This afternoon we put the Daily Dot’s commenting system on indefinite hiatus. Chances are you didn’t notice—and that’s part of the point.

The Daily Dot was founded as a hometown newspaper for the Internet—a paper of record for the Web—chronicling the people, news, and events shaping life online. The concepts of community and authenticity are at the core of everything we do: We don’t just report on Reddit, and Tumblr; we’re active participants, putting in as much as we’re reporting out. That’s what’s distinguished us from every other new media site.

But that sense of community has largely stayed in those communities. Focused as we are on communities across the Internet, we employed a best-in-class, third-party system for our on-site comments that’s used by many of the biggest and most prestigious publishers in the world. As we’ve said, however, we are not like other publishers. The system has been difficult to manage in concert with the distributed way we engage with our community and has created unintended barriers to entry that were simply too high for our hyper-social audience. In fact, we think our unique position in online communities has put us at the edge of a trend that many publishers are experiencing, and we suspect that many publishers will soon find that their existing commenting systems do not serve their readers as the conversation continues to move off websites to social media, where most of our content is discovered and consumed.

This trend is about more than just raw engagement. It’s also about what kind of engagement we want to have. We’re at an interesting point in the history of the Web. In the wake of Gamergate, Celebgate, and the Reddit Meltdown of 2015, both publishers and social networks are grappling with the same fundamental issue: how to foster engagement and dialogue without inadvertently feeding the trolls in the process. The general consensus is that we need to detoxify the Web—to make it a cleaner, nicer, safer, and more inclusive place to live and work. Of course, at the Daily Dot, we would like to see a more civil, compassionate Web, but we want to be careful that in the name of fostering civility, we do not inadvertently kill all dissention. It is the cacophony of the Web—the voices from every point in the spectrum that give it its vibrancy—that make it the community we love. No one has quite figured out how to thread that needle yet, even those who have invested significantly in their own internal systems.

We’re encouraged by the interactions we have daily with our readers on Twitter and Facebook—the vast majority of which have been positive—but commenting systems take thoughtful moderation and constant development to provide a platform for every voice in the community that supports it to be truly heard. We’re open to the possibilities, and we’ll be looking to bring back commenting at some point in the future, most likely through Facebook integration, but right now our resources are better spent elsewhere. We’ve already tripled the size of our audience engagement team this year to interact more directly with our community, and we’re still growing.

It’s a different route toward the same goal: to deliver the news to our readers, wherever they may live online, and to keep the conversation moving forward.

Photo via Sh4rp_i/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

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Today the Daily Dot, along with many of our Internet brethren, is coming out in favor of net neutrality—the principle that internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all Web traffic the same. That is, that ISPs should not be able to make Netflix load faster through your connection than YouTube—and charge Netflix for that privilege.

We are supporting the principle because it is what is good for the Internet. In fact, to eliminate the neutrality of the Internet would be to fundamentally change the nature of the Internet community. A non-neutral Internet would be almost unrecognizable—the very fact that anyone can make anything available to anyone else, whether it’s merely a tweet or a new digital product, is one of the defining characteristics of the community that has become so much a part of our lives.

The Internet may be changing the world in myriad ways, many of them very good, but one field it has changed dramatically is journalism, and those changes have been decidedly mixed. 

On the one hand, I love the many new voices, including that of the Daily Dot, that the Internet has made possible. On the other, I worry about the trend we are seeing today off- and online: We are getting more and more repackaged news and less and less new news. The problem is one of resources. Since 2006, total newsroom employees across all media has declined by 30 percent.

The largest purely digital newsroom might be numbered in the dozens; it may even break 100. By contrast, the New York Times’s newsroom is well over 1,000 people. 

The reason that the Times can employ so many is because it makes a lot of money—enough money to afford a $300 million newsroom budget. One of the main reasons that the Times can make as much money as it does is because there is an enormous barrier to entry in the newspaper business—the enormous expense of a physical printing press. There is a similar barrier to entry in broadcast forms of media—FCC licenses. 

On the Internet, there is no equivalent, and so the cost of entering the market is much lower. And that means that news companies are constantly under threat of facing new competition, and that constant threat limits the prices they can charge. In turn, investors are more reluctant to invest in media companies, knowing there is not a barrier to entry analogous to the printing press or FCC license.

If we were to abandon net neutrality, then ISPs would charge companies, including the Daily Dot, Vox, the Atlantic, and any other large news site to carry their content to consumers, and that expense would be the new printing press. Such a barrier would kill off some smaller competitors and prevent many (but certainly not all) new ones from entering. Revenues at existing companies would increase and there would be more resources available to hire journalists—an online company could conceivably support as many reporters as the New York Times.  

Of course, I don’t really want to see us go back to the way things were before the Internet, when print and broadcast journalism were each dominated by a few monopolies, exerting a stifling force of their own. Those monopolies occurred because the barrier to entry got too high. But right now, the barrier to entry online is too low.

Abandoning net neutrality would help the business behind journalism, but there are other things than can (and will) happen to improve it. 

