Ultra-Realists

Category: Ultra-Realism

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

    Paul Alker, Liam Miles and Emma Armstrong

    As outlined in the first post of this series, the overarching aim of these theoretical interventions is to shed light on the key determinants of the rising levels of violence against women and girls (VAWG) in its myriad forms. It is our belief that a multi-level critical analysis of the issue is essential if we wish to fully comprehend the various causes of this violence on a symbolic and subjective level – violence that women and girls are experiencing with greater frequency and severity. In this post, as a precursor to further investigations of the meso and micro levels, we will focus on some of the main macro-level factors, which are the large-scale social systems and structures that contextualise the cultural forms involved in this violence.  

    As Lynes et al. (2021) illustrate, adopting an initial macro approach to understanding violence enables us to explore the issue of VAWG from a novel and often overlooked vantage point, affording us the opportunity to emphasise the broader social forces that create the conditions in which such violence takes place. From this position, a key debate in contemporary discussions of VAWG concerns the role of patriarchal power in late-capitalist societies. Some question whether patriarchy remains as dominant and influential as it once was or whether it has been displaced by other power structures (Lynes et al., 2021). Yet, Yardley (2020) argues that patriarchy does indeed still exist but it has undergone a mutation under neoliberalism to become what she terms ‘neoliberal patriarchy’.

    This iteration of patriarchal power operates through the celebrated neoliberal principles of hyper-individualism, instant gratification, hostile competitiveness, hedonism, narcissism, and success premised upon the failure of others. These zero-sum values are clear in the behaviour of many who perpetrate violence and harm against women and girls. Exhibiting a sense of what Hall (2012) calls special liberty, in which sovereign individuals follow the libertine drive to satisfy their own self-interest, regardless of the harm it may cause to others, for both expressive and instrumental purposes (Kotzé, 2024). This is a concept we will explore further in a forthcoming post on micro-level factors. 

    Alongside the neoliberal shift towards competitive individualism, identity-based divisions, such as race and gender, have increasingly replaced class as the fundamental structures of inequality (Žižek, 2002). In the absence of the traditional class struggle, this shift has fostered ‘culture wars’ in which men and women are positioned as adversaries, with identity politics weaponised to fuel antagonism rather than solidarity. Hall and Winlow (2014) refer to this as the construction of a ‘society of enemies’, in which both individuals and various identitarian groups are encouraged to view one another as pseudo-pacified competitors rather than allies. In the context of a society of enemies, the concept of neoliberal patriarchy enables us to appreciate the ways in which misogyny is effectively sewn into the fabric of late-stage capitalism (Yardley and Richards, 2023). Rather than being a deviation from contemporary social values, perpetrators of VAWG can be seen as extreme embodiments of the neoliberal ethos. In the forthcoming micro-level post, we argue this leads some men to believe that women are responsible for ‘stealing’ something that is rightly theirs, resulting in violence that manifests in both symbolic and subjective forms.  

    The intersection of politics, economics and violence in relation to VAWG is indeed a global phenomenon. A striking example of this is found in Mexico, where Rodriguez’s (2012) research explores the manner in which the anarchic confluence of global capitalism, alongside Mexico’s corrupt national politics, has displaced transient populations of people seeking work. Narco-warfare has enabled the emergence of The Femicide Machine: an apparatus that did not only create the conditions in which dozens of women and young girls could be murdered, but also developed the institutions that would guarantee impunity for those who perpetrated such crimes. Žižek (2016) frames this as a form of macho reaction to an emerging class of independent working women. Sayek Valencia (2019) further highlights the prevalence of this issue by presenting the staggering statistic that, at the time of writing, every four hours in Mexico a young girl or adult woman is killed.

    There are two common threads present across these authors’ assessments of the violence being perpetrated against women and girls. One, that it is extremely brutal in nature, and two, that it is inextricably linked to the social, cultural, political and economic context in which it takes place. Valencia (2018) argues elsewhere that this culture of extreme violence in Mexico would not exist were it not for the economic crisis the country suffered in the 1980s; the breakdown of the nation-state which led to an unholy alliance between politicians and the cartels, and the catastrophic shortcoming of NAFTA in the 1990s.  

    There are of course a number of contextual differences between the causes of violence against women and young girls being perpetrated in Mexico and the UK. Yet, we should not understate the role of the social and economic changes within the UK over the past four decades alongside some of the positive cultural changes that have occurred in the realm of women’s rights. What the examples of VAWG in Mexico illustrate is the importance of considering the macro context in which violence is taking place and the subsequent need for significant interventions at the macro socio-political and cultural levels.  

     Turning to the UK context, the Cost-of-Living Crisis (COLC) as a mediated and political term, can be utilised as a timely example of how risks in late-modern society permeate the fabric of everyday life and its social practices to produce and heighten the experience of ontological insecurity (Giddens, 1991). These insecurities can be traced through the rise of food poverty (Francis-Devine et al., 2024), the housing crisis, in which many, particularly young people, struggle to access affordable housing (Atkinson and Jacobs, 2020) and insecurity in the labour markets, following a flexible and increasingly precarious turn (Lloyd, 2018). It can be argued that through neoliberal politics, the social emphasis on raising aspirations through centring the individual’s life journey, or what Beck (1992) denoted as reflexive modernisation, has been exposed as a lie, as in the contemporary moment, the opportunities to attain symbols of success are few and far between. Moreover, as Sanz (2017) suggests, the socialisation practices for men and women have seldom changed and largely retained the binary dichotomy of gender.  

    According to Ellis (2015), for many men living in post-industrial Britain, the norms around displaying masculinity remain. The male body has lost much of its value in the labour force. The attributes of physical strength and toughness have become redundant, replaced by a greater emphasis on cognitive abilities and communication skills, but a vestigial visceral habitus continues to be reproduced in some locales (Hall, 1997; Hall et al., 2005). This has created a situation in which many men are faced with the terrifying abyss of their own insignificance, in the absence of opportunities to gain any positive form of recognition from others (Ellis, 2015; Gibbs et al., 2022).

    As they struggle to accept this situation, articulate their growing frustrations and channel their libidinal energies in a positive or productive direction, a cacophony of negative emotions are allowed to develop – feelings of anger, shame, envy – the end result of which is often either implosion or explosion. Alcohol and substance misuse, depression and suicide characterise the former, whilst street-level and domestic violence against partners and children become the explosive chosen outlet for this pent-up energy and ill feeling (Dorling, 2010; Berardi, 2015; Power, 2022). Similarly, DeKeseredy and Schwartz (2005) theorise how economic integration may contribute to VAWG, as it may prompt some men to reassert traditional patriarchal roles in response to perceived threats to their dominance. At this point of bringing forth the idea of visceral habitus, it is timely to return to Beck’s idea of ‘risk’, of which contemporary examples include the Covid-19 pandemic and the COLC, to make sense of how violence against women and girls is increasing. 

     It can be argued that there are two levels through which one can understand the COLC. The first, is at a surface level and arguably an objective standpoint. Indeed, the cost of living has increased. This can be observed in the ever-increasing cost of the weekly food shop, alongside rising fuel, energy and utility costs which can be attributed to geopolitical events including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which has led to a disruption of global supply chains, thus increasing the costs for imports, and the production of essential goods. These accounts are clearly pin-pointed by the British Government as constituting the causes for the rising cost of living in Britain (See Francis-Devine et al., 2024). The second layer of understanding the COLC is as a systematic process, caused by the entrenchment of neoliberal politics, austerity, and wider anti-statist ideology. It is argued by Dorling (2010) that the system of neoliberal capitalism is designed to produce and reproduce inequalities, across communities and households, which manifests in the form of a ‘society of enemies’ (Hall and Winlow, 2014) and ‘neoliberal patriarchy’ (Yardley and Richards, 2023). Thus, we contend that rising levels of violence against women and girls can, at least in part and at the broadest level, be viewed as symptomatic of the present social and economic situation. 

