So now that we have established criteria for determining moral culpability for modern mass murders, how can we apply those criteria in specific situations. The focus, in my opinion, has to be on the creators of certain devices. Now for a long time, the main mechanical devices that have been subject to scrutiny have been guns. Guns are devices that are directly connected to deadly assault. Some guns like hunting rifles are used primarily for killing game animals. But many other guns from pistols to assault rifles and machine guns have been created with one purpose in mind: injuring or killing humans. So, the connection to human danger becomes fairly obvious. This is why so many legal cases involving gun violence have been brought before the courts. Cases are partly based on the notion that the very availability of guns for the general public and, particularly for young men, stimulates fantasies of opportunities to use guns. Now these fantasies are normally never discussed as a vehicle to pull themselves out of their numbness. But in my opinion, that is what they are. So, when the opportunity does arise to obtain a gun either through lawful purchase, through buying one on the street, or through borrowing one from a family member or friend, the fantasy is allowed to fructify, the potential perpetrator is allowed to carry out his fantasy and shoot one or more people and even kill one or more people. Guns give lethal abilities to people who through lack of physical strength and/or lack of martial arts skills would normally be unable to kill someone. Again, when it comes to modern mass murders, it is guns that are the devices to which blame is normally ascribed.
However, when it comes to screen reality devices, the connection to modern mass murders is not so apparent. If anything, the idea of sitting in front of a screen and playing video games or watching movies or television programs would appear, on the surface, to put a person in a more passive state of mind. At least, if some of the digital activities generate aggressive fantasies, within the context of the activities, they never seem to escape beyond the mental state of the fantasies into the crude reality of the external world. Until, of course, some stimulus in the form of an abrasive tension-pocket comes along and triggers an aggressive response, which depending on the weapons available, has all the potential of becoming a lethal response.
So the connection between screen reality technology from video games to television programs to movies and even to social media, on the one hand, and carrying out aggressive lethal fantasies in the external world is a little less obvious, is more attenuated than the connection between fire arms and carrying out mass murders. Which is why there has been very little discussion about this connection up until now. There has been concern about the violence present in many of the video games, many of the virtual reality games, many movies, many television programs and of course many cults, hate groups and social action groups on social media that one finds trying to attract followers and new members. But seldom has this concern ever translated into a concerted effort to limit or eliminate their presence in the public marketplace. As far as I know, there haven’t been any law suits against modern consumer technology companies. Meantime, the crimes of numbness have become so commonplace, that many people just take them for granted.
The truth is that for the vast majority of people in modern society, their nervous systems have been transformed by all the years they have been immersing themselves in screen reality. The nervous systems of human beings were constructed to absorb organic stimuli, but since modern technology has increasingly changed the fields of experience in which people dwell, replacing the organic stimulation found in traditional natural living environments with the experiential vacuum and the abrasive stimulation associated with modern technological living environments, human nervous systems have been forced to at least partly adjust to the changes in the preponderant stimuli that are now available to them. But being organisms and not mechanisms it is not as if they can totally change themselves in such a way as to not only barely survive with technological stimuli, but to actually thrive. People can change their nervous systems up to a point in order to meet the demands of modern technological society. But they can’t change their nervous systems completely. To do that would mean to become a machine or a robot or a computer themselves. So, they end up becoming robotized people. Uncomfortable being halfway between a mammal and a machine. And one way they have of stimulating themselves to life given their transformed nervous systems, is to shock themselves to life with the overstimulation of abrasive stimulation, and then, to prevent their brains from being fried, coming off of the overstimulation and coming into the understimulation of the experiential vacuum. This is where people who live in modern technological society are today. In truth, it is not just the consumer technology that creates sensory distortion, but the Internet of Things, 3-D printing, virtual reality and A I as well. Increasingly our whole lives are becoming unnatural. And this means more and more mass murders among other effects.
© 2025 Laurence Mesirow