In the meantime, the freewheeling Internet that we all know and love is too valuable to sacrifice. 

Photo via Don O'Brien (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Jason Reed

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“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

That statement, often misattributed to Voltaire, gives perfect voice to a core belief that has defined democratic values since the Enlightenment.

It is also a sentiment at the core of how we handle comments on the Internet.

The most glaring example is perhaps Reddit, which hews so closely to the principle of free speech that it features user-maintained sections of the site (subreddits) that are openly racist or dedicated to the fetishization of sex crimes.

This problem is in no sense limited to Reddit, however.

Vlogger Anita Sarkeesian, a woman who dares to talk about sexism in video games, was recently forced from her own home because of threats to her and her family that arrived on Twitter and numerous other social networks.

It’s not even limited to sites that primarily rely on user-generated content. Even the most advanced sites offering professionally produced content can go full-on “Lord of the Flies” in their comment sections. Recently news site Jezebel called out its own parent company for maintaining commenting systems that allowed abusive behavior. Gawker Media arguably leads the industry in commenting systems, with its home-grown platform, Kinja.

Ultimately, Gawker updated Kinja to discourage abusive comments, requiring users to establish a track record before they’re allowed to post openly to the site without review from moderators—we’ll see if it’s effective.

On the Internet, we allow comments we vehemently disapprove of, that verge on hate speech, harassment, and threats because, we say, we will not curb free speech. We may hate these comments, but we will defend to the death your right to post them anonymously on an open commenting system.

And yet, is that stance actually encouraging free speech? Or, by being so uncompromising on the rules of civic engagement online (i.e. a commenting system’s Terms of Service agreements,) have we in fact compromised free speech?

We are confusing anarchy with freedom.

Consider this: Wednesday, a group of moderators from Reddit—arguably the worst hellhole of trolldom on the Internet—signed an open letter asking the site to take a more proactive stance against hateful and racist messages. One signer is a moderator of the r/rape forum. Yes, the moderator has the right to remove offensive posts in the subreddit, which is currently intended to be a support room for people who have suffered sexual assault. However, the moderator often has to delete entire threads spawned by the trolls, which also removes the victim's valid and important responses.

In that moderator’s own words:

Personally, there is nothing that I enjoy less than not only having to remove the messages that violate our rules but the messages of the person they are attacking. Not only were they forced to defend themselves and their account of events as if they were on trial, but I then remove their brave statements of defense. This is often the first time these survivors mentioned their rape to another person only to be told that they are lying or just a slut. And then I have to follow and take their words from them, usually because their half of the conversation can be triggering to other users. It doesn't feel good.”

On top of that, r/rape’s previous top moderator was herself driven off Reddit because of harassment and doxing, or reveal information that can personally identify a user (doxing is against Reddit’s rules, but the tools to ban users are fairly ineffective in enforcing those rules in any meaningful way).

In other words, the laissez-faire system of comments on Reddit manages to allow many users (the trolls) to silence others, just as effectively as any government apparatchiks ever have.

Many of us would like to believe that the Internet is a chance to build a more perfect society. And in some sense, it is that impulse that underlies our almost mindless cries of “free speech.” But as we shout, we also must ask ourselves, are we actually creating a society that lives the values we so loudly espouse?

Because this is the current state of the Internet, at least in the comments: While those who would spew racist, hateful remarks with all the discrimination of a grenade feel their speech now enjoys near-perfect freedom, women seeking empathy for traumatic experiences they've endured feel anything but free to speak.

Illustration by Jason Reed

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The post The cost of absolute free speech? Less speech appeared first on The Daily Dot.

The gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the apex of the wild, wild west, lasted 30 seconds. I dare you to find a single movie version of the shootout that lasts just half a minute.

In the inaugural issue of the Kernel, the Daily Dot’s weekly Sunday magazine, we took a deep look at the state of hacking. One thing is obvious, to me at least, from the special report: when most of us think about hacking, what we imagine is as highly distorted a version of reality as any of those film treatments of the O.K. Corral.

And those fantasies likely tell us more about ourselves than they do about the world of hacking itself.

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The world of hacking is surprisingly lo-fi.

In the words of one cybersecurity expert, “only amateurs attack machines; professionals target people.” Put another way, at the high end, identity theft is not about sophisticated technology, but about simple confidence schemes. It’s not elaborate programs that crack codes, but simple ruses—an email that seems to come from a close friend or colleague, a request to verify the information at your bank—that identity thieves rely on. A great hacker, said Gregg Housh, an activist and technical consultant on hacking, is ultimately a “good social engineer.”

Similarly, our exclusive look into the FBI sting operation that took down the United States’s most-wanted hacker and cyber criminal, Jeremy Hammond, reveals that they did not rely primarily on any compromised machine, but on the soft skills of a confidential informant. Despite carefully protecting his identity, what brought down Hammond were a few hints he dropped about himself as a person: where he lived, that he was a “freegan” (someone who scavenges for his food), etc.

