Well, a year and change goes by quickly. It’s been a good year and change despite the fact that my desire to express myself has felt fairly diminished. Last time I wrote that I wanted to talk about a really cool record, and that’ll happen next time as I’ve been revisiting it lately. It won’t be another year and change this time. I think.
This time, I wanted to talk about a weird, specific phenomenon I’ve noticed amongst certain circles of internet gaming discussion. The audience here is a little “normie” by the standards of the hobby, and I’ve noticed it primarily where we all know only the most scintillating discussion happens. It’s a beautiful place, full of nuance and people engaging in good faith with the Western tradition of spirited debate on which the foundation of healthy adult discourse is formed.
I’m talking, of course, about comments on TikTok!
This is an example of what I run across on TikTok all the time, and it demonstrates perfectly a few things about this stupid fucking app that bring me pause:
That guy also can’t grow facial hair on his philtrum. We’re so alike.
AI-generated Anton Chigurh in the gas station during the coin flip scene instead of just using an example from google images. It would take 3 seconds.
Point #3 is what really bothers me about TikTok. If a concept gets popular on TikTok, it will get ripped off. It will get repeated. No attempt to put an original spin on whatever the idea was will be made. It’s just “here’s that joke you saw someone else do it, but now you’re seeing me do it!” It’s the equivalent of the theater kids coming to school on monday so they can repeat the exact lines Rachel Dratch said on Saturday to their own thunderous applause.
What’s happening in the screenshot is a little more insidious [to me] though.
What’s happening in the comments is somewhere between a shared delusion and the repetition of a joke for the millionth time over. I have seen this so absurdly often that it makes me wonder if these people actually believe, en masse, that they were threatened by an adult on Xbox Live back in the day.
Was it possible? Of course. Connections on Xbox Live were peer-to-peer back then, and Wireshark (née Ethereal) existed, so you absolutely could packet-sniff your way into pulling someone’s IP. Do I believe that there were enough people out there who both knew how to do that, had the free time with which to do so, and also chose to spend that knowledge and time threatening 12 years olds on Call of Duty 4?
Fuck no.
Furthermore, just because you had someone’s IP didn’t mean you’d know their teacher’s name. You’d get a city and state, but the IP is handed out by your ISP. When you reboot your router, you get a new WAN IP anyway, so it’s not like your IP address is tied to your identity forever.
Lastly, if they could pull a name, it would have been one of your parents’, since presumably their name is on the bill. Could you do enough cross-referecing with an IP, general location, and name to track someone down these days? Almost certainly, but the world of today is not the world of 20 years ago. Hell, even 10 years ago.
Has this happened? Absolutely.
Has it been used to threaten or bring violence to women and kids? I’m sure of it. There’s a lot of fuckin’ creeps and bad actors out there.
Has it happened so many times that thousands upon thousands of kids all have the exact same story that they reminisce on with apparent glee? I really don’t think so. If I was, as the commenter here says, so freaked out as a fifth grader that some adult had my location, I don’t think I’d be yucking it up about it on TikTok. I’d shudder, thank my lucky stars I didn’t get pulled into a van, and wonder how the hell that even happened in the first place.
I was a teenager and college-aged during the famed Golden Era of Xbox Live. Sure, I ran across my fair share of weirdos and creeps, especially before my sack had fully dropped. Adults definitely do love talking shit to a pipsqueaked little asshole on the other end of a headset. Kids are stupid, and easy to scare, but I don’t think the dude taking bong rips of some hot late 2000s-era reggie and wondering where the “bitches” (his words, probably) might be at any particular moment was firing up a packet-sniffer to find their IP addresses and track down their Xanga.
Now, obviously some of this is just dead internet. Some of it is bot traffic because the internet is no longer a place for humans to gather and discuss, but rather a tool to command the behaviors of vulnerable people and volatile markets. If you can amass enough compute and point it in the right directions, you can use artificial discourse to generate human discourse.
The internet is no longer a place for like-minded individuals to create subcultures or participate in existing ones. The internet is a place to share in a delusion that something happened that almost certainly didn’t. It’s a place to stare in the mirror while the person looking back at you doesn’t stare back. It doesn’t mimic your every move.
The person staring back at you isn’t a person, but an entity, jingling the proverbial keys in front of your face and asking if you’ve got it yet. And guess the fuck what? You haven’t. But you want to. You want to get it. So you repeat the lines that speak to you the most. You pretend. You participate in the discourse. You do the puppet man’s dance.
My point is, you were in all probability not doxxed and threatened on Xbox Live in the late aughts. You can imagine what it’d be like if you had, though. For some folks out there, I guess maybe that’s close enough.
