Terror: live

ABSTRACT

To what extent can the immediacy of live-streaming bring distant spectators into proximity with an event? In an article analysing the aesthetico-political stakes of terrorist-produced media, Lilie Chouliaraki and Andreas Kissas, drawing from Adriana Cavarero, differentiate between terrorism and horrorism in digitally mediated contexts: terror(ism) ‘is associated with proximity and addresses the eyewitness of violent death, horror is associated with mediated witnessing and addresses the distant spectator’. How then, should we make sense of terror attacks when they are live-streamed by the perpetrator? The Christchurch Mosque attacks marked the first time a terror attack was live-streamed on a mainstream social networking site, though as has been noted, it was not the first socially mediated iteration of performance crime. By live-streaming overt forms of violence, terrorists seek to destabilize the terror/horror dichotomy by bringing distant spectators into proximity with death. In this article, I argue that the capabilities of live-streaming technologies help to constitute a new kind of terror spectacle in which the affective capacity of images is intensified images in order to garner support and paralyze audiences who simultaneously participate in and consume the event.

KEYWORDS:

• Terror
• horror
• affect
• live-stream
• mediation

Introduction

On the 15^th of March 2019, a white, far-right terrorist killed 51 Muslims and injured 49 during Friday prayer at the Al-Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand. Seventeen minutes of the attack was streamed online via Facebook live. Although less than 200 people watched the attack as it occurred, around 4000 were able to watch the stream for 24 hours following the event. During this time, Facebook blocked 1.2 million uploads and deleted another 300,000 which had already been uploaded (Macklin 2019). Though terror attacks in the form of mass shootings seem to have become common in recent years, they are not usually livestreamed from the perspective of the perpetrator. Even groups like the Islamic State, who arguably changed the landscape of terrorist-produced media in terms of quality and scope, were limited to pre-recorded and carefully produced mediations of terror.

To what extent can the immediacy of livestreaming bring distant spectators into proximity with a horrific event? A useful point of departure is the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s differentiation between terrorism and horrorism. Lilie Chouliaraki and Angelos Kissas capture this distinction in an article analysing the aesthetico-political stakes of terrorist-produced media: terror ‘is associated with proximity and addresses the eyewitness of violent death, horror is associated with mediated witnessing and addresses the distant spectator’ (Chouliaraki and Kissas 2018, 24–25). The 2019 Christchurch Mosque attack marked the first time a terror attack was livestreamed on a social networking site, although there have since been similarly mediated attacks in Buffalo, New York, and Halle, Germany. Such an attack, and its mediation, is made possible by the affordances of digital technologies and preferable for far-right white supremacists in highly mediatized societies ontologically constituted by an online presence, and who wish to produce fascist spectacles. This article critically analyses the technical and aesthetic affordances of livestreaming. Examining the affective stakes of bringing distant spectators into contact with scenes of horror, it argues that terror attacks livestreamed from the perspective of the perpetrator attempt to destabilize relations of proximity and intensify affective potentialities. By livestreaming overt forms of violence, terrorists attempt to destabilize the terror/horror dichotomy, bring distant spectators into proximity with death, and seek to intensify the affective capacities of images. This destabilization, propagated through what Yasmin Ibrahim (2020) calls ‘technologies of trauma’, remediates liveness to produce a terror spectacle (Kellner 2003a, 2003b, 2004). In other words, the unique combination of p/re/mediation and content work to provoke fear and enjoyment in affective publics (Papacharissi 2016). The troubled proximity of the scene itself, thus, works doubly to garner support for a monstrous politics and paralyze a complicit audience. In short, this essay problematizes the proxemics and technological assemblage of livestreaming, bringing into question the technical affordances made available in a digitally sophisticated and networked world.

This article is split into three sections. Firstly, I review extant attempts to make sense of the Christchurch terror attack as performance crime (Bender 2017), new genre of witnessing (Mortensen 2021), and death spectacle that amplifies the excludability of racialized bodies (Ibrahim 2020). I then discuss the significance of platform affordances (Bucher and Helmond 2018) in the live mediation of death, focussing on the ways in which live media and interactions with it work to dispose audiences in specific ways.

