Ultra-Realists

Category: UR PGR/ECR Network

  • From Tragedy to Spectacle: Kirk, Zarutska, and the Digital Afterlife of Violence.

    Craig Kelly

    Max Hart

    When Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was fatally stabbed on a North Carolina train, CCTV images of her last moments were not only shared but reframed to become the backdrop to further cultural and political debate (Wolfe, 2025). Similarly, when Charlie Kirk was shot in Utah during his latest of a series of campus events, footage circulated online within hours (Scruton et al. 2025). Clips of the chaos became partisan talking points, recycled endlessly in memes, Tik Toks, miscaptioned videos and other viral content formats. It was not long before they were gamified, sparking public outrage when platform moderators discovered users had built parody scenarios inside Roblox – a popular gaming platform with predominantly younger audiences (Feiner, 2025).

    Both events offer another daily reminder that violence in the twenty-first century does not remain confined to the terrestrial space in which it was inflicted. Instead, it is rapidly captured, clipped, circulated in online spaces, and consumed. These spectacles tell us less about the crimes themselves than they do about the cultural and economic system in which they are digested. To make sense of this transformation, we draw from Kelly et al.’s (2023) graze culture, the Deviant Leisure perspective (Raymen and Smith, 2019), and Hall and Winlow’s (2025) analyses of pseudo-pacification, special liberty, and lack. Ultimately, they show that today’s violent spectacles are not aberrations of digital media but symptoms of a much longer historical relationship between violence, entertainment, and consumption harnessed by capitalist desire.

     
    A Long History of Consuming Violence

    Public fascination with violence is not new. From gladiatorial combat in Rome to public hangings in London, societies have long witnessed collective rituals of suffering (Kelly et al. 2023). As Hall (2012) argues, violence was monopolised, pseudo-pacified, and though such public brutality may have declined, the underlying appetites were never extinguished. What disappeared from physical reality has historically emerged in the marketplace, in mediated forms such as penny dreadfuls, crime reports, horror movies, news reports, music, and later, social media and video games. Violence was sanitised, repackaged, but always a present commodity (Kelly et al. 2023).

    This duality sits at the core of late consumer culture. As societies officially condemn violence, we simultaneously aestheticize and commodify it. In this sense, the spectacle of Kirk’s assassination or Zarutska’s egregious murder should not be viewed as a rupture within a pacified society, but rather a logical continuation. Where once stood a scaffold for the public to experience suffering and death, now prevails a device cradled in our palms feeding us brutal violent content at the swipe of a screen. Often with algorithms pushing this content whether individuals have searched for content of that nature or not. Indeed, the cultural function, the circulation of violent images as both fear and fascination, remains intact and increasingly automated.

    Grazing Death

    Kelly et al.’s (2023) concept of graze culture captures how late technological capitalism reshapes this consumption. Instead of sustained critical engagement, audiences “graze” across short, affectively intense fragments. The murder clip, such as that of Kirk and Zarutska, is ideal grazing material – an eight-second shock that is replayable, memeable, and stripped of the messy context that might otherwise awaken us to the harmful structural realities of late consumer capitalism. Importantly, Graze culture is not simply passive scrolling, it is structured by algorithms that reward shareable intensity. Hence the CCTV stills and phone footage that dominate our understandings of these events. They are not just evidence; they are commodities whose value lies in their repeatability and capacity to hold attention in a crowded digital landscape. The tragedy is extracted into consumable fragments that can circulate independent of, and often in disregard to, the victims’ lives, or of justice itself.

    Leisure, Play, and the Commodification of Trauma

    The deviant leisure perspective (see Raymen and Smith, 2019) helps us further understand, and see the outcomes of, what happens when violence is not just viewed but turned into entertainment. The Roblox murder experiences based on Kirk’s death for example illustrate how late-capitalist leisure cultures merge trauma into the circuits of play. This is not a subcultural transgression, it is a predictable outcome of a cultural and political economy in which every shocking event, especially those demonstrating extreme forms of subjective violence, becomes content to be remixed, mocked, or monetised.

    Whilst this violence may be consumed reluctantly by unknowingly netizens as they scroll through their timelines, it is also specifically sought out and enjoyed by many others. The killings are re-enacted in ludic spaces believed to be void of real formal sanction or judgement (Atkinson and Rodgers, 2016) – shared on TikTok with ironic captions or turned into memes to become vital in-group marking points. This is not only deviant because it is (for the most part) socially tolerated, market-driven, and platform enabled. It is also because it further distracts us from deeper rooted social violence that we remain oblivious to (Kelly et al. 2023). Ultimately, leisure under late capitalism thrives on commodifying harm (Raymen and Smith, 2019).

    Pseudo-Pacification, Special Liberty, and Lack

    As stated, any violent drives have been repressed and channelled whereby such appetites are fulfilled by brutality in its commodified form. Watching Zarutska’s CCTV clip or Kirk’s phone footage becomes a more socially acceptable proxy for transgressive desire. To further this understanding, we can explore the concept of special liberty (Hall and Winlow, 2025). This describes the way neoliberal subjects experience their freedom to transgress. Sharing clips and stills of Kirk’s and Zarutska’s deaths, whether that be under the guise of dark humour through memes, as political irony, or just content for contents sake may initially feel like rebellion against taste and morality. In reality it is what platforms encourage – a shallow freedom that masks deeper conformity to capitalist logic. This brings us to the concept of Lack, the psychoanalytic engine that drives this consumption. Subjects in late capitalism experience a void, an endless yearning that can never be satisfied (Hall and Winlow, 2025). Spectacular violence offers an intense but temporary release. Each shocking clip fills this lack for a fleeting moment – only to reactivate desire for the next spectacle. Indeed, whilst we may see these deaths become the result of further political and ideological debate, it should not be surprising when such clips fade into the background to be replaced by the next. It is disposable capitalism (Hart et al. 2025 forthcoming) in an attention economy.