Those clues led investigators to piece together Hammond’s identity and put him under surveillance (as in, a guy in a car across the street from his apartment, not a keylogging program on his computer). It was all far more Maltese Falcon than Hackers.

We shouldn’t really be surprised, when the law treats so many aspects of cyber crime as if it were 1986 (a year after Back to the Future came out, in case you’re having trouble remembering what that was like). That was the year that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act was passed—a law that has largely gone unupdated. At the time, email services could only store about two dozen emails. (When was the last time you had 24 emails? You “Inbox 0” jerks don’t count.)

***

Are hackers criminals or folk heroes?

Vivien Lesnik is the director of upcoming documentary The Hacker Wars, which tracks the prosecution of the three most prominent post-WikiLeaks hacktivists. “In a sense,” she said, “my film is about the co-opting of the fourth estate and the rise of the fifth.”

Lesnik clearly admires her subjects and views them as freedom fighters—they are the modern-day Billy the Kids. She hopes her own film will “make a glitch in the matrix.”

On the other hand, many hackers’ works are not so truly altruistically motivated. One of the most dangerous cyber surveillance tools in existence today was originally created to help people cheat at Halo. Since then, it’s not only been used to co-opt a Miss Teen USA’s webcam to take nude pictures of her, it’s been used by the Syrian government to keep tabs on and feed misinformation to the rebels.

***

Given that we’ve had outlaw heroes since at least the days of Spartacus, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that we romanticize cyber crime, whether that idealization is in terms of excitement or virtue.

At base, the romanticization itself relies on our fascination with crime, as do movies about the wild west or the mob. These criminal milieus are the proxies for our frustrated ids. Our romanticized visions are the fantasies of our own secret desires loosed unfettered upon the world.

Hacking is less whizbang and more human than we’d like to think. To those of us with less technical skill, hacking turns out to be more relatable for being a human, rather than technical, phenomenon. The humanness of it also illuminates the fact that it relies on the foolishness of its victims as often as it does on obscure technology. In a sense, the victims, as in any good con movie (e.g. The Sting) are complicit in compromising themselves.

We are even further complicit at the level of governance. At times, the line between freedom fighter and outlaw is as thin as the line between tyrant and protector, and our Wyatt Earps and Doc Hollidays—Jeremy Hammonds and Andrew “weev” Auernheimers—exist a bit on both sides of that line.

In turn, the rest of us are part of a system that is so dysfunctional that we have failed to even update the laws on email since 1986. When the system fails, it creates an imperative to act outside of it—usually with less than ideal consequences. For every George Washington, history offers a dozen Fidel Castros, and a hundred Mullah Omars. So long as we accept that failing system, then we are creating the conditions that give rise to the freedom fighter criminal—and we will have to deal with the consequences of that.

Whenever we tolerate living in Gotham, we are going to get Batman if we’re lucky—Harvey Dent, if we’re not.

From the trenches

This week the Daily Dot launched its weekly Sunday magazine, the Kernel. Each issue of the Kernel will be an in-depth, special report on a topic of importance to the Internet community. As you might have noticed, the first issue is a look at the state of hacking.

This is an important step for us in further developing our mission to inform active members of Internet communities. Each day, the Daily Dot covers the Internet with breadth and depth, but there’s a distinct type of understanding that comes from taking a moment to focus on something specific and consider it from all angles.

So far the reception has been great, and if you haven’t taken a look yet, I hope you’ll check it out. I’d love to know what you think of it, and I hope that we can be part of your Sunday morning routine, along with a good pot of coffee and pancakes.

Photo via altemark/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

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The post The truth about hacking is in the eye of the beholder appeared first on The Daily Dot.

Don’t look now, but you might be on TV. If you can see another human being then you might be being filmed. Oh, and look up—do you see any drones?

Just 10 years ago, when I was making student films, a pretty low-end 35mm film camera cost something like $50,000, if memory serves. And the film to put in it could easily cost far more to shoot even a short movie. And even then, you just had a bunch of film in the can. No one was ever going to see it, and distribution is still an area that I find as mysterious as what was in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction.

Today, pretty much everyone carries in their pocket a camera that puts that hulking piece of equipment to shame. And distributing whatever they shoot to thousands—millions, even!—is the work of a few swipes that even your 5-year-old can do (but probably not your parents).

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The ubiquity, size, and ruggedness of cameras today is solving all sorts of heretofore unsolvable mysteries. For example, last week a GoPro, a basically indestructible camera that syncs with your smartphone, solved one of the modern world’s greatest mysteries: What is it that happens inside the dishwasher?

Because the GoPro can go where even the iPhone fears to tread, it has captured things that have so far been only the stuff of fiction and discovery channel documentaries. A man in Australia recently strapped his trusty GoPro to his head to capture the experience of his cliff dive in Sydney bay. You sail through the air with Terry Tufferson (remarkably quickly, btw) and then you hit the water and surface to hear shouts that every swimmer dreads: “Shark! Shark!”