     Whilst the surface level reasonings for the COLC are not to be dismissed, particularly as geopolitical insecurity and wider global restructuring has led to the rise of economic insecurity and heightened competition in the labour markets, it is further argued that the very nature of the system itself needs to be examined. This is to map the complexities of the COLC, but also to recognise that the system of neoliberal capitalism has engineered social and economic life, to sustain and manufacture inequalities and harm, to allow the system to sustain and reproduce itself.   

    Rising rates of VAWG, largely at the hands of men can be linked to COLC, plays a significant role as a layer of risk in a risk society. This is not to position the COLC as the sole contributor to this rise of violence, but to recognise that violence at the interpersonal levels is sustained and reproduced through objective, symbolic and systemic modes of violence (Žižek, 2008) that exist in everyday life. This poisonous mix of a rising cost of living and austerity politics has arguably led to a rise of men who feel increasingly marginalised and powerless. The enaction of what could be termed ‘residual power’ can be seen at the domestic and interpersonal levels and is arguably fuelled by the intensification of economic alienation, exemplified by the relentless struggle against the COLC. Here, the notion of ontological insecurity can be refined and understood more precisely as ‘objectless anxiety’, and foregrounded against the backdrop of the deaptative socialisation of young men and the cultural reproduction of the socially and economically redundant visceral habitus (Hall, 2012). 

     Whilst highlighting the importance of broader social and economic factors in contextualising and contributing to the rising tide of violence against women and girls. Of course, as we briefly mentioned above, some violent men are relatively successful, therefore it is also important that this macro socioeconomic context is considered alongside the meso- and micro-levels in which we find the differentiation to be discussed in forthcoming publications. We cannot truly understand the key determinants of this violence and develop meaningful strategies to address the issue by exploring each level in isolation. It is imperative that as social scientists, we seek to develop a robust understanding of VAWG in all its complexity so that we can understand the level of intervention required to meaningfully address the problem and reverse the tide of violence we are witnessing with growing frequency against women and girls. Only when we adopt such a robust approach to understanding the issue will we have the capacity to truly address it. 

    References

    Atkinson, R., and Jacobs, K. (2020) What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Housing? London: Sage Publications.  

    Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage Publications.  

    Berardi, F. (2015) Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. London: Verso.

    DeKeseredy, W. S., and Schwartz, M. D. (2005) ‘Masculinities and interpersonal violence.’ In Kimmel, M. S., Hearn, J., and Connell, R. W. (Eds.) Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities. California: Sage Publications.  

    Dorling, D. (2010) Injustice: Why social inequality still persists. Policy Press.

    Ellis, A. (2015) Men, masculinities and violence: An ethnographic study. Routledge.

    Francis-Devine, B., Malik, X., and Roberts, N. (2024) ‘Food poverty: Households, food banks and free school meals.’ House of Commons Library Research Briefing. [online]. Available at: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9209/CBP-9209.pdf. (Accessed on: 19/03/2025).

    Gibbs, N., Salinas, M., and Turnock, L. (2022) ‘Post-industrial masculinities and gym culture: Graft, craft, and fraternity.’ The British Journal of Sociology. 73. Pp. 220-36.  

    Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. New York: Polity Press.

    Hall, S. (1997) ‘Visceral Cultures and Criminal Practices’, Theoretical Criminology, 1(4): 453-478.

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

    Hall, S., and Winlow, S. (2014) ‘The English riots of 2011: Misreading the signs on the road to the society of enemies.’ In Pritchard, D., and Pakes, F. (Eds). Riots, Unrest, and Protest on the Global Stage. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 

    Hall, S., Winlow, S., and Ancrum, C. (2005) ‘Radgies, ganstas, and mugs: Imaginary criminal identities in the twilight of the pseudo-pacification process.’ Social Justice. 32. Pp. 100-12.  

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

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

    Lynes, A., Yardley, E. and Danos, L. (2021) Making sense of homicide: A student textbook. Waterside Press.

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

    Power, N. (2022) What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and its Discontents. Penguin. 

    Rodríguez, S.G. (2012) The Femicide Machine. MIT Press.

    Sanz, V. (2017) ‘No way out of the binary: A critical history of the scientific production of sex.’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 43. Pp. 1-27.  

    Valencia, S. (2018) Gore Capitalism. MIT Press.

    Valencia, S. (2019) Necropolitics, postmortem/transmortem politics, and transfeminisms in the sexual economies of death. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 6(2), Pp.180-193.

    Yardley, E. (2020) ‘Technology-facilitated domestic abuse in political economy: A new theoretical framework.’ Violence Against Women. 27(10). Pp. 1479-98.  

    Yardley, E., and Richards, L. (2023) ‘The elephant in the room: Toward an integrated, feminist analysis of mass murder.’ Violence Against Women. 29(3-4). Pp. 752-72.  

    Žižek, S. (2002) For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso. 

     Žižek, S. (2008) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books. 

     Žižek, S. (2016) Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours. Penguin.

  • TikTok Made Me Buy It: The Harms of Consumer Capitalism

    Poppy-Anne Turner

    On TikTok, a platform once associated with memes and dance trends, shopping has become inseparable from leisure. The rise of TikTok shop, driven by AI-powered algorithms, demonstrates how capitalism has colonised our downtime. After all, we live in a world where capitalist markets reach into almost every part of our lives. In the digital age, AI, and the algorithms that power it, shape what we see, what we buy, and even how we think about ourselves.

    In many of ways, this can cause algorithms to almost act as an omnipresence within neoliberal societies. AI and algorithmic curation are popular topics in discourse, yet their actual operation often remains unclear. Put simply, AI in our everyday lives works through algorithms – coded systems embedded in search engines, apps, and online platforms. Companies harness this technology to rank, analyse, and interpret user data, ultimately with the goal of increasing sales and maximising profit. Because of this role, algorithms are often described as ‘sociotechnological systems’ that are technological in design, but social in impact. They influence what we see, what we choose, and how we think about consumption, acting as ‘non-human mediators that actively shape consumer culture’ (Airoldi & Rokka, 2022, p.412). Nowhere is this clearer than TikTok, where algorithms predict, manipulate, and monetise desire. The platform’s AI-driven recommendation system turns attention into data, and data into sales, blurring the line between content and commerce.

    From a philosophical perspective, consumer culture can be understood as epiphenomenal to capitalism, meaning it exists because capitalism shapes and sustains it (Arnould et al., 2021), but this blog will question that claim. TikTok shop exemplifies how consumer culture becomes an unquestioned norm. The phrase ‘TikTok made me buy it’ encapsulates this epiphenomenal process: consumption is not only normalised but celebrated and absorbed into social life as a shared digital ritual. Once an idea is reinforced by enough people, it becomes accepted as shared knowledge within a given social system (Rostek, 2024). Perhaps the most relatable example of this in neoliberal societies would be experiences of debt, as borrowing money is not only normal, but actively encouraged because it fuels economic growth (Horsley, 2016; Vetta and Muriel, 2024). Over time, this normalisation makes debt feel like an inevitable part of life, rather than something to be questioned. This is where harm comes in.

    Shared cultural norms like this feed into the Symbolic Order, the system of meanings and values that capitalism maintains (Hall and Winlow, 2018). To ensure their survival within this order and promote feelings of inclusion and non-suffering, people feel pressure to display certain signs of success, style, or belonging, often through what they consume (Hall and Winlow, 2025). For many, consumption offers a fleeting sense of safety or relief from the discomfort of life under neoliberal capitalism (Winlow and Hall, 2013). In this way, the cultural norms surrounding consumerism are not just harmless habits as they are often presented, they are mechanisms that keep us tethered to, and dependent on, the very systems that cause harm. Influencers on TikTok function as conduits of this Symbolic Order, modelling the signs of success and desirability that followers internalise. Their curated performances of happiness and consumption promise relief from the insecurities of neoliberal life, a digital illusion of non-suffering.

