Killer Content: How Violence Learned to Perform for the Attention Economy
When violence becomes a message, and the audience becomes part of the crime
I have been thinking about serial killers, which is rarely the beginning of a cheerful sentence.
Not in the usual true crime way. Not in the “let’s decode the letters, rank the suspects, and pretend we would definitely have spotted the pattern before the police did” way. What has been bothering me is not just the violence itself, but the way violence changes shape depending on the media environment around it.
Because public violence does not happen in a vacuum. It happens in a culture. It happens in front of cameras, newspapers, documentaries, podcasts, algorithms, timelines, comment sections, and group chats. It happens in societies that decide, often without quite admitting it, which kinds of horror become forgettable and which kinds become myth.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether modern violence has not simply become more visible. In some cases, it may have become more performative.
Not all violence. Not most violence. Most murder is still tragically ordinary: domestic, personal, chaotic, intimate, impulsive, despairing, or brutally practical. But a particular kind of public violence seems to operate differently. It is not only an act of harm. It is also an act of communication.
The violence says: look at me.
Or worse: understand me.
And the media age has become very good at helping it speak.
The slow myth of the serial killer
The serial killer belongs, in many ways, to an older media world.
That does not mean serial murder no longer exists. It does. But the specific cultural figure of the serial killer, the one who becomes a national obsession, feels tied to newspapers, police sketches, evening news bulletins, letters to editors, blurry photographs, and years of accumulated dread.
The serial killer became a myth slowly.
A body was found. Then another. Then maybe a pattern emerged. Then a nickname appeared. Then the press began to construct a figure in the public imagination. The killer might write to newspapers, taunt police, send symbols, make claims, deny claims, correct the record, or simply enjoy the fact that the city had begun whispering about them.
The myth depended on repetition.
The killer returned. The fear returned. The headline returned. The public did too.
That repetition mattered psychologically. It created a kind of unwanted relationship between offender, media, police, and audience. The killer was not merely killing; they were becoming a character. A shadow with a name. A pattern with a personality.
This is part of what makes serial murder so culturally sticky. It lends itself to narrative. There is a villain, a mystery, a trail, a detective structure, a map, a set of clues, and the horrible implication that the monster may be hiding inside ordinary life.
It is also part of why serial killers became so easy to mythologise. The more a case remained unsolved, the more the offender seemed to expand beyond the original crimes. They became not just a person who harmed real victims, but a symbol of the unknown. A proof that evil could be clever, patient, and invisible.
That is already a media construction. The victims become fixed in tragedy. The offender becomes mobile in imagination.
This is the first uncomfortable lesson: attention does not merely record violence. It can enlarge it.
When infamy got faster
The classic serial killer needed time.
A modern mass killer may only need an afternoon.
That is not because the psychology is identical. Serial murder and mass public violence are different forms of offending. They have different patterns, motives, victims, timeframes, and opportunity structures. It would be lazy to flatten them into one category.
But they can share one feature: the desire to be seen.
The serial killer built infamy through duration. The mass killer compresses infamy into spectacle. Instead of returning again and again, they create one catastrophic interruption. One moment that tears through the news cycle, floods the screen, stops the country, and produces instant biography.
Who were they?
What did they believe?
What did they post?
Were there warning signs?
Was there a manifesto?
Were they radicalised?
Were they mentally ill?
Was it political?
Was it personal?
Was it preventable?
These questions matter, of course. We need to understand violence if we want to reduce it. But there is something dangerous in the speed and volume of the attention. Within hours, an obscure person can become globally known. Within days, their image, writing, ideology, grievances, and chosen symbols may have been reproduced more widely than anything they could ever have created in life.
That is a perverse reward structure.
Again, this does not mean media “causes” mass violence in a simple sense. That kind of claim is too crude. People do not become killers because they watched the news. Millions of people encounter the same media environment and do not harm anyone.
But media can shape scripts. It can show what is possible. It can teach the choreography of notoriety. It can demonstrate, again and again, that extreme violence is one of the fastest ways for a nobody to become a somebody.
That matters because some offenders are not only seeking death. They are seeking meaning.
The psychology of mattering
One of the most useful psychological ideas here is the need for significance.
Human beings need to feel that they matter. Usually this is ordinary and healthy. We want to be loved, respected, useful, recognised, remembered. We want our lives to mean something to someone.