    When combined with graze culture, these concepts reveal a cycle. Society pacifies real violence, consumers experience lack, platforms offer pseudo-transgressive spectacles of death, and audiences graze across them in search of fleeting satisfaction. The murders are real, and so is the grief experienced by the victim’s loved ones, but their mediated afterlife is shaped less by this grief than by this structural compulsion.

    Celebrity Commentators, Instrumental Influencers, and the Culture Industry

    Whenever we see tragedy such as the Kirk and Zarutska’s murders, celebrity commentators and influencer prosumers become natural intermediaries. Indeed, figures with large online followings rapidly convert violent events into cultural, and in some cases, literal currency. In Kirk’s case, for example, partisan influencers rushed to define what the footage meant, framing it as evidence of broader conspiracies or political decline (Abels et al. 2025; Riccardi and Boak, 2025; Goldin, 2025; Ingram, 2025). In Zarutska’s case, commentators seized on her identity as a refugee, instrumentalising her death in debates on immigration and national security (Cunningham and Sandman, 2025; Hagstrom, 2025; Salsameda, 2025; Sandman, 2025). Furthermore, we see public figures such as Elon Musk and Andrew Tate offer donations for memorial paintings of Zarutska (AOL News, 2025). This act, however, risks being less about genuine commemoration and more about accruing cultural currency and stoking discontent through the culture wars. Such performances are a pseudo-commemoration. Less an act of mourning than a superficial display of empathy that reinforces their visibility in the attention economy rather than addressing the structural conditions that produced the violence. Similarly, celebrities take to social media to offer their condolences, support, and call for solidarity. Whilst these may be positive intentions, in the context of late capitalism’s attention economy, even condolence becomes a kind of spectacular currency within a grief economy. Such appearances of care are ultimately converted into visibility, reach, and soft power.

    These commentaries exemplify what Adorno and Horkheimer (1997) refer to as the culture industry. This being the process whereby the complex realities of society are reduced into commodified, superficial soundbites. In late capitalism, celebrity voices do not deepen our understanding, they amplify grazing, feeding audiences the quickest, most emotionally charged interpretations. This dynamic is not accidental. Influencers monetize outrage, platforms reward engagement, and audiences, driven by lack, seek out further transgressional release.

    Harm and the Market for Death

    Such processes are not harmless. Indeed, families are re-traumatised by the endless replay of their loved ones’ final moments. Likewise, are online populations who, without any consent or warning, are suddenly consuming violent content in the form of real tragedy and death. In this space misinformation spreads faster than facts, distorting justice, and public memory, fuelling existing political and cultural tension. Additionally, not all deaths are equally spectacularised. Some murders capture public imagination, amplified by celebrity voices, whilst others remain invisible. Indeed, just moments after Kirk’s murder a school shooting took place in Colorado though received little media or social media attention (Banner, 2025). Such instances reflect the deep inequalities of the hierarchy of late-capitalist media culture. A culture that further pushes structural violence, and the deep-rooted harm it generates, to the background whilst turning individual violent moments into digital spectacles.

    Conclusion

    The Colorado school shooting coinciding with the assassination of Kirk functioned as one of the catalysts for politically left leaning social media users to mock his death. Pulling upon previous comments he had made in which he had stated firearm related deaths were “unfortunately” worth it to keep the second amendment, memes flooded the internet inferring the proverbial chickens had come home to roost. In reaction to this, a portion of the right quickly began to store screenshots and forwarded them to the employers and educational institutions of those who had posted. As this blog was being written, a searchable index of 30,000 social media posts was being compiled and is due to be released, offering a searchable index of the doxed posters.

    Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets on London, rallying around Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka. Tommy Robinson) to take part in the Unite the Kingdom, anti-immigration protests. In the online space, the murder of Zarutska was quickly conflated with the ongoing discontent around immigration in the UK, spurned on with the appearance on Musk being broadcast to those marching and demanding the dissolution of parliament (Ahmed, 2025).

    Here we see starkly the conflation of separate social and political landscapes brought forth by globalisation and online spaces. So too, we see a clear demonstration of a dearth of realpolitik in contemporary life (Winlow et al., 2017; Telford, 2022; Winlow and Hall, 2022; Winlow, 2025). On one side, the right who have decried cancel culture over the last decade stymie free speech (admittedly in poor taste) and justify it as consequence culture. Meanwhile the left continues to fail to recognise that the grievances that have led to the death of Kirk and the upsurge in the sale of flags in the United Kingdom stem from decades of some portions of the population being ignored and dismissed as racist and xenophobic.

    The tragic murders of Zarutska and Kirk demonstrate both the deep political turmoil faced by western democracies and spurned on by unregulated online spaces. So too, they demonstrate clearly how consumer culture plays a significant role in the pseudo pacification of contemporary life. Spectacular forms of violence, such as these two tragic losses of life, served to offer not only pseudo-transgressive spectacles for those who are politically alienated to graze upon, but offered those who hold power the opportunity to further entrench and normalise ideological and moral stances into political life and move ever further from a realpolitik. Rather than being viewed as a rupture of a pacified society, these appalling acts of violence, commodified and consumed, served as the logical continuation of late capitalism.

    References

    Abels, G., Briceno, M. and Tuquero, L. (2025) Fact-checking claims about sniper’s identity in Charlie Kirk shooting. Al Jazeera, 12 September. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/12/fact-checking-claims-about-snipers-identity-in-charlie-kirk-shooting (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Ahmed, A. (2025) Elon Musk calls for dissolution of parliament at far-right rally in London. The Guardian. 13 September. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/13/elon-musk-calls-for-dissolution-of-parliament-at-far-right-rally-in-london (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Banner, A. (2025) 5 things to know for Sept 11: Charlie Kirk, 9/11, Colorado school shooting, Georgia ICE raid, gas truck explosion. CNN, 11 September. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/11/us/5-things-to-know-for-sept-11-charlie-kirk-9-11-colorado-school-shooting-georgia-ice-raid-gas-truck-explosion (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Adorno, T. W. and Horkheimer, M. (1997) The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. In: G. S. Nörr, ed. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Verso, pp. 120-167.

