VaaS, Scandi Style
This can't possibly be the right timeline.
Jun. 19 - The Danish news media are so awful I’ve finally given up on them completely. I’ve offered my constructive criticism in web and book form, there were no takers, they’re not going to change, so the hell with them.
(Danish media have been reporting recently that Danes are afraid to visit America because of Donald Trump. I wonder how long it will take them to realize that Danes are only afraid of Donald Trump because of the Danish media?)
One can never tune out the news completely, however. It’s just not possible. So although I no longer browse Danish news media regularly, bits and pieces still manage to reach me.
One Danish news item today did catch my eye and draw me in:
Police call press briefing: Warn youth against offers to commit violence and murder “as a service.”
That’s actually become a thing here. Teenagers are being recruited on social media to commit violence and murder for money. VaaS and MaaS: violence and murder as a service.
I had no idea.
Apparently just last month a 14-year-old Swedish kid was arrested in a suburb close to my own. He was found with a valuable electric scooter, a loaded pistol, three stolen phones, and 25,000 Danish crowns in cash (about four grand in U.S. dollars). He was immediately handed over to Swedish authorities—so quickly there wasn’t even time for anyone to kick up a fuss about his due process rights being violated.
Not a single member of parliament shed a single tear for a single camera. Shameful indifference!
It’s gangs behind all this, of course. I don’t really follow gang culture, but as far as I can tell there are two primary gang groupings in Denmark: “rocker” gangs and immigrant gangs. They don’t play well together, or even within their own groupings. I can’t tell from what little I’ve read about it all whether it’s mainly rocker or immigrant gangs who are recruiting all these kids, but I can’t tell anything about reality based on Danish reporting anyway because it’s all such a hopeless shit show.
I also get the sense, from the slipshod reporting I work so hard to avoid, that this phenomenon is seeping into Denmark from Sweden. At least, Danish law enforcement seems to be blaming it on perfidious Sweden. Swedish authorities are twisting themselves into all sorts of knots to not blame it on—well, one simply doesn’t even like to speak of such things.
It sounds so funny to American ears: Sweden, a wretched hive of scum and villainy? You mean the country best known for Abba, IKEA, Volvos, and a beer commercial bikini team?
Well, yeah. Even Europol is reporting on this story today. They have this quote from one of the top cops in Sweden:
Through international police cooperation, we will continue the hunt for those fuelling violence from behind the veil of anonymity on digital platforms – wherever in the world they may be. At the same time, we must again stress the urgent need for platform owners to step up their self-monitoring and remove violent content. They have the technology to do this. When it comes to the safety of our children, both public authorities and private companies – including tech firms – must play on the same team.
On the surfacee and out of context, it could easily be mistaken for one of those pinched-nosed scolds going off on the ever-present threat of online video game violence.
But the “violent content” on “digital platforms” in this case isn’t Fortnite or Counterstrike or whatever (don’t look at me, the last shooting games I played regularly were Quake and Doom—I may have written the dialog for Hitman, but I could never even master the controls well enough to play it).
No, in this case it’s offers of big rewards for kids willing to, I don’t know, fire an RPG into a gang clubhouse, or see to it that Sven Walnuts sleeps with the herring.
(By “big rewards” I assume we’re talking huge quantities of Skittles and Gummi Bears.)
In case you didn’t watch it, the video includes a statistic that there were 31 murder investigtations with a suspect under the age of 15—meaning 14 at the oldest—in Sweden in the first 8 months of 2023. There were 102 in the first 8 months of 2024.
These are relatively recent problems in Scandinavia. There wasn’t much talk of 14-year-old hitboys when I moved here in 2003.
I wonder what’s driving these trends?
Probably all the violent video games available online.