gunman continued to the elevators, where he shot a security guard who took cover behind a desk.

When the elevator arrived to the ground floor, a woman was inside. The gunman let her exit the elevators unscathed and leave before going up to the 33rd floor to Rudin Management offices, where he opened fire on another woman before he turned his gun on himself and ended his life.

Along with Rudin Management, the 44-story building also housed Blackstone and NFL headquarters.

Although there is absolutely no link to the UHC CEO shooting, the parallels are strikingly similar in some regards: urban location, corporate setting, premeditated entry, and shooter self-destruction.

Whereas the shooting of the UHC CEO was overtly symbolic – the Park Avenue shooting feels more cryptic and chaotic in nature. In his back pants pocket, the gunman had a suicide note explaining he had a CTE and that “you can’t go against the NFL” because “they’ll squash you”.

The gunman also asked for his brain to be studied as a CTE injury can only be confirmed with post-mortem analysis. Even with how mysterious and seemingly random the Midtown shooting seems, the motive still hints at systemic injustice – like the UHC shooting – with CTE coverups and the NFL.

We are currently in a vicious loop of numbness.

It goes like this: breaking news, viral shock, algorithmic forgetting.

The story breaks. A headline flashes across your phone. Maybe you even get the live video: grainy lobby footage, people ducking behind reception desks, the familiar sound of gunfire echoing off marble.

Then comes the deluge – thirty-second clips on TikTok, a carousel of news alerts, a press conference where the police commissioner repeats that it’s “an ongoing investigation.” Within hours, every angle has been exhausted. Every pixel of shock has been mined.

Finally, the algorithm moves on – pushing the next tragedy, the next outrage, the next flicker of horror to keep the scroll alive. Yesterday’s massacre becomes tomorrow’s trivia.

We’ve turned violence into content, and content into ambient noise. A city can be bleeding, but your feed is already suggesting a new recipe, a meme, a viral dance. Moving onto the next thing.

This is the new cycle of public life:

1. Shock.
2. Consumption.
3. Erasure.

And it will keep spinning until the unthinkable becomes routine. Until we’ve learned not to flinch.

One day, the feed will serve you another massacre, and you won’t feel it at all. This is how society operates now – quiet and numb while scrolling for the next distraction.