A fifteen-year-old in Ohio watches the television on April 20, 1999. The anchors repeat the names. She does not know them. By midnight she does, and by morning so does the rest of the country.
Before that date, violent events decayed with the medium that carried them. Television required broadcast slots and print required column inches. When both expired, the event disappeared. A town three hundred miles away never learned the perpetrator's name because the signal never reached it with enough fidelity to hold.
Digital transmission holds everything. The names, the manifestos, the final recordings, and the surveillance footage live inside search indexes that return them in under a second. The 1999 Informational Inflection is the phase transition when the violent script stopped decaying and became a permanent global archive. Every subsequent actor found it waiting. The template was searchable, downloadable, and detailed.
The people who came of age inside that archive have never known a different architecture. That is their native environment. Naming it is the first structural act. The No Notoriety protocol is the second: a voluntary decision by media institutions and individuals to withhold perpetrator identity from amplification, reducing the archive's yield one share at a time.
The fifteen-year-old in Ohio is in her mid-thirties now. The No Notoriety protocol determines what her students find when the search runs.
Refuse to share, search for, or repeat the name of any perpetrator in your own networks today.
Read the full economic framework: Notoriety Arbitrage (DiBella, 2026).
Glossary 1999 Informational Inflection: The phase transition from decaying analog violent signal to permanent, globally searchable digital script. No Notoriety Protocol: A voluntary media and individual standard that withholds perpetrator identity from broadcast and social amplification.
Reference Citations DiBella, C. J. (2026). Notoriety Arbitrage: Informational Incentives in Violent Acts. SSRN. Towers, S., et al. (2015). Contagion in mass killings and school shootings. PLOS ONE, 10(7).
Notoriety Arbitrage Series | Post 2 of 15 | Start here: Why Does Mass Violence Keep Happening?