    AOL News, 2025. Elon Musk and Andrew Tate pour millions into Iryna Zarutska murals across U.S. Available at: https://www.aol.com/news/elon-musk-andrew-tate-pour-165211008.html (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Cunningham, T. and Sandman, G. (2025) North Carolina Republicans blame Democrats for ‘woke’ policies they say contributed to Charlotte light-rail stabbing. ABC News. Available at: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/north-carolina-republicans-blame-democrats-woke-policies-contributed/story?id=125480126 ([Accessed 14 September 2025).

    Feiner, L. (2025) Roblox says it will remove posts re-enacting Charlie Kirk’s killing. The Verge, 12 September. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/policy/777628/roblox-says-it-will-remove-posts-re-enacting-charlie-kirks-killing (Accessed: 14th September 2025).

    Goldin, M. (2025) ‘Fact Focus: Assassination of Charlie Kirk prompts flood of false and misleading claims online’. NBC10 Philadelphia, 12 September. Available at: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/politics/fact-focus-assassination-of-charlie-kirk-prompts-flood-of-false-and-misleading-claims-online/4268659 (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Hagstrom, A. (2025) ‘NC Republicans lay into Dems over Charlotte murder, crime policies: ‘She died because of our complacency’’. Fox News, 11 September. Available at: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nc-republicans-lay-dems-over-charlotte-murder-crime-policies-she-died-because-our-complacency (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Hall, S. (2012). Theorising Crime and Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage.

    Hall, S. & Winlow, S. (2025). Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Advances in Ultra-Realism. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Hart, M., Bavin, K. and Lynes, A. (2025 – forthcoming) Artificial Intelligence, Capitalism, and the Logic of Harm: Toward a Critical Criminology of AI. Critical Criminology.

    Ingram, D. (2025) ‘Toxic rhetoric, including calls for ‘civil war’ and retribution, surges after Charlie Kirk killing’. NBC News, 12 September. Available at: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/national-international/charlie-kirk-shooting-online-calls-civil-war-retribution-rhetoric/4268391 (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Kelly, C., Lynes, A. & Hart, M., 2023. ‘Graze Culture’ and serial murder: Brushing up against ‘familiar monsters’ in the wake of 9/11. In: S.E. Fanning & C. O’Callaghan, eds. Serial Killing on Screen: Adaptation, True Crime and Popular Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 295–321. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17812-2 [Accessed 26 August 2025].

    Raymen, T. and Smith, O. (eds.) (2019) Deviant Leisure: Criminological Perspectives on Leisure and Harm. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan

    Riccardi, N. and Boak, J. (2025) Utah governor says the motive is not yet certain but the suspect was on the left. AP News, 12 September. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/aef9fe8dc82d218a36d078536717d95d (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Sandman, G. (2025) ‘Media uses ‘Republicans pounce’ spin in Charlotte stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska’. Fox News, 12 September. Available at: https://www.foxnews.com/media/liberal-media-fuels-republicans-pounce-narrative-charlotte-stabbing-ukrainian-refugee-sparks-outcry (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Salsameda, C. (2025) ‘N.C. Republicans blame Democrats, say light rail killing ‘100% preventable’’’. Spectrum Local News, 12 September. Available at: https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/charlotte/news/2025/09/11/north-carolina-republicans-charlotte-stabbing (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Scruton, P., Watson, C., Boulinier, L. and Olorenshaw, A. (2025) How the Charlie Kirk shooting unfolded – in maps, videos and images. The Guardian, 11 September. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk-shooting-maps-videos-images (Accessed: 14th September 2025).

    Telford, L. (2022) English Nationalism and its Ghost Towns. London: Routledge

    Wolfe, E. (2025) Charlotte train stabbing: Ukrainian victim. CNN, 9 September. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/09/us/charlotte-train-stabbing-ukrainian-victim (Accessed 14th September 2025).

    Winlow, S. (2025) The Politics of Nostalgia: Class, Rootlessness and Decline. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited.

    Winlow, S., Hall, S., and Treadwell, J. (2017) The Rise of the Right: English Nationalism and the transformation of working-class politics. Bristol: Policy Press.

    Winlow, S., and Hall, S. (2022) The Death of the Left: Why we Must Begin from the Beginning Again. Bristol: Policy Press.

  • The Disunion Jack: National Flags and the Fragile Balance of Orderly Disorder

    Emma Armstrong

    Steve Hall

    One year and one month after the summer riots of 2024, here we are again. The same tensions are bubbling to the surface. Across towns and cities in England, the St George’s flag has been painted on roundabouts, draped from lampposts, and flown proudly from windows and car bonnets. Some councils have begun to remove them, arguing that it’s a matter of health and safety – in our region, a local hospital requested their removal because they posed a risk to air ambulances (O’Leary, 2025) – while others insist they will leave them untouched (ITV, 2025). But for protestors, these removals are not bureaucratic housekeeping, they are a direct attack on free speech and national pride.

    The St George’s Cross has long carried contested meanings in England, and today’s disputes are part of that longer story. In the 1990s and 2000s, the flag was heavily associated with far-right groups, but at the same time, for many football fans major sporting events such as the World Cup normalised its display. During the World Cup in 2014, Labour MP Emily Thornberry caused a furore and was forced to resign from the Shadow Cabinet after she had posted an inferential photo of a football fan displaying a St George’s flag in his window with his white van parked underneath it. This dual history means that the St George’s Cross continues to sit uneasily between patriotism and xenophobia, between an apparently benign symbol of national identity and a banner that can evoke fear and exclusion (Brown et al., 2012).

    The current disputes, then, are not a new phenomenon but the latest manifestation of a long-running symbolic struggle over who the flag belongs to, and what kind of nation it represents. From an ultra-realist perspective, we argue that these disputes are not really about flags or even about free speech. They represent the deeper insecurities and fractures of the West’s late-capitalist, post-industrial, post-imperial societies. The national flag is a convenient symbol onto which people can project numerous feelings ranging from pride and belonging to exclusion, resentment and xenophobia.

