The Not Same Consequences

Have you been following the story about Jessi Slaughter and her dad against the internet? It’s as complicated as it is disturbing, and it ends with the 11-year-old Jessi, who lives in Florida and whose real last name is not Slaughter, being placed under police protection. But here goes: Jessi had an active online presence, posting messages, pictures, and videos on Tumblr and Myspace page, Youtube and a crowd-sourced “tween” site called Sticky Drama, which promotes itself as “The #1 Tabloid About Internet Celebrities and Social Network Gossip!” (I’m already way out of my depth here.) She was a fan of the techno group Blood On the Dancefloor.

On July 10, someone going by the name “tdomf_e8e13” wrote an article on Sticky Drama claiming that Jessi was romantically involved with Blood On the Dancefloor singer Dahvie Vanity, who is 25 years old. Jessi wrote a response denying the claim. Comments to both posts were as ridiculous and cruel as the internet can get. Jessi then recorded a shockingly vulgar and vitriolic webcam video addressed to her “haters” and put it up on Youtube. The video found its way onto image-sharing site 4chan’s gleefully amoral, aggressively puerile “random” board, /b/. (I am now even deeper out of my depth; I learned a lot about the internet today, much of it thanks to a site called Know Your Meme and Ryan Broderick’s reporting on The Awl.) The web-savvy users of 4chan are notorious for wrecking havoc on the internet—they are reportedly the genesis of the once ubiquitous “rickroll” prank. Apparently amused by Jessi’s rant, and hoping to prompt more, some of them organized an effort to harass her. Her real name and address and phone number were posted. A wave of crank calls ensued, and people—pizza delivery guys, prostitutes—showing up at the house. And, reportedly, death threats. (Police are investigating, and guarding the house. Meanwhile, 4chan users have since launched side campaigns against Dahvie Vanity and Gawker’s Adrien Chen, who wrote about the story on Friday. A coordinated denial-of-service attack successfully shut down operations at Gawker for a short time Tuesday. Cyber warfare is nasty, powerful business.)

As you’d expect, Jessi freaked out. She made and posted more video—desperate, sobbing, please for mercy—but the torment continued. And then her father joined her in one of the videos. Enraged, also clearly freaked out, he pointed directly into the camera and addressed the invisible hordes who had so quickly upended his family life. “Ya dun goofed,” he said, threatening legal action:

“This is from her father. You bunch of lying, no-good punks, and I know who it’s coming from because I’ve backtraced it and I know who is emailing and doing it and you’ll be reported to the cyber police and state police, so you better not write one more thing or screw with my computer again! You’ll be arrested. End of conversation. FROM. HER. FATHER. And if you come near my daughter, guess what, consequences will never be the same!”

Of course this only made the situation worse. The video with the father become a meme—viewed by millions, mocked, spoofed and used as fodder in a way similar to what happened with Kanye West’s interruption of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at last year’s MTV Video Awards show. Within days, “Ya dun goofed!” T-shirts were available for sale.

It’s a sad story. And one of those that points to the struggle people have keeping up with the changes technology brings to the world. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal wrote a good piece about it called “The Helplessness of a Father in the Internet Age.” He writes,

“Parents want to protect their children, but a precondition of that is being able to know what or who the threat is. Father and daughter alike are now living inside one of those nightmares where the thing that’s out to get you remains perpetually just out of sight and reach. FROM. HER. FATHER. Those words used to mean something. Mostly it meant, ‘I’m a full-grown man and I’m willing to use physical force to stop you from hurting my kid, you punk kid.’ But who is the man in this video going to scare? Everyone knows his threats are empty, that he’s bluffing and helpless. And he does, too, which must make it all the more enraging.”

Without wanting to come down on a little girl and a family who found themselves in a really awful situation, the first question that struck me was, Why wouldn’t these people turn off the computer? Once internet use is leading to tears and upset, it seems like the first thing to do is make the screen go dark. Thinking about it more, maybe it’s not that easy. I wonder if this points to a future the paranoids among us already suspect is coming: a time when we really can’t turn off the computers, because we rely on them for food and air and safety and stuff. (On a larger scale, of course, that time is already here. Like, we wouldn’t want the computers to go off at the Nuclear power plants.) But maybe that time is already here in lots of ways on the personal level, too. Maybe for this family, with the attacks coming in over phone and at the door, the thought of turning off the computer, the main information source, would have just made it all the more frightening. Like, There are these people out there talking about us, plotting against us—we need to monitor them, and in fact, strike out in defense. Maybe the dark screen would feel like a blindfold in that situation. And your enemies are out there, targeting your family with infrared vision.

Yeesh! Creepy. Here’s hoping to never find out.