A high school junior in rural Kansas restores a community garden that has been empty for three years. The local paper runs a photograph. Twelve neighbors stop by to help over the next two weekends. His name appears in print. He is seen.
The digital script offers one story of permanent significance: the violent act, the global name, the archive that never expires. Communities that generate no competing stories of local significance leave the field to that script. The visibility trade stays open because nothing local bids against it.
Signal Jamming is the structural counter-operation. It outcompetes the violent script by generating higher local significance yield through visible, named, community-anchored acts. The high school coach who recognizes three students publicly, the employer who promotes on local merit and announces it at a neighborhood event, the church that names its volunteers in the weekly bulletin: each of these generates Meaning Sovereignty, the condition in which a person's sense of significance is anchored in local community rather than available to the highest-yield digital offer. Communities with high Meaning Sovereignty density are structurally resistant to the arbitrage trade. The counter-script does not require silence. It requires volume.
Local stories are the instrument. The more visible they are, the less the digital archive can compete. Any person who builds or shares a story of local recognition this week contributes to the structural defense.
The junior in rural Kansas who was seen in print has a story. Signal Jamming is the structural mechanism that ensures the next student also gets one before the archive finds him.
Find one person in your community doing something worth naming this week, and name them publicly.
Read the full economic framework: Notoriety Arbitrage (DiBella, 2026).
Glossary
Signal Jamming: The structural operation of generating abundant local significance narratives to outcompete the digital violent script on visibility yield.
Meaning Sovereignty: The condition in which an individual's sense of significance is anchored in local community and resistant to digital script capture.
Reference Citations
DiBella, C. J. (2026). Notoriety Arbitrage: Informational Incentives in Violent Acts. SSRN.
Klapp, O. (1991). Inflation of Symbols: Loss of Values in American Culture. Transaction Publishers.
Notoriety Arbitrage Series | Post 9 of 15 | Start here: Why Does Mass Violence Keep Happening?