Essay: "No Real Limits of Any Kind"

For those of you who haven't heard of it, the computer program "Steam" is like a combination between an online video game store and a social networking site. So you buy your games through the program and then when you play them online, you can add people you play with to your friends list and then chat with them and set up games later. A number of extremely unusual people have "friended" me through Steam after a successful round of Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead, but surely the most unusual is a young man who I know as "Turtle."



I accepted Turtle's friend request because he seemed like a good enough guy to kill zombies with, meaning that he didn't shoot his own teammates or go running off by himself and get pounced by a Hunter or play the soundtrack to "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" through his microphone at high volume. Over the next few weeks, Turtle sent me all sorts of questions about all kinds of things, including his homework, and it became clear that he was a pretty nerdy Jewish high school kid from California. I kind of felt like he might lonely, and so I would usually chat with him for a while if he messaged me.

Eventually, our correspondence grew more ironic on his part, as he asked me questions to which he seemed to know the answer, as if he was trying to get a response. Eventually he also became incredibly racist - his nicknamed changed from "Turtle" to "That N***** Turtle" or to "That K*** Turtle." This concerned me, but not too much. The Internet is a cesspool and it's not my job to babysit it and I guess I wasn't offended enought to defriend him. I was curious however, so I finally asked him about it. Was he really racist? And he told me no, he just did it for "teh lulz." And then he provided me with an link to the definition of "lulz" on a website called "Encyclopedia Dramatica."

If you decide to google Encycolpedia Dramatica, I simply won't be held accountable for what you might see. It is the asshole of the Internet; basically a politically incorrect parody of Wikipedia that is racist, sexist, and homophobic, and that contains a number of images from shock websites. Although the racism and such is presumably not sincerely intended, it's tough to say what is intended. The website doesn't seem to have any higher purpose than to be deliberately offensive.

Encyclopedia is linked to the Internet community of Anonymous (specifically, the "/b/" message board on 4chan, a notorious Internet forum). Anonymous isn't really a community so much as it is a label adopted by some who like to "troll": that is, post off-topic or incendiary messages intending to either derail an on-topic discussion or to provoke an emotional reaction. Not all trolls are members of Anonymous, of course, but Anonymous (with its endless in-jokes and elaborate rules of etiquette) provides a kind of ideology for trolling, or the search of "lulz" (defined, for those who are interested, as the provocation of an "exchange between the sensitive and the cruel" in order to achieve the "joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium").

You can see how this would be gratifying to high school nerds, used to being tormented and powerless. On the Internet you have no power over anyone else, but no one else has any power over you. Your freedom is unlimited. You can do anything and no one can touch you. Rule 30 of Anonymous' Rules of the Internet states fairly: "No real limits of any kind apply here - not even the sky." That's the power of being anonymous.

What to think of all this? Is it bad or good? Am I offended by Encyclopedia Dramatica, by its appalling racism and sexism? Or do I think it performs some kind of useful function, a check on the sometimes stifling culture of political correctness?

The real answer is it doesn't matter what I think. One of the secrets of the Internet is that it is a place where anger is a useless emotion. Anyone who has ever gotten into a fight on an Internet forum (which I think is probably most of us) has realized this. If you are arguing with a troll, you have already lost, because while you were trying to be right, they were just trying to disrupt your equilibrium. Internet trolls, Anonymous, and Enyclopedia Dramatica stand outside the power of any such judgments and to feel anything towards them at all is to give them power over you. Remember Rule 30 - it's just how things go on the Internet.