 "Love and longing on the net")
The year coming to its close got me wondering. Who would be the most celebrated person of the year? Many names crossed my mind. And I settled upon one: Myself.
The internet had allowed me to live a different life under different circumstances in a different world. And I looked every bit the rock star of my teenage fantasies.
Much as I was in control of my virtual world, I knew I was part of a subculture comprising wackos and lonely people who said and did what they liked - uncensored, unregulated, and outside of society's norms. It was as shocking as it was innovative.
And as I quickly learned, chasing unfulfilled desires was exactly what many of the people here spent their time doing. Some characters looked like giant fluffy squirrels - which was wonderful, they told me, because there was nothing like the warm flush they felt when discovering this oddity in themselves.
For me, Second Life was like a psychologist's couch on which I could learn about myself by safely indulging my fantasies. Mine, I was pleased to find, did not involve sex. So I could free myself from the gnawing diversion. This meant that for the first time, I would be able to train all my energies on a quest for power. I planned to buy an island, and raise an army of weaponised drones that would help me occupy other lands, besides enforcing my laws (whims) on my subjects. Unfortunately, the other thing I learned about myself on Second Life, after wasting two hours just knowing how to walk, was that the learning curve was too steep to do any of those things. Or even draw my virtual abs and cheekbones right.
After practicing walking at the Welcome Area, I was approached by Camila, who helped new people. She told me I needed to upgrade my idea of a fantasy life.
So after giving me a dinner jacket, she changed into a gown and a blonde wig and teleported us to a ballroom, where we clicked on a button to dance. All these graphics were impressive, but they really were an excuse to talk about something. Once we typed to each other about how cool the dancing was, I discovered a lot about Camila's real life: her husband, her Peruvian background, her recent move to Holland. She called me "hun" a lot and LOL-ed (laughed out loud) at all my jokes. She seemed so smart and interesting, I felt pretty sure she was a 25-year-old guy living with his grandmother.
While we were walking around the ballroom, I learned that Second Life was aggressively heterosexual. Male characters would not talk to me for more than a sentence or two. In fact, when I tried to talk to a dude, he wouldn't even say hello. This may be because I opened with: "Dude, you're the biggest dork."
Such online menaces were common in the virtual world. People exercised free speech by hitting out at each other, and making the other guy cry "daddy".
I spent the next five hours with Camila as she took me to a waterfall, a snowy Christmas scene, a shipwreck and a nudist club. At some point, she offered to give me a peck on the cheek. I gave her a sheepish smile. Much as I didn't want to take it, it was damn hard to tell even a fake woman that you didn't want that peck. So I thanked her, and realised how nice she was, and how, even in Second Life, where anything was possible, I wasn't any different than in the real world.
Four days later, I went back to Second Life and found Camila. After having to remind her who I was, she gave me her real name, Marcia, and her Facebook identity. It turned out that Marcia was not only a woman but an awfully pretty one. She seemed to have a full life, just as she did on Second Life. It would have been a lot more exciting to know that before. But, I asked myself, would that have ruined the purpose of Second Life?
Tom Standage's Writing on the Wall says the social media (such as Second Life) has put the spotlight back on the individual. In the age of the mass media (films, television, newspapers), there were only a handful of celebrities we cared about. Besides, the mass media never offered much in terms of user engagement, and communication was mostly one-way. But now, with the rise of the Internet, the common man is taking the centre stage, becoming a celebrity in his/her own right. Technologies such as Facebook and Second Life welcome us to our own world (minus the real-life ugliness), and allow us to inflate our personas.
The only problem: There are too many rock stars now.
We have begun to idolise ourselves to the world at large. As a result, self-loving trends such as selfie (self-image), liftie (self-image in a lift), buttie (of a behind), and poopie (of human waste) have taken off. This has spawned an Internet generation that craves admiration.
I encountered a boy this year from Sweden. He was lurking on a video-chatting site called Omegle. There was nonsense in his room and he danced about it, making lewd gestures. He even peeled down to his underwear, and asked me to rate his bottom.
In whatever form it takes, it is clear that more people are sharing more personal images about themselves than ever before. Some think this taps into a hard-wired need to seek affirmation from our peers. That explains the boy's very natural desire to seek enhanced reputation for his bottom. Sharing intimacy reflects a need for affection, and, in the boy's case, social recognition.
I could use the same logic to explain off the rise of Tinder (smartphone dating app). Ms Namita Gupta (name changed), 22, had told me she loved the ego boost that came from being matched with someone and having him message her.
Reading her friends' Twitter feeds and watching YouTube videos, she had started feeling lonely, restless, and bored. "Sometimes I just wanted to talk to a guy so bad," she said. That is when she downloaded Tinder.
Of course, none of this is possible without the power and freedom that endow our creative and destructive faculties. The net magnifies both. I noted how invisibility had emboldened screwballs to overrun the video-chatting website.