And the GoPro captures both Terry’s frantic swimming (Michael Phelps has nothing on Terry in this scene) and a close-up of a reasonably bored-looking great white. When will they start shipping the GoPro with a solid special effects package?

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Still, the GoPro does not get all the fun. Who needs security cam footage anymore when you’ve got your trusty iPhone or Android?

Last week a bystander’s smartphone captured a Family Dollar employee pursuing a shoplifter into the parking lot. He confiscated her stolen air freshener, and heated words were exchanged. To underscore his point, the store employee used what came readily to hand and Febrezed the woman in the face.

If I’d been writing the movie, I could not have invented a better scene to dramatize the state of public surveillance and its effect on people than the incident in early May when a young man used his aerial drone to take photos of a beach in Connecticut. His hobby incensed a fellow beachgoer who called the cops on him. Apparently feeling that the authorities were not responding to the crisis with the appropriate celerity, she took matters into her own hands, first trying to liberate some of his equipment and then physically attacking him.

When the police did arrive, she told the fuzz that he had in fact attacked her. Unfortunately for her, the man had taped the entire proceedings surreptitiously on his phone. Ultimately she was arrested for assault and breach of peace.

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In 1984, George Orwell wrote about the terrifying future under the surveillance state. Hounded by constant observation and state control over even the most intimate and personal details of their lives, the main characters are desperate to find some place private—away from the eye of Big Brother.

Today, we’ve learned how much we do live in a surveillance state just as active in its reconnaissance of its own populace as Orwell’s fictional Oceania. Yet it is far harder to get away from a camera than even Orwell imagined: There’s always another human with a smartphone in shooting distance.

State surveillance, it turns out, is outdone by social surveillance. What Orwell could not predict was that surveillance, when social in origin and coupled with the Internet, functions quite differently.

The state’s intelligence is used for security and control, and it is, above all, secret. With the advent of sites such as Facebook and YouTube, social surveillance could not be more public.

It may be too early to tell what this new form of surveillance will mean, but there are some hints.

A conversation has been evolving online about how we confront and deal with abortion as a society. The camera—or rather what it can capture—has been at the center of that conversation, particularly when, for example, an abortion counselor taped her own abortion and put it online. The hope among some is that having to personally confront the experience in a way only video can facilitate will add new perspectives to a conversation that has made little progress in 40 years.

I don’t know where this new perspective will take this very difficult conversation, and the effects of social surveillance will be multifaceted and wide-ranging. But if one of those effects is that we have more perspectives represented in public debate, then perhaps even George Orwell could find some reasons for hope.

Photos by Ben Pollard/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0) and Luke Hayfield/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Fernando Alfonso III

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We want to believe that events like the mass killing in Isla Vista last Friday are isolated events. That they are non-recurring phenomena. That they have nothing to do with us.

And yet, we talk about it incessantly. It captures our attention like little else because we have some sneaking suspicion that actually, we are implicated somehow. 

Partly, it’s that the school shooting is an American phenomenon—no other culture has produced these particular tragedies. Partly, it’s that we cannot easily excuse ourselves from the school shooting because whether we like to admit it or not, this is a crime that arises from a nice, middle-class, suburban experience. We have all either shunned the awkward kid or been the shunned awkward kid—or in some cases, like mine, both.

In this particular catastrophe, it’s not just that it’s an American phenomenon and a symptom of a diseased adolescence; it’s that these things were exacerbated by the Internet as well. Isla Vista may have been the first Internet massacre.

When it comes to the “why,” whether at the University of California at Santa Barbara or Columbine, I cannot believe that we have some kind of monopoly on mental illness in the United States or on the Internet. We did not invent rage so extreme and twisted that it could kill indiscriminately. 

Nor can I believe that the ostensible reason—in this case bro culture and men’s rights attitudes—is the actual reason. Islam is no more to blame for 9/11 than patriotism for the Oklahoma City bombings or the rights of man for the Reign of Terror. There are always justifications aplenty for those who want to commit violence.

My own personal theory is that there are two primary reasons the United States sees far more of these types of events than any other. For one thing, we can't deny the impact of the copycat effect. The more things like this happen, the more they seep into the cultural subconscious and take root. The fact that it's been done before makes it more likely to happen again. 

But more importantly, mass shootings are the result of the lack of a key factor that mitigates between rage and ideology—and I do not mean our lack of gun control, since after all, three of Elliot Rodger’s victims were stabbed to death. I am referring to a lack of community.  Both of these factors, in Elliot Rodger’s case, seem to have been exacerbated by the Internet.

As Robert Putnam exhaustively demonstrated in Bowling Alone, Americans emphasize the nuclear family almost to the exclusion of extended networks. We know our neighbors far less than our counterparts in other countries; we are less engaged in community organizations and have fewer personal relationships in the institutions we do engage with, such as school. As we grow beyond infancy and childhood, this extended support network becomes more and more important—and our parents, our nuclear families, less and less so.