In the second section, I introduce various theories of liveness as they have been developed and adapted in media, communication, and cultural studies. The phenomenon of liveness as it relates to media is well established in these fields, yet the liveness of the mediated terror attack recorded and streamed on a GoPro marks a new development beyond the remit of current theories of liveness. Considering the ways in which mediating proximity is an aggregate form of violence in the case of self-mediated terror attacks, I argue that theories of liveness that overly privilege the technological risk emptying acts of horror of their subjective content. In other words, the aesthetics and politics of live events play a role in how we ought to theorize and comprehend such events: enactments of force against the vulnerable and defenceless, despite their commonalities with other live media, ought to be thought as what Cavarero calls scenes of repugnance (Cavarero 2009, 4). In the final section, I discuss and apply Cavarero’s etymological account of ‘terror’ and ‘horror’ to the Christchurch Mosque attacks. These key terms have a critical relationship to the affective capacities of contemporary forms of mediated violence. The proposed duality between terror(ism) and horror(ism) is problematized by modern media forms that try to disappear the medium itself and achieve immediacy (Bolter and Grusin 1999). Here, the terror/horror binary can be seen to have a relationship with the double logic of remediation as accounted for by Bolter and Grusin. The double logic of remediation has two constituent parts: immediacy, which refers to media’s attempt to provide a ‘more transparent and direct revelation to reality, to effectively disappear in the very act of mediation they enable’ (Fisher and Brendan 2013, 62) and hypermediacy which, in contrast, reveals the extent to which the real is being mediated: ‘the spectator no longer simply looks through [its] mediation, like a transparent window, but also at its texture and materiality rendered partially opaque within its remediated context’ (Fisher and Brendan 2013, 63, emphasis in original). The terror/horror duality (itself problematized by live-streaming), aggregated with the double logic of remediation, are appropriate tools to consider the stakes and a/effects of bringing distant spectators into proximity with violent death. I use this final section as an opportunity to consider the ways in which the aporia of terror/horror, mapped onto immediacy/hypermediacy remediates liveness to produce a new spectacle of terror.

Horrific events

The Christchurch terror attack has been analysed in a number of different ways. For example, Stuart Bender has made sense of the March 2019 terror attack as a performance crime (2019). As he notes, Raymond Surette (2015) and Majid Yar (2012) have outlined definitions of performance crime previously, with the former denoting it as crime that includes the ‘spectacle of recording, sharing and uploading crime in order to distribute the performance to new media audiences’ (Surette 2015, 201). Though there are many cases of performance crime, Bender notes two significant examples: the live-streamed torture of a disabled man in Chicago in January of 2017, and the random murder of an elderly man in Ohio during April of 2017 (though, he notes that only the former was live-streamed) (Bender 2017, 53). For Bender, the mediation of a performance crime is as important as enacting the crime itself and is marked by what Yar calls the will-to-representation; essentially, ‘the imperative to represent the self via electronic mediation’ (Bender 2018, 309; Yar 2012, 251). For Yar, performance crime and its will to representation are connected to a media-based social ontology; they are located within a celebrity culture where social existence is grounded in online, mediated selves (2012, 251). Existence is qualified and made valuable when mediated selves are known and popular. No wonder that, within the context of socially mediated death online, Jon Stratton sees social media and the ubiquitous technological context that it constitutes, and within which it thrives, as the emphatic realization of the society of the spectacle (Stratton 2020).

Performance crime is not limited to terror attacks. In another case of performance crime discussed by Bender (2017), an 18-year-old woman live-streamed her friend’s rape. She reportedly said that the original purpose of live-streaming the event was to deter the offender, but got ‘caught up’ in the likes the stream was getting so carried on filming. One wonders if the mediation of the screen brought her away from the attack – did the hypermediality of recording the event itself distance her from the attack, eliding instinctual flight, and thus freeze her as in the mediated scene of horror? Mediating a terror attack live has a number functions and effects, not least of which is to enable participation in the event and make it consumable for distant audiences. The stakes of bringing another into proximity with not merely death, but the scene of horror, are stark. Writing on the affective potentialities in the difference between attending sport events and watching them live from afar, Diana-Luiza Dumitriu notes that the ‘genuine live experience is built on emotional grounds’ (Dumitriu 2014, 38). The hypermedial aesthetics of live sport with its close-ups, replays, statistical overlays and so on, do not resemble the optics of a terror attack recorded on a GoPro. Instead, the mediation of this event seeks to simulate presence within the scene of horror. Regardless, as a performance crime and example of the will to representation, the fact that the event was streamed live marks it out as significant within the coordinates of contemporary violence and the mediatization of terrorism. The presence that the live mediation of the event emulates problematizes the duality proposed in the terror/horror dichotomy I discuss below.

