Hackers on Steroids (33 page)

The world of the interactive Internet is filled with little pricks like that, and I eventually became one of those little pricks myself. In my lust for troll blood, as it were, I helped to wrongly dox a completely innocent young man, an utterly harmless lad that my gross idiocy and bungling led me to wrongly declare as a certain troll who is not just a complete psychopath, but a paedophile as well. Once the word went out that this innocent young man was thought to be this certain troll his parents were contacted, his college was informed, hate pages were being made about him and his dox was being posted all around different anti-trolling groups. There was even talk of resurrecting the packages for him. And then the horror dawned on me that it had all been a terrible mistake. I spent weeks cleaning up that mess, but who the fuck cares? I had no right to do any of it, no right at all, and from then on I deeply, deeply regretted having ever become any sort of a cybervigilante at all. That was truly the end of my doxing days. King dickhead, that was me.

My raging hatred for the worst of the trolls had led me to myself become the tormentor of a completely innocent person. Innocent people at the end of such allegations as I took it upon myself to level at that lad have been known to kill themselves. Those still wanting to play Batman on the Internet – including those in the moralfag wings of Anonymous, who seem to think of themselves as invincible doxers supreme and yet have a serious strain of dickwittery running through many of their members - need to think hard about whether they could themselves live with something like that happening because of them. For this is most certainly the truth: the longer you go on trying to dox people – and no matter how good and how careful you think you are as regards it - the more certain it gets that you are going to ‘out’ the wrong people. Without any doubt at all, it will happen.

Take with a very large pinch of salt any dox that is spilled on the Internet: in my experience the vast majority of it is widely off the mark, many times maliciously so.

The trolls named in this book are all trolls whose identities have long been established beyond all doubt, and in most cases even admitted. After that gross error of mine I had to look at what I had become, and the bigger picture of what I was involved in. I remember a man telling me a story about a neighbourhood watch group he was once a part of. It started off well and had put an end to much of the teenage vandalism that a housing estate was enduring at the time. But then he attended a meeting at which the leaders of the group started talking about taking upon themselves the power to walk into people’s homes at random to check if their kids were doing their homework. He just got up and walked out of that meeting and never returned to another.

In the summer of 2010 what became something of a cause célèbre for the Internet took place. A 11-year-old girl from Florida calling herself Jessie Slaughter was targeted by legions of trolls from 4Chan over some stupid Youtube videos she had made, one of which contained a promise to ‘pop a glock’ in someone’s mouth. After a sustained troll campaign of harassment against the child and her family appeared a now infamous video in which she sobs uncontrollably about all that is happening while her father launches into an apoplectic and utterly clueless tirade against the tormentors of his family, coming out with a string of remarks which have now become established Internet memes. ‘Cyberpolice,’ ‘backtraced,’ ‘Consequences will never be the same,’ and, most famously of all, ‘You done goofed,’ have all taken their place in cyber folklore. Watching the video at the time, and even knowing the story that lay behind it all, I still couldn’t help laughing so very hard as that man ranted helplessly against an Internet he could never understand. I just laughed and laughed so much.

In the midst of unconquerable black seas in solitude on a rock we find ourselves in the belly of an inexplicable monstrosity. Mankind with all its futile imaginings is nothing more than a beast born of death and to death will it also inevitably succumb to; a speck of foam in the maelstrom of time and space. Taking into account much of what I have witnessed in the past few years, I think now that that sure and certain annihilation of the species may not be such a bad thing. There is no phantom from the sky coming to save the children from a countless multitude of devils shaped in the same mould as Paolo Ghelardini; it is only the devils who are real. And we’re all each of us in this world so fragile, ready to cross that thin line between life and death at any given moment and have the soil claim us. There are those already drowning slowly in that soil; not-quite dead things themselves gnawing on the bones of the dead for the only nourishment they can find. They won’t let the dead sleep in peace for they seek by this to steal some life from the living so as to make they themselves forget, just for a while, that they lie dying in graves of their own making.

It won’t end. The names of dead children will continue to be fed into the Internet machine for the sadists and the professional mourners to claim ownership of. The Internet machine will itself continue to help generate dead children for its own self to feed on. Children will die, incidents of trolling will happen, the media will ask some more questions, the PR robots will be turned on in response and the clean corporate machine will continue to glisten as brightly as the smiles that go along with it. And then as the world turns in its orbit more girls going to meet ‘boys’ they found online ending up being found dead in fields or in deserts, and all as the workings of the child pornography factory continue to hum away quite silently under the much louder noise of billions of dollars’ worth of social networking stock being bought and sold. I was so naïve at one early stage in all of this that I believed that all which had to be done was to get the media to report on RIP trolling and change in social networks would be forced. I was as innocent as a child in that belief. Nothing is really going to change at all, except maybe that it all is just going to get worse and worse. To look into the horribly schizophrenic mind of the Internet is to perceive in the most modern and awe-inspiring of technologies the still-primitive race which built it. Technology is helping to bring the psyche of mankind back closer to the nightmare of the cave rather than awakening us further from it. To get a vision of the Internet as it now is, picture a horde of painted savages howling, anonymous and bearing spears and chasing a frightened boy through a burning forest as a great white shell lies smashed into a thousand fragments beside the spot where an endless line of children wait to have monstrous rocks dropped upon their heads.

“‘Fun and games,’ said the officer.”

The wind is screeching like the portentous warning of a banshee as I walk home under images of stars as they were past years ago. The scent of the wet asphalt feels like warm rain in my nose, and I love that smell as it reminds me of playing outside as a child after a period of being imprisoned in the house by a downpour. It smells of a freedom to me, and I am going to be free of all the worrying and all the dramas that come along with delving too deeply into the horror of man’s collective brain. I looked so deep because I raged so hard, but even anger like that burns out after a time in the rain. I’m done with it all. I just reach the house as it starts to pour again from the godless heavens and from inside I watch the rain rapping on the window, its heavy wet fingerprints leaving little spiral galaxies where the orange streetlight meets the pane and makes the water droplets appear like a myriad of distant lights seen in tiny clusters, the galaxies crashing into other galaxies to become obliterated and then reborn between the swarming shadows made by a row of oscillating coniferous trees that seems to move about wildly in the night and in the wind like pitch-black demons insane and chained. Dark puddles are running into the drains on the road to be sucked then into the sewers flowing always and forever beneath us and in which the thoughts of ghouls and paedophiles begin.

End