Look at Elliot Rodger. His parents did notice that something was wrong. He was in therapy (with several therapists, apparently). They even called the cops on him. But that was not enough. 

He tried to find a community of his own online. And I have written before that the virtue of the Internet is that on the Internet, no one is alone. And yet, in Rodger’s case that turned out to be not such a good thing. He bounced from group to group. He engaged with other virgins in World of Warcraft but left as it went more mainstream. He found pick-up artist (PUA) communities but left them for PUAHate when he didn’t score. The pattern exposes a fundamental feature of Internet communities, which in this case was a tragic weakness.

A traditional IRL community is tough to leave, and you don’t get to choose it. Rodger could easily disappear from a massively multiplayer online game or from a subreddit and no one would notice. In a strong community, if you suddenly don’t show up at school or never leave your apartment, someone notices. 

I think we’ve all felt angry and isolated at one time or another in our lives. I know I have. While I never contemplated anything like what Rodger did, what got me through those times was the one or two people, out of all the people around me, who reacted to me a little differently than everyone else—the one or two people who seemed to be on my side even if they did not approve of everything I did. It took a pretty big, pretty strong community that was not of my choosing to find those certain people  who would show me a different way of being rather than amplifying my worst impulses.

The ability to find communities online filled with people who embrace you in all of your strangeness has been a saving grace for many. But in Rodger’s case, he found the online equivalent of madrasas, groups that gave him a validation of and language for his rage. 

I have argued before that the Internet is a medium of connection, rather than isolation. But the case of Elliot Rodger forces us to admit, perhaps, that connection is not necessarily benign. The Internet has the power to connect us in ways that can both mitigate and amplify the most deplorable aspects of human nature.

That is the seedy underbelly of the Internet that I live in. The back alley that I would prefer not to have to acknowledge. 

I don’t want that sad truth to be the final word on the matter though. I don’t want to believe that the Internet is a cycle driving us all ever deeper into two camps, one of anger, hate, and tribalism and another of acceptance, compassion, and humanism. Maybe I’m grasping at straws, but I think if there is a saving grace to the Internet, it is that the most insightful, powerful thing I have read about these crushing events was a post shared with me (and many others) by a third party. It was written on Tumblr by someone I have never heard of, Chris Gethard, a self-proclaimed “unsuccessful comedian,” and it is a brave and insightful essay about this event. If you read nothing else about it all, I suggest you read this. 

The thing is, Gethard didn’t need anyone’s permission to write it,  and I didn’t need to have ever heard of him to read and re-read his words and have them remind me what acceptance and compassion are all about. And I have to believe, while the Internet facilitates both Elliot Rodger’s message and Chris Gethard's, that a message of compassion is more powerful than any message of hate. The Internet may amplify both good and evil. But if you believe that good is stronger than evil, then you must also choose to believe that the ride of the Internet is ultimately taking us somewhere we want to be.

Illustration by Jason Reed

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Since long before the first Pict painted himself blue two millennia ago, we’ve been trying to find a way to both express ourselves and improve on nature. It must be something in our genes.

The Internet has changed this ancient human impulse as completely as the discovery of henna and clothing starch did for the Elizabethans. 

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Nowhere is the influence of the Internet more evident than in one of the most venerable—and trendy—forms of personal customization: the tattoo.

British rapper Dappy, for example, tattooed a hashtag on his face. He intended an homage to Twitter, but he was unwilling to commit to any particular hashtag. After all, who knows if #rapperproblems is still going to be “hip” and “with it” when he’s 90. Instead, he just went with a hash mark: #. And so now, we feel like his face is an unfinished tweet, sitting in drafts, while its author tries to fill in the tag that will turn his snoozer into a zinger.

If the rapper Dappy has made us feel like our “But I’m the cool mom” is asking us again about the trending hashbags on the Tweeter, others have used the tattoo to create a new level of awesome on the Internet. An artist named Evan Hawkins has gotten 11 of his friends to tattoo a different frame of a 19th-century photography series on some part of their bodies. The images come from an experiment that finally proved that when horses run there is a moment when they take all their feet off the ground. The result is a tattoo GIF. 

At one end of the spectrum there’s the clueless. If cool is somewhere in the middle, then the far other end of the spectrum is “what the actual fuck,” another Internet specialty. A scientist in Colorado has invented an alternative to needles and ink for applying a tattoo: bed bugs. No I’m not kidding. The “bedbug tattoo gun” directs the vicious little beasts to bite your skin in the pattern of your choosing, leaving behind a whimsical inflammation. I mean, Matt Camper is not the first guy to do something stupid in science lab, but in the past we would have had to be in science lab too to know about it. 

But I suspect the fact that we can so easily share these experiences only amps up our desire to do this kind of silly shit. After all, this video is part of a larger “Bugs that Eat You” series. Yeesh.

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The conceit of all this self-expression is in some sense individuality, yet when it comes to personal customization, there seems to be an awful lot of monkey-see-monkey-do. Celebrities, after all, are so much cooler than the rest of us, and now, they are so accessible via the Internet, why go to the trouble of creating our own identities? Better to take one off the shelf.