Earlier in the year, I was looking at a hit list on a website. There were photographs of prominent people and next to each was an amount of money. The site's creator, Kuwabatake Sanjuro, thought that if you could pay to have someone murdered with no chance of being caught, you would. That's one of the reasons why he created the website, Assassination Market. There were four simple instructions on its front page:
1) Add a name to the list
2) Add money to the pot in the person's name
3) Predict when that person will die
4) Correct predictions get the pot
You can't find the Assassination Market on search engine Google. It can only be accessed with a browser called the Tor. The latter allows people to browse the Internet anonymously and securely.
Users of Tor are undetectable. So are the websites that exist as Tor Hidden Services. All these may be referred to as the deep web or the dark net.
The Assassination Market is a part of this. Here, it is impossible to know how many are predicting the deaths of eminent people. But if I correctly predict the date of the death of a former chairman of the US central bank, I will get $75,000. The amount has been put on his head by anonymous crowd-funders.
But it may seem futile. After all, it's difficult to guess someone's death date.
Which is why the Assassination Market has a fifth commandment: Making your prediction come true is entirely optional.
This means you can go out there, kill that person, and make your prediction come true. All for the bounty.
The Assassination Market is just one example of what people can do online. It gives us an insight into human nature under the conditions of freedom and anonymity. But liberty here seems to be leading us to death.
If it looks like a contradiction, you may have to face many more throughout the Internet's underworld. And it would be wrong to believe the latter is confined to the deep web only. In fact, the underworld stretches across, from the familiar world of Google, Hotmail, and Amazon, to beyond.
I had met Sachin on a website, Hack Forums, which sits on the normal web. He used remote administration tools (RATs) to spy on a computer user from afar. He would go through his victim's messages and browsing activity, and hijack the webcam to take photographs of whoever was on the other side. Abusing the victim tended to be the rule.
It's very difficult to know how many RATs are out there because of their secretive nature. Hackers often sell and auction access to women's computers. And hijacked systems are called slaves, the word highlighting the power dynamic.
The net spurs creativity. Outsiders, outcasts and lonely people are often the first to find and use technology in clever ways. The rest of us have much to learn from them.
Technology might make you feel like a rock star but it also makes bad things easier to do. Did it make me larger than life? Yes. Did it encourage my darker side? Not really. It didn't make me want to bully someone anonymously, among others. I would like to think that I am a balanced person, who went about this experiment with his eyes open. But I did become accustomed to horrible things. I saw how quickly and easily people could get sucked into dark places. If I had an inclination towards any of these behaviours, perhaps it would have encouraged me. Note: Welcome to your world, but beware the pitfalls.
The internet had allowed me to live a different life under different circumstances in a different world. And I looked every bit the rock star of my teenage fantasies.
Much as I was in control of my virtual world, I knew I was part of a subculture comprising wackos and lonely people who said and did what they liked - uncensored, unregulated, and outside of society's norms. It was as shocking as it was innovative.
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I began my year by exploring Second Life, a virtual community in which you can look however you want, do whatever you want and use the fake name you want, to make all your fantasies come true.
And as I quickly learned, chasing unfulfilled desires was exactly what many of the people here spent their time doing. Some characters looked like giant fluffy squirrels - which was wonderful, they told me, because there was nothing like the warm flush they felt when discovering this oddity in themselves.
For me, Second Life was like a psychologist's couch on which I could learn about myself by safely indulging my fantasies. Mine, I was pleased to find, did not involve sex. So I could free myself from the gnawing diversion. This meant that for the first time, I would be able to train all my energies on a quest for power. I planned to buy an island, and raise an army of weaponised drones that would help me occupy other lands, besides enforcing my laws (whims) on my subjects. Unfortunately, the other thing I learned about myself on Second Life, after wasting two hours just knowing how to walk, was that the learning curve was too steep to do any of those things. Or even draw my virtual abs and cheekbones right.
After practicing walking at the Welcome Area, I was approached by Camila, who helped new people. She told me I needed to upgrade my idea of a fantasy life.
So after giving me a dinner jacket, she changed into a gown and a blonde wig and teleported us to a ballroom, where we clicked on a button to dance. All these graphics were impressive, but they really were an excuse to talk about something. Once we typed to each other about how cool the dancing was, I discovered a lot about Camila's real life: her husband, her Peruvian background, her recent move to Holland. She called me "hun" a lot and LOL-ed (laughed out loud) at all my jokes. She seemed so smart and interesting, I felt pretty sure she was a 25-year-old guy living with his grandmother.
While we were walking around the ballroom, I learned that Second Life was aggressively heterosexual. Male characters would not talk to me for more than a sentence or two. In fact, when I tried to talk to a dude, he wouldn't even say hello. This may be because I opened with: "Dude, you're the biggest dork."
Such online menaces were common in the virtual world. People exercised free speech by hitting out at each other, and making the other guy cry "daddy".
I spent the next five hours with Camila as she took me to a waterfall, a snowy Christmas scene, a shipwreck and a nudist club. At some point, she offered to give me a peck on the cheek. I gave her a sheepish smile. Much as I didn't want to take it, it was damn hard to tell even a fake woman that you didn't want that peck. So I thanked her, and realised how nice she was, and how, even in Second Life, where anything was possible, I wasn't any different than in the real world.
