Justice As Content
We're drowning in truth, but starving for consequences.
You might be feeling a particular kind of unease right now. The sense that we are drowning in truth but starved of justice. We’re living through a moment where crimes against humanity are visible to everyone, long protected networks of abuse are cracking open, and political power can openly defy the very systems meant to constrain it.
Yet despite the fact that proof keeps surfacing and evidence keeps circulating, you know that none of it will lead to consequence.
The unease you’re feeling is the suspicion that no amount of truth will lead to justice.
And while this dissonance feels new to some, many communities have lived for generations with the knowledge that truth does not reliably produce justice.
That mismatch between what we know and what actually changes is creating one of the largest cultural vacuums of our time. Justice is a cognitive requirement. We need to believe we live inside a moral universe or our minds start to fracture. Humans can tolerate pain, loss, uncertainty and even chaos. But we cannot tolerate meaninglessness, and nothing feels more meaningless than watching harm go unanswered.
If you’re familiar with my work, you already understand what cultural vacuums are, and you know these vacuums cannot stay empty. If you want to understand how culture is changing right now, you have to look at what’s rushing in to fill the void.
People have started improvising new structures and rituals of justice in very interesting places that let them feel some version of consequence again.
And once you start paying attention, you can see these substitutes everywhere. They show up in the stories we escape into, the influencers we obsess over, the platforms we give our money to, and most importantly, the content we consume. They may look unrelated on the surface, but they’re all serving the same psychological function of giving people a place where justice still feels possible.
Vigilante Release
One of the clearest places you can see this vacuum filling itself is in the rise of vigilante justice on platforms like Kick, Rumble and Locals. Pedophile hunters pose as minors, lure men into encounters and film the confrontation in a sort of DIY To Catch a Predator, except it’s done by influencers for a social audience.
These videos have evolved into a new genre in recent years. It’s not uncommon to see creators now break into homes, tie people up, beat and rob them on camera, and then livestream the footage. One attacker who calls himself “realjuujika” told a bloodied 73 year old man, “You will probably die tonight,” as the comment section blew up. Humiliation is often a part of the program.
They’re getting more violent, more branded, and ratcheting up the showmanship of their content. Extrajudicial justice continues to rise in production value.
(Above, Vitaly Zdorovetskiy, a content creator who livestreams pedophile hunting on Kick, using a handler to threaten a target with a live alligator.)
What’s most notable is that these influencers and their fans have little interest in working with law enforcement. They are not looking for arrests. Regardless of what you may feel about that, it tells you a lot about the lack of confidence in the justice system.
We’d rather consume this content than try to work with a system that feels either too inept or too inadequate to deal out the consequences we crave.
Dreaming of Dragons & Daggers
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we see fairytales of justice playing out in the booming literary genre of romantasy.
Those ACOTAR and Third Wing books you see popping up at airport bookstores and the BookTok feed are part of an expansive literary ecosystem that has women of all ages in a chokehold.
On the surface, it’s easy to treat the genre as escapism. There is no shortage of dragons, magic, and slow burn romantic misunderstandings. But if you read these books the way millions of women are reading them right now, something else becomes obvious. These stories are not primarily about desire. They’re about vengeance.
Even if you’ve never picked up one of these books, the emotional blueprint they’re working with speaks to a much broader hunger to see power confronted and the moral universe restored… even if only in fiction.
Romantasy has exploded because it offers a world where power can be confronted, and where someone who has been wronged can rise, fight back, and win. These books deliver the feeling that the real world has failed to give us: the sense that justice can still be reclaimed.
What’s striking is how consistent this emotional structure is across the genre. The heroine is betrayed, dismissed, underestimated, or violated by a corrupt system. She discovers her strength, redraws the terms of power, and forces the world to reckon with her. Only after the scales have been rebalanced does love enter the picture. Intimacy is the booby prize. The real reward is justice.
Sex + power has always been a compelling formula, but power + justice has a real gravitational pull right now. Romantasy is giving people a controlled environment where that equation still works.
Justice In The Comments Section
I’m willing to bet that no matter what your algorithm looks like, you’re probably regularly getting served TikToks of people rage-crying into their phones. It can be about partners who betrayed them, friends who betrayed them, relatives who humiliated them or coworkers who crossed a line.
Or maybe instead it’s a video of someone sitting in a restaurant, about to confront their cheating partner in the next booth. Or perhaps someone posting abusive texts and images from an ex. It’s heart wrenching content that makes you want to step into the scene and fix it, but instead all you can do is go to the comments.
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The comments never disappoint. There is a cathartic release in knowing that thousands of other people also know it’s wrong, and also want the wrongdoer to pay a price, albeit in such a tiny and often inconsequential way. So much of our informal justice infrastructure plays out in comments sections or response videos now, that the comments have turned into a kind of public square where we perform the justice we can’t get anywhere else.
Someone catches their boyfriend on a date with another woman and posts the confrontation. Someone screams into a shaking phone as they recall being harassed. Someone sits in their car processing a fresh betrayal in real time. This is a good portion of many people’s social feeds right now.
It’s not too dissimilar from what we see on reality TV. Carly Lewis recently wrote in the New York Times about how networks like Bravo have shifted from vapid gossip to serious trauma, doubling down on new storylines in shows like The Valley and The Real Housewives of New York City where producers are “increasingly building storylines out of crimes perpetrated against the women on their shows. Rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence have all been tantalizingly woven through the network’s programming recently. Fans accustomed to giddy live-action gossip and vodka-fueled mischief are now subjected to trauma plots that feel designed for rubbernecking.” If you paid any attention to ‘Scandoval’, you were privy to the beginning of the trend.