Our newest celebrity darling, Jennifer Lawrence, being of Internet-appropriate age, seems to inspire one meme after another. She photobombed Taylor Swift and a new meme—and hashtag, #lawrencing—was born. In another, more extreme example of the same phenomenon, a young woman in Baltimore actually recreated an outfit worn by Rihanna and wore it to her prom. Sadly, Rihanna did not appreciate the tribute, something she made abundantly clear on Twitter.

If the Internet makes it easy for us to copy our favorite stars, it also makes it easy for our favorite stars to treat us like the third assistant to their make-up artist.

Of course, most of all this is just in good fun, but there is a point, this being the Internet, where we veer into “what the actual fuck.” The Internet doesn’t just get us closer to celebrities—it’s created whole new ones from the annoying Rebecca Black, to the anodyne (musically, anyway) Justin Bieber, to the aggressive Lady Gaga. Eventually, all the remixing and resharing just had to turn in on itself. 

A new group of young wannabes is hoping a YouTube video can catapult them to international stardom too. Their hook, however, isn’t even as original as you “gotta get down on Friday.” In fact, they’ve decided to stick entirely with what’s worked before. The three members of The Plastics have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to look like their favorite stars: Jennifer Lawrence, Justin Bieber, and some kind of Internet fairy godmother, Madonna.

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The truth is that identity has always been about sharing in a community as much as establishing a sense of individuality. 

The Internet lets us project ourselves out into the world, and at the same time, it makes that self more fungible than ever before. We are less constrained by nature or anything else than ever before in the group identities that we can take—and perfect. Or, as we’ve seen with the rise of “me irl,” playfully subvert expectation. 

Online, just as we’ve created an identity and shared it, it seems, there’s always someone else who’s upped the ante. As a result, there’s a kind of circular flow of shared self that spins ever faster on the Internet. The centrifugal force of that puts pressure on our sense of self in a kind of psychic G-force simulator pushing us to ever greater extremes of self-identification. A few of us will inevitably crumble under that pressure, but some, surely, will transcend it instead.

Photo by ¡Yiyo!/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

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In 20 years or so, VH1 will air an episode of I Love the ’10s: 2014. When they do, they will dedicate a whole segment, if not the entire hour, to the “selfie.”

When an ultimately trivial cultural phenomenon reaches the president or takes a life, as it did this week, then I think it’s fair to say the trend has peaked—at least we hope it has.

The phenomenon cannot survive such levels of frenzy. But right now, it defines our cultural moment.

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The rich, famous, and influential have discovered the selfie, and perhaps at first, it was a moment of connection. The Oscar selfie, which quickly became the most retweeted post in history, made us feel that we were as cool as all those movie stars, at least for a moment, because, hey, we do that! Stars—they’re just like us.

Then there’s the presidential selfies. Now, usually, a president doing anything kills the cool. But not this president. If Nixon had taken a selfie, we would feel very different about the whole thing. And to be fair, even Obama was off to a rocky start, taking a selfie with several other world leaders at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. But he quickly recovered the cool with a selfie with a champion baseball player (even if it did turn out to be product placement), causing us to wonder whether the White House would ban presidential selfies; and finally our affably awkward Vice President Joe Biden snagged one for his new Instagram account.

We are watching the selfie jump the shark in real time. 

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For the record, I was an early enthusiast of the selfie. Long before the camera phone was invented, I would refuse offers from waiters, tour guides, and kindly passersby to take a nicely framed picture with my pocket point-and-shoot. I preferred instead to do it myself at arm’s length. 

As a result, I have a variety of photo collections from family trips or excursions with friends. There’s me, smiling; my brother, smiling; and my mother’s forehead—she is much shorter, so it was very difficult to keep her in frame. In the best ones, she’s peering over the bottom edge of the frame, a latter day Kilroy. And somewhere in the background are a few barely recognizable stones of some site of dusty historical interest.

The shots with friends were more spontaneous, and they served a secondary function of preserving plausible deniability: Do those kids look like they’re abusing substances of some kind, or is it just this strange and awkward camera angle?

In the pretention of film-school-headed youth, these shots were a kind of pop art, in their intimacy, awkward spontaneity, and imperfection. They were a whimsical moment of truth, in a medium more often used to facilitate artifice. 

But as we have now en masse turned to the selfie, intimacy and spontaneity may be the conceit, but they have become as artificial as any Hollywood movie. We don’t have to wait until the film is developed to know what the camera has revealed; we can simply use the front camera and pose ourselves just so, desperately trying to find our best angle—like Claudette Colbert whose movie contract stipulated that she could only be photographed from the left. 

The spontaneity is gone. Nowhere is this more obvious than in those cases of rich and famous selfie shooting. The world’s most tweeted moment wasn’t a moment of “stars being just like us.” It was a planned and paid-for product placement. The same goes for the president’s post-World Series selfie. At least the moment at Mandela’s funeral was an instance of the most powerful man in the world being just like us—presumably he was honestly excited to find himself in the same room with two other world leaders. But nobody liked that one.