Four days later, I went back to Second Life and found Camila. After having to remind her who I was, she gave me her real name, Marcia, and her Facebook identity. It turned out that Marcia was not only a woman but an awfully pretty one. She seemed to have a full life, just as she did on Second Life. It would have been a lot more exciting to know that before. But, I asked myself, would that have ruined the purpose of Second Life?
Tom Standage's Writing on the Wall says the social media (such as Second Life) has put the spotlight back on the individual. In the age of the mass media (films, television, newspapers), there were only a handful of celebrities we cared about. Besides, the mass media never offered much in terms of user engagement, and communication was mostly one-way. But now, with the rise of the Internet, the common man is taking the centre stage, becoming a celebrity in his/her own right. Technologies such as Facebook and Second Life welcome us to our own world (minus the real-life ugliness), and allow us to inflate our personas.
The only problem: There are too many rock stars now.
We have begun to idolise ourselves to the world at large. As a result, self-loving trends such as selfie (self-image), liftie (self-image in a lift), buttie (of a behind), and poopie (of human waste) have taken off. This has spawned an Internet generation that craves admiration.
I encountered a boy this year from Sweden. He was lurking on a video-chatting site called Omegle. There was nonsense in his room and he danced about it, making lewd gestures. He even peeled down to his underwear, and asked me to rate his bottom.
In whatever form it takes, it is clear that more people are sharing more personal images about themselves than ever before. Some think this taps into a hard-wired need to seek affirmation from our peers. That explains the boy's very natural desire to seek enhanced reputation for his bottom. Sharing intimacy reflects a need for affection, and, in the boy's case, social recognition.
I could use the same logic to explain off the rise of Tinder (smartphone dating app). Ms Namita Gupta (name changed), 22, had told me she loved the ego boost that came from being matched with someone and having him message her.
Reading her friends' Twitter feeds and watching YouTube videos, she had started feeling lonely, restless, and bored. "Sometimes I just wanted to talk to a guy so bad," she said. That is when she downloaded Tinder.
Of course, none of this is possible without the power and freedom that endow our creative and destructive faculties. The net magnifies both. I noted how invisibility had emboldened screwballs to overrun the video-chatting website.
Earlier in the year, I was looking at a hit list on a website. There were photographs of prominent people and next to each was an amount of money. The site's creator, Kuwabatake Sanjuro, thought that if you could pay to have someone murdered with no chance of being caught, you would. That's one of the reasons why he created the website, Assassination Market. There were four simple instructions on its front page:
1) Add a name to the list
2) Add money to the pot in the person's name
3) Predict when that person will die
4) Correct predictions get the pot
You can't find the Assassination Market on search engine Google. It can only be accessed with a browser called the Tor. The latter allows people to browse the Internet anonymously and securely.
Users of Tor are undetectable. So are the websites that exist as Tor Hidden Services. All these may be referred to as the deep web or the dark net.
The Assassination Market is a part of this. Here, it is impossible to know how many are predicting the deaths of eminent people. But if I correctly predict the date of the death of a former chairman of the US central bank, I will get $75,000. The amount has been put on his head by anonymous crowd-funders.
But it may seem futile. After all, it's difficult to guess someone's death date.
Which is why the Assassination Market has a fifth commandment: Making your prediction come true is entirely optional.
This means you can go out there, kill that person, and make your prediction come true. All for the bounty.
The Assassination Market is just one example of what people can do online. It gives us an insight into human nature under the conditions of freedom and anonymity. But liberty here seems to be leading us to death.
If it looks like a contradiction, you may have to face many more throughout the Internet's underworld. And it would be wrong to believe the latter is confined to the deep web only. In fact, the underworld stretches across, from the familiar world of Google, Hotmail, and Amazon, to beyond.
I had met Sachin on a website, Hack Forums, which sits on the normal web. He used remote administration tools (RATs) to spy on a computer user from afar. He would go through his victim's messages and browsing activity, and hijack the webcam to take photographs of whoever was on the other side. Abusing the victim tended to be the rule.
It's very difficult to know how many RATs are out there because of their secretive nature. Hackers often sell and auction access to women's computers. And hijacked systems are called slaves, the word highlighting the power dynamic.
The net spurs creativity. Outsiders, outcasts and lonely people are often the first to find and use technology in clever ways. The rest of us have much to learn from them.
Technology might make you feel like a rock star but it also makes bad things easier to do. Did it make me larger than life? Yes. Did it encourage my darker side? Not really. It didn't make me want to bully someone anonymously, among others. I would like to think that I am a balanced person, who went about this experiment with his eyes open. But I did become accustomed to horrible things. I saw how quickly and easily people could get sucked into dark places. If I had an inclination towards any of these behaviours, perhaps it would have encouraged me. Note: Welcome to your world, but beware the pitfalls.