Ultra-Realists

Category: Zemiology

  • 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].

  • 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.