The Transition From Serial Killing to Mass Shooting as a Symptom of Capital.

I was writing every Monday about plant intelligence and bioacoustics, but then the omicron variant mutated its way into my house and I lost my train of thought, and as you’ll see, perhaps my better judgement about what constitutes a proper topic. It’s not about plants or the political implications of evolutionary biology this time. The title sums up the topic, so if you opened this and started reading, maybe it’s interesting to you and my better judgment remains intact after all. Or maybe we’re both in the same bad judgement boat. Speaking of sea vessels, you may also be wondering why this is the image I chose. Anyway,

There were more serial killers in the 1990s than any decade we have data for, with 991 documented cases worldwide. There was then a noticeable and perhaps-ominous decline to 666 in the 2000s. And although statistics are still coming in, the 2010s were on pace for less than 500. Serial killers are becoming increasingly rare.

But the news is not all good. As serial killing declined, mass shootings increased. In the 1990s, while those 991 serial killers slowly meandered from murder scene to murder scene, mass shooters killed about 21 people per year. Yet by 2019, there were more mass shootings than days in the year.

Plug these two trends into a graph, and it makes the letter X. We have swapped one form of murdering multiple people for another. Serial killers do their killing at a series of separate events. They kill. They wait. They kill again. Mass shooters also kill multiple people, but compress time and space as much as possible. There is no longer a series of events. There is only one event, and it usually takes minutes, not years.

Consider that between 1954 and 1957, Ed Gein murdered two people and exhumed nine. Over the course of six years, John Wayne Gacy killed thirty-three people. But in just six minutes on August 6, 2019, Patrick Crusius murdered twenty-three people. In fourteen minutes on October 27, 2018, Robert Bowers killed eleven. The United States’ brief foray into COVID related lockdowns slowed the incidence of mass shootings, but as public gatherings have returned, so has mass murder. Preliminary data shows a 0.78% daily increase in mass shootings over the mean since April 2020. A less-than-one-percent-increase may not sound like much, but I’m still against it.

Mass murder isn’t the only thing that’s accelerating. The economy is as well. The global economy doubles every quarter century or so. This is actually quite alarming. Think about those math problems that go something like, ‘Would you rather have 1 million dollars in a lump sum today, or one dollar today, two tomorrow, four the next, and have it keep doubling like that for thirty days?’ If you like large sums of money, there is a correct answer, because if you choose the daily double, by day twenty you could expect $1,048,576, with $2,097,152 coming the next day, and another nine days of doubling after that. These kinds of increases start slowly, but quickly get out of control.

To continue doubling the economy every twenty-five years will require accelerating our cycles of production, consumption, and obsolescence far beyond the fathomable. At the onset of the industrial era, goods were moved by waterways, then trains, then planes, and are now available for immediate download or same-day delivery. Any amount of time a commodity spends in an unsold state slows down an economy we expect to speed up. Capital seeks to destroy every spatial barrier and just get it there now, whatever it is, or wherever there happens to be. Space and time must be obliterated.

At the time of this writing, about 3000 people die from COVID-19 in the United States each day. But the political will to shut down schools or businesses isn’t there. The economy can’t stop moving and growing. Stasis is death for capital, and the choice has been made that this abstraction we call “the economy” gets to live while people die. When a container ship called the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal, it seemed like global commerce was about to collapse. Just one shortcut for ships gets closed off and the stock market goes into a tailspin and your 401K collapses. Stuff needs to move around. We need to make it, ship it, and sell it, more of it every day than the last, doesn’t matter what it is, but please, get it there faster than ever before.

In high-frequency trading (HFT), computers run algorithms to buy and sell stocks, usually making a fraction of a cent per trade, but making up for the low margins through sheer volume. Machines race other machines to make advantageous trades, exchange trillions of bytes of information every day, and process transactions in a few hundredths of a second, every second. Truly accurate numbers don’t exist, but HFT likely makes up 50-60% of the trades on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Traders pay a premium to put their computers near or within a market’s headquarters, because a shorter cable can give a crucial nanosecond of advantage. At the NYSE’s data center in Mahwah, New Jersey, everyone gets the same length cable so no one has the advantage of being physically closer to the central computer. Between buildings and across borders, HFT often uses microwave transmission systems because light travels slightly faster through air than through cables. A competitive edge is measured in microseconds. Computers are trading with other computers at a rate beyond human comprehension, and this now constitutes about half of all stock market activity.

Money is in constant motion, always moving faster and faster. And when it seems to have reached maximum velocity, it somehow goes even faster. The always-open shopping mall we call Earth appears to have reached the point where any further increase in the velocity, volume, or ubiquity of commerce should be impossible. Yet it just keeps getting larger and faster. The market may end up being like a piano falling off a building—we can’t figure out why or how it keeps getting bigger and bigger, but then it hits us.

Serial killings, that is, multiple homicides spread out over space and time, have been on the decline since the 1990s. On the rise, and in their place, are multiple homicides accomplished in a single location within a span of minutes. Serial killers will slowly murder over the course of years, perhaps get caught, have a trial, and maybe even an execution. Mass shooters do it all at once, often dying at the scene, cramming all the murders and an execution into a matter of minutes. The contemporary demand for more speed and growth has been fully internalized. Even an avocational act with little-to-no chance for profit, such as senseless murder, is subject to the overall societal speedup. It’s sort of like same day delivery for a pair of pants, only deadlier.

Serial killing is an artisanal cottage industry compared to mass shooting, but there’s really no need to get sentimental about some lost golden age of slow murder than there are reasons to lament the end of feudalism. What’s lost to the past was not necessarily better. Yet it’s remarkable just how much the world has changed in a few decades. We are accelerating headlong into an increasingly catastrophic future. The incredibly wealthy amass amounts of wealth so staggeringly huge as to be meaningless, while the rest of us watch our social safety net and the natural world turn to dust. Before the eerie respite from mass shootings brought on by the massive daily death toll of a global pandemic, on almost any given day, angry young men would shoot large numbers of people in short spans of time for no reason at all, and now they’re coming back, probably more unhinged than ever. We buy and sell faster and faster. The economy grows and grows. The troubled men kill quicker and quicker. The catastrophe looks bigger and bigger. Then it hits us.