Rick's May Tirade
Tale of a Virtual Village
The old place lies desolate now, like a ruined sandcastle on
a deserted beach. The day-bathers have fled; the tide rises
in the dimming light; the waves begin to lap around the
crumbling ramparts. Soon all traces of its existence will be
gone -- obliterated like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,
expunged like blacksmith shops after 1910, erased like a
quadratic equation on the blackboard in Mr. Brown's algebra
class.
The ruined sandcastle is the old Cynic's Message Board, a
cozy corner of the Internet that I had established as a
haven and meeting-place for disgruntled idealists. I built
it and, sure enough, they came: disheartened and melancholy
cynics... sharp sarcastic cynics... mirthful cynics and
bitter cynics... mischievous, earnest, rowdy, rueful, silly
and pensive cynics... genteel, scatological, lyrical,
abrasive, admirably sane and admirably demented cynics. It
was home, and we loved it.
We assembled a colorful tribe of regulars and irregulars
who became indispensable companions and confidants. Our
roster included a self-professed witch and part-time rock
singer, a member of the cinema review board for Australia,
an Irish stand-up comic, lawyers present and future, a
bouncy Southern diva and her entourage, technical writers
and construction workers, a dog-park activist, an old flame
who remained a friend, plus students, parents and bachelors
of both sexes. In the early days we had an astute Canadian
university student named Jay who eventually revealed that he
was a she; in our latter days we befriended a corporate
consultant who insisted that Walter Brennan's severed head
was speaking to him in dreams. (The late actor's detached
noggin would utter an apocalyptic pronouncement and sign off
with "Gawd bless Amurrica!") Somehow we made it
work for three-and-a-half years.
This was no mere message board, after all. It was the
cyberequivalent of a small town -- a thinking person's
Mayberry -- warm, funny, intimate, quirky and cerebral. We
shared each other's triumphs and setbacks, debated
everything from natural selection to the virtues of cheese
curls, praised and panned the latest films, and simply hung
out together on the front porch. We grumbled about work,
politics, religion, bad art, consumerism, mating, oversized
sport utility vehicles and everything else a cynic is
inclined to grumble about.
When I received the news one night that my father had
died, I sat up in the dark with only my glowing screen for
illumination, funneling my feelings onto the board so I
could commune with my tribe. When one of our Message Board
Regulars was tossed into the slammer, we banded together and
tried to cajole the local bureaucrats into liberating him.
We nursed other cynics through an assortment of domestic
disasters, dating woes, flat tires, and dyspepsias of the
spirit.
The board was an oasis, a union of diverse but kindred
souls, a brief respite from the toil and monotony of our
day-jobs. As a not-quite-hardened cynic, my heart would
instantly warm whenever I'd see that pale golden screen and
scroll down to check the latest messages. Who had posted?
What delectable absurdities would we be laughing about this
time? Could I dash off a quick response before my
clairvoyant boss sniffed me out and peeked into my cubicle?
The place was a continuous source of amazement and delight.
Now the board is a forlorn ruin, a casualty of terminal
feuding, cybervandalism and human nature in all its fevered
waywardness. You can almost hear the wind whistling where a
tribe of genial cynics used to dwell. It saddens me to the
core; at times I feel as if I've lost my entire family in a
freakish bus accident.
The Internet is a vast and curious paradox: essentially a
technogeek's medium used to promote "cool"
culture, with all the prescribed edginess of attitude that
one must adopt to attain the exalted rank of coolness. Of
course, we also see an abundance of sweaty hucksterism on
the Internet; seekers of wealth can't always afford to be
cool. And if you look hard enough, you can stumble across
boundless acres of scholarly scribbling that rival a
Nebraskan landscape for extended flatness. But let's face
it: on the Internet, cool rules. You can see it in
everything from the most primitive home pages to the
bitching brilliance of Cintra Wilson's columns for Salon
Magazine.
I had used the Internet to create something outside the
presiding cool-geek axis: a virtual village that attracted
the better sort of cynics, those who had earned their
stripes through hard experience and wounded solitary
observation. Their cynicism was more humane than the mere
sarcasm that passes for cynicism on sitcoms and, too often,
on the Internet. These were the "kinder, gentler
cynics" I had hoped to attract.
Ours was an online utopia for the disillusioned. We
couldn't see or hear one another, couldn't hunker down
around a table with mugs in our hands, couldn't clap a
fellow-cynic on the back or enjoy any of the fleshy
pleasures of real-world socializing. But our interactions
often proved more satisfying than "meatspace"
relationships, and certainly more equitable: there could be
no judgments based on superficial criteria like looks,
speech, mannerisms, clothes, class or substandard breath.