    This dynamic can be understood by mobilising the Lacan’s concepts of lack and desire. As Mieli (2025) explains, objects of desire are often imagined as what subjects feel they are missing, an attempt to fill an existential void or achieve a sense of satisfaction. This feeling of lack is something many experience daily, and it is precisely this emotional absence that consumer culture seeks to exploit. Within the login of late capitalism, consumptions offers a temporary resolution to this lack, a fantasy of wholeness that is always destined to fail. McGowan (2016) in Capitalism and Desire, argues that consumerism is structured around this paradox as it continually produces dissatisfaction so that the subject remains caught in a cycle of desire, pursuing fleeting satisfaction through consumptions. Thus, the act of ‘retail therapy’ becomes a socially sanctioned ritual through which individuals attempt to soothe the discontent generated by the very system that profits from it.  

    Capitalism has never been static. It takes many different forms, and as Fisher (2022) argues, it adapts to social change to survive. In the digital age, this adaptability is most visibly in the way capitalism has reshaped itself around new technologies. The rise of AI and its algorithms show how the system evolves to protect its power and ensure that capital accumulation continues. Algorithms now play a central role in shaping consumer culture and influencing patterns of consumption (Airoldi and Rokka, 2022), creating instrumental power for their capacity to impact social processes (Beer, 2017).

    Companies such as TikTok exploit their awareness of the power they have over patterns of consumption by designing algorithms that analyse consumer data, using the insights they gain to draw people back into cycles of consumption (Laapotti and Raapana, 2022), by ranking and sorting through data sets provided by the user to generate personalised recommendations, which are presented to the consumer as though they are tailored to their best interests (Hayes et al, 2021). Yet, these recommendations are not neutral, they are designed to maximise profit through the targeted advertisements they facilitate. The now familiar phrase, ‘TikTok made me buy it!’ captures how the algorithms in apps like TikTok are able to make choices for us, acting as an omnipresence in our everyday lives (Tang, 2021). As they become increasingly dependent upon technological devices, neoliberalism’s consumer subjects find this presence difficult to escape.  

    This issue is perhaps further exacerbated by the fact that smartphones are increasingly acting as ‘portable markets’ of sorts, wherein targeted advertising has become a constant feature of the apps present on the device. TikTok targets younger consumers, particularly those from Gen Z and the Millennials (Amin and Scorita, 2025). As a company led platform, it has generated ‘$23 billion annual revenue’ (Tafradzhiyski, 2025) and is indisputably one of the most popular leisure activities in neoliberal societies, boasting ‘24.8 million active users’ in the United Kingdom alone (The Global Statistics, 2025). There is a plethora of ways by which this platform makes money from consumers. For example, it profits from advertisements facilitated by its platform and commissions for sales which occur within its confines. Yet this is often overlooked by consumers of the app, who scroll through content, unintentionally furthering TikTok’s business model. The algorithms within the platform are designed to analyse the behaviours and patterns of user consumption, to ensure that appropriate recommendations are provided to them, either by targeted advertisements in posts or by providing video recommendations tailored to users’ likes to ensure they keep consuming content off the platform (Larsen, 2024). TikTok dissolves the boundary between consuming media and consuming products. The same gesture – a swipe – serves both leisure and labour, pleasure and purchase. The user becomes an active participant in their own commodification.

    By providing tailored content to the consumer, a plethora of harms can occur. For example, the tailored content can boost the user’s wish to consume, creating potential for binge-scrolling. Binge-scrolling is something all of us can relate to – it’s essentially scrolling through content on a given platform as a pass time, or as a mode of procrastination. It is for this reason that binge-scrolling is often considered to be a socially acceptable leisure activity despite the harms it connotes, outlined in Smith and Raymen’s (2018) research into deviant leisure. Ironically, there is often an awareness surrounding the harms of this leisure activity, but they are often disavowed and dismissed as being the norm. But this pattern of activity can cause a series of harms depending on the subjective experiences of the individual consuming content on the app. For example, as previously mentioned, TikTok primarily targets younger audiences, most of whom will be either in education or in early stages of their careers. Thus, binge-scrolling promoted by algorithmically tailored content can promote a plethora of harms, such as hindering their capacity to further their grades should they be in education, or their careers should they be in occupational fields, creating pressure on younger generations.

    To further this point, if you consider the fact that binge-scrolling results in prolonged exposure to TikTok’s tailored content, there is potential for psychological harm to occur, particularly when you consider the role of Electronic-Word-of-Mouth (EWOM) and the idea of Fear-of-Missing-Out (FOMO). Globally, consumer culture is highly influenced by E-WoM, as it promotes materialism and expression based on branding (Taylor et al., 2025). The idea of ‘brand evangelism’ considers how customer enthusiasm can create brand loyalty, which causes a chain reaction wherein positive views can be shared online via EWOM, allowing positive brand imagery to be created, allowing for the company’s consumer base to expand (Iyadi, 2024).

    Coinciding with the positive impacts for the companies is the presence for psychological harm to be inflicted on the consumer, as E-WOM often creates pathways for purchased items to be displayed – causing a relationship between E-WoM and the need for social status (Pangarkar et al, 2023). This can create feeling such as Fear-of-Missing-Out (FoMO), wherein anxious feelings permeate the subject when a purchasing event occurs which holds items which may be able to boost their social status (Durusm et al, 2023). This fear is often used as a marketing strategy by companies to increase brand desirability amongst targeted consumers (Hewer, 2024), causing FOMO to become important for the development and expansion of consumer markets across various platforms, including TikTok. This demonstrates the ultimate psychological harm associated with striving for social status by participating in consumer culture, which is created when the identification of a subject becomes inherently construed in their patterns of consumption.

    Moving beyond the harms of tailored content and binge-scrolling, many academics argue that the targeted advertisements used by companies are highly manipulative (see Mager, 2012). Fenwick (2022) has highlighted that this has caused ethical concerns to be raised regarding the use of algorithms by companies. These have been labelled ‘normative concerns’, which are outputs from algorithms deemed to be unfair to consumers. Increasingly, neoliberal subjects identify themselves with the products they consume (Sharlmanov and Kostovska, 2025), thus further demonstrating how targeted advertisements increase pressure on younger generations. This is emphasised in research conducted by Deustch and Theodorou (2010), who found that items used as an exhibition of the subjects consumption are used to gain status within social systems. This alludes to the needs of the ideal ego, wherein the subject will strive to reach their image of perfection to further their intention of being perceived positively by the other. In essence, items become consumed by the subject to achieve what ultra-realists refer to as ‘non-suffering’ (Hall and Winlow, 2025), a position of security driven by the need for social acceptance – the desire to be socially accepted by other social actors within a given system (Wolsnik, 2018). Thus, consumption can be used as a mechanism by the subject to provide an illusory sense of safety (Gornik-Durose, 2020), as it fills the emotional gaps in the subject’s life, enhancing the emotional experience of non-suffering.

    Paradoxically, however, this pursuit of non-suffering through consumption often generates new forms of suffering. As individuals attempt to soothe emotional discomfort through purchasing, they may find their finances increasingly strained, drawing them into what Apraido et al. (2025, p.89) describe as the ‘digital financial ecosystem’. On TikTok, this ecosystem manifests through features such as ‘buy now, pay later’ options via Klarna or PayPal, integrated seamlessly in the TikTok shop. These financial tools encourage impulsive spending, particularly among Gen Z consumers, and normalise borrowing as a routine part of everyday consumption (Hidayah et al., 2025). In doing so, TikTok demonstrates how easily digital platforms can foster patterns of overconsumption and debt, making financial harm a standard by-product of algorithmic capitalism.

    Targeted advertisements provided by TikTok are also enhanced as the platform has become an expansive base for celebrities and influencers. Although catered content based upon consumers’ influencer preferences do not necessarily equate to the provision of targeted advertisements, the influencers the consumer watches may collaborate with a brand by advertising the company’s products – a dynamic often referred to as ‘celebrity endorsement’, wherein the influencer or celebrity endorses and recommends a product to their audiences. This arguably promotes harm as younger generations are more likely to seek influencers as role models as they navigate through the digital age and more likely to purchase items recommended by those they find.

