It was still Thursday night here when Brenton Tarrant walked up to a mosque on New Zealand’s Friday afternoon and opened fire on several dozen unarmed civilians in prayer. Soon after Tarrant was captured at a second mosque, various new services began sending out breaking news alerts around the world. Simultaneously, messages from darker presences deeper in the web started sending out messages as well: “He lived streamed it,” and “There’s a manifesto.”
A couple of clicks later and I had the manifesto and was watching what appeared to be helmet-cam footage of the entire shooting recorded live. And it was right around that point that the media lost their collective shit. In a fairly fine flash the media, which had morphed rather desperately and pathetically from decent journalism into a commentary/interpretation/dissemination service, saw that it had been rendered superfluous and pointless. Almost immediately, the media coverage focused intently and rather angrily at Facebook and YouTube for 1) allowing people to stream anything live, and 2) seeming to be unable to remove the postings of the videos at the same rate they were being propagated. These articles seemed to outnumber and outpace updates on the actual shooting. At that point, I went to sleep.
When I woke up the next morning, the articles seemed to have evolved quickly as the media struggled to grasp what had happened and exactly what to do about it. The headlines were all slight variations on this theme: If You Downloaded the Video, Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Watch It. A couple of these articles were allegedly by mental health professionals attempting to protect the psychological welfare of the unwashed masses, but most seemed to be by “journalists” who seemed to be primarily interested in protecting their jobs, and a huge reason the media exists these days is their access to “the wire” – raw footage of events that would historically not be released to the public because it is on some level too extreme. So the media served as a sort of filter/censor. If you wanted to see the available footage from any news incident, you tuned in to the news outlet of your choice and watched. But this dude had done an end run completely around the middleman of the media and streamed his content live directly to everyone on Facebook and YouTube. In the first 24 hours after the shooting, Facebook reported that it had removed 1.5 million videos from its pages, but that even that was not enough to come close to stopping or even containing the dissemination of the video.
And very quickly after that, by the following morning, the media seemed to totally back away from stories about the footage and began running stories about what was going on with New Zealand and its government in the aftermath of the shooting, which is probably what they should have been reporting on. The following day the two big articles about the shooting were 1) about how the Prime Minister of New Zealand was doing what she could to prohibit the use of Tarrant’s name so as not to give him the infamy he craved (a decision which, while I understand and appreciate why it was made nonetheless disagree with), and 2) a vividly detailed scene-by-scene description of the video (which seemed an embarrassing last-ditch attempt by the media to analyze (they used to determine what footage was seen, and they would of course provide commentary and analysis, so even though viewers of the video clearly didn’t need commentary or analysis, they did it anyway, almost like a reflex)) what had happened. Both of these efforts seemed like rather futile and pathetic attempts the either put the genie back in the bottle, or just pretend it never got out in the first place. The world had already seen the video, the world already knew his name and had already read his words.
I am reminded of the Church’s desperation when literacy began spreading rampantly and the Holy Roman and Apostolic began having difficulty controlling the flock that was rapidly becoming educated. I’m also reminded of the music industry when mp3s and Napster showed up. Their actual message for years was “Here is why you should not download music for free but instead pay us for a lesser quality product: because that’s the way it’s always been and thus that is the way it’s supposed to be. We’ve been ripping you off for decades because, well, we could because we controlled the supply, and it is somehow your moral duty to let us keep ripping you off.”
I can’t help but remember how the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, and the Zodiac Killer had to basically beg/extort news outlets to publish their manifestos. No more. Suddenly the media is relegated to the sidelines, unable to even play catch up with the news stories being live streamed directly from the source. “Oh, you already have the video?” Yep. “I see. Well, do you need me to explain it to you?” Nope. “Hmmm. Okay, Would you like to hear my opinions and what I thought of the video?” Nope.
So several million people downloaded the video, me among them…what about that? Where they deviants? Sadistic, hateful perverts who would find such a video entertaining or in any way enjoyable to watch? Did they endorse Tarrant’s murder spree, or support his ideology? I’m sure there were instances of that…the web reaches some unbelievably dark places where even innocent and innocuous YouTube videos of children’s birthday parties are viewed by malicious eyes with dark intent. I suspect the majority of people who accessed the video did so with the exact same intent as they had in the past when they tuned into a news network to find out the latest on a story. Only here they were offered The Story in pure, unadulterated form without having sit through advertisements, patronizing commentary, and interviews with “experts” wringing their hands and trying to assign academic or sociological meaning to the whole thing.
N.P.: “Better As One” – The Heavy