Within a technologically mediated social ontology, the mundane SNSs/social media which intercede and constitute our everyday lives can easily be mobilized as affective interfaces of fear. Contextualising the Christchurch terror attack, Ibrahim locates the Christchurch massacre within a ‘convergent viral economy’:

The amateur images enter a transaction economy online where these can be shared, reposted and archived – enmeshing with algorithms and digital capitalism thriving on content that spills, leaks, leaps platforms and floats ad infinitum, remaking the ‘horrific’ incomplete by emptying out terror from the terrified and objectifying them through a sharing economy and the non-erasure of the Internet. (Ibrahim 2020, 804)

Although digital media work against distance in the name of connectivity, this transaction economy of online spaces elongates processes of horror so that the ideological content of images resonates with distant subjects as much as possible. While the livestreaming of the event contributes to its horror, the spectacular logic of online spaces alongside the non-erasure of the internet work collaboratively to ensure the captured event is circulated and endures as much as possible. In other words, the assemblage of high-speed internet infrastructure, 5 G, technological ubiquity, and our contemporary mediated social ontology, are, thus, necessary (material) conditions for the live mediation of horrific events.

Liveness, livestreaming and remediation

Liveness has a firm history in media, communication, and cultural studies. Bourdon’s (2000) observation that live broadcasting was a ‘public phenomenon’ as events were simultaneously consumed by a spatially disparate public, is important to recall here. Translating this consideration to the present, we are reminded of the mediated (affective) public(s) that livestreamed horrific events seek to produce. For Karen van Es, liveness has primarily been formulated along three theoretical contours: liveness as ontological (technological) (Sørensen 2016); phenomenological, which addresses audience affects (Scannell 2014); and rhetorical or discursive (th construction of ‘live’ is propagated from an institutional perspective) (van Es 2017, 1246). Though liveness is about both ‘technical performance’ and ‘spectatorial belief’ (Bourdon 2000, 538), the rhetorical or discursive construction of liveness is as important as the technical capacities of live media and the shared experiences they require for affective promulgation. Van Es’s addition that live experiences are fundamentally social experiences is crucial, particularly when addressing mediated scenes of horror. Part of the allure of liveness is the opportunity to be part of an event and an experience. Live broadcasting (TV) as a ‘public phenomenon’ (Bourdon 2000, 534) characterized by ‘maximum liveness’ (Bourdon 2000, 534) means that distant and distinct audiences watch at the same time as everyone else; we become connected to the event through each other and through the medium itself.

Liveness, and livestreaming, have an important connection to immediacy and the conditions of terror, as I discuss below (Bolter and Grusin 1999). Livestreaming on a mainstream platform exists in the dichotomy between immediacy and hypermediacy. The affordances of platforms are malleable and can be harnessed and directed in a range of ways (Bucher and Anne 2018). Valaskivi et al. (2022) note that the same livestreaming capabilities used to mediate the Christchurch terror attack were also used to stream haka¹ to respond to the event. More broadly, the affordance of livestreaming is not usually used to mediate scenes of horror; on the contrary, livestreaming and wearable image capturing devices are technologies of immediacy, often used to mediate leisure and pleasure.

Immediacy is not just understood to mean ‘as quickly as possible’, though this is certainly encompassed in the term. Immediacy here refers to Bolter and Grusin’s 1999 theorization as that which seeks to render invisible the technological form. Immediacy highlights the attempt to close the gap between technologies of mediation to give as ‘true’ or ‘close’ a (re)presentation as possible. In the case of platforms like Facebook Live, Twitch, Twitter Live, and YouTube Live, other hypermedial affordances such as the chat function, reactions via emojis, chats with friends on other platforms, links and buttons that populate the interfaces of these media, and the physical features of the interface, all work to interrupt the pursuit of immediacy, yet it is these very (im)material features of social media that work to formulate contemporary subjectivities. Digital visual media negotiate between immediacy and hypermediacy and thus problematize the mediation of horrific acts and the smooth/seamless ontology sought out by liveness.

Yet, live horrific events in digitally mediated contexts have their own specificity. This is not the liveness of mass mediated spectacles like 9/11 (See Kellner 2003a, 2003b, 2004) or the hostage-taking terror spectacles of the 1970s, yet it does borrow tactics from these terror spectacles. The Christchurch terror attack, beyond an abhorrent politics, was about extending the reach of abject violence and producing the event itself as consumable. It was a ‘massacre made for sharing’ (Ibrahim 2020, 804). Spectacular performances of violence such as this constitute the event itself as something that can be consumed and shared: the techno-aesthetic mediation of the event invited participation beyond the temporal confines of its actual enactment where spectators were interpellated as violent witnesses. This terror attack borrows some features of previous terror spectacles: it exploited violent imagery to gain attention for a mode of politics and distributed fear among disparate populations (Kellner 2004). In many ways, however, the livestreamed terror attack constitutes a new kind of spectacle.