But under certain conditions, the need to matter can become desperate and distorted. Humiliation, isolation, grievance, rejection, ideological obsession, or personal collapse can create a state where someone no longer wants to live a meaningful life. They want to force meaning out of the world.
Violence becomes a shortcut.
It says: you ignored me, but now you have to look.
This is where social learning matters. People do not only imitate actions. They imitate roles. They imitate stories. They imitate the emotional structure of an act.
A person who is already angry, alienated, suicidal, or ideologically captured may look at previous attackers and not simply see violence. They may see a script for transformation.
Before: invisible.
After: notorious.
Before: powerless.
After: feared.
Before: nobody.
After: a name everyone says.
That is the poison in the attention economy. It does not create the wound, but it may offer the wound a stage.
And the stage keeps getting faster.
The old serial killer had to wait for the newspaper. The modern attacker may prepare for the algorithm. They may leave behind writings, videos, posts, symbols, memes, references to previous attacks, or direct attempts to control interpretation after death.
The crime is not only committed in physical space. It is designed for circulation.
That is why the word “content” feels so grimly appropriate. Content is what fills the feed. Content is what keeps us watching. Content is what gets clipped, discussed, condemned, monetised, recommended, and remembered.
The killer does not need our approval. They only need our attention.
From body count to symbolic value
There is another shift that feels especially bleak.
Once mass public violence becomes familiar, it risks becoming less shocking in the public imagination. That is a horrifying thing to say, but I think it is true. Repetition dulls the edges of horror. The first story horrifies. The tenth becomes part of the background. The fiftieth becomes a genre of headline.
But targeted political violence carries a different kind of media power.
One high-profile victim can dominate attention more than several unknown civilians. Not because that life is worth more, but because that life is more symbolically legible. A politician, judge, activist, public official, journalist, or cultural figure arrives already loaded with meaning. They are not just a person in the public imagination. They are a proxy for a cause, a party, a movement, a threat, a resentment, or a fantasy of national decline.
That makes targeted violence dangerously efficient.
A mass killer may need scale to create spectacle. A political attacker may only need a symbol.
The target does some of the narrative work for them.
This is where assassination, attempted assassination, threats against officials, and violence against public figures become more than individual acts. They are attacks on meaning systems. The victim is harmed as a person, but also converted into a message.
This is the logic of symbolic violence: the body becomes a billboard.
That does not mean every attack on a public figure is part of one simple trend. Political violence has many causes: polarisation, conspiracy thinking, ideological extremism, social fragmentation, access to weapons, institutional distrust, economic stress, personal crisis, online radicalisation, and plain old human rage. We should resist neat explanations.
But I do think the media environment changes the perceived payoff.
A targeted attack produces instant interpretation. Everyone knows where to place it. Everyone knows what argument to have. Before the facts are fully known, the story has already been recruited into wider narratives.
It becomes proof.
Proof that the other side is dangerous. Proof that society is collapsing. Proof that speech has consequences. Proof that censorship is needed. Proof that censorship caused it. Proof that politics has become war. Proof of whatever the audience was already waiting to prove.
The act continues after the act.
That is the frightening part.
The audience problem
This is where the argument becomes uncomfortable, because it would be easier if the problem were only “the media.”
But the media is not just a building full of editors anymore. It is us.
We are not passive viewers sitting in front of a scheduled news bulletin. We are distributors. We are amplifiers. We are commentators. We are screenshotters, quote-posters, reaction-makers, amateur analysts, thread-builders, and outrage merchants.
Sometimes we spread things because we approve of them. More often, we spread them because we are disgusted. But the algorithm does not have a conscience. It does not know the difference between praise and condemnation. It knows attention.
That creates a moral trap.
A killer wants to be seen. We hate what they did, so we look. We want to understand, so we read. We want to condemn, so we share. We want to warn others, so we reproduce the image. We want to prove we are not like them, so we place them at the centre of our conversation.
And by doing so, we may give them part of what they wanted.
That does not make the ordinary viewer guilty of the crime. I do not like arguments that turn everyone into a murderer by association. Watching the news is not violence. Wanting to understand a tragedy is not complicity. Curiosity is not the same as endorsement.
But we can be structurally implicated without being personally guilty.
That distinction matters.
