Monday 12 May 2008

Rant 134 / If All Internet Schadenfreudes Die, The Earth Would Be Empty.

Watched 4 movies in 2 nights: just now and last night.

Only ones that deserves a mention are Untraceable and Diary of the Dead.

Untraceable was a very realistic movie in the sense that it portrayed the public reactions very accurately. So accurate that I think they broadcasted the video on the net somewhere as if it were real, just like what was seen in the movie, to get all those realistic comments.

What do I mean? What I am trying to say is that there are millions of people on the web who just enjoy watching others suffer. Schadenfreude. Instead of trying to help, the average netizen is more likely to encourage whoever is causing the pain and grief. Twisted but true. Most of us grow up in a safe and sterile environment where such behaviour is unthinkable.

But this is the Internet. Anonymity brings out the worst in humans. Without fear of reprisal, we would have the freedom to do whatever we want. This includes indulging in what we secretly like to do. In the case of these millions of internet schadenfreudes, the web is Paradise.

Even in online games we see such people often, and these people are known among gamers as griefers. When I first encountered this term, I had mistakenly believed that these people only played MMORPGs and all they did was to kill other people.

Griefers are people, in online games, go out of their way to cause unhappiness. The pursuit of unhappyness. Not only do they kill other players' ingame characters in MMOs, they will do anything else to turn other people's enjoyment into anger and frustration. This includes exploiting map bugs in FPS games to keep important doors closed, trying to get teammates killed and ruining the game in general.

It's like a goalkeeper who runs away every time the ball approaches just to piss everyone off. Except that on the web, you can't just go up to him and give him a nice and satisfying punch in the face. In fact, there is usually nothing the victims can do but complain to the authorities, like the GMs. That will result in bans, but that will merely mean a change of server/game for the griefers. No big deal for them.

Schadenfreudes prosper in anonymity. In real life, laughing at someone who got raped and murdered would be unimaginable. People would beat you up, or at least fantasize about it. On the web, the same reactions would occur, but they wouldn't know who their target is.

On the net, there is a higher degree of true freedom. For someone who truly believes in freedom, anonymity would be God. People have been fantasizing about complete anonymity a lot in recent times: the Invisible Man, Batman, Spiderman and etc.

Somehow, few stories made in the times known as Back Then had anything to do with anonymity. I believe it has to do with our subconscious acknowledgment that we are losing our freedom. From birth, we are labelled with numbers, like cattle but without the branding. Our birth certs, identity cards, passports and death certs are all examples of how "unknown" we all really are.

And with the onset of the so-called "international terrorism", governments around the world now have the excuse to use the book Nineteen Eighty-Four as an instruction manual. Just take London for example. In the busier parts of the city, there are cameras everywhere. It would take a genius to rob someone there.




To keep people from accessing a web address, the worst thing one can do is to tell them the address itself, no matter how many negative superlatives you describe it with. They wouldn't not access it to save their lives. If Curiosity is no longer able to kill the proverbial cat, it would be the greatest motivator in Man, beating Cash by a significant margin.

Be it due to the great sense of safety anonymity provides or suicidal intentions, someone in the general public will enter a website even if he/she knows accessing it will destroy the world. I can bet my soul on it.





Diary of the Dead is yet another film with many acts of human stupidity and emotional illogic. The cause of the creation of the film within the film makes no sense. He didn't need to record everything to save someones' lives; he just needs to film a zombie getting a headshot and visual evidence that it wouldn't rise again. Who the fuck would care who his friends were anyway?

Jason Creed was such an asshole I would have used a gun on his cameras, if not on him. He would be the first person I'd throw to the zombies when I need a decoy.

Yet again, Romero portrays humans as something not worth saving despite that humans triumph consistently in all his films. Maybe it wasn't his choice.

Overall, not a good film unless the viewer is a zombie fan. It just sucks when the main man really deserves to die. Like this guy.



An example of how people can joke about horrible things on the net.

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