I Miss the Old Days…

I was saddened to hear that in the aftermath of the earthquake in Japan last week there were apparently cases of people using the occasion for a few cheap laughs. I’ not referring here to the firing of Gilbert Gottfried by AFLAC because of a few insensitive tweets; that has always been Mr. Gottfried’s style of humor, and if the idea bothers them the company shouldn’t have hired him to voice their spokesduck in the first place. No, here I am referring to some roguish jokester who apparently thought it would be funny to tell the parents of a young woman living in Japan that she had been confirmed dead in the aftermath of the disaster…

You can pick up the Associated Press story off of the Toronto Star website if you want to, but the basic idea is that someone posted a message on a Google site set up for the purpose of tracking loved ones who might have been in the affected area, saying that the woman in question had been confirmed dead. It became clear that this was incorrect when the woman managed to get a text message through to her parents using a satellite phone a day or so later, and it became clear that this was a deliberate hoax (not just an informational error) when it was determined that the name signed to the “medical” report was not that of any doctor who had ever worked at the facility where the “death” supposedly occurred, and no one has been able to identify who actually posted that entry in the first place…

Now, I realize that modern-day trolls are not, for the most part, truly descendants of the hacker culture of the last century. I used to run with a group of hackers, back when the Internet was still just a gleam in DARPA’s eye and most computer exchanges were done over telephone lines using 300-baud modems and bulletin-board systems, and I can tell you that not only would we never have considered such a hoax, we wouldn’t have tolerated anyone who did. We might have attempted humor by listing Julius Caesar, Richard M. Nixon, Pope Pius IX or the AFLAC Duck among the departed, or political commentary by making entries for Wisconsin’s Public Employees’ Union or Governor Walker’s career (depending on our party affiliation), but causing somebody’s parents such a moment of heartbreak and grief isn’t just unfunny, it’s also cruel, callous and stupid – and those are just the adjectives I can print…

There was a time when being a hacker meant something; when we aspired to be the knights of the Information Superhighway, defenders of the defenseless, the conscience and the whistle-blowers of a nation (and, one day, the world). We knew it wasn’t really true, of course; just as we knew that the majority of us really were zit-faced nerds playing video games in our parents’ basements who had never had girlfriends. But it was something to believe in; something that made us more than just a bunch of poorly-socialized technology geeks with a penchant for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and vintage Mountain Dew. The interconnection of all of humanity has done some wonderful things for our world, bringing people together and creating friendships and communities where once there was only quiet desperation and loneliness, but it has also given that tiny number of truly monstrous human beings the chance to vent their spleen, hatred and cruelty onto innocent people in a time of crisis…

It makes me sad for my species, sometimes. And if this behavior is ever accepted – indeed, if it is ever greeted with anything less than a murderous rage – then our Race to the Bottom has achieved a new speed record…