Misnomers

I am going to break two of my cardinal rules  at once over the course of this post, for it is the first in the history of this blog that could be adequately described as a whinge. I have something of a personal hatred against these on principle that they never improve anybody’s life or even the world in general, but I’m hoping that this one is at least well-meaning and not as hideously vitriolic as some ‘opinion pieces’ I have had the misfortune to read over the years.

So…

A little while ago, the BBC published an article concerning the arrest of a man suspected of being a part of hacking group Lulzsec, an organised and select offshoot of the infamous internet hacking advocates and ‘pressure group’ Anonymous. The FBI have accused him of being part of a series of attacks on Sony last May & June, in which thousands of personal details on competition entries were published online. Lulzsec at the time made a statement to the effect that ‘we got all these details from one easy sting, so why do you trust them?’, which might have made the attack a case of trying to prove a point had the point not been directed at an electronics company and was thus kind of stupid. Had it been aimed at a government I might have understood, but to me this just looks like the internet doing what it does best- doing stuff simply for the fun of it. This is in fact the typical motive behind most Lulzsec activities, doing things ‘for teh lulz’, hence the first half of their name and the fact that their logo is a stick figure in typical meme style.

The BBC made reference to their name too in their coverage of the event, but since the journalist involved had clearly taken their information from a rather poorly-worded sentence of a Wikipedia article he claimed that ‘lulz’ was a play on words of lol, aka laugh out loud. This is not, technically speaking, entirely wrong, but is a bit like claiming the word ‘gay’ can now be used to mean happy in general conversation- something of an anachronism, albeit a very recent one. Lulz in the modern internet sense is used more to mean ‘laughs’ or ‘entertainment’, and  ‘for teh lulz’ could even be translated as simply ‘for the hell of it’. As I say, the argument was not expressly wrong as it was revealing that this journalist was either not especially good at getting his point across or dealing with slightly unfamiliar subject matter.

This is not the only example of the media getting things a little wrong when it comes to the internet. A few months ago, after a man was arrested for viciously abusing a celebrity (I forget who) using twitter, he was dubbed a ‘troll’, a term that, according to the BBC article I read, denotes somebody who uses the internet to bully and abuse people (sorry for picking on the BBC because a lot of others do it too, but I read them more than most other news sources). However, any reasonably experienced denizen of the internet will be able to tell you that the word ‘troll’ originated from the activity known as ‘trolling’, etymologically thought to originate from fishing (from a similar route as ‘trawling’). The idea behind this is that the original term was used in the context of ‘trolling for newbies’, ie laying down an obvious feeder line that an old head would recognise as being both obvious and discussed to its death, but that a newer face would respond to earnestly. Thus ‘newbies’ were fished for and identified, mostly for the amusement of the more experienced faces. Thus, trolling has lead to mean making jokes or provocative comments for one’s own amusement and at the expense of others, and ‘troll’ has become descriptive of somebody who trolls others. Whilst it is perhaps not the most noble of human activities, and some repeat offenders could definitely do with a bit more fresh air now and again, it is mostly harmless and definitely not to be taken altogether too seriously. What it is also not is a synonym for internet abuse or even (as one source has reported it) ‘defac[ing] Internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to families’. That is just plain old despicable bullying, something that has no place on the internet or the world in general, and dubbing casual humour-seekers such is just giving mostly alright people an unnecessarily bad name.

And here we get onto the bone I wish to pick- that the media, as a rule, do not appear to understand the internet or its culture, and instead treat it almost like a child’s plaything, a small distraction whose society is far less important than its ability to spawn companies. There may be an element of fear involved, an intentional mistrust of the web and a view to hold off embracing it as long as possible, for mainstream media is coming under heavy competition from the web and many have argued that the latter may soon kill the former altogether. This is as maybe, but news organisations should be obliged to act with at least a modicum of neutrality and respectability, especially for a service such as the BBC that does not depend on commercial funding anyway. It would perhaps not be too much to ask for a couple of organisations to hire an internet correspondent, to go with their food, technology, sports, science, environment, every country around the world, domestic, travel and weather ones, if only to allow issues concerning it to be conveyed accurately by someone who knows what he’s talking about. If it’s good enough for the rest of the world, then it’s surely good enough for the culture that has made mankind’s greatest invention what it is today.

OK, rant over, I’ll do something a little more normal next time out.