    We use the concept of pseudo-pacification to explain how these symbolic battles are the way conflict is staged and managed in Western societies. Over a period of 700 years, the overt physical violence that was once a primary internal social structuring and managerial force has largely been repressed and institutionalised (at least for now). However, underlying resentments and insecurities have in many ways increased in intensity. During flashpoints associated with economic decline, political failure and social unrest they have to go somewhere.

    Hall (2012) argues that modern societies have not eliminated or even ‘stored’ physical violence as Elias (1939) suggested, but have essentially re-routed and repurposed it. Through what Hall (2007) calls the pseudo-pacification process, everyday physical violence is suppressed by the state in order to allow markets and commerce to flourish and property to be protected. But the aggressive impulses that once played out in direct confrontation have not simply disappeared and indeed were never discouraged. Instead, they were encouraged, sublimated and bound by evolving norms and laws to fuel the sociosymbolic competition essential to consumer culture’s crucial role in boosting aggregate demand (Hall and Winlow, 2025).

    In other words, the arena of physical conflict has been relocated from the battlefield or the street to the cultural sphere, where people fight over meaning, recognition, and legitimacy. This is what we see in the disputes around flags. In a pseudo-pacified society, the West’s national flags have become a gesture representing deeper frustrations, a major signifier in the symbolic site where struggles over identity and belonging can be staged. To remove them is an act many experience as silencing, erasure, or disrespect. For others, flying them is an attempt to reestablish atavistic sentiments of imperial supremacy that should be consigned permanently to a history we should all be glad to leave behind.

    But why now? Ultra-realism’s historical research suggests that capitalism cannot survive in conditions of either pure pacification or pure disorder. Energetic markets rely on sublimated competition in the spheres of production and consumption and therefore simply cannot function in cultures of normalised altruism or violence. Too much violent chaos disrupts trade, property, and everyday life. Too much altruism, peace and stability, however, would sap the competitive energy and resentment that consumer capitalism relies on. What we live in, then, is a managed middle ground, what Horsley et al. (2015) call ‘orderly disorder’, where people are simultaneously stimulated and pacified.

    In situations where market systems veer rapidly towards plutocracy and fail to deliver social justice and economic opportunities or rewards for increasingly precarious workers, political protests and riots are common responses. Where brutal repression has been imposed in the past, today’s neoliberal authorities do not aim to eliminate unrest but to manage it within tolerable boundaries, a process Horsley et al. (2015) describe as essential to the maintenance of legitimacy. Subjects must be given the opportunity to feel as though their protests are resonating amongst the political class at the same time as their activism is quickly absorbed back into the system to become yet again neutralised, mythologised and, where possible, commodified as a historical memory (Kotzé, 2020). “Yes, we showed ‘em what’s what on that day!”

    So, briefly, what are the principal ways in which the subjects we see today spray-painting roundabouts stimulated and pacified? We can see populist rhetoric positioning the white working class as betrayed or left behind (Telford, 2025) in a context where the death of the left and absence of effective political representation (Winlow and Hall, 2022) creates a desolate empty space in which resentment echoes and reverberates to a crescendo. Some white working-class citizens in precarious economic situations (Lloyd 2018) perceive immigrants and minority groups as ‘the others’ able to enjoy sympathy, freedoms and cultural expression supposedly denied to them.

    This ‘theft of enjoyment’ (Žižek, 2005), once derived from a sense of cultural belonging spiced by an old imperialist ideology of false superiority, has been lowered by the liberal political elite into a dark abyss of inferiority and displacement (Winlow 2025). From this perspective, the removal of St George’s flags is not a neutral bureaucratic act, but another example of stolen enjoyment experienced in stark contrast to the ‘celebration of the other’, typical of a treacherous political elite populated by figures such as ‘two-tier Kier’ currently haunting the Palace of Westminster and our other mainstream institutions.

    To these insecure people it seems quite unequivocal that consumer capitalism’s broken promises of success and the ability and right to display all its symbols have stoked feelings of inadequacy (Ellis et al., 2018). Flags are perfect vehicles for this nostalgia as they condense the memory of a simpler, more secure identity, which, for a brief period after WWII, was celebrated as heroic, functional and deserving of all the rewards under the sun (Winlow, 2025). Those who were imaginary heroes of the British Imperium and workers in the temporary industrial economy of rising wages have experienced the reality of a great fall.

    This sense of loss after a rapid fall has jeopardised the efficiency of the pseudo-pacification process. Where subjective violence has been largely suppressed through criminalisation and anger has been assuaged by the consumer pleasures of streaming services, sport, alcohol, fast food and so on, there are times when the sense of loss, humiliation and betrayal intensifies and erupts through these always fragile layers. Here the shameless display of nationalistic symbols acts as a perverse duality, a personally risky yet structurally safe challenge to the distant political elite – a spectacular micro-resistance that allow subjects to feel as though they are resisting and being punished while at the same time showing their loyalty and commitment to the system.

    Misrecognition of immigrants as their principal enemy permanently distracts these theatrical white nationalists from effective political engagement with opposition to the neoliberal system that has pulled the rug from under their feet. When the anger subsides and the streets are cleared, nostalgia returns as the great pacifier, redirecting emotional energy backwards to a mythical past rather than a future that would be susceptible to real change should substantive politics return (Winlow and Hall, 2022). Anger is thus trapped in this imagined history, fuelling a yearning for a past that can’t be restored and succeeding only in reproducing sentiments that belong to it, an emotional spectrum that ranges from mutual love and solidarity to overt racism.

