Inescapable Horror

Don't force me to watch murders please.

As a member of GenX, I attended college in the 1990’s. I remember at that time a series of videotapes that somehow circulated on campus in an analog to the Dark Web. They were called “Faces of Death”, and the premise was simple - in an age much less saturated by surveillance, somehow people had been captured on camera at the moment of their death, (imagine car crashes, pedestrians getting hit by trains, etc…). To this day, I don’t understand why someone would want to watch these, let alone compile and share. But there was obviously some underground market for this. Several years later in 1999 there was a Nicolas Cage film called ‘Eight Millimeter’ (+Joaquin Phoenix & James Gandolfini) in which a widow discovers “snuff films”, (actual murders on film), owned by her husband after his death and hires Nick Cage to investigate. Dark stuff, and again - underground culture. I was a big movie guy, but ended up wishing I hadn’t watched it just because of how dark the topic was.

Fast forward to 2025, and one seemingly can’t escape watching actual murders regularly wherever you turn. Two incidents in the last month in particular have forced me to do quite a bit of careful navigation not to see - the murders of Charlie Kirk on a college campus in Utah and the murder of Iryna Zarutska on a bus in Charlotte. How hard is it to avoid watching actual murders now? For at least 24 hours, but felt like several days, whenever I opened the front page of the Wall Street Journal online, it started auto-playing a video of Charlie sitting and talking moments before his death. I would quickly scroll away before the actual event, so I don’t know in what detail it was shown, but the fact that I assumed they would show it says a lot about our current culture of death.

Showing violence, murder, and death is now the default setting on many apps that are fed by algorithms - including mainstream media outlets like the WSJ. I’m not a power user of social media, but on any app I use, I've gone to the settings to turn off “auto play video”. If you don’t aggressively curate your media consumption, a good day will ‘only’ expose you to racially charged violence caught on camera in a school or obese women pulling each other’s hair out in a Waffle House. On a bad day, you will see the dead and dying in Gaza, the Ukraine, public transportation, or a college campus.

How did showing this atrocious content become the norm? Many of these incidents could be news-worthy stories, and if so - I’d like to read about them. I do not need to be force-fed the grotesque video by default. Our media and culture is becoming medieval in its acceptance of everyday disregard to the worst behaviors man is capable of.

This post will likely be read by less than a thousand people, but if you are reading this - be the change you want to see in the world. Stop sharing video of violence and murder with your friends and family. Stop encouraging the algorithms that have somehow found this to be a profitable enterprise. Turn off "autoplay” in your apps. Give feedback to your media providers when gratuitous violence is shared. We need to change the culture, and it will only happen one person at a time. Controversial statement of the week - “Stop showing me murders.”

If you are a regular social media user, learn a little about NOSTR. It’s an attempt to build an alternative social media ecosystem where attention is not the currency that rewards creators. It’s an open source protocol for sharing content and not owned by any company. On Nostr, currency is the currency that rewards creators. Using apps like Primal you can use Bitcoin to ‘zap’ posts that you like anywhere from fractions of a penny to hundreds of dollars. (My current default is 31 satoshis, or about 3 cents, and my rule is “if I laugh, I zap”.) Your attention to the blood and guts on regular media is only funding more of the same as that attention is monetized by the platforms. As a prominent Nester promoter once said - “Nobody ever zapped a car crash.” If there is no reward for sharing garbage - less garbage will be shared. If you want social media to be better, support a better social media.