    By examining the various elements of consumer culture facilitated algorithmically on TikTok, this post has endeavoured to demonstrate how consumer culture as a feature of capitalism perpetuates harm on multiple levels, perhaps to an extent where we should consider it to be generative rather than epiphenomenal (Hall et al. 2013). TikTok represents capitalism’s latest evolutionary form: an interactive marketplace where consumption is gamified and algorithmically personalised. The platform does not merely respond to consumer demand – it creates it, folding shopping into the architecture of sociality itself. This total integration of consumption, leisure, and identity production signals a new phase of algorithmic capitalism. Yet, within this system, enjoyment becomes part of the mechanism linking desire with control. Users derive pleasure from participating in their own commodification, from the thrill of discovery, the satisfaction of purchase, or the illusion of connection. This enjoyment is not incidental, it is essential, binding subjects affectively to the very structures that exploit that. We know TikTok manipulates our desires, yet we keep scrolling, liking, and buying. This is ultra-realism’s central paradox: the subject’s submission to the very system that harms them. In this sense, TikTok is an external mirror of neoliberal subjectivity itself.

    References

    Airoldi, M. & Rokka, J. (2022) ‘Algorithmic consumer culture’, Consumption Markets & Culture, 25(5), p.411-412.

    Amin, A. & Scorita, K.B. (2025) ‘Digital Marketing Strategy For Millenials And Gen Z: A Literature Review’, International Journal of Financial Economics (IJEFE), 2(6), p.620-627.

    Apraidi, D., Adelin, D., Mutumanikam, P.R. & Lanjarsih, L. (2025) ‘Personal Finance Transformation in the Digital Era: The Impact of Financial Technology on People’s Economic Behavior’, Journal of Management Economics and Accounting, 2(3), p.89.

    Arnould, E., Soila, T., Hietanen, J., Huotari, I. & Pantzar, M. (2021) ‘Special section – The moral legitimisation of money and debt in consumer society’, Marketing Theory, 24(2), p.193-203.

    Beer, D. (2017) ‘The social power of algorithms’, Information, Communication & Society, 20(1), p.1-2.  

    Deutsch, N.L. & Theodorou, E. (2010) ‘Aspiring, Consuming, Becoming: Youth Identity in a Culture of Consumption’, Youth & Society, 42(2), p.230-231.  

    Dursum, M.T., Argan, M., Argan, M.T. & Dinc, H. (2023) ‘Sensation seeking and conspicuous consumption in event-based activities: the mediation role of fear of missing out (FoMO)’, International Journal of Event and Festival Management, 14(4), p.490.  

    Fenwick, N. (2022) ‘The Ethics of Consumerism’, Think Summer, 61(21), p.73.  

    Fisher, M. (2022) Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?. 2nd edn. Hampshire: Zero Books. 

    Gornik-Durose, M.E. (2020) ‘Materialism and Well-Being Revisited: The Impact of Personality’, Journal of Happiness Studies, 21(1), p.322.

    Hall, S., Winlow, S. and Ancrum, C. (2013[2008]) Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture. London: Routledge.

    Hall, S. & Winlow, S. (2018) ‘Big Trouble or Little Evils: The ideological struggle over the concept of harm’ in Zemiology: Reconnecting crime and social harm. 1st edn. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.

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

    Hayes, J.L., Britt, B.C., Evans, W., Rush, S.W., Towery, N.A. & Adamson, A.C. (2021) ‘Can Social Media Listening Platform’s Artificial Intelligence Be Trusted? Examining the Accuracy of Crimson Hexagon’s (Now Brandwatch Consumer Research’s) AI-Driven Analyses’, Journal of Advertising, 50(1), p.81.  

    Hewer, P. (2024) ‘Reflections on a reimagined future for consumer research’, Journal of Marketing Management, 40(7-8), p.625.

    Hidayah, N., Daulay, A.N. & Kusmilawaty, K. (2025) ‘FOMO and Digital Loans Drive Impulsive Purchases Among Gen Z’, Business and Economics, 10(2), p.9.

    Horsley, M. (2015) The Dark Side of Prosperity. London: Routledge

    Iyadi, R.C. (2024) ‘Evangelism marketing and consumer purchase behaviour of selected products: A focus on fashion industry’, International Journal of Intellectual Discourse, 7(4), p.202-203.

    Laapotti, T. & Raappana, M. (2022) ‘Algorithms and Organizing’, Human Communication Research, 48(1), p.491.  

    Larsen, R. (2024) Demystifying TikTok’s Business and Revenue Model: An In-depth Explanation. Available at: Demystifying TikTok’s Business and Revenue Model: An In-depth Explanation | Untaylored (Accessed: 21/10/2024). 

    Mager, A. (2012) ‘Algorithmic Ideology’, Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), p.769.  

    McGowan, T. (2016) Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. 1st edn. New York: Columbia University Press. 

    Mieli, P. (2025) ‘The frame in analysis: On Lacan’s perspective’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 106(2), p.431-438.

    Pangarkar, A., Patel, J. & Kumar, S.K. (2023) ‘Drivers of eWOM engagement on social media for luxury consumers: Analysis, implications, and future research directions’, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 74(1), p.1.

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  • 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

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    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.

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    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 Response to Pridemore and Rogers

    Please allow me to have a quick whine. If any other researchers involved in the UR project think I’m abusing my privileged position here, please submit a blog any time you think you have been misrepresented in any type of publication.

    Unfortunately, we do tend to encounter ‘straw targets’ in mainstream academic journals. Here, Pridemore and Rogers – link below- in an article to be published in the journal ‘Criminology’, take quotes from a 2009 article ‘A Tale of Two Capitalisms’, written by myself and Craig McLean, out of context. According to Pridemore and Rogers, we had claimed that ‘markets’ are some sort of causal context for high homicide rates. Here are the quotes. “In sum, according to Hall and McLean (2009), markets are “socially toxic” (p. 329), and a neo-liberal market orientation (at least as practiced by the United States and similar nations) is “the quintessential politico-economic generator of social division, anomie, narcissism and brutalizing competitive individualism” (p. 334) that “invariably generate[s] the basic socio-cultural conditions that tend to increase homicide rates” (p. 333).”

    Utter nonsense. We actually wrote that neoliberalism – we were referring to the ‘greed is good’ culture of the 1980s in the context of deindustrialisation and job loss in the US and the UK – is “the quintessential politico-economic generator of social division, anomie, narcissism and brutalizing competitive individualism”. We also suggested that minimally regulated forms of neoliberal capitalism “invariably generate the basic socio-cultural conditions that tend to increase homicide rates”. Not ‘markets’ in general. All modern societies have markets of one type or another – even North Korea. The main differences revolve around the extent to which they dominate and monopolise human activities.

    Furthermore, as the title of our 2009 article should suggest, it wasn’t a comparative analysis of multiple nations aross the globe. What we said is that compared to periods characterised by a minimally regulated market economy in the US, the more regulated social market economies of the US under FDR and historically ongoing in Europe had proven more effective at reducing homicide without resorting to mass surveillance and incarceration, especially after the economic crash of 1929. We also pointed out that during deindustrialisation after 1979 the regulatory social market legacy of Europe coped better than the US and maintained lower homicide rates, while during the rapid transition to neoliberalism in Russia after 1992 – “more shock than therapy” – homicide rates increased.

    Nowhere in our article did we claim that ‘markets’ – whatever that might mean – are a direct and invariable cause of high homicide rates. How does stuff like this get past reviewers?