    However, when the balance of stimulation and pacification is disturbed the pseudo-pacification process breaks down (Winlow et al., 2015) and we see acts permitted by special liberty, the subject’s sense of entitlement to enact harm and violence with impunity (Kotzé, 2024). When the balance tipped in the UK in July 2024, the consequences were volatile, enabled by the rioter’s momentary belief that they had the ethical case and the social permission to act. The physical violence that marked last year’s riots was repressed and remains so for now, but the underlying energy of the unsymbolised Real trapped in the misrecognitions of the Imaginary continues to fuel battles over representation.

    The disputes around flags are not isolated eruptions of cultural grievance. They are symptoms of a social order dependent on a managed tension between stimulation and pacification. Symbolic battles such as the fight over the St George’s Cross absorb the frustrations of those who feel excluded, channelling aggression into disputes over cultural meaning and recognition that risk bouts of outright violence and revanchist racism – a risk the dominant neoliberal order is willing to take rather than confront coordinated political action. Councils remove flags, protestors re-erect them, media coverage amplifies the outrage, and the cycle continues. Neoliberalism’s underlying insecurities remain unresolved, but the conflict is contained, managed, and endlessly recycled. It is also quickly and easily commodified. Parsley (2025) reported that ‘sales of Union Flags and St George’s flags have risen by around 20 per cent and flagpole purchases have doubled in recent weeks’. What appears to be an act of cultural defiance is also a profitable consumer trend, with neoliberal capitalism once again the only winner.

    References

    Brown, L., Richards, S., and Jones, I. (2012) ‘Sojourner perceptions of the St George Cross flag during the FIFA 2010 World Cup: A symbol of carnival or menace?’ International Review for the Sociology of Sport. 49. Pp. 102-20.

    Elias, N. (1939) The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Ellis, A., Winlow, S., Briggs, D. J. S., Esquinas, A. S., Verdugo, R. C., and Suárez, J. R. P. (2018) ‘Liberalism, lack and “living the dream”: Reconsidering the attractions of alcohol-based leisure for young tourists in Magaluf, Majorca.’ Journal of Extreme Anthropology. 2(2). Pp. 1-19.

    Hall, S. (2007) ‘The emergence and breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process.’ In Watson, K. (Ed.) Assaulting the Past: Placing Violence in Historical Context. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press.  

    Hall, S. (2012) Theorizing Crime and Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage Publications.

    Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2025) Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Advances in Ultra-Realism. (2nd ed). Abingdon: Routledge.

    Horsley, M., Kotzé, J., and Hall, S. (2015) ‘The maintenance of orderly disorder: Modernity, markets, and the pseudo-pacification process.’ Journal of European History of Law. 6. Pp. 18-29.

    ITV. (2025) ‘Lincolnshire County Council won’t paint over England flag graffiti.’ [online]. Available at: https://www.itv.com/news/calendar/2025-08-28/council-says-it-wont-paint-over-england-flag-graffiti. (Accessed on: 29/08/2025).

    Kotzé, J. (2020) ‘The commodification of abstinence.’ In Hall, S., Kuldova, T., and Horsley, M. (Eds.) Crime, Harm and Consumerism. Milton: Routledge. 

    Kotzé, J. (2024) ‘On special liberty and the motivation to harm’. The British Journal of Criminology. 65(2). Pp. 314-27.

    Lloyd, A. (2018) The Harms of Work: An Ultra-Realist Account of the Service Economy. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

    O’Leary, A. (2025) ‘Flag removed near James Cook Hospital over risks to air ambulance.’ The Northern Echo. [online]. Available at: https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/25447662.flag-removed-near-james-cook-hospital-risk-air-ambulance/.

    Parsley, D. (2025) ‘Flag wars fuelling Union Jack and St George’s Cross sales.’ The I Paper. [online]. Available at: https://inews.co.uk/news/flag-wars-fuelling-union-jack-st-georges-cross-3885185?srsltid=AfmBOoqfIt69989PWGY61lHe0yjymuA5BZmconDwmzHL5jlm0UG7fkca.

    Telford, L. (2025) ‘Left behind places, neoliberalism and systemic violence in the UK.’ Frontiers in Sociology. 10. Pp. 1632190. 

    Winlow, S. (2025) The Politics of Nostalgia: Class, Rootlessness and Decline. London: Emerald Publishing Limited.

    Winlow, S., and Hall, S. (2022) The Death of the Left: Why we Must Begin from the Beginning Again. London: Policy Press. 

    Žižek, S. (2005) The Metastases of Enjoyment. London: Verso.

  • Datafication Laid Bare: Making sense of the Grok AI leaks

    What the Grok? Performance Promises, Cases of Controversy and Grok.

    On the 22nd of August 2025, news headlines began to circulate on social media sites regarding X (formerly Twitter) owner and tech-billionaire Elon Musk’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot ‘Grok’. Initially launched in November 2023, Grok has seen rapid evolution with Grok-2 offering image-generation capability and Grok-3 advancing key features such as AI reasoning and reflection. Finally, Grok-4, launched in July 2025, claims to offer PhD level intelligence reasoning (Business Today, 2025). Of course, newer premium pricing tiers (around $300 a month for ‘SuperGrok Heavy’) have also emerged (ibid). However, recent headlines are about controversy and not the usual celebrations of AI ambition or performance. Rather, they demonstrate only the latest structural example of datafication, algorithmic governance, and harmful asymmetry.

    Interestingly, this is not the first instance where Grok has been at the forefront of controversy. In July 2025, Grok experienced backlash for generating anti-Semitic material, with reports suggesting the bot had praised Hitler whilst referring to itself as “MechaHitler”. This sparked condemnation from watchdogs and resulted in the developers promising improvements to hate speech moderation (Speakman, 2025). Prior to this, concerns were raised regarding the bot’s safeguards and prompts design as it was reported to have issued guidance on practical violence, offering advice to users on how to assault a public figure (Saeedy, 2025).