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Life is not just a body

Today, I am in a bad mood. When I get into this particular bad mood, my thoughts turn a little dark. So, as such, this post is going to be on the subject of death.
People die all the time- just about the only certainty of anyone’s existence is that it’s going to happen eventually. Death is perfectly necessary, and for most humans living in the developed world, it happens after a long and hopefully fulfilling time on this earth. In fact, across nature this is a fairly established pattern- if a wildebeest survives to be full-grown, it’s likely that, barring illness or injury, it will continue to live until it is old enough to become a prime target for the lions again. Another regularly occurring feature is the method of death- animals die either of disease, or they are hunted and killed- this is the natural cycle. However, humans are the exception to the rule, as we have taken death and killing to an entirely new level.
The most obvious example of this is pure, cold-blooded murder. Humans are not the only species to fight and kill one another over, for example, a mate, but they are the only race to commit pure slaughter of innocents on such a massive scale as has been done. Psychopathic killings, grotesque genocides- many times throughout human history killing innocent people has been done for no justifiable reason. The Nazi genocides were of course the worst example of this- millions upon millions of people, innocent of any crime, were slaughtered like worthless animals simply for being different to a perverted image of perfection.
With its prevalence in everyday culture, the true impact of actually killing someone can often be forgotten. Consider it for a moment. You are the killer, faced with an innocent figure, begging you for their life. They have a life, maybe a family. They are a person just like you or I. They have hopes, dreams, emotions- they could be a wonderful person, do amazing things, help other people.  Once they are gone, all that can never be. You have removed someone’s child, someone’s parent. You have removed someone’s protector, someone’s friend. By removing them, you are abandoning their friends, their partners, their relatives, leaving them alone without a shoulder to lean on. When one really thinks about it, human beings can be truly amazing, capable of doing truly amazing things. Now, ask yourself- how is anybody capable of taking a perfectly innocent life?
Notice how all the above points make no reference to the destructive effect on the body- the real crime of a murder is not the destruction of their vehicle to live and breath, but the destruction of their ability to think and, in a more philosophical sense, be. There is something truly and deeply inhuman about idea of deliberately targeting a fellow human being’s soul to be forced to undergo the most horrible atrocities against its nature, to be battered and bent and destroyed. And that is why there are two other crimes I wish to talk about here that I believe, loosely, to be in the same bracket as murder.
The first of these is torture (and also, for much of the same reasons, rape). For anyone who hasn’t read it already, I refer you to part 3 of George Orwell’s ‘1984’. For everyone who has read it already, read it again- it’s a great read and I always thought that his descriptions of the effects of torture were especially accurate. Orwell makes a very telling point- the torture does not stop when Winston’s body is battered and destroyed- it stops when he surrenders his will. At that point, he has ceased to be Winston Smith, a man under his own control- his very being has been bent into the party doctrine. One does not even have to force the surrender for torture to be the basest of crimes- deliberately causing another human being to hurt and suffer. Deliberately making the life of another worse to the point of mental collapse, another person like yourself… now there is inhuman.
The last of the three crimes in this bracket is somewhat far removed from the other two, and is certainly not as severe a crime as either- it is defamation of character, ie formulating lies about another person in order to make them social rejects and generally ruin them. This varies widely in scale, from simple bullying (something else I have an obsessive hatred of on principle), to… well go onto BBC iPlayer, watch the latest episode of Sherlock and you get the idea- its a far more effective and complete victory than murder ever would be. The really interesting thing about this is the effect that it has on the mind. Loneliness is never noted as being a good thing for one’s mental health, but when it is combined with the knowledge that it is perpetuating for as long as you remain in the same sphere of existing, it is enough to drive you insane. Knowing that you are innocent of what is being said, and yet simultaneously having that fact thrown back into your face at every turn sends the mind into a spiral of confusion and chaos, ruining someone from the inside out. It may seem like something completely alien from the inhuman atrocities of torture and murder, and when it is performed ineffectually its effect is trifling. But doing it properly, to the right target in the right way, watching all the structure of the life they lead crumble about them, is one of the most destructive forces to target the mind.
I don’t really know why I wrote this, or if it sounds like some disjointed ramble or not (if it does, please comment and say so). But this has been going round my head for the past 24 hours, and I kind of needed to get it off my chest. My apologies for the dark subject matter, I’ll try to be more light-hearted next time