    @ASCRM41https://assets.pubpub.org/ih43ssi9/Market%20Orientation%20and%20National%20Homicide%20Rates-71755197799367.pdf

  • Leagues of Gentlemen (and Women) on the illicit (violent) playing fields of neoliberal capitalism: An ultra-realist analysis of Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen

    ‘Criminal markets are now sophisticated and competitive, riven by class divisions created on the back of the individual’s relative success and failures in markets. A successful new proto bourgeoisie drawn from all positions on the former social order dominates a defeated precariat’ (Hall & Winlow, 2015: 126)

    Take director Guy Ritchie’s Netflix series, The Gentlemen (Netflix, 2024), which follows Eddie Horniman, a reluctant aristocrat who inherits his family estate only to discover it sits atop a vast underground cannabis empire. Here is a criminological reality in the 21st century where liberalism has been outgrown and which demonstrates symbolic inefficacy for those competing in the current neoliberal economy. By entering the reality of organised crime, corruption, and violence, a new Symbolic Order of entrepreneurialism and wealth creation materialises that would otherwise not be possible, or within reach for most, within the global neoliberal capitalist system. Thus, recycling the traditional economic business model of supply and demand for controlled substances, the actors in The Gentlemen have diverted their libidinal drives to fill the void of the Lacanian Real for a slice of the high life; where the high rollers of wealth accumulation previously sat and to which access was limited despite the capitalist fantasy and falsehood of ‘rags to riches’  that everyone can compete and succeed within the ‘fair and equal’ neoliberal system.

    What we can see in The Gentlemen is Hall’s (2007: 2012:2015) pseudo-pacification process in action. Let us revisit where this fundamental element of ultra realist theory derives. Hall posits that in medieval England the economy and the family unit were conjoined, where property was owned by the family unit and shared between them from generation to generation to support their existence (Polanyi, 2002; Sombart, 1915). The family units produced on a subsistence level for self-consumption rather than profit as their Aristotelian ‘telos’ or fulfilment. Labour was a family activity and not an economic commodity at this point, and the family units existed under moral guidance of the Church, which acted as the big Other, maintaining morality, stabilising prices, and keeping the peace. However, the co-existence of the market trader, who bought commodities only to sell them unchanged for profit, operated outside this subsistence model but was tolerated as they appeared to abide by the morality and ethics of the Church, which kept trade functional. The emphasis was very much in favour of the peasant labourer and the artisan at this stage rather than the profiteering of the market trader. The change in this system began in the 16th and 17th centuries, or earlier according to Dyer (2000). Dyer suggests that the nobility was more concerned with leisure pursuits such as hunting, prayer and entertainment than managing the land and estates that they owned; this was the realm of the peasantry and labourers, which opened the opportunity for the more entrepreneurial peasants and artisans in motivating aspiration and access to wealth creation whilst paying rents to the landowning nobility. Sound familiar?

    Let’s get psychoanalytic. Hall argues that at the core of subjectivity lies nothing but ‘a powerful and structuring absence that inspires deep anxiety; one which is assuaged by the active solicitation of a coherent symbolic order from which meaning can be established and the individual can orientate and navigate themselves within the world’  (Raymen, 2023: 141). As the Enlightenment overrode the Church’s morality, rooted in unconditional selflessness and sacrificial love, it ushered in a new era defined by the pursuit of profit, where the family unit was eroded and displaced by individualism and market competition. Subjective Lacanian ‘lack’  was reoriented to be fulfilled by economic gain and status seeking, and as a by-product, those less aspirational and entrepreneurial were left behind  – ‘Ha ha, losers.’

    In The Gentlemen, we observe the different socioeconomic units, whether they be family by birth or by entrepreneurial activity, all competing in the lucrative market of cannabis production and distribution using a division of labour and complete vertical integration (see Messina, 2022) to operate an illicit capitalist business model. Let us start at the top with the protagonist Eddie Horniman. Born the second son to the Duke of Halstead, a model of aristocracy in the colonial British Empire mould with a good education and a commission in the Army, Eddie unexpectedly finds himself heir to his father’s estate over his brother, who has been overlooked in the will. Inheriting a crumbling country estate which is costly to maintain, Eddie is announced as overseer of the family assets in an epoch of decolonisation where the past aristocracy has no real purpose or place in the current globalised neoliberal world. Still focused on leisure pursuits and entertainment, the Halstead family, especially Eddie’s Brother Freddy, cling to the defensive unit of family and land in a contemporary landscape of neoliberal market economics. With no notable income to maintain this wealthy status, a truth is revealed to aristocratic Eddie by the stylish, sardonic, sophisticated, and steely (Tudum by Netflix, 2025) commoner Susie Glass; the land he has inherited sits on top of a cannabis mass production site in return for rent; a last gasp deal his late father made to maintain the family income and status. Eddie’s brother, Freddy, still overindulgent in recreational excess, places the family under further strain by running up a drug debt amongst gambling and other failed risky ventures.

    Enter Gospel John, a Merseyside working class fish trader and zealot, to whom Freddy is indebted, known for his violence and a healthy dose of Christian fervour. Gospel John sends his brother Tommy to collect the debt from Freddy. He is shot by Freddy in the process. Now introduced to what the mass production of cannabis on his inherited property entails, Eddie is moved well beyond the safety and comfort of the aristocratic and privileged Symbolic Order he thought he had inherited into the reality of the highly lucrative, competitive, and violent sphere of serious and organised crime. Eddie’s former institutionalisation by the Army and government is now well past its sell by date and part of the vestige of power that once was (Netflix, 2025). The former Symbolic Order now being ‘deaptative’ (Johnston, 2008), Eddie has now become an actor in a new adaptive market economy with a higher scale of violence, yet operating within and on the same model as the neoliberal economic system, which Eddie finds addictive. At the same time, American Crystal Meth entrepreneur Stanley Johnstone is filling an absence, read as ‘lack’, of history and identity by re-inventing himself as a liberal English gentleman of wealth and property, eager to progress in the still rigid codified British class system, whilst the last remains of the Halstead aristocracy is desperately abandoning theirs to adapt and survive in this new reality. All this takes place and is maintained in a space of ‘orderly disorder’ (Horsely, Kotzé, and Hall, 2015) which is being run by convicted gang boss Bobby Glass (Ray Winstone) from a privileged existence in prison, read as ‘holiday’, whilst his daughter Susie Glass runs the business on the ground for him.

    Hall’s (2012) interest in pseudo-pacification comes from the explanation of the decline of violence from the Middle Ages to the present day as market economies emerged and developed and where rates of violence and homicide are seen to have decreased. Economic trade cannot function in a totally altruistic or totally violent space. There must be a reduction of violence for economic exchange to function, not a total pacification but a balance between civility and controlled aggression; something which is evident throughout all the character interactions within ‘The Gentlemen.’ As Hall, in Raymen (2023:143) argues, ‘a perpetual cultivation of dynamic tension between the poles of pacification and stimulation which provides the ideal pseudo-pacified subjectivities for the flourishing of a market society.’ Hall suggests that as economies grew, subjectivity did not lose its aggression. Instead, aggression was preserved and put to an appropriate and scaled down use as a driving energy in nascent market economies.

     As we see in The Gentlemen, violence is a normalised (see Žižek, 2009) part of the organised crime economic modus operandi, an accompaniment to drug production and distribution used to ensure the security and continuous flow of products and maintain market share, just as it is in military form in the legitimate globalised neoliberal market economy. The drive to succeed in this open space of organised criminal enterprise, which can more easily be accessed by anybody, has increased the level of interpersonal violence necessary to compete and survive. Thus, the sliding scale of pacification has been moved further away from civility and upped the level of accepted violence on which Eddie’s new-found market economy operates. Yet, as we see in the various cohesive units within the show, elements of medieval pacification, morality and aesthetics – through the morality and values of the church in Gospel John, and the desire for the iconography and architecture of the nobility in Stanley Johnstone – are holding on.

    Yet for Eddie Halsted, the collapse of his aristocratic status sees him move into the arena of the organised criminal elite to be thrown into a violent economic reality. Interjected with various other criminal entrepreneurs, traders, labourers and artisans within the organised criminal fraternity, we see a wide spectrum of historical socioeconomic roles from the early centuries of capitalism now intersecting in a new global neoliberal illicit economy. Cannabis has been weaving its way into normality over the decades and is now quite commonplace everywhere, legalised or decriminalised in many parts of the world, yet still a controlled substance as defined under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 in the UK. One only has to walk through our post-industrial cities and towns to find the unmistakable scent of weed present.  So much so, that the production of cannabis in The Gentlemen is truthfully portrayed as a new and expanding industry where the means of production, packaging, and distribution are controlled in-house and underpinned by the artisan skills and labour of ‘weed horticulturalist’ Jimmy Chang as chief grower. Hmmm, sounds medieval but with guns to me.