The audience becomes part of the crime not because we caused it, but because the crime was designed with us in mind. We are the imagined receiver. The final stage. The marketplace where the act is converted into meaning.
If violence is communication, then attention is delivery.
That is why responsible coverage matters. It is why we need to be careful with names, images, manifestos, rankings, aesthetic details, and the strange online habit of turning murderers into lore. It is why “deep dives” can become ethically slippery. It is why true crime so often ends up pretending to honour victims while quietly building monuments to offenders.
We tell ourselves we are analysing evil.
Sometimes we are just keeping it famous.
The seduction of the explanation
There is another trap here: the feeling that understanding violence makes us superior to it.
It does not.
Psychology can help explain pathways into violence. It can identify warning signs, scripts, risk factors, vulnerabilities, and social conditions. Philosophy can help us think about meaning, spectacle, attention, and responsibility. Criminology can map patterns. Sociology can show us how institutions, communities, and technologies shape behaviour.
But explanation is not mastery.
This is especially important in true crime culture, where knowledge often becomes entertainment wearing a serious face. We learn the timeline, the clues, the red flags, the mistakes. We get to feel perceptive. We get to believe we would have noticed. We would have left. We would have called someone. We would have seen through them.
Maybe.
Or maybe not.
Most people do not recognise danger while it is still ambiguous. Most people only see the pattern after someone has edited the story for them. Hindsight is very good at making cowards and geniuses of us all.
That same hindsight problem affects how we interpret public violence. After the fact, everything becomes meaningful. The post was a clue. The argument was a clue. The clothing was a clue. The isolation was a clue. The joke was a clue. The ideology was a clue.
Some of those clues matter. Some do not. The hard part is knowing the difference before the harm occurs.
That is why prevention cannot simply be “watch out for weird people” or “monitor everyone online” or “ban the bad ideas.” Those responses are too broad, too blunt, and often too politically convenient. They can easily become ways to stigmatise mental illness, neurodivergence, political dissent, loneliness, or social awkwardness.
Most lonely people are not dangerous. Most mentally ill people are not violent. Most angry people do not kill. Most people who consume dark media do not become dark actors.
The problem is not one trait. It is convergence.
Grievance. Leakage. Access. Identification with previous attackers. Suicidality. Ideological permission. Personal collapse. Opportunity. A script. A target. An audience.
The audience is not the whole story.
But it is part of the stage.
Refusing the performance
So what do we do with this?
Silence is not the answer. Public violence must be reported. Victims deserve to be named. Systems need scrutiny. Failures need investigation. Patterns need analysis. A society that refuses to look at violence honestly will not become safer; it will only become more confused.
But attention needs discipline.
Name the victims more than the perpetrators.
Describe the systems more than the spectacle.
Avoid turning attackers into antiheroes, masterminds, monsters, geniuses, or avatars of civilisational collapse.
Do not publish manifestos as if the public needs the full text of someone’s self-justifying fantasy.
Do not rank offenders by body count.
Do not obsessively replay footage.
Do not confuse aesthetic analysis with moral seriousness.
Do not let the killer become the protagonist.
That last one matters most.
Because if there is one thing the attention economy does very well, it is create protagonists. It turns events into stories and stories into characters. The danger is that public violence already comes with a person desperate to be cast in the lead role.
We do not have to give it to them.
We can report without worshipping.
We can analyse without mythologising.
We can remember without making the offender unforgettable.
Simply Put: Killer content
The phrase “killer content” sounds like a joke until it stops sounding like one.
Because that is the horror of it. Violence can become content. Murder can become narrative property. The dead can become backstory. The killer can become a brand. The audience can become distribution.
And somewhere inside that machinery, the original act gains a second life.
The first weapon harms the victim.
The second is meaning.
That is the part we have more control over.
We cannot prevent every act of violence by changing how we watch, share, report, or discuss it. That would be naïve. But we can refuse to make attention the reward. We can refuse to turn every violent man into a mystery worth solving, every manifesto into a text worth decoding, every symbolic attack into the opening scene of someone else’s mythology.
The serial killer needed time to become a myth.
The mass killer learned to become a spectacle.
The symbolic attacker may need only one recognisable target.
What connects them is not just violence. It is performance. The demand to be seen. The hope that harm will become history.
That is the part we should starve.
Not the truth. Not the victims. Not the analysis.
The performance.
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