    Recent reports have revealed that over 370,000 chat transcripts between Grok and its users have been unintentionally published on the open web after being indexed by numerous search engines such as Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo (Caswell, 2025; Dees, 2025). This was due to a technological oversight whereby neither no-index tags nor restriction of access commands were programmed, leaving unique shareable URLs unprotected – ultimately making them visible to search engine crawlers (Martin and White, 2025). All of this was reportedly done without any user knowledge, with many believing their chats were private (ibid). The exposed content seemingly varies in sensitivity and legality. Reports include relatively benign uses, such as summarising journal articles or drafting tweets, alongside the sharing of highly sensitive information, including names, passwords, private medical and/or psychological queries, and confidential uploaded documents such as spreadsheets and images. Further to this, much more dangerous or illicit content has been reported. Instructions for making fentanyl, methamphetamines and bombs were found. There is also evidence of users instructing the bot to write its own malware, assist in planning suicides and assassination plots of figures such as Elon Musk himself (Kundaliya, 2025; Dees, 2025).

    It may be easy to understand these events as another example of a privacy accident or data breach resulting in erosion of user trust, akin to those we have seen since the development of the internet and its subsequent technological advancements (Singh, 2025). So we may call for better safeguards in future use of the AI bot. However, such understandings and action fail to recognise that accountability and safety in AI, much like its technological predecessors, should not just be about technical fixes, but about confronting political-economic and cultural structures within late capitalism that normalise such exposure and harm. To aid this, the remainder of this blog draws from recent critical criminological discussions of AI and Harm (Hart et al. 2025 forthcoming); Ultra-Realist perspectives and critique of the structural logics of late capitalism (Hall and Winlow 2025), Kelly et al’s. (2023) ‘graze culture’, as well as Atkinson and Rogers (2016) work on ‘zones of exception’ to outline how we can better make sense of the Grok leaks.

    Grok, Graze Culture, and Zones of Exception

    As Atkinson and Rogers (2016) explain, society has witnessed a cultural re-positioning of our once previously pseudo-pacified desires and “guilty” pleasures. We now engage with ‘enclosed screen spaces’ such as video games (or in this instance smartphones) to interact with sexual and violent desires under the assurance that they remain within these zones of cultural exception. As we move further into prosumer society (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2020), AI technology has developed to allow users to access such zones with ‘AI girlfriends’ or through the creation of ‘AI deepfakes’ (Goodwin, 2024). In this current context, however, Grok and other AI chatbots alike form a conversational zone of exception where one can engage with violent, criminal or deviant content, or share personal and sensitive information, in what is perceived as a private space. However, as users click the ‘share’ button, their intimate exchanges become globally accessible artifacts.

    Ultimately, Grok did not just experience a technological flaw, it positioned its users into a permanent digital zone of objection. A more public space where private desires and sensitive information is laid bare for all netizens to consume. Essentially, as we seek out further virtual spaces to fulfil such pseudo-pacified desires, spaces offered to us in the form of commodified technological innovation, we willingly offer data to a political and economic order orientated towards extraction, optimisation and profit (Hart et al. 2025 forthcoming). Here, chats designed to feel safe become instruments of exposure and harm.

    AI bots such as Grok have further blurred the line between production and consumption, just as social media apps and similar technology have done (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2020). AI, by design, produces content from what it consumes. It is both a vehicle of and dependent upon prosumerism. However, in light of the Grok leaks, users were, whether knowingly or not, producing valuable cultural and emotional labour in the form of conversations and prompts. However, the flawed “share” button rebranded this labour into indexable content, unpaid and involuntary – commodifying intimacy, turning private exchanges into commodified data streams. Essentially, users became prosumers at their own exposure – creating and consuming simultaneously whilst corporations extracted surplus value. What may have been satire, experimentation or cathartic expression has now become a media spectacle.

    Kelly et al’s. (2023) ‘graze culture’ adds important depth here. They explain that society brushes up against the familiar (usually in the form of obvious subjective forms of violence epitomised by the serial killer) in order to disavow their sense of lack and experience of everyday structural violence, such as political inequality and global disasters. The implications here are twofold. First, it positions the leaked transcripts as fodder for our graze culture. Content for journalists, readers, doom scrollers and perhaps academic commentators to skim without context, disavowing their own realities. Secondly, it allows us to recognise that, whilst a technological fix may be offered, and we may raise alarms towards the safeguards in place in such technology, we will ultimately disavow the realities of the system that creates such harms in the first instance. In essence, the outcomes of such data optimisation (exposure and embarrassment, for example) become the very dark matter we brush up against to banish the reason it happened in the first place.

    AI’s Logic of Harm and Grok

    Raymen’s (2023) work on telos tells us that in order to fully understand harm we must explore the end goal or purpose of an entity. In this respect, AI, once marketed as a force for human advancement, has been redirected to optimise surveillance and profit and thus its telos is corrupted. This crucial point was raised at the recent Critical Criminology conference at Northumbria University, where myself alongside my colleagues Kyla Bavin and Adam Lynes presented our forthcoming work exploring the harms of AI (see: Hart et al. 2025 forthcoming). As we explained, the elite’s implementation of AI technologies in the gig economy (Lynes and Wragg, 2023) demonstrates this corrupted telos, as well as the special liberty they enjoy (Hall, 2012).

    The Grok case demonstrates similar luxuries as elites continue to profit from the infrastructure of surveillance and datafication whilst users absorb its costs. In Grok’s case, over 370,000 individuals have had their vulnerabilities laid bare whilst the corporation remains opaque and shielded from responsibility. Drawing upon Hart et al’s (2025 forthcoming) critical typology of AI, we can understand the harm generated by Grok’s leaks as follows:

    Datafication harms: Personal conversations have been transformed into searchable, exploitable data points.

    Algorithmic governance harms: Platform designs of Grok (for example the “share” button and lack of privacy warnings) governed user behaviour invisibly, coercing them into unwanted exposure.

    Operational harms: Users may experience reputational damage, psychosocial stress, and the chilling effect of knowing that their private queries might circulate without consent.

    Existential harms: Trust in AI as a safe mediator of thought and dialogue is momentarily destabilised, leaving users disempowered and alienated as they brush back up against the very system that harms them in the first place.