    Effectively, in The Gentlemen (and women such as Susie Glass, Lady Sabrina, and the extremely dangerous and violent Mercy), all actors have become the ‘losers’ of the neoliberal capitalist system. They have therefore entrepreneurially adapted their own game, markets, and Symbolic Order. From the masculinity of the working-class actors to the entitlement of the privileged nobility, by exercising  ‘special liberty’ to lever themselves above the herd and achieve their instrumental and expressive aims (Kotzé, 2024), often violently but with ‘criminal fraternal civility’, all operate in pursuit of that which has been made absent in the restrictive  construct of the lawful neoliberal economy. By diverting their Freudian libidinal drives to fill the Lacanian void with the jouissance of illicit free market competition and its rewards, their aggressive drives have become accustomed to operating on a lesser pacified scale suited to the competition rules of the illicit market in which they operate – a free market that functions in parallel to the legitimised economy, but one which has higher returns and requires intensified competition and aggression to function optimally. Let us face it, the organised crime world does not operate with the same civility as the current economic system, but then the current economic system does not offer the same equally accessible opportunities, and when cannabis becomes legal, criminal entrepreneurs already have the means of production, the market connections and the infrastructure in place to continue their operations and maintain their competitive advantage.

    Reference List

    Dyer, C. (2000) Everyday Life in Medieval England. London: Hambledon and London.

    Hall, S. (2007) ‘The emergence and breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process’. In Watson, K (Ed.) Assaulting the Past. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.

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

    Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2015) Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Towards a New Ultra-Realism. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2018) ‘Ultra-realism’. In DeKeseredy, W., and Dragiewicz, M. (Eds.) Routledge Handbook of Critical Criminology. (2nd ed). Abingdon: Routledge.

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

    Johnston, A., (2008) Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

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

    Messina, M. (2022) ‘Exploring vertical integration in the supply chain’. Forbes. [online]. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2022/12/29/exploring-vertical-integration-in-the-supply-chain/.

    Tudum by Netflix (2025) The Gentlemen cast is full of Nobility and Scoundrels. Available at: https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/the-gentlemen-series-cast.

    Polanyi, K. (2002) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. London: Beacon Press.

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

    Sombart, W  (1915) The Quintessence of Capitalism. New York: E.P Dutton & Co.

    The Gentlemen. (2024)Directed by Guy Ritchie. Available from: Netflix.

    Žižek, S. (2009) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books Ltd.

  • The Digital Coliseum: How Capitalism Turns Our Pain into Spectacle

    What if the freedom we feel when using digital platforms is just a beautifully packaged illusion? We spend hours on TikTok, Instagram, OnlyFans, Tinder, BeReal, Snapchat, or Reddit, convinced that we are choosing, enjoying, and even liberating ourselves. But who really benefits? Spoiler: it’s not us. As ultra-realist criminologists argues, not everything that looks like empowerment truly is (Hall and Winlow, 2015). Digital leisure, once imagined as a liberating space, has become a structural machine of emotional, symbolic and economic exploitation (Raymen and Smith, 2020). And the most insidious part? It happens with our apparent consent. Or so we think.

    We live inside an emotional economy where algorithms don’t reward what is valuable but what is viral. Not what is ethical but what is profitable. The logic is simple: the more you expose yourself, the more you’re rewarded. TikTok’s ‘For You’ page doesn’t promote creativity; it promotes emotional intensity. Tears, nudity, self-harm, humiliation, anything goes if it attracts clicks. This mirrors the principles of late-neoliberal capitalism, where an individual’s value is tied to market performance (Streeck, 2016). Psychologically, this virality of disturbing content also taps into our evolutionary and affective sensitivities, what Rozin and Royzman (2001) call negativity bias, where the brain is wired to pay closer attention to potential threats, pain, and spectacle.

    In 2024, Ofcom reported that 57% of children aged 7-17 in the UK use TikTok daily, often with minimal parental oversight (Ofcom, 2024). Meanwhile, The Guardian (2022) reported that TikTok’s algorithms internationally and repeatedly pushed the ‘Blackout Challenge’ videos to children, resulting in tragic deaths later linked to the challenge. And it doesn’t stop there. One disturbing manifestation of this emotional economy is the practice of ‘sharenting’, whereby family vloggers monetise their children’s lives. YouTube and TikTok are flooded with ‘day-in-the-life’ content, birthday reveals and emotional breakdowns, produced and consumed like reality TV but starring minors. A stark example is the case of teen ‘kidfluencer’ Piper Rockelle, whose mother and partner now face lawsuits alleging exploitation and abuse, claims unpacked in Netflix’s documentary Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing. What does informed consent mean for a child raised as content? As Strohmaier et al. (2020) warn, this practice and the wider platform economy reward emotional over-exposure with visibility and symbolic capital.

    But let’s be clear: this isn’t just about influencers or irresponsible parenting. This is a structural issue. And it’s working exactly as designed. Ultra-realist criminology dismantles the comforting myths of agency in late capitalism. What often feels like freedom is, in fact, a simulated agency, a carefully engineered illusion of choice that operates strictly within the limits of what the system considers profitable, acceptable, and self-defeating (Hall and Winlow, 2015). You are free to choose, but only from the options that will keep the machine running. This becomes especially clear when we look at platforms like OnlyFans. You can decide what to post, when to post, and how to brand yourself. But when your rent is due, your benefits have been slashed, and mainstream employment excludes or devalues you (Lloyd, 2018), how meaningful is that ‘choice’? This isn’t about traditional notions of deviance or criminality. We are not talking about ‘others’; we are talking about ourselves. Ordinary people are trapped in a structure that demands constant self-curation and emotional performance just to stay visible, relevant, or afloat.

    Deviant leisure may sound like academic jargon, but its reality is raw and disturbingly familiar. It names those practices that seem transgressive (sexting, filtered selfies, livestreamed self-harm, ironic misogyny and performative outrage) but are, in fact, deeply integrated into the digital economy. They look like rebellion but in reality they are often rehearsals for visibility, monetised through clicks, shares and algorithms. Cultural theory once romanticised these acts as symbolic resistance, subversive gestures against social norms – but in actuality they are a form of hyper-conformity, rather than non-conformity (Kotzé, 2020). But ultra-realist criminology cuts through that illusion. These aren’t ruptures in the system; they are expressions of it, performances for power, not against it. Each one feeds a platform economy that thrives on our suffering, our vulnerability and our compulsion to be seen (Smith and Raymen, 2016). In the digital coliseum, an algorithmically built arena where pain is polished and applause is measured in interaction metrics, the user becomes both audience and gladiator: performing for survival, competing for visibility, and always one swipe away from erasure. 

    We live in an age where suffering is curated. It’s not just about what we feel, but how we present it. Anguish must be aesthetic. Anxiety must be shareable. Despair must be productive. From viral ‘breakdown’ confessionals to trends romanticising trauma, the performance of harm becomes a pathway to recognition. The issue isn’t that people speak about their pain (expression matters), but expression within a system that demands emotional exposure for engagement is not the same as autonomy. You can suffer – but only if your suffering is algorithmically legible and profitable. And if you don’t perform it, someone else will. Because in the visibility economy, not being seen means not existing. But being seen requires packaging yourself as a spectacle. And what once might have been intimate, collective or therapeutic now becomes just another product in the endless scroll.

