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Only the other day, the Internet got even darker or perhaps I mean dizzier. And I'm sure you know just what I'm thinking about. Elon Musk, not long ago the richest, and now the second-richest plutocrat on this planet " if only they lived on Pluto " and Mr. Free Speech (unless he doesn't like it!) got into an imbroglio with various reporters on Twitter.
Of course, in a world where a set of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of our former president as a superhero, astronaut, and Top Gun-style pilot ("amazing ART of my Life & Career") sold out in a day for $4.5 million, nothing is too strange. And hey, what can possibly go wrong when purchasing those fabulous non-funges (??) for $99 puts you in a lottery to win a dinner at Mar-a-Lago? Travel expenses on you, of course! (Maybe it's time for me to figure out how to make some NFTs of my life & career, thrilling superhero shots of an old man in a cluttered room sitting in front of a computer screen.)
Anyway, I'm sure you noticed how Elon Musk advanced his free-speech platform by suspending the accounts of technology journalists from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, The Intercept, and other places for violating "Twitter rules" by "doxxing" him " that is, treating him in a way he didn't like. At least in part, it had to do with a website run, as the Times wrote, by "a 20-year-old college student and flight tracking enthusiast who had used Twitter to post updates about the location of Mr. Musk's private plane using publicly available information." All of this led to " you guessed it! " controversy and ever more publicity for that billionaire, including criticism from the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, which he probably loved. (He reinstated most but not all of the accounts only a day later.)
It seems all too appropriate to me to leave the last word on this incident not to some reporter, but to the New Yorker's brilliant satirist Andy Borowitz who began his piece on the subject this way:
"Shortly after Twitter suspended accounts that were tracking billionaires' private planes, including Elon Musk's, a new poll shows that most people who seek Musk's precise location are doing so to avoid him. The poll, from the University of Minnesota's Opinion Research Institute, reveals that a visceral fear of encountering Elon Musk is what drives eighty-nine per cent of those who follow his movements."
Now, as the end of this strange year approaches, I'd like to turn you over to Andy Kroll, whose new book , A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, offers a dazzling and dizzying journey into the darkest, most conspiratorial corners of the Internet. Let him leave Elon Musk in the dust (or do I mean "dox"?) of our world and take you to a planet where darkness truly does reign supreme. Tom
Lessons Learned in the Internet's Darkest Corners
A Plea for Real Connection in a "Connected" Era
By Andy Kroll
We all do it. Make little snap judgments about everyday strangers as we go about our lives. Without giving it a second's thought, we sketch minibiographies of the people we pass on the sidewalk, the guy seated across from us on the train, or the woman in line in front of us at the grocery store. We wonder: Who are they? Where are they from? How do they make a living? Lately, though, such passing encounters tend to leave me with a sense of suspicion, a wariness tinged with grim curiosity. I think to myself: Is he or she one of them?
By them, I mean one of the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of "people" I encountered during my many forays into the darkest recesses of the Internet. Despite the staggering amount of time many of us spend online " more than six-and-a-half hours a day, according to recent research " we tend to haunt the same websites and social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, CNN, Reddit, Google) again and again. Not me, though. Over the past five years, I've spent more hours than I wish to count exploring the subterranean hideaways and uncensored gathering spaces for some of the most unhinged communities on the Internet.
Call it an occupational hazard. Only recently, I published my first book, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, an investigative political thriller that opens with the 2016 street murder of a 27-year-old who had worked for the Democratic National Committee. In the absence of a culprit, Seth Rich's killing got swept into the fast-flowing conspiratorial currents of that year's presidential race, a contest that pitted an unabashed conspiracy theorist, Donald Trump, against a candidate, Hillary Clinton, who had been the subject of decades' worth of elaborately sinister claims (with no basis in reality). For my book, I set out to understand how a senseless crime that took the life of a beloved but hardly famous mid-level political staffer became a national and then international news story, a viral phenomenon of ever more twisted conspiracy theories that reached millions and all too soon became a piece of modern folklore.
To do so, I traced the arc of those Rich conspiracy theories back to their origins. In practical terms, that meant hundreds of late nights spent huddled over my desk, eyes fixed on my computer screen, clicking and scrolling my way through a seemingly endless trail of tweets, memes, posts, and videos. The Internet is, in some ways, like an ancient city, its latest incarnation resting atop the ruins of so many civilizations past. I came to think of myself then as an online archeologist digging my way through the digital eons, sifting through archived websites and seeking out long-vanished posts in search of clues and answers.
Or maybe I was a waste handler, holding my nose as I picked through piles (or do I mean miles?) of toxic detritus that littered old versions of social media sites you'd know like Twitter and Reddit, and others you probably don't, like 4chan, 8kun, and Telegram. It was there that I encountered so many of them, those faceless users, the ones I might have passed on the street, who, with the promise of anonymity, had felt unburdened to voice their unfiltered, often deeply disturbing selves. It was all id, all the time.
Who were these people? I couldn't help but wonder whether they actually believed the stuff they wrote. Or was it all about the thrill of saying it? In an unnervingly boundless online world, were they testing the boundaries of the acceptable by one-upping each other with brazen displays of racism, misogyny, or antisemitism (just to start down the list)?
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