Just like with any other social medium, the justice here is served online in reaction videos, comment threads where people declare to be 'Team This Person or That’, and stitch together conversations deciding exactly who deserves sympathy, who deserves blame, and what the moral outcome should be.
Insatiable Appetites
The collective craving for justice is sky high, but there is the obvious cultural implication that when we consume justice as content, we distract ourselves from actually repairing the systems that should be meting out justice for real.
We’ve become addicted to experiencing quasi-justice in place of the real thing. It’s simple, it’s clear, it’s an emotional release. It’s all of the things we want real justice to be.
When we return to our original inquiry of injustice on a global and political scale that is only now coming into light, you can see the outline of what’s changing. These are disruptions to the underlying structure that tells us the world is coherent and predictable. When institutions fail to give consequence to actions, meaning collapses along with them. Justice is very much a vacuum, and pop culture has become the place where people are trying to rebuild it.
But cultural meaning can only ever go so far in a domain like this. Vigilante videos, romantasy revenge arcs, and comment section tribunals mimic the shape of justice without its institutional weight. They provide no real structure, and the danger is that over time these symbolic rituals begin to replace our expectation of real justice.
This is why anyone who works in or around culture needs to pay attention. If you’re a cultural participant, notice what kinds of justice content you gravitate toward. It might reflect where your sense of moral coherence has been disrupted.
If you’re a creator, understand that your work now carries a kind of borrowed authority. People are turning to stories and platforms for both entertainment and moral orientation. It sells, for better and for worse.
If you’re a strategist like me, you need to track where these justice rituals emerge and mutate. They’re indicators of where societal trust is thinning and where new cultural meaning-making will concentrate next. They are clues into where the next major cultural shifts will materialize long before they show up in data or headlines.
If you’re a leader or builder, remember that people are looking for systems, communities, and institutions that restore a sense of order to a world that increasingly feels unstructured. We know this, but do not make the mistake of underestimating it.
Justice as content is a mirror. It reflects back the places where meaning has been lost, the places where our internal sense of order has been violated. People don’t turn to vigilante videos, vengeance fantasies, and comment-section tribunals only because they want spectacle. They turn to them to remind themselves that cause and effect still exist somewhere.
Sweat It Out
Here’s what we’ve been consuming.
Take Weird Ideas Seriously (Not Boring by Packy McCormick): “One of the best ways to be different is to feed your brain different ideas, and let it really chew on them. Go deep. Read books no one else is reading. Speak with people no one else is speaking to. Give yourself time and space offline, disconnected, to let your ideas take their own shape. Make connections between your new weird ideas and normal ideas.”
Bodybuilders find new calling in Japan’s struggling care industry (The Japan Times): “It was in 2018 — a decade after he founded Visionary — that Niwa unveiled the concept of “Macho Caregivers,” a campaign to remove the stigma around the care industry. Before then, the company had struggled to hire even one carer a year, but the idea brought applications flooding in, including from young men. The firm says it hired 168 people in the fiscal year 2024 alone. Visionary now expects annual sales of ¥2.2 billion ($14.4 million) for this fiscal year ending in March 2026, roughly a tenfold jump compared with the period before 2018.”
Has Rosalía finally invented World Music? (La Nona Ora): “LUX has more structural affinity with Stravinsky, Kendrick Lamar or Laurie Anderson than with what Bad Bunny dropped. But the algorithm can’t process that. You’re either legible to the platform (filed under “Latin pop,” recommended to people who listened to Karol G) or you’re invisible. There’s no category for “Spanish artist making techno-liturgical opera in 14 languages that deconstructs the sacred/profane binary through Vivaldi and trap.””
The End of Naked Locker Rooms (The Atlantic): “Although these changes are largely positive, they also introduce a new reality: Today, the only naked bodies that many Americans will likely ever see are their own, a partner’s, or those on a screen. Gone are our unvarnished points of physical comparison—the ordinary, unposed figures of other people. In their place, we’re left with the curated ideals of social-media posts, AI-generated advertising, and pornography. The loss may seem trivial, but it also may change how people see themselves.”
We just hosted our “Wit and Whiskey” dinner party for Exposure Therapy in NYC to cap off Humor month in the community. Here are two things I learned this month:
Memeologist Aidan Walker gave us an incredible presentation and taught us how memes are the new folk art of the digital age, and how Wojak acts as the Mona Lisa of digital emotion.
Emmy winning comedy writer Brent Forrester gave us a workshop where we learned the divine form of humor that comes from pairing the sacred with the profane. Comedy thrives where reverence meets irreverence.
So if you want more laughter in your life, seek out the places where the meaningful and the playful collide.
Or just join us in Exposure Therapy ;)
Special thanks to our member Charles Fulford, cofounder of Pinhook Bourbon (that’s his side gig) for giving us a very special whiskey tasting experience with his private, rare stash at the dinner.
Also thanks to the fine folks at Strap Photo Club for helping us capture the real magic of the night.
Yours,
I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:
My private community Exposure Therapy is where my team and I share our best original research, have provocative conversations, special dinners, and lots of fun.
My brand strategy agency Concept Bureau that works with some of the most powerful cultural brands in the world today.
My LinkedIn where I post my ideas daily, before they turn into reports or articles. Come connect or follow me on TikTok and Instagram.
My public speaking, where I bring my energy and enthusiasm to life with people who are deeply curious about culture, strategy, and the future.
One of the problems of the age is the lack of real consequences for those in power. It might have always been the case, but now we see it everywhere and as the disparities between have and have nots grows, the resentment will grow as well.