    As Debord (1967) warned, the spectacle doesn’t reflect reality; it replaces it. In that replacement, even our most personal forms of distress become raw material for platforms that extract affect like a resource, just another currency in the attention economy. There’s nothing rebellious in this. No rupture. No liberation. Just a perfectly designed loop of pseudo-transgression and aestheticised harm, repeated not out of resistance but out of ontological hunger – a desperate search for meaning, status or survival within systems that thrive on our fragility (Kotzé, 2020). But this loop doesn’t exist in isolation, it demands spectators. The digital coliseum relies not just on those who perform, but those who consume. As products of consumer culture, we are conditioned to take interest in the suffering of others, not with empathy, but with fascination. Kelly (2023) shows how 21st century media cultivates an obscene enjoyment, a compulsive pleasure in pain among audiences who repeatedly consume scandal, hate, and humiliation. Viewers are not mere witnesses but active participants deriving ecstatic thrill from exposure to transgression, yet Kelly argues it is the spectators who are truly ‘caught on tape’.

    On OnlyFans, many marginalised women monetise their intimacy, which some call sexual empowerment.  But how much empowerment exists within a structure that rewards exposure and punishes silence? Illouz (2007) and Han (2014) describe this as affective capitalism: a system where our emotions are valuable only when they can be turned into data. Yet, as Medley (2019) argues, even feminist pornography, which is often celebrated as resistance, succumbs to the same capitalist logic. What appears as empowerment is often an example of ‘hedonic realism’, the inability to imagine leisure or pleasure beyond consumer capitalism. Within this logic, consent is shaped not by autonomy but by economic desperation. Rather than resisting the mainstream, these practices are ‘precorporated’ (Fisher, 2009; Medley, 2019), already formatted to fit capitalist structures before they even begin. Claims to political agency may amount to little more than ‘hypercorporation’, the performance of resistance that deliberately reproduces the very dynamics it claims to challenge. So, are we really free if all we get to choose is how we market ourselves? To make sense of how power, visibility and harm are distributed in the digital ecosystem, I found it useful to represent these dynamics as a conceptual pyramid.

    Figure 1. The Structural Logic of Digital Harm (Mayra Barrera: 2025)

    This framework doesn’t just map behaviours – it reveals a structural order. Digital leisure isn’t free-floating; it’s stratified and each analytical layer performs a specific role in sustaining the system’s logic. As we move from macro-level structures to micro-level subjectivities, we see how harm becomes routine, not by accident but by design.

    • Macro. System Architects. At the widest layer of the inverted triangle sit the system architects, the technological monopolies, platform owners, and algorithmic designers who define the digital environment. Through the political economy and surveillance infrastructures, they engineer desire, structure emotional expression, and embed neoliberal logic. The socio-economic system promotes competition and non-physical aggression, which creates the anxious, pseudo-pacified subjects visible in the other levels (Hall, 2012).
    • Meso. Emotional Intermediaries and Institutional Brokers. The middle layer contains the intermediaries who translate macro logics into everyday practices. Influencers, content creators, and parents who monetise emotional labour function here as brokers of affect. Their actions exemplify what Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum (2008) termed special liberty: a narcissistic sense of entitlement to transgress ethical or legal boundaries with impunity. In digital capitalism, their behaviour is not a failure of moderation, but a predictable outcome. Alongside them are digital employers and moderators who enforce platform norms. These actors operationalise harm by converting emotion, intimacy, and identity into marketable content, all while appearing authentic or empowering. They don’t create the rules, but they enforce and benefit from them.
    • Micro. Structurally Exposed Individuals. At the tip of the triangle, the narrowest but most densely populated, are the individual users, especially the structurally exposed. Children, racialised communities, neurodivergent users, and those with limited digital literacy face the highest vulnerability with the least power. Yet, their visibility is actively engineered; they are both product and audience. The vast majority of users are ‘passive’. They consume, like, share, and scroll, not always maliciously but often uncritically. Even when they reject certain content, their engagement sustains its visibility. Participation becomes complicity and disengagement threatens symbolic erasure.

    Hovering over every level is a force less visible but more powerful than any single actor: the ideological and algorithmic logic of late neoliberal capitalism. This is not just a technological infrastructure, but an ideological architecture. It scripts desire, visibility, and value, encoding neoliberal principles into reward systems, including what to feel, when to share, and how to perform pain. The system doesn’t need to force you, it only needs to train you. And that’s the paradox, we are not outside the pyramid. We’re inside it, producing, consuming, and reproducing the very logic that exploits us.

    Governments legislate. But they move slowly, clumsily. France, Germany, the UK and the EU all have attempted content regulation but without dismantling the architecture of harm. Such legislation addresses the symptoms, not the system, targeting the visible effects while leaving the structural logic untouched. Deleting violent videos isn’t enough if the algorithm that promotes them remains untouched. We need an ethical approach that sees harm not just as a legal issue, but as a structural feature of digital capitalism. Because this isn’t just about content, it’s about how lives, emotions and identities are structured for profit. It’s anxiety, burnout, compulsive exposure, and the slow erosion of autonomy sold back to us as empowerment.

    Digital leisure, far from offering refuge, becomes a form of pacified compliance. What appears as transgression – sexual display, emotional oversharing and commodified vulnerability – is, in fact, a desperate negotiation with invisibility. These performances don’t subvert the system, they sustain it, one post, one click, one trauma at a time. As Hall and Winlow (2015) argue, capitalism no longer dominates through force when it can seduce us into exploiting ourselves. We internalise market logic so deeply that we brand our pain, aestheticise our despairs, all while believing we’re empowered. The system creates the suffering whilst providing a commodified coping strategy that it also profits from. This is what ultra-realism calls ontological insecurity: a pervasive sense of meaninglessness, of being structurally out of place, that drives us to seek validation in commodified forms (Raymen and Smith, 2020). But in the attention economy, visibility is conditional. Social media becomes the mirror where we hope to ‘matter’ (Billingham and Irwin-Rogers, 2022), even if it means performing harm, overexposure or reducing ourselves to spectacles. Recognition comes at the cost of your intimacy, stability, and self. This cycle is reinforced by what Hall et al. (2008) termed ‘pseudo-pacification’: a form of control that doesn’t rely on punishment and subjective violence, but on pleasure, distraction, symbolic gratification, competition, and structural harm.

    Digital leisure is no longer just entertainment; it’s a battlefield — symbolic, emotional, and political, where bodies, attention, and identity are negotiated and commodified. What used to be play is now performance. What once offered freedom now extracts value. And where are we headed? If we do nothing, the future won’t be dystopian, it will be a more optimised version of today. Algorithms won’t protect us, they’ll predict us. Content won’t be more human, it will be more addictive, manipulative and profitable. Surveillance will become ambient. Consent will become decorative. The line between intimacy and exposure will vanish. As Zuboff (2019) argues in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, surveillance infrastructures are not passive observers, but systems actively shaping behaviour to align with corporate goals. Similarly, Kuldova (2020) shows how algorithmic governance turns human interaction into predictable, governable, and monetisable flows of data. Within this logic, other content creators are not just peers but competitors, obstacles to recognition, visibility, and symbolic survival. In various online communities, users employ the very architecture of the system designed to protect users (e.g. reporting posts) as weapons through which they can attack and undermine the competition, potentially causing harm. Here, symbolic violence can result in a kind of symbolic death for the victim, via the erasure of visibility within the digital economy.

    Technology is not the enemy. Technological advancement is necessary, laudable, and even emancipatory when developed with justice, care and democratic intent. The problem isn’t platforms or AI themselves, but how they’re designed, owned and weaponised within systems that turn attention into capital and vulnerability into spectacle. The real issue is structural. Algorithms don’t exploit people. Systems do. Systems that engineer desire, monetise emotion and normalise harm while branding it as freedom. As McGowan (2016) argues, capitalism doesn’t suppress desire, it feeds on it, manipulating our longing by promising fulfilment through consumption while ensuring that fulfilment remains perpetually deferred. These systems tap into the very structure of human subjectivity, turning lack into a profit model. It’s not just a question of values, it’s about how our desires, technologies and lives are being structured. Changing that requires not only ethics, but also politics, collective imagination and structural conflict.

