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

Craig Kelly

Max Hart

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

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

 
A Long History of Consuming Violence

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

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

Grazing Death

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

Leisure, Play, and the Commodification of Trauma

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

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

Pseudo-Pacification, Special Liberty, and Lack

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

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

Celebrity Commentators, Instrumental Influencers, and the Culture Industry

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

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

Harm and the Market for Death

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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