In the age of mass media, spectacles of terror could rely on the ‘the ontology of the television image’ characterized by ‘movement, process, “liveness” and presence’ (1983, 13). This remains true in the context of social media which has its own form of liveness in which subjects are always mediated in real time (See Lupinacci 2021). As in the case of, say, sporting events, liveness relies on unpredictability to leverage affective investment in the onscreen performance. The perpetrator/audience relationship that the livestreamed terror attack pursues, moreover, assumes a presence and participation facilitated by the medium itself. At the same time, we ought to be wary of accounts of liveness that place too much emphasis on the technological: live media, again, have an ontological specificity in that they seek out copresence and an affective correspondence between dislocated audiences. In other words, accounts of liveness should not empty themselves of the content of the scene. For example, if the genre of perpetrator witnessing (Mortensen 2021) is to be retained, then it needs to reconcile with the aesthetic production of horror to avoid emptying the genre of its subjective content. The notion of a ‘perpetrator witness’ is not radical or pejorative enough for the practice it names. Juxtaposing these terms fails to capture the asymmetry of horror and the networked production of fear and enjoyment the scene of horror works to remediate.

This new kind of spectacle differs in some ways to terror spectacles from the age of mass media. Audiences in Aotearoa New Zealand were not endlessly assaulted with images of the event.² Instead, the livestream itself was quickly classified as objectionable and thus obscured from view. Part of the spectacle of this event, however, was knowledge about the event disseminated through news media. Though local journalists have been praised for the so-called ‘proximity filter’ at play in their reporting (Ellis and Muller 2020), the content of the livestream was described in significant detail: one exposed to this coverage would likely have been able to describe the events of the video without watching it. In this new kind of spectacle, however, which draws on various aspects of digital technology and the remediation of liveness, terrorists appropriate significant portions of the mediation process: they prime or premediate (Grusin 2010) an audience, for example, by posting to an imageboard; they produce the content for the attack by carrying out a mass murder; they stream and record the attack themselves in a way leverages the experiential and aesthetic dynamics of their chosen media. The audience of the new spectacle of terror is, in the first instance, primed towards relatively discrete audiences including those connected to the perpetrator as a friend or follower, as well as those informally sutured to them as algorithmic neighbours who might stumble across the video. It relies, however, on its content in order to be further spread and shared. Obviously, this new spectacle of terror is not entirely novel: it remediates old techniques in a new context such as producing a manifesto to be read in the wake of the event, and so that the perpetrator takes on the form of a martyr. Central to this new type of terror spectacle, however, is its combination of liveness, technical mediation, and content.

The liveness of live-streamed terror attacks refers, then, to the technological recording device (in this case, the GoPro), its attendant aesthetics (which seek out an experiential relation), the co-presence of other viewers, and the content of the scene. That is, the technological facilitation of the video works to produce an explicit aesthetics of liveness and the material conditions of the video are folded back into this visual mode. The aesthetics of liveness bring the audience into the realm of shared experience and harness the power of affective (social) networks by eschewing the transcendental subject in pursuit of the embodied subject of horror(ism). Further: the aesthetics of liveness, alongside the technological, phenomenological, and sociological conditions of liveness, are the precise tools which seek out the ambivalent positions of viewers and attempt to mobilize their participation in the event by way of its consumption.

Terror(ism)/Horror(ism)