    The threat isn’t AI, it’s symbolic capitalism, a system where every difference becomes a product, every connection becomes data and every wound becomes content. This is not a technical crisis. It’s a cultural, emotional and existential one. The question is no longer whether we can resist; the real question is whether we are willing to imagine and build other ways of living, connecting, showing up and caring. Ways that honour dignity, not market visibility. Because if we don’t, we will continue to celebrate our slavery as if it were autonomy. And the coliseum, though digital, will keep devouring bodies. Only now, not with roars or spectacles but with filters, likes and monetisation.

    We can’t afford to be spectators anymore. It’s time to leave the coliseum.

    References

    Billingham, L., and Irwin-Rogers, K. (2022) Against Youth Violence: A Social Harm Perspective. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

    Debord, G. (1967) The Society of the Spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chastel.

    Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books.

    Guardian. (2022). ‘TikTok served blackout challenge videos to children minutes after joining’. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/02/tiktok-served-blackout-challenge-videos-to-children-minutes-after-joining. (Accessed on: 17th June 2025).

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

    Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2015) Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Towards a New Ultra-Realism. London: Routledge.

    Hall, S., Winlow, S. and Ancrum, C. (2008) Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: Crime, Exclusion and the New Culture of Narcissism. Cullompton: Willan Publishing.

    Han, B.-C. (2014) Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. London: Verso.

    Illouz, E. (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Kelly, C. R. (2023) Caught on Tape: White Masculinity and Obscene Enjoyment. New York: Oxford University Press.

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

    Kuldova, T. (2020) ‘Algorithmic governance and the opacity of power’. Big Data & Society. 7(2). Pp.1–5.

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

    McGowan, T. (2016) Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Medley, C. (2019) ‘The business of resistance: Feminist pornography and the limits of leisure industries as sites of political resistance.’ In Raymen, T., and Smith, O. (Eds.) Deviant Leisure: Criminological Perspectives on Leisure and Harm. London: Palgrave.

    Ofcom. (2024) ‘Children and parents: Media use and attitudes report 2024’. [online] Available at: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/265961/children-and-parents-media-use-and-attitudes-report-2024.pdf. (Accessed on 17th June 2025).

    Raymen, T. and Smith, O. (2020) Deviant Leisure: Criminological Perspectives on Leisure and Harm. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Rozin, P., and Royzman, E. D. (2001) ‘Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion.’ Personality and Social Psychology Review. 5(4). Pp. 296-320.

    Smith, O. and Raymen, T. (2016) ‘Deviant leisure: A criminological perspective’. Theoretical Criminology. 20(2). Pp.196–212.

    Streeck, W. G. (2016) How Will Capitalism End? London: Verso.

    Strohmaier, H., Murphy, C., DeRiggi, S., and Brunner, R. (2020) ‘Sharenting: Children’s rights and digital media’. Journal of Family Studies. 26(1). Pp.78–92.

    Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books.

  • Zemiogenesis and the Rudakubana case

    Steve Hall

    “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one.”
    Jacques Lacan

    Before, during and after his heinous crime, Axel Rudakubana clearly displayed symptoms associated with the psychopathy spectrum. The symptoms must have been noticed by parents and professionals, and they must have aroused some suspicions. Forty years ago, Rudakubana would have been at least eligible – if not guaranteed a placement – for time-limited confinement in a secure ‘assessment centre’ awaiting diagnosis and a recommended treatment programme. In the 1980s I worked with a dangerous youngster and his darkly obsessed family in such a centre. In this case, as in many others, all professionals agreed that earlier therapeutic and medical intervention would have produced better results.


    In 2019, after years of budget cuts, only 14 such centres – renamed Secure Children’s Homes – remained in the UK. Some of these homes are failing inspections, there’s a long waiting list, and children are referred only as a last resort after numerous failed interventions by the social services and the criminal justice system. Glancing briefly through the official literature, it’s quite noticeable that the cost of running such places features heavily in the analyses. Those who believe the myth that taxes and borrowing fund public spending will be quite easily convinced that the government simply can’t afford adequate services for young people with mental health issues, some of which, as we have just seen, can be deadly.


    As the children’s mental health crisis deepens, we are forced to live under the neoliberal cult of austerity, the objective of which is to run down public services ready for privatisation. It is aided and abetted by the postmodernist cult of moral relativism and the new left cult of minimal intervention and anti-psychiatry. This toxic combination of institutionalised parsimony, negligence and naivety demonises any form of moral, scientific or political authority – no matter how humane, advanced and rational – as an existential threat to the freedom of the individual. It also conveniently supplies the neoliberal politicians and financiers with yet another excuse for cost-cutting. Individual freedom is a great thing, no doubt. By the way, it’s also quite cheap to run, and neoliberals are convinced it can be cheaper still, at least where public money is involved.

    Each cult in the symbolically inefficent trio is now a veteran in the art of concocting excuses for itself and the other two tacit partners. The new three-headed master currently exerts its negative consequentialist power over all of us – I command that everyone shall be free from authority no matter what the real costs. Apart from the authority of the market, of course. The master is playing with children’s lives, both the tiny and often remediable minority suffering from the more dangerous forms of mental illness and their innocent victims. The current Anglo-American, late liberal way of life is, in the term used by ultra-realists, zemiogenic.

  • The Society of Enemies: 1. Identity Politics and Crime

    Steve Hall

    The extreme liberal activism associated with identity politics and sexual/gender politics continues to poison the well. Recently, myself and others made the claim on social media that the ‘moral panic’ cult, backed up by the dubious statistical ‘crime decline’ narrative, has hampered effective research and the struggle against today’s largely hidden traditional and novel crimes, particularly child sexual abuse. Originally placing itself in opposition to media sensationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia and ‘authoritarian populism’, the cult’s principle of minimal intervention has backfired badly, creating an atmosphere of inertia, ignorance and anxiety in which hidden crime proliferates and hostile, authoritarian reactions are more likely.

    The recent child abuse scandal in the UK elicited immediate responses from self-appointed identitarian activists – individuals and small cabals who imagine themselves to be intrepid leaders of their cultural constituencies. Rather than argue for the return of universal ethics, intelligent research and rational, effective politics and policies, they claim that hateful ‘white cis-het reactionaries’ – people like me and some other ultra-realist researchers, I suppose, along with gender-critical feminists – are all abusers at heart, care nothing about crime, harm or abused children, and simply want to take advantage of the current outcry to accuse gay, trans and ethnic minority communities of harbouring a disproportionate number of paedophiles. Paranoid whataboutery seems to have replaced rational research and debate.

    When Kimberlé Crenshaw, with what we must assume were good intentions, proposed an intersectional matrix of race, gender, sexuality and class, she hoped we could transcend hostile identity politics to create new solidarities, where each group might develop an empathetic understanding of the others’ modes of subjugation. But no. Activists, mimicking the zero-sum mindset of ethnonationalists, instead drew upon the intersectional matrix to emphasise what they feel – not ‘know’ – is the timeless existential hatred felt towards them by the groups on the other ends of the intersecting axes. In an emotivist culture, of course, what people ‘feel’ assumes the elevated position of absolute knowledge beyond question.

    The activists’ solution? They demand that we immediately subvert and abandon all traditional identities, institutions – including the family – and moral orders to become like them…. free-floating, undefined individuals, the pioneers of a beautiful, free, progressive future. Was that ever going to work, or was it the road to intersectional paranoia, the return of reaction and what Simon Winlow and and I once called ‘the society of enemies’ ? A society in which inherently antagonistic cultural groups imagine a world full of hostile others who don’t want them to exist, and immediately react with aggressive denunciations that can elicit and affirm precisely that assumption amongst the others they blame? This is the polar opposite of the ‘tolerance’ that liberals claimed to be one of their founding principles. Has post-structuralist identity politics bequeathed us with the most destructive, multipolar self-fulfilling prophecy we have ever known? Is this danger inherent in accelerated cultural progressivism in the midst of declining economies and institutional orders? An accidental ‘fatal strategy’? We need to know.