A state legislator stands at a podium the day after an event. "We need better mental health resources," she says. The room applauds. She is right. She is answering a question the room has asked for decades. The architecture poses a different one.

Clinical psychopathology rates are biologically stable within developed populations. The rate of diagnosable serious mental illness in the United States has not shifted by a magnitude that explains the post-1999 surge in mass violence events. If clinical impairment drove the increase, event frequency would track with shifts in population pathology rates. It does not. The surge is temporally anchored to 1999 and accelerates after 2012, dates that map to the Informational Inflection and Operational Saturation events rather than to any change in diagnostic epidemiology.

The Predestination Objection is the claim that the actor was clinically determined and therefore the informational environment is irrelevant. Peterson and Densley's research on the comprehensive dataset of mass violence events in the United States found that the majority of perpetrators carried no documented serious mental illness at the time of the act. The informational vector, the causal pathway through which digital script exposure drives violent ideation, operates across the clinical spectrum. Social isolation, digital drift, and script adoption are conditions of informational exposure, not symptoms of clinical disorder. Mental health investment addresses one causal pathway. The informational vector framework addresses the parallel architectural pathway that clinical treatment cannot reach. Both tracks run simultaneously and do not compete for policy space.

The legislator at the podium is right to call for mental health resources. The informational vector framework is the parallel track that addresses the architectural driver her call does not reach.

Support mental health funding initiatives and separately advocate for Voluntary Transparency Standard adoption in your next contact with an elected representative.

Read the full economic framework: Notoriety Arbitrage (DiBella, 2026).

Glossary

Predestination Objection: The argument that clinical psychopathology alone determines violent outcomes, making informational interventions irrelevant.

Informational Vector: The causal pathway through which digital script exposure drives violent ideation independently of clinical mental health status.

Reference Citations

DiBella, C. J. (2026). Notoriety Arbitrage: Informational Incentives in Violent Acts. SSRN.

Peterson, J., & Densley, J. (2021). The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic. Abrams Press.

Notoriety Arbitrage Series | Post 10 of 15 | Start here: Why Does Mass Violence Keep Happening?