Despite having so far used the terms ‘terror’ and ‘horror’ interchangeably, they have an important etymological distinction worth considering in the context of live mediated scenes of violence. Cavarero’s formulation of terror and horror can be mapped onto immediacy and hypermediacy as it relates to liveness and the mediation of horrific events. The techno-aesthetics of this mapping distinguishes livestreamed spectacles of terror and works to remediate liveness. Drawing on their Latin and Greek roots, Cavarero conceptualizes terror as referring to physical trembling rather than psychological fear or fear rendered intelligible. The Greek ter, from tremo or treo is the root of the word terror which refers to such a sensation; to be in a state of terror is to shake or vibrate – it is a physical feeling. Importantly, Terror references a flight or f(r)ight response and is associated with the former, to seek to flee and save oneself. Because of this, terror entails a corporeal proximity to the event (Cavarero 2009, 4–6). That is, in the binary of terror/horror, terror is the pre-cognitive feeling of fright which manifests in flight. This iteration of terror was accounted for by Omar Abdel-Ghany in an interview with national New Zealand media outlet Stuff.co.nz (Sherwood 2019). Running late for prayers on 16 March^th, Abdel-Ghany was told by others on his way to the Al-Noor Mosque that there was a shooter: upon seeing his friend and repeating the message as he himself was running away from the Mosque, the look on his friend’s face, and the gunshots he could hear, Abdel-Ghany remarked: ‘That shook me to my core, everything inside me said run’, which he did (Sherwood 2019). To be terrorized, in this duality, is to be present (to be there) at the scene of horror.

Cavarero differentiates the immediacy of terror with the hypermediacy of horror. As in the case of terror, Cavarero links horror to its latin roots. Its roots, the Greek phrisso and the Italian orropilante respectively refer to a bristling sensation and the prickling sensation invoked when the hair on the head is bristled – literally, hair-raising. Horreo and phrisso signify a paralytic state like that experienced by one who is turning cold or freezing. Though Cavarero notes the closeness to fear that the word horror shares with terror, alluding to the discussion of its root words mentioned above, she claims that ‘more than fear, horror has to do with repugnance’ (2009, 7). The idea of repugnance is critical to thinking through the affective capacities of contemporary forms of violence and its mediation.³

In Cavarero’s diagram, terror and horror are different. Physical sensations, or what she calls the ‘physics of horror’, are not here related to one’s mortality or a threat to it: ‘It has rather to do with instinctive disgust for a violence that, not content merely to kill because killing would be too little, aims to destroy the uniqueness of the body, tearing at its constitutive vulnerability’ (2009, 8). Horror is associated with disgust and repugnance rather than with a threat to one’s own survival. This is not to say that the residue of the scene of horror cannot be bound to more thoughtful accounts of disgust. Valaskivi et al (2022), for example, highlight the ambivalent rituals of belonging sought out by violent mediated events where circulation is pursued by supporters. The immediacy of a sense and scene of horror is tantamount in the case of the Christchurch terror attacks not just because those images are ideological, but also because they are affectively powerful.

The word Cavarero uses to encapsulate contemporary forms of violence related to the etymology of horror is ‘horrorism’. She argues that ‘terrorism’ does not go far enough to capture the repugnance of modern violent scenes. While she uses the term to capture the revulsion of scenes of torture, it should be stretched to include and address other forms of violence in which the victims are defenceless. Crucially, scenes of repugnance are a defining point of the new kind of terror spectacle identified in this essay. Following Judith Butler, Cavarero thinks through vulnerability as the common feature of contemporary scenes of violence. In other words, the common condition of physical vulnerability should be understood (particularly in the wake of disaster) as configuring ‘a human condition in which it is the relation to the other that counts’ (Cavarero 2009, 21). Understanding horrorism as violation of this relationship and captures ‘a particular form of violence that exceeds death itself’ (2009, p. 32). The Christchurch terror attack, as well as its discrete features such as the terrorist’s return to the scene to continue killing following the initial engagement, embodies these features of horrorism. The horror of this spectacle was not just enacting the attack itself; it was the mediation of the attack. The repugnance which characterizes horrorism arises not only due to the horror of the scene itself and the production of death, but also because of the asymmetry of the scene. Scenes of horror are attacks against the vulnerable and defenceless. In this sense, contemporary scenes of horror strike us at an ontological level: they attack our common vulnerability. The networked spaces of the internet thus function not just to amplify the affective capacities of the on-screen performance, though liveness goes some way to eroding the distance between the terrorized and those who experience horror. Instead, online networked spaces and the remediation of the event elongate the profanation of human life and the scene of horror. They constitute, moreover, and crucial element in the remediation of terror spectacles.

