I made my first youtube video! It’s not good, but I made it. This post contains the script I wrote for it.
Content Warning: Discussion of violence, suicide