All the Rage: Digital Bodies and Deadly Play in the Age of the Suicide Bomber
Bibliographic record
Abstract
"Violence is viral..." Jean Baudrillard says in The Spirit of Terrorism, "it operates by contagion, by chain reaction, and it gradually destroys all our immunities and our powers to resist" (94). Seung-Hui Cho succumbed to those powers at Virginia Tech, as did Kimveer Gill at Dawson College in Montreal, and Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine, and too, too many others to mention. Meanwhile, half the world away, young men and women in the grip of a spiritual agenda enact similar acts of suicidal revenge to answer their own need for salvation, a sense of entitlement, and a retaliatory yearning to set right real or imagined wrongs. As much as these killers' acts are incomprehensible, they are simultaneously sanctioned by our own news media and entertainment industry. If these lost souls do not know where to draw the line, it is surely because our culture makes no distinction. In fact, the infamous psychedelia professor Timothy Leary, who performed his own death as a fashion statement and online signature media event in "designed dying," said "The most important thing you can do in your life is to die." We are immersed in visual violence of all kinds on a daily basis as entertainment. Suicide, especially murder-suicide, has become commonplace, yes, but more to the point it is now both fashionable and newsworthy. We are bombarded by popular culture forms that require ever worse-bigger and more dramatic events-to feed its massive hunger. These symbolic acts (and to say they are symbolic is not to suggest that they do not cause very real carnage) of blowing up bridges and markets in Baghdad, twin towers in Manhattan, or performing enactments of resentment against those Cho claimed had trust funds and drank cognac are happenings made real and more powerful because of their dramatization as carefully staged events for the media.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".