I have not seen the videos of the death of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. I won’t watch them. I also have not seen the videos of Iryna Zarutska’s death on the Charlotte metro. I won’t watch those either. In fact, when any video depicting a violent death makes the rounds on social media, I avert my eyes, log out, do anything not to see it.

I know many people feel that it is necessary to watch these videos, if only to stay informed. I used to feel that way too. But then I started making the videos myself, and that changed everything. It is one thing to watch someone suffer, even die, in a short clip on social media. You get this feeling of shock, outrage, and, weirdly, a guilty satisfaction that it wasn’t you. But it is something else entirely to film that clip, post it, and then be rewarded for its popularity. I’ll admit it: I found it thrilling.

In a past life, I was very good at making these videos—perhaps a little too good—and over the course of a year, I lost my sense of reality. The only way for me to come back to earth was by blocking any of these videos from my screen. And now I believe that my work, along with that of many others, not only desensitized millions of people to violence, but worse, encouraged its spread. The very thought of those days makes me sick.

My brief career in this sordid business began shortly after George Floyd’s death under Derek Chauvin’s knee. I watched that whole nine-minute video—who didn’t?—and was horrified by its brutality. But, like many of my peers, a part of me wanted to see more. In the following weeks, I received many chances. Protests broke out in every major city, and I became a devotee of the demonstrations in Washington, D.C. Each night I dumped my car on K Street and trudged down to Lafayette Square and stood beside those protesting. I was there when arsonists burned St. John’s Episcopal Church. I filmed the aftermath, and the clips performed surprisingly well on Twitter.

That is of course how these things are designed to work. Social media algorithms boost whatever drives the most engagement, and, because user tastes demand blood—they always have—the most lurid content gets the most clicks, views, shares. (No amount of content moderation has yet managed to change human nature.) If you are in the content creation business, you are incentivized to seek out violence and disorder and then record it simply because that’s what people want to see.

I soon began seeking out other protests in the city. I kept my camera rolling the whole time and developed a minor following. It was exciting. Before the Floyd protests my account rarely got attention for anything I posted. That was fine by me. I am by nature an analogue person. (To this day I subscribe to three print newspapers.) But once I began seeking attention online, I found it was surprisingly easy to get. Certain subjects were always winners: angry activists, tough-looking cops, and, most of all, street violence.

The most-watched video I ever made was of some anti-Amazon protesters setting up a guillotine in front of Jeff Bezos’s house in Kalorama. The implication was obvious, and the video was impossible to ignore. The day I posted it my phone overheated and died from all the Twitter notifications I received. Every major news outlet in the country picked it up and so did all the cable networks. When I bought a new phone and logged back into Twitter, I had thousands of unread notifications, mentions, messages. It was intoxicating.

The reaction made me determined to capture the genuine article. Thus far I had only played ambulance chaser, but I wanted to capture the most sensational acts as they were unfolding. The night of the 2020 election I camped out with D.C.’s local anti-fascist group in McPherson Square. They had promised to burn the city to the ground if Donald Trump triumphed over Joe Biden. Somehow I doubted Trump would win, but I felt certain that the Capital would burn either way. I was wrong. And then I was wrong again that the “Stop the Steal” marches in the weeks afterward would yield any memorable content. I was so disappointed. Even the nightly showdowns between Antifa and various white nationalist groups downtown were underwhelming—not violent enough to gain traction with viewers already numb to months of street brawls.

I wish that I could say that the events of January 6, 2021 shook me to my senses. But they didn’t. I remember groaning with envy as I watched the protesters smash the glass windows of the Capitol building. I had planned to go to the National Mall that morning, but stayed home to work on a magazine story. All day I was glued to my phone, watching the ersatz Storming of the Bastille, feeling left out.

But a few months later I was finally at the center of the action. In April 2021, a young man named Daunte Wright was killed at a traffic stop in Brooklyn Park, a suburb of Minneapolis. By blind chance I happened to be in the area. And so for the next week I drove daily to the Brooklyn Park police station, where the cops were barricaded inside. I filmed continuously.

One night I was standing near the back of the crowd, tailing someone I had seen take a hit of a nasty narcotic concoction earlier in the day. He was behaving erratically, and I knew he was going to cause trouble. I wanted to be there to catch it. He started harassing a local C.N.N. crew. Suddenly there was a crowd surrounding them. Someone threw a full water bottle and it hit one of the cameramen on the head. He staggered and fell backward. I saw his eyes roll into the back of his head. But I kept filming—and leaned closer.

Of course the cameraman was all right. The water bottle had only stunned him and he had momentarily passed out. But as I walked away from the scene—and fended off other reporters asking me about what had just happened—I felt like I was going to puke. Why had I kept rolling? What if he had not been all right? Would the content have been worth it?

That was the end of it for me. The first few times that I filmed violence on the streets it was (so I told myself) strictly for journalistic purposes. By the time I reached Brooklyn Park I had an unhealthy fixation on being there when punches began flying and the tear gas grenades were thrown. I had to stop, right then and there.

It is not too difficult to draw a line from the events of 2020 to the recent spate of political assassinations. I am not the only one who trained myself and others to revel in political violence. For nearly a decade, violence—first in speech, then in images, and now in action—has been the lingua franca of American public life. Everyone is complicit in some way. Ours has always been a coarse society, but that doesn’t stop us from finding new ways to become more savage.

As I finished writing this, the person alleged to have shot Charlie Kirk was arrested. The specific details of his motives will emerge in the coming days. But right now I am certain of one thing. In the past few years he saw what I saw—perhaps what I filmed—and rather than stopping and reconsidering, kept pushing forward: deeper, darker, until image and action blurred into the blast of a bullet.

This essay has been updated to reflect the arrest of the alleged shooter.