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In California, an artist named Gabe Ferreira unveiled his latest work, a giant iPhone selfie installation. The screen of the 7-foot-tall iPhone is a mirror, inviting you to stare at yourself in the triumphal scale. 

The same week in Russia, a 17-year-old girl went out in search of selfie triumph, with tragic results. She leaned out over train tracks, hoping to get “the most dramatic effect” and beat the other kids, who’ve been climbing buildings for their selfies. She lost her balance and grabbed a power line, sending 1,500 volts through her body. She died within moments. 

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Over the last century the camera has emerged and evolved as a popular art form, culminating, in this moment of the selfie. In our phones, the camera has become something other than it has ever been, demonstrating just how the technology and culture of the Internet has changed humankind.

At first, back in the 19th century, the camera was a tool exclusively for professionals. But once the point-and-shoot came out, it became a popular tool to document our lives—from the trite slideshow of your parent’s Grand Canyon trip, to the clichéd jokes about Japanese tourists. 

Then we had the camcorder, and Dad sacrificed his experience of the school play to watch the whole thing through the lens in the expectation that you would want to experience it yourself later, or maybe your aunt would when she visited. Or maybe it was just so that he could experience this fleeting moment again when you’d grown up and turned into an awful teenager. 

We started seeing the world through a lens, and we shared our view of the world.

Cameras got smaller and integrated into our phones, and thus into our pockets where they are now at all times; at nearly every moment there is a camera within three feet of your body. And in that transition, something interesting happened: We turned the camera around. 

We stopped sharing our views and started sharing our selves.

Social media gives us each the power to share our selves with the world, and so we don’t share our view of the world anymore—that would be pointless as any view in the world is merely a Google image search away. Instead, we share our view of ourselves. 

But with the loss of spontaneity, with the artifice enabled by the front-facing camera, it is not our true selves that we share. It is a manufactured self, an artificial ontology. 

When we look in the mirror of the selfie, often we are seeing not what we are, but what we want to be. And it is that aspiration that we share with others, with the full intention to deceive. To make others, at least, believe that we are as we would like to be: carefully curated, filtered, posed, and polished—no matter how spontaneous it may appear. 

And few of us likely stop to think that in sharing our pretenses we may be revealing our selves more nakedly than we ever could without all that artifice.

Photo by ComBron/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

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The social media celebrity meltdown has become a regular feature of online life and culture. Whether it’s the now infamous and seminal “#Weinergate” or the recent antics of James Franco, celebrities behaving badly on the Internet has become a cornerstone of the Internet.

Of course, celebrities are hardly the only people behaving badly on the Internet. One of the definitive characteristics of people on the Internet seems to be that they behave badly. That broader fact might suggest that celebrities (who are in fact people too, despite evidence to the contrary) simply behave badly because they are a subspecies of those notorious bad-behavers, the aforementioned “people.”

However, this latest episode with Franco suggests that in fact it’s the other way around. To some extent, we behave badly on the Internet because we are all becoming celebrities.

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I doubt I need to remind you about Weinergate. Even for those who avoid the tabloids, such as myself, it was unavoidable. Congressman Anthony Weiner DMed pics of his boxer brief-clad erection to someone on Twitter. He was forced to resign. He ran for mayor of New York. Then he did it again.

More recently, Shia Labeouf, of Transformer fame, plagiarized something. Then apologized, using plagiarized material. Then he committed an act of supposedly performance art called “I’m sorry,” in which he sat in a room with a bag over his head that said “I am not famous anymore” so people could walk through and look at him.

And just in the last 10 days, James Franco, actor and academic, tried to get a 17-year-old to go to bed with him over social media. Of course, that whole thing may be a hoax to promote his new movie, based on his own short story, which features a teacher falling for a, you guessed it, underage student. The previews started the same day the scandal broke—April 1.

But if Franco’s behavior is explained by his promo tour and Weinergate is explained by his sexaholism, Labeouf’s antics are less easy to comprehend. In the New York Times, Franco himself made an attempt, arguing that it was an instance of Labeouf rebelling against his celebrity, trying to reclaim an identity that an industry had coopted—and that this phenomenon has been behind much of the celebrity world’s most strange and nonsensical behavior.

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Hasn’t every one of us at some time in his life felt this dissonance? When we’ve been called a bully or a wimp, demonized in one of myriad ways, we have said, “No, that is not me, can’t they see who I really am? I’m the good guy.” We rarely think of ourselves in the terms others apply to us. Everyone who has ever been disliked and talked about behind her back has had to face the fact that someone, perhaps many people, are wrong about who we are.

Of course, the dissonance also occurs—if we are honest—when we are flattered and adored, but it is much easier to take under those circumstances. Then, we hope it is true, rather than insist that it is not. However, if the parade in our honor is sustained long enough and beyond all reasonable bounds, most of us, I think, will start to resent the ticker tape. Some of us will fall into the trap of believing our own hype, but many will realize that whoever is being cheered, it isn’t us.

