I’ve just seen a fairly egregious misuse of the term “stochastic terrorism” in the context of what I think is an otherwise really good post. I’m not at all interested in being anyone’s language police, but “stochastic terrorism” is a really useful term (if a bit unwieldy), and I sort of fear its usage being stretched to the point of meaninglessness. I know this is probably a futile effort, but I’d like to just try to break it down in the hope that we can maintain its usefulness at least a little bit longer.
“Stochastic terrorism” (or sometimes just “stochastic violence”) is what happens when someone with a platform uses vilifying, dehumanizing, or generally violent rhetoric in a way that is likely to provoke violent physical action without that speaker directly or explicitly any particular person or group to carry out an act of violence. Tucker Carlson, for instance, often tells his viewers that the US is being invaded, white people are being replaced, and “they want you dead”. So when someone hears that, decides that immigrants are an existential threat to white people, and then starts attacking people in an immigrant neighborhood, that’s what stochastic terrorism is. Carlson didn’t directly order anyone to kill, but he created conditions where violence was likely, and it would have been difficult or impossible to know in advance just which person would actually do it or where or when.
If it helps, “stochastic terrorism” was coined by mathematician Gordon Woo in a 2002 essay about insurance. In his case, he was talking about the decentralized model used by groups like Al-Qaeda. If, for instance, a cassette was circulating with a recording of a speech by Osama bin Laden calling for attacks on the infrastructure of major Western cities, insurers could adjust their actuarial tables on the assumption that an attack was likely, but they couldn’t know in advance just where or when an attack would happen. So Woo offered some mathy solutions for addressing that (I sort of glazed over at that part of the essay – sorry!).
At any rate, that’s the gist of what stochastic terrorism actually is. Marches and rallies organized by shitty, reactionary people for shitty, reactionary causes may involve speeches or slogans that ratchet up the possibility of subsequent material violence, but they are not, in and of themselves, “the outcome of stochastic terrorism”. If anything, most of the time they are more likely the instigators of stochastic terrorism (more like Tucker Carlson or Osama bin Laden than like the person or group that actually carries out an attack.
It’s not a term that covers every possible contingency; it has limits. When parents go to school board meetings and get really aggressive about the absolute need for a ban on book X or movie Y, is that stochastic terrorism? Maybe. It probably depends mostly on just how aggressive they actually are and how you define “terrorism” – a term many of us who remember the Bush years tend to avoid as much as possible (hence the term “stochastic violence”). But at any rate, “stochastic terrorism” is not just another term for fascism or other shitty, hateful worldviews. Its meaning is really pretty narrow, and I honestly hope it will remain that way, so that it can continue to label this particular dynamic for the foreseeable future.
#stochasticterrorism #stochasticviolence
