What is the inevitable conclusion of perpetually mounting tensions? The endless stream of shootings, riots, and conflicts we see on our screens is curated, framed, and monetized. Reporting, in its traditional sense, has died. What we are living through is a deliberately induced crisis: a system where tragedies are staged as theater for mass consumption.

Mainstream outlets, social media, and political operatives have become dependent on providing this small taste of death that the collective unconscious of the public yearns for. They require the blood, the division, and the constant drip of catastrophe to keep their audiences outraged and addicted. The violence itself becomes the raw material, endlessly reproduced like Warhol’s soup cans, but the real product is the narrative.

This business model, or way of life, is propelled by the fuel of division. The disseminators no longer compete to explain what happened; the victory comes from who best weaponizes the what. When violence occurs, which is often, the conditioned outlets fixate on how it can be used, not why it happened. Headlines in a post-news world function as psychological triggers that audiences aren’t intended to think about beyond the point of acknowledging a feeling: rage, vindication, fear. In content production, nothing harms vitality more than nuance, the ultimate click killer. Consequently, every tragedy becomes an opportunity to deepen existing cultural fractures.

Modern culture, unprecedentedly rich in luxury and malignantly sadistic aggression, has become either the child or the breeding ground of Thanatos, the pull towards destruction and death. And when this drive cannot be directed outward in a socially acceptable way, it turns inward, manifesting in a type of self-destructive behavior that garners more attention than any other spectacle. In this sense, cultural pathology today is a form of sublimated suicide. Given the most recent shooting in Minnesota, consider the transgender phenomenon: mutilating the body in pursuit of annihilating the old self. The Post-Human Movements, extreme risk-taking, digital technology obsession, opioid epidemic, and anorexia all stem from this same drive towards self-erasure or annihilation.

Read the full essay on Substack.

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