A man travelled from Lethbridge, Alberta to the Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood of Montreal with a long gun, a manifesto, and a plan. On June 22, 2026, he opened fire on the commercial building that housed the headquarters of Aylo, a multinational company specializing in online pornography. A police officer and a bystander were killed before police shot the man dead. The victims were Const. Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, who was 34, and Michel Mizrahi, who was 68. These men were not the targets here. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The shooter, Seth Hatfield, left behind a lengthy manifesto written to justify mass violence. It reads like a radicalization pipeline rendered in academic language. And while it was organized and logical on its own terms, it was also completely cut off from anything resembling the day-to-day reality of most Canadians.
In Canada, unlike our neighbours to the south, a planned shooting is a national tragedy. We tend to sit with it—analyzing where we went wrong, trying to understand how to keep it from happening again. And so, naturally, we have already begun trying to make sense of it. The RCMP’s national security team has opened an investigation into ideologically motivated violent extremism. At the Polytechnique memorial—where a gunman murdered fourteen women in 1989—protesters gathered to call this what the manifesto makes clear. Incel ideology. Misogyny. The online radicalization of young men. These labels are accurate, but what they can’t answer is the harder question: how does a 25-year-old from Alberta end up here in the first place?
We are also debating the rifle. The SKS he carried is legal and unrestricted in Canada, and that debate is worth having. But the gun is the last link in the chain, not the first.
And neither is the manifesto. It is not where the story begins—it’s only a small passage in a much larger story that is still being written. A story that runs through every smartphone and feed and platform that learned to profit from people who don’t know where they stand in this world.
The internet was not built to help people know themselves, it was built to capture attention. And somewhere along the way we discovered that the easiest people to capture were the ones who already felt lost. The lonely and the disoriented. People who could not voice what they needed in their physical space. So, they found a place to belong inside the architecture of an algorithm in the digital one.
The problem is that the algorithm is designed to find the gaps between what we feel and what we understand about what we feel. And when we can’t close those gaps ourselves, the system fills them for us—with the next piece of content. The next video. The next community of people already sorted by the same grievances. And all of that filler is then reshaped into something that can generate a profit.
The radicalization pipeline is the attention economy doing exactly what it was built to do: optimize for engagement. Profit. Repeat. But in cases like Hatfield’s, the design works too well, and what began as profit in the digital space becomes harm in the physical one.
Hatfield’s digital trail, recovered after his death, showed this progression clearly. The algorithm did not force him down this path, it just built a path clear enough to keep him moving in the direction set out for him. And unless we find a way to opt out of the paths constantly being drawn for us, they will keep carrying people from lives built in the digital world toward damage done in the physical one.
The early internet was mostly harmless. The problem started when the algorithm arrived alongside an endless stream of content, because these algorithms are designed for extraction, not orientation. We built them to harvest tiny signals about our behavior—signals that add up to a portrait of what triggers you, positive or negative—and then we let the system feed that portrait back to you, louder. The system does not care whether what it amplifies is true, healthy, or humane. It cares whether you stay engaged.
And the people who stay the longest are usually the ones who are most lost, stuck in that space between what they feel and what they understand about what they feel. And there is nothing in the current architecture to help them close that gap.
In a grotesque and violent way, Hatfield’s manifesto is a document about that space. He could not locate himself, so he spent page after page constructing an explanation for his own suffering. The ideology he adopted supplied that explanation. It said: here is why you feel this way. Here is who is responsible. Here is what you should do about it.
It can feel like all of this is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to be. We do not have to accept that this is simply what the internet does, as if it were a force of nature rather than a series of decisions made by people with specific incentives—because decisions can be made differently.
So what would it mean to build something between you and the technology that gave you visibility into that gap instead of filling it for you? Not by telling you what to think or who to be, but by creating a layer between impulse and action—a space where the question of what you actually need could be asked and, over time, answered. This would require something structurally different: not a new algorithm or a better content filter, but a design that treats attention as something belonging to the person rather than the platform.
We have spent two decades optimizing for engagement. What we have not yet seriously tried is optimizing for orientation—helping people understand what they need before those needs get intercepted and filled with someone else’s priorities.
Mohamed Lamine Benredouane and Michel Mizrahi left behind entire communities. Neighbourhoods that should have moved through an ordinary Monday morning are now forever changed. We owe them more than a label for the man who did this. We owe them an honest accounting of the system that shaped him, and the serious, sustained work of building something different.
Not abstinence. Not destruction. A redesign—technology built not to exploit the human need for meaning, but to protect the space in which meaning gets made.
Because that space belongs to each of us—and for humans to build lives instead of manifestos, it needs to be designed that way.