    Ultimately, the Grok case demonstrates how AI infrastructures govern not through overt coercion, but by creating conditions of pacification and exception. Users feel free to share intimate thoughts as the interface appeared safe. However, this freedom is illusory as the act of sharing transports them into a digital zone of objection where they can be surveilled, indexed, and judged. This is a form of algorithmic pacification where individuals are pacified into compliance, only to find that compliance itself generates new harms. Whilst we should not overlook the somewhat heinous prompts being inputted into Grok, seen critically, these leaks are not an isolated technical misstep but an exemplary case of how AI platforms embody the logic of late capitalism: the suspension of protections (zones of exception), the palatable fodder to brush up against in times of misery (graze culture), the corruption of emancipatory promises (telos), and the granting of unchecked freedoms to elites (special liberty). They highlight that criminology must move beyond narrow cybercrime framings to confront AI as a structure with extreme zemiogenic and criminogenic potential – a system whose very design can produce and reproduce harm, inequality, and disempowerment.

    References

    Atkinson, R., and Rodgers, T. (2016) Pleasure Zones and Murder Boxes: Online Pornography and Violent Video Games and Cultural Zones of Exception. British Journal of Criminology, 56(6), pp. 1291-1307.

    Business Today (2025) ‘The rise of Grok: Elon Musk’s foray into the AI chatbot landscape’, Business Today, 17 March. Available at: https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/the-rise-of-grok-elon-musks-foray-into-the-ai-chatbot-landscape-468150-2025-03-17 [Accessed: 26 August 2025].

    Caswell, A. (2025) ‘Hundreds of thousands of Grok chatbot conversations are showing up in Google Search — here’s what happened’, Tom’s Guide, 20 August. Available at: https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/hundreds-of-thousands-of-grok-chatbot-conversations-are-showing-up-in-google-search-heres-what-happened [Accessed: 26 August 2025].

    Dees, M. (2025) ‘Hundreds of thousands of Grok chats accidentally published’, Techzine, 22 August. Available at: https://www.techzine.eu/news/privacy-compliance/133998/hundreds-of-thousands-of-grok-chats-accidentally-published [Accessed: 26 August 2025].

    Goodwin, L. (2024) Romance scammer duped £17k from me with deepfakes. BBC News. 19th December. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdr0g1em52go. [Accessed 25th August 2025].

    Hall, S. (2012). Theorising Crime and Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage.

    Hall, S. & Winlow, S. (2025). Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Advances in Ultra-Realism. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Hart, M., Bavin, K. and Lynes, A. (2025 – forthcoming) Artificial Intelligence, Capitalism, and the Logic of Harm: Toward a Critical Criminology of AI. Critical Criminology.

    Kelly, C., Lynes, A. & Hart, M., 2023. ‘Graze Culture’ and serial murder: Brushing up against ‘familiar monsters’ in the wake of 9/11. In: S.E. Fanning & C. O’Callaghan, eds. Serial Killing on Screen: Adaptation, True Crime and Popular Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 295–321. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17812-2 [Accessed 26 August 2025].

    Kundaliya, D. (2025) Elon Musk’s xAI exposed hundreds of thousands of Grok conversations to Google search. Computing. Available at: https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2025/security/elon-musk-s-xai-exposed-hundreds-of-thousands-of-grok-conversations-to-google-search [Accessed 26 August 2025].

    Lynes, A. and Wragg, E. (2023). “Smile for the camera”: Online warehouse tours as a form of dark tourism within the era of late capitalism. Tourism and Hospitality Research, 24(4), 615-629.

    Martin, I. and White, E. (2025). Elon Musk’s xAI published hundreds of thousands of Grok chatbot conversations. Forbes. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2025/08/20/elon-musks-xai-published-hundreds-of-thousands-of-grok-chatbot-conversations/ [Accessed 26 August 2025].

    Raymen, T. (2023). The Enigma of Social Harm The Problem of Liberalism. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Ritzer, G. and Jurgenson, N. (2010) ‘Production, consumption, prosumption: The nature of capitalism in the age of the digital “prosumer”’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 10(1), pp. 13–36.

    Saeedy, A. (2025) ‘Why xAI’s Grok Went Rogue’, The Wall Street Journal, 10th July. Available at: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/why-xais-grok-went-rogue-a81841b0 [Accessed: 26 August 2025].

    Singh, A. (2025) From Past to Present: The Evolution of Data Breach Causes (2005–2025). LatIA, 3(333). Available at: https://doi.org/10.62486/latia2025333 [Accessed 26 August 2025].

    Speakman, K. (2025) ‘Elon Musk’s X Chatbot Praises Hitler While Sharing Multiple Antisemitic Posts’, People, 9 July. Available at: https://people.com/elon-musk-x-chatbot-praises-hitler-antisemitic-posts-11769138 ]Accessed: 26 August 2025].

  • A Multi-Level Ultra-Realist Approach to Understanding Violence Against Women and Girls: An Introduction

    Emma Armstrong and Paul Alker

    Teesside University

    Despite being a global issue for centuries, violence against women and girls (VAWG) has often been dismissed by governments as a private or peripheral concern rather than a systemic problem (Andrews and Ellis, 2022). The term VAWG encapsulates a wide range of offences disproportionately perpetrated by men against women and girls, including domestic abuse, sexual violence, and so-called ‘honour-based’ abuse. Additionally, the rise of smartphone technology, social media and artificial intelligence has not only reshaped existing forms of violence and abuse, but has also given rise to new ones – what has been dubbed Technologically Facilitated Sexual Violence, which takes myriad forms. This includes non-consensual sexting (more commonly known as revenge porn), cyber-flashing, cyber-stalking and the creation of deep-fake pornography (Henry and Powell, 2018).
     
    While activists and scholars have long drawn attention to these harms, policy responses have historically been reactive and inconsistent. In recent years, a series of high-profile cases have forced the issue into the public consciousness, leading to widespread calls for change. In response, the Labour government declared VAWG a national emergency and pledged to halve its prevalence within a decade. While this commitment signals a shift in political will, the question remains: will such interventions address the root causes of VAWG, or continue tackling symptoms while systemic violence remains unchallenged?
     
