When Alan Turing first conceived of a machine that could
process instructional data by way of binary code, he inadvertently opened the
gateway to a future in which the super-powers once confined to sensationalist
fiction were available to each mere mortal at a reasonable retail price. As the
comics told us was the way of things, some chose to use this newfound power for
good, to spread messages of love and righteousness across the globe, and others
for evil, to spread messages of supremacy or expand the frontiers of ritual
humiliation. Most people just floated around in the middle, and used them as a
form of introspective and expressive tool, or source of gentle amusement, in
the same way Superman might spend a lazy Sunday lighting cow-pats with his
laser-vision.
At its core, the internet’s ubiquity and ease of access
gives it the appearance of a form of an inappropriately powerful but
successfully policed public instrument, like a cash machine or Boris Johnson,
but recently I’ve come to the realisation that it’s more than that. The
internet is one of the most lethal weapons of our time, only most people are to
scrupulous to use it – much in the same way most people, if given a light
machine gun for Christmas, might use it to reach jars of bolognaise on the top
shelf or as a piece of trendy office furniture. And I’m not talking in Y2K or
Die Hard 4 terms, I’m talking Enabling Act, nuclear war-head stuff.
Anyone who watch C4’s latest Dispatches: Hunted on the homophobic attitudes
ingrained into Russian society will know that one of main tools in the arsenal
of the ‘Occupy Paedophilia’ group (one of the many gangs in Russia who commit a
litany of co-ordinated acts of assault on homosexuals and to whom Liz McKean
infuriatingly refers as ‘hunters’ and ‘vigilantes’ in place of the traditional
nomenclature of ‘morally bankrupt state-sanctioned psychopaths’ or ‘criminally
backward pond-scum’) is social media. Having crawled through a hole in
spacetime from the realms of the d both entrap and then ritually humiliate
their victims through forcing them by violence, debasement and threat of further
violence into various acts of depravity. Unfortunately this is neither limited
to Russia nor particularly innovative. It’s a method that was first publicly employed
by Chris Hansen to humiliate paedophiles on NBC, and has been used in Syria numerous
times in order to debase protesters against the regime of Al-Assad. (Even more
depressingly, when researching for this article I made the schoolboy blunder of
Googling the words ‘humiliation and torture uploaded to internet’ in search of
an academic resource or at best an inflammatory blog-post and inadvertently
lifted the rock under which a host of psychotic viral woodlice squirm in their
unfiltered filth, returning several videos depicting grainy but graphic scenes
of torture.) The whole thing’s starting to feel like one of those old filler
news broadcasts postulating on the dangers of video games and the internet,
except that it’s real, and in HD, and no matter how many plugs you pull the bad
guys are still lurking in the shadows, waiting to grab you and pour their hot
piss on your neck and ram kitchen utensils up your bum while their mates all
stand around laughing and marvelling at the awesome quality with which they can
record your pain with their new Noksung-Lumixia-G Smartphones or whatever.
So of course, I’ve come up with a solution – well, two
solutions actually, one slightly more realistic than the other. Number one is
that all the pundits on these social media sites give up using them to try to accrue
friends and broadcast logorrheic self-disclosure and limp observational humour
and instead use them to catch these ‘hunters’. Just imagine the look on Sergei’s
hate-swollen mush as he steps into your house to try to lure you back to his ‘safari’,
only to realise that he himself has been lured into a room full of heavily
armed Human Rights Activists with video cameras.
No? How about this one then: Boycott the internet. Starting
today. It may seem like a monumental task and a potentially unrewarding and
pointless way to spend your laughably short existence, but so does giving up
smoking and apparently somebody’s done that. The next time you get a craving to
read your email or scroll blankly through streams of your friend’s inconsequential
opinions, or upload a picture of yourself pouting into a bathroom mirror, do
something else. Go for a bike ride. Read a book to a blind child. Smoke a
cigarette. Start a cult. Get that zany haircut you always wanted. Pretend to
mug someone then tell them it was all a joke and you’ll send their money back by
Royal Mail. The possibilities are endless. Just, whatever you do, don’t go
online, or you’ll end up face-down in the desert with a jar full of hummus in
your jacksie. I guarantee it.