What makes the experience of being wrongfully accused (or praised) painful is that we want to believe that we own ourselves. But we are social beings and we cannot ignore the views of others. In fact, we belong to a group. If everyone around us sees us differently than we see ourselves, we begin to question our most intimate and precious knowledge: our knowledge of ourselves. And nothing could be more threatening. If you were to discover one day that you were in fact a monster, what would you have to do about it?

We are imprisoned in other people’s expectations, and soon we find ourselves living up to other people’s expectations rather than our own. The “self” we thought we knew begins to vanish and as such, we die. Even if those expectations are positive, that gilded prison may be enjoyable at first, but it is still a prison, and the death of the self is still death.

The celebrity, according to Franco, finds himself in exactly this prison, amplified with all the force and complexity of modern society and communications technology. It is an ocean of expectation in which the mere droplet of our selves is quickly and easily lost. It is that, again according to Franco, which underlies so much destructive celebrity behavior.

And in the world of social media, is this experience becoming democratized? Are more of us, searching for more fans and followers, for some tiny sliver of fame, exposing ourselves to the same flood?

Paradoxically, it may be the flood itself that attracts some of us. Not liking what we’ve seen in the mirror already, we hope to construct a mirror far more powerful than that on our own wall, one that will show a far fairer self, whose bright light will overwhelm and extinguish the one that we see already and do not particularly care for.

If there were ever a case of being careful what you wish for… The Internet has made fame accessible, and yet fame has likely destroyed more of those who have attained it than it has truly salved.

To know thyself is the greatest wisdom of all—or at least, so the Oracle at Delphi had it. Self knowledge, like that of good and evil, is dangerous, and the question remains if we are ready to wield it.

Photos by Vanessa Lua/Flickr and Evan-Amos/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY SA 2.0) | Remix by Jason Reed 

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If the movie The Social Network is to be believed, early on in Facebook’s evolution, the company made the conscious choice to be “cool” by avoiding cheap advertising.

Well, these days, amidst reports that young people are abandoning Facebook, the dominant narrative around its most recent strategic moves is that the company is desperate to find relevance again. It should be noted, however, that the site recently replaced Google as the most trafficked service on the Internet.

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Earlier this week, virtual reality platform maker Oculus succumbed to Facebook’s mudslide of cash and stock. After raising $75 million in December, bringing the total investment in the company to $92 million, the company took $2 billion off everyone’s social network. Not bad for three months’ work.

Facebook’s own Uncle Zuck, a.k.a. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, said (in a Facebook post, naturally) that the company would continue to focus on gaming with its new toy in the short term. During his call with investors, Uncle Zuck suggested that virtual reality could be “the most social platform ever” in the long term. Also, Facebook will be using the platform in its continuing push into advertising.

Not that any of that was much of secret or a surprise to anyone. Ever.

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Immediately upon announcement, gaming forums on Reddit went straight into covering their hair with ashes and rending their clothes.

Within hours, the parody video had appeared. In just a few short years, you could wander a mall virtually with all of your Facebook friends. Obviously, what going to the mall was missing was everyone in your graduating class shoving their baby pictures in your face.

Presumably, all conversations, eye movements, and potentially thoughts will be tracked for advertising purposes.

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The thing is, the parody doesn’t seem so far fetched in a way. Virtual reality is enjoying a renaissance of sorts as the current favorite technology from movies that we thought would have happened by now that now might actually happen. (I’d still be more excited about jet packs or flying cars.) And the initial uses seem strangely… boring.

One early application lets you go to the supermarket. Surely, the whole point of the Internet, robotics, and artificial intelligence—the ultimate goal of the towering edifice of technology that humankind has painstakingly constructed since the Enlightenment is to avoid having to go to the supermarket of all possible places. I mean, if we have to deal with Skynet AND still have to go to the damn Walmart, then WHAT is the fucking point?

Another application allows you to take a virtual tour of your hotel before you go. I mean, I love real estate porn as much as the next person, but I no matter how far down the abyss of apartments I can’t afford I go, I still never, ever look at the virtual tour.

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For someone who is very happy to live a large portion of his life on the Internet, I have to say our VR future leaves me a little cold. I also went to film school and yet am completely uninterested in 3-D movies (with the notable exception of Captain EO). Partly, it’s because I have a delicate constitution and am pretty sure it would make me motion sick (be glad you’ve never tried to sleep next to me with a pea under the mattress). But really, it’s that the third dimension just doesn’t seem to add much. And it might even subtract.

Maybe, I’m right and VR, like 3-D, is going to be just a sideshow. A cute trick and a nice sideline for a niche audience.

But more likely, I’m a curmudgeonly jerk who’s wrong. When I’m living in my Matrix pod, living off an intravenous feed of Soylent, I’ll probably really enjoy every virtual open house I can get into, if only for the pixelated snack table.

Illustration by Jason Reed

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