Ultra-Realists

Category: Criminology

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.