    As scholars such as Treadwell (2013) and Yardley and Richards (2023) point out, crime and harm do not occur in a vacuum, but in a context that is influenced by social, economic, cultural and political factors. With this in mind, this blog series will examine VAWG through an integrated multi-level framework (Hall and Wilson, 2014; Lloyd, 2018) that provides us with the theoretical tools to explore VAWG from a uniquely parallax perspective, by examining the issue at a macro, meso and micro level. In adopting this approach, alongside drawing upon the ultra-realist theoretical framework, we aim to provide a comprehensive analysis of why such violence occurs and why it remains such a persistent issue. Ultra-realism is particularly well-suited to this task, not only for its return to the question of offender motivation, but also due to its willingness to transcend analytical boundaries – bridging the personal and structural. In the seminal ultra-realist book, Revitalizing Criminological Theory, Hall and Winlow (2015) note how the progress from feminist and critical criminology laid crucial groundwork for understanding harm and power beyond legalistic definitions, yet argue that a deeper ontological and structural analysis is now required to account for the evolving conditions of late modernity. Ultra-realists have certainly embodied this goal in various contexts, such as Lloyd’s (2018) research into the harms of neoliberal work, or James’ (2020) application of the theory to the harms of hate. To our knowledge, however, this is the first attempt to apply ultra-realist theory specifically to the problem of VAWG.
     
    It is our contention that much of the research and commentary on VAWG, while illuminating, tells only part of the story. Simply analysing this violence and harm on an individualised micro level, as much of the mainstream media has a tendency to do, is problematic in that it obscures the structural conditions that underpin such violence (Kelly et al., 2022). At the same time, broad explanations that attribute VAWG solely to the dominance of patriarchy or the presence of ‘toxic masculinity’ fail to account for wider structural and cultural changes associated with neoliberalism and consumerism. These forces have fostered harmful subjectivities across the gender spectrum, imbuing the individual with a kind of ‘toxic sovereignty’ (Tudor, 2020) – a form of individualism where self-interest is prioritised at the expense of others, what Hall (2012) has termed special liberty – a libertine drive to satisfy one’s own interests regardless of the harm it may cause to others (Kotzé and Lloyd, 2022) for both expressive and instrumental purposes (Kotzé, 2024). As Yardley and Richards (2023) point out, this has intensified a sense of entitlement within the perpetrators of VAWG to inflict such harm. Much of the academic and cultural commentary has failed to acknowledge these factors. Additionally, the development of policing strategies, governmental promises to address the pandemic of VAWG and calls for changes to legislation may have some impact, but will only serve to address the symptoms of what we believe is a far deeper issue.
     
    Ultimately, this blog series seeks to make sense of VAWG by providing a critical analysis of issues present at the macro, meso, and micro levels. We appreciate that there are nuances across the broad spectrum of offences encapsulated under this umbrella term and across cases that we will not have space to delineate here. However, we hope to offer a robust starting point which not only demonstrates the utility of the ultra-realist theoretical framework for understanding VAWG, but also contribute to what we believe to be some much-needed discussion on the level of intervention required to begin to meaningfully address the issue of violence against women and girls. Therefore, in the spirit of the ultra-realist return to the fundamental question of motivation, this blog series poses a fundamental question: why do individual men seek to inflict harm upon women in both a symbolic and subjective form? Once we have attempted to answer this question via three posts tackling each level, we will then consider what exactly is to be done to challenge VAWG in a meaningful way in the concluding post.
     
    References
     
    Andrews, S., and Ellis, A. (2022) ‘Incel masculinity.’ In Atkinson, R., and Ayres, T. (Eds). Shades of Deviance. (2nd Ed). Abingdon: Routledge.
     
    Hall, S. (2012) Theorizing Crime & Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage Publications.
     
    Hall, S., and Wilson, D. (2014) ‘New foundations: Pseudo-pacification and special liberty as potential cornerstones for a multi-level theory of homicide and serial murder.’ European Journal of Criminology. 11(5). Pp. 635-55.
     
    Hall, S., and Winlow, S. (2015) Revitalising Criminological Theory: Towards a New Ultra-Realism. Abingdon: Routledge.
     
    Henry, N., and Powell, A. (2018) ‘Technology-facilitated sexual violence: A literature review of empirical research.’ Trauma, Violence, and Abuse. 19(2). Pp. 195-208.
     
    James, Z. (2020) ‘Gypsies’ and travellers’ lived experience of harm: A critical hate studies perspective.’ Theoretical Criminology. 24(3). Pp. 502-20.
     
    Kelly, C., Lynes, A., and Hart, M. (2022) ‘”Graze culture” and serial murder: Brushing up against “familiar monsters” in the wake of 9/11.’ In Fanning, S. E., and O’Callaghan, C. (Eds). Serial Killing on Screen. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
     
    Kotzé, J. (2024) ‘On special liberty and the motivation to harm.’ The British Journal of Criminology. 65(2). Pp. 314-27.
     
    Kotzé, J., and Lloyd, A. (2022) Making Sense of Ultra-Realism. Leeds: Emerald Publishing Ltd.
     
    Lloyd, A. (2018) Harms of Work: An Ultra-Realist Account of the Service Economy. Bristol: Bristol University Press.
     
    Treadwell, J. (2013) Criminology: The Essentials. London: Sage Publications.
     
    Tudor, K. (2020) ‘Toxic sovereignty: Understanding fraud as the expression of special liberty in late-capitalism.’ In Kuldova, T., Hall, S., and Horsely, M. (Eds). Crime, Harm, and Consumerism. Abingdon: Routledge.
     
    Yardley, E., and Richards, L. (2022) ‘The elephant in the room: Toward an integrated, feminist analysis of mass murder.’ Violence Against Women. 29(3-4). Pp. 752-72.