June 16, 2026 — Bloomsday
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ — McDialogues™
An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™ and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science
by Nelson S. Thall
Former Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, Ca.
Why Does Violence Seem to Be Growing More Cruel?
A Student of Technology asks:
Reported crime in many countries is actually falling, yet the violence that does occur seems to have changed character — more random, more public, more cruel, harder to explain. Attacks increasingly appear to have no motive one could even bargain with. What might be causing this shift?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
You have asked the better question. The popular claim that violence is simply rising does not survive contact with the figures. By the most reliable measures, everyday criminal violence in the West has been falling, not climbing — in the United States, recent years have brought some of the steepest declines in homicide ever recorded. What is rising is not the volume of violence but a particular kind of it.
To see the change, distinguish two species of violence. The first is instrumental: violence as a means to an end — money, territory, revenge, a rival removed. It presupposes a stable self pursuing a goal, and in principle one could negotiate with it. The second is expressive: violence in which the act itself is the entire point. It seeks no outcome beyond the deed and the doer. Law enforcement has begun to track its extreme form under the name nihilistic violence— destruction for its own sake, in which the attack is the message and meaning is precisely the thing being denied. A growing share of recent attacks fits no coherent belief system at all. That is what people are sensing when they call the new violence "evil." Evil, here, is simply violence emptied of any purpose you could reason with.
Why should the character of violence change in this way? The answer returns us to identity.
For most of human history, people awoke to essentially the same world and the same sense of self. Today the environment changes continuously; new technologies, new information, and new conditions arrive so quickly that yesterday's assumptions can be obsolete by morning. At the same time, electronic technologies extend memory, attention, relationships, and experience outside the body, producing what I call the discarnate effect — a weakening of stable identity. The modern person suffers a double loss, waking to find both that the world has changed and that the self has grown less secure. The continuity that once linked yesterday to today dissolves. To lose one's world and one's self at once is a disorienting and angering way to begin a day.
McLuhan put the consequence in a single line: violence is the quest for identity. When one is unsure who one is, one reaches for violence to find out. But notice what kind of violence this produces. A man pursuing money will rob; a man pursuing a self will simply destroy, because the destruction is the self he is manufacturing. As stable identity erodes, instrumental violence gives way to expressive violence — violence whose only product is the identity of the person committing it. This is why the new cruelty feels motiveless. Its motive is not in the world; it is in the doer's need to become someone by being seen to act.
And seen is the operative word. The decisive feature of expressive violence today is that it is performed for the electronic environment. It is recorded, posted, and scored by the approval of online communities. The discarnate audience is not merely a witness to the act; it has become the motive for it. Medium and motive fuse. The violence is made discarnate, for the discarnate, by people who have themselves been discarnated. That is the loop the headlines never close.
The condition is not without remedy, but the remedy is not more policing of an act whose author cannot be deterred or bargained with. The first step is to see the environments shaping us. Neither adults nor children are taught to recognize how technological environments act on perception, identity, and behavior — including how an environment that strips away private identity quietly raises the demand for violent self-definition. The discipline of Technology Ecology exists to teach that recognition. The task of our age is not merely to survive technological change, but to understand it well enough to remain fully human within it — and to deny the discarnate audience the spectacle it has learned to reward.
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All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM) was not employed. We hired a stenographer. No intellectual contribution or creative authorship is attributed to the AI tool. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
I can be reached at nelson@themediumisthemessage.com