But here was the seed of a prickly problem. The ability
to identify a person by face or voice is something we take
for granted in our real-life encounters. If the person
seated across the table looks, sounds and acts like our
friend Wellington Wertz, chances are that he actually IS
Wellington Wertz. We can acknowledge his identity and get on
with business. On the Internet, the person who claims to be
Mr. Wertz could in fact be Tammy Sue Poover of Yazoo City,
Mississippi. Even if Tammy Sue is posing as herself, she
could be creating an online persona that bears little
relationship to her earthly identity. The Internet is an
ideal medium for would-be actors and chameleons; it
introduces a tricky fluidity into human boundaries.
All of us who communicate online are handicapped by the
inability to spot telltale facial cues: the appearance of a
smirk or a frown, a furtive downward or sideways glance, the
raising of eyebrows singly or in pairs. We can forget about
interpreting body language, too, since we can't see our
acquaintances leaning forward or back in their seats,
crossing their arms, scratching their chins or giving us the
fickle finger. We need all those hundreds of twitching
muscles to complete the painting; the words are only a
preliminary sketch. Without the nuances of face, voice and
body, most of the canvas must remain stark white. And
because written words are our only clues, we're forced to
read our online acquaintances as if they were paperbacks.
The Internet is changing us gradually but unmistakably,
the way TV and suburbia changed us after World War II. We
now inhabit an electronic realm of megabytes and pixels,
gaudy colors and cheesy icons; we're increasingly immune to
the subtle enticements of sunlight, woods, lakes and Chopin.
Seated in front of our incandescent screens, we fail to
notice the clouds turning dusky blue as daylight fades
outside our window. We've acquired an appetite for quick,
artificial, path-of-least-resistance stimulation; we've lost
our patience with punctuation, capital letters and other
bothersome clutter from the pre-electronic age. We might be
losing our manners, too.
The Internet allows us to shed our veneer of civility,
the glossy layer of inhibition that keeps us from acting out
our most obnoxious fantasies in public. Safely shielded from
retribution by distance, anonymity and a reasonably durable
screen, we're now free to let the furies fly -- to tweak our
online oppressors, stomp on our inferiors, skewer the
pretentious and roast our adversaries until they're dark and
crispy on the outside. We never have to worry about being
punched in the nose or whacked upside the head; a challenge
to a duel is just as unlikely. Here you see the flip side of
our new ability to create fake identities: the Internet also
gives us the freedom to be our nastiest, nakedest selves --
the people we've always been afraid to be in real life.
Sounds liberating, doesn't it? Just break that lock,
swing open the cage door and trot your inner savage outside
for some needed exercise. Let him thump his chest, fling
some spears, burn down a village or two, and collect a few
scalps for the trophy room. The problem is that the village
he burns down might be yours.
Let's return to my own burned-out ruin of a virtual
village, the old Cynic's Message Board. You're probably
wondering -- and if not, you SHOULD be wondering -- how such
a tranquil and congenial haven could have destroyed itself.
After all, it's hard to imagine tanks and flame-throwers on
the streets of Mayberry.
Here's my theory. On the Internet as in real life, some
people inevitably get on other people's nerves. They might
talk incessantly about school districts or snort like a
horse when they laugh. In real life this friction can
usually be avoided by shunning the people you perceive as
irritants. You don't invite them to your parties, you cross
the street to avoid saying hello, you make sure your kids
don't play with their kids. God forbid that you should have
to cross paths with someone who snorts like a horse.
On the Cynic's Message Board, this avoidance wasn't so
easily accomplished. Everyone was crammed into a single
tent, declaiming on one subject or another as the spirit
moved them. If you wanted to enjoy yourself, it helped if
you could develop a tolerance for bile, buffoonery and body
heat.
Remember, too, that all the occupants of our tent styled
themselves as cynics, a tribe noted for its ability to
channel unproductive anger into equally unproductive but
diverting humor. When the channeling mechanism broke down,
as it sometimes would, all you had was the anger.
The close quarters and temperamental tendencies, combined
with the liberating effect of the Internet on our public
inhibitions, pointed to the possibility that the volatile
mixture could eventually explode. Now all we needed was a
catalyst.
The Diva arrived in our midst like Tigger bouncing into
the Hundred-Acre Wood. She was sunny and loquacious,
vociferously devoted to her young husband and, like many of
her show-business compatriots, prone to frequent and
aggressive self-promotion. She even came equipped with her
own entourage of loyal retainers who willingly jumped into
the message board conversation.
I thought the Diva contributed warmth and color to the
proceedings, but some of the veteran cynics weren't amused;
they accused her of effusive rambling and offensive
braggadocio. Two factions quickly formed on the board, with
the Diva and her entourage on one side, and a nucleus of
irate veterans on the other. As war clouds loomed over the
sanctuary, the News to End All News suddenly broke: the Diva
had ELOPED with one of our resident cynics! (Clearly her
marriage wasn't all she had claimed it to be, and just as
clearly her Romeo wasn't one of the irate veterans.)
The message board survived the verbal hellfire that
nearly consumed it in the ensuing weeks, but just barely.
Behind their protective shields, both factions escalated the
verbal abuse to levels unseen in more mundane venues; they
pelted each other relentlessly and without fear of real-life
reprisal. Finally, in a hasty attempt to expunge an
incriminating insult, the Diva inadvertently erased the
entire message board archives. For the veteran faction, that
was the newspaper that finally toppled the stack: the Diva
was hounded off the board.
They underestimated her. Like Richard Nixon and Silly
Putty, this woman was made of incredibly resilient stuff.
She'd bounce back from time to time and gamely try her luck
on the board, hoping for either forgiveness or
forgetfulness. For that matter, I'd invite her for an
occasional encore when I detected an ominous lull in the
general conversation.
This habit of mine didn't sit well with the veterans. So
sensitized were they to this woman's idiosyncrasies that she
could have provoked a new war simply by adding an extra
exclamation point at the end of a sentence. The insults
flew, and invariably I'd end up in the crossfire, accused of
favoring one side or the other.
I've never been able to fathom why some people should
find other people so irritating. Maybe I'm an irritating
sort of person myself, so it takes a truly obnoxious
individual of world-class caliber to impress me. For
whatever reason, I seem to be unusually tolerant of other
people's quirks and peccadilloes. I'm one of those cynics
who rail against human degeneracy but can't help liking most
of the individual Clydes and Clarissas who comprise the
species. That's my misfortune.
The final crisis commenced last month with the Diva's
most recent resurrection. As soon as she made her entrance
one of our veterans abruptly jumped ship, followed by
another. Once again the dogs of war were loosed upon the
board; both factions dug in and aimed for nothing less than
total annihilation. Sharp volleys of vilification boomed
across the screen, startling the younger cynics and drawing
me once again into the crossfire as I pleaded with both
sides to stop the abuse.
But this was no ordinary Diva war. This time an unseen
hand was accelerating the carnage with a new and obscene
tactic: inflammatory insults falsely posted under the names
of combatants on both sides. The targets of these
pseudo-posts would strike back at their presumptive
assailants, escalating the war until the message board was
poisoned beyond all prospects of recovery. Both sides began
posting long threads of gibberish to knock the enemy's posts
off the board; the place had gone hopelessly, terminally
mad.
There was still more destruction at hand: now some
anonymous arsonist crippled the warring board by depositing
the entire Yahoo! home page on our premises. If you tried to
post a message, you'd end up somewhere in the fields of
Yahoo-land. I summoned Steve, our intrepid server chieftain,
who came to our aid and removed the offending search engine.
But within days it happened again, this time with Alta
Vista. A day later it was Yahoo! all over again.
This was agony; it was like watching Old Yeller in the
last stages of his madness, snarling and foaming at the
mouth. Finally I e-mailed Steve and told him that if anyone
sabotaged the board again, it would be time to put this old
dog to sleep.
It happened within hours. Our resident idiot-savant, an
unapologetic teenage hacker who called himself Oxygenboy,
found a wallpaper collage of colorful toy airplanes and
managed to mount it on the board, complete with black
background and links flashing like neon lights.
This was the end. With a pet-owner's mixture of regret
and relief, I gave Steve the command to administer the
lethal injection.
And so the original Cynic's Message Board winked into
history, obscure and irretrievable, done in by a combination
of ego, intolerance, invective, sabotage, and a Chief Cynic
who tried to walk down the middle of the road with traffic
buzzing in both directions. But in its happier days the old
board was an Enchanted Place: a simple electronic screen
transformed into a virtual village filled with life, lust,
wit and wisdom, anger and regret, fevered visions and
riotous inspired lunacy -- and the almost palpable warmth of
the personalities who materialized upon the pale golden
screen.
Too bad they couldn't get along. Maybe it was too much to
expect that cynics could get along with anyone, including
themselves. But the board was a thing of beauty while it
lasted, at least most of the time.
There will be a new message board, password-protected and
filled with the kinds of gadgets that appeal to the
technophile mind. Fragmented into structured topics, it
won't be the free-and-loose virtual village that we came to
love. It certainly won't be Mayberry, though many of our old
neighbors undoubtedly will be visiting.
The new message board will simply be a message board, an
efficient communication tool for the world's disgruntled
idealists. Nothing more, nothing less. And perhaps that's as
it should be.