This differentiation between terror/horror opens up a space through which we can consider how the live mediation of terror attacks seeks to bring distant spectators into proximity with violent death. If, in this case, terror is proximal and horror is characterized by mediated witnessing from afar, then live-streaming violent attacks and their subsequent circulation and remediation intensify the affective potentiality of images. The erosion of the terror/horror binary is precisely what the livestreamed terror attack seeks out. Tal Morse has questioned the relationship between terror and horror with regard to the livestreamed terror attack:

to what extent are the remote spectators, whose physical security is not endangered, put in danger? To what extent do the horror and fear ‘out there’ invade the safety of the living room? How, if at all, can the media bridge the distance between vulnerable others and their spectators at home?’. (2020, p. 132)

It is liveness and the ambivalence of spectators that emerge from the gap between terror and horror. The ambivalence of the event’s reception is, moreover, a crucial feature of the event that structures subjects within rituals of belonging (Valaskivi, Sumiala, and Tikka 2022, 87). After all, witnessing ‘refers to an assumed group identity. A witness is, so to speak, always on the lookout for other witnesses whose existence she is convinced of’ (Richardson and Shankweiler 2020, 248). Within the aesthetic fold of the livestreamed terror attack, these witnesses stand and gaze in the same direction. The witness of the horrific event, then, ambivalent as they are, are understood by the perpetrator to be part of distinct communities disposed towards the affective forces of fear and enjoyment. In other words, livestreamed terror spectacles seek to collapse the binary of terror and horror, bringing distant spectators into a new proximity with death wherein economies of fear and enjoyment are borne out in the bodies of ambivalent witnesses.

Conclusion

Since Christchurch, there have been other terrorist attacks livestreamed on social media. In October of 2019, another neo-Nazi livestreamed the murder of two people in a synagogue in Halle, Germany (Jee 2019). February 2020 saw the livestream of a series of shootings by a sergeant in the Thai army who shot dead 29 and injured 58 at a military camp, temple, and mall in Nakhon Ratchasima (Wongcha-um and Tanakasempipat 2020). In May of 2020, a self-professed incel livestreamed a shooting at Westgate mall in Glendale, Arizona. The perpetrator claimed he didn’t want to kill anyone; instead, he merely wanted to inflict pain on couples (Press 2020). While the Nakhon Ratchasima attacker’s reasoning remains uncertain, it is abundantly clear that terrorists in Germany, the US, and Aotearoa New Zealand are articulated to the same political antagonism.

The lines of force that emerge from the Christchurch terror attack and others like it rely on repugnance as spectacle. Mediated scenes of horror, much like other terrorist-produced media, has multiple effects: not only does it seek to bring distant spectators into proximity with death and invoke in them paralysis or animation contingent on their premediation, it also quite obviously seeks to incite fear in distant and disparate populations. The shock and fear produced by the Christchurch terror attack is typical of terror spectacles in that it ‘conjures up its meaning largely through the power of images that grate against humane sensibilities’ (Giroux 2007, 22). This terror spectacle, as above, employs some old tactics in a new context. A violent scene in which the vulnerability and vitality of the other is destroyed beseeches an affective dislocation that leverages the ambivalence of distant audiences. So, while the livestreamed terror spectacle is not an entirely novel style of terror attack, its remediation of liveness produced by the tension of terror/horror may have set the course for a new style of enacting horrific events. The ambivalence of the spectator is a crucial pivot point for mediations of horror in that these subjects are relied on for the circulation of fear and enjoyment. Certainly, they are relied on also for the infinite circulation of the livestream too.

The 2022 Buffalo right-wing white extremist terrorist attack at Tops Grocery store in which a white man shot dead 10 people, 8 of whom were black, bears the most semantic resemblance to Christchurch in political expression, aesthetic, and materiality. The technological assemblage of livestreaming, while not intended to capture scenes of repugnance, alongside wearable image-capturing technologies, was again able to commandeer the experiential gap apparent in the space between terror and horror. The perpetrator of the Buffalo attack sought to fold the aesthetics of liveness into the scene of horror and elongate processes of networked suffering in a similar way to what we saw in Christchurch. Although there are similarities between the mediation of the Buffalo and Christchurch terror attacks, the repertoire of content, capture, platform, and virality of livestreamed acts of horror nevertheless need to be considered in their specificity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘Haka’ is a general term for various kinds of Māori performances.

2. For example, the video has been used in Turkey as part of Recip Erdogan’s political campaign. Parts of the video were also shown on Sky News Australia (See Meade 2019; See also Lowen 2019).

3. Cavarero draws on the Greek myth of Perseus to establish the role of repugnance in scenes of horror. Among other deeds, Perseus was famous for killing Medusa, the snake-haired gorgon who turned people to stone with a mere look; the embodiment of horror (Cavarero 2009, 9). Interestingly, Perseus was only able to look at (and subsequently kill) Medusa through the reflection of his shield (2009, p. 15). In other words, he was only able to gain access to the scene of horror by mediating the scene itself.