Information Failure Modes in Networked Violence
“Over a period of three years, I examined the emergence of networked animal torture as a structural phenomenon.
The analysis deliberately excludes explanatory frames centered on individual pathology, cultural deficiency, or episodic deviance.
Across platform architectures, incentive regimes, and distribution mechanics, the findings converge on a single conclusion: the persistence and scaling of this harm is a product of infrastructure-level design choices operating in the absence of adequate regulatory constraint.”
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19599230 / (print) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Information-Failure-Modes-Networked-Violence/dp/B0GTWPQVWP
Cyber-enabled, transnational, monetized animal torture networks use offshore platforms, cryptocurrency payment channels, and distributed spectatorship to convert cruelty into repeatable, commissioned media. Domestic law then collapses the harm into low-level public-order enforcement because animal abuse, child protection, platform circulation, cross-border payment, and evidentiary contamination are split across incompatible legal categories.
Information Failure Modes in Networked Violence collapses attribution ambiguity to the point where systems must either internalise cost or openly refuse to do so.
QUOTATIONS
“Classical accounts of violence treat harm as an event: a perpetrator acts, a body is injured, a witness observes. Response mechanisms (responsibility, repair, enforcement) are anchored to that moment. Networked cruelty breaks this model. Once recorded, encoded, and transmitted, the act persists independently of its initial conditions. The recorded suffering functions as a transmissible signal. Each replay, repost, crop, or transformation reproduces exposure to the same harm-content without repeating the original act. The representation of the wound becomes persistent within the system.” from ‘Information Failure Modes in Networked Violence’
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19599230
Elijah Morgan
Information Failure Modes in Networked Violence
“The purpose of this text is narrow and exacting. It does not argue for better values. It does not propose reform programs. It does not promise resolution. It collapses attribution ambiguity to the point where the system must either internalize cost or openly refuse to do so. Once that line is crossed, there is no neutral position left. The system can continue to function only by admitting that it is actively selecting for harm under conditions of preserved deniability.” from ‘Information Failure Modes in Networked Violence’
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19599230
Elijah Morgan
Information Failure Modes in Networked Violence
“The analytic register is intentionally constrained. Rhetorical excess has been excluded. Moral exhortation has been avoided. Activist framing has been rejected. Outrage does not alter architectures. Visibility alone does not disable systems. Empathy, while humanly necessary, is operationally insufficient.” Elijah Morgan, ‘Information Failure Modes in Networked Violence’ (2026)
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19599230 / (print) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Information-Failure-Modes-Networked-Violence/dp/B0GTWPQVWP
Overview
This monograph develops a structural framework for analyzing information failure in networked systems. It examines how audit suppression, chronology loss, incentive distortion, and platform-level affordances interact under adversarial pressure to produce coercion, escalation, and systemic risk.
Published: 2026/03/26
The imprint (‘Information Failure Modes in Networked Violence‘) provides the theoretical framework. [pdf, cc by 4.0] https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19599230
Codeberg (https://codeberg.org/PlayDarkly) provides lemmas, formal notes, equations, and supporting technical material.
Play Darkly is a cybernetic systems lab and imprint, building bounded interactive systems, and producing formal notes for studying pressure, distortion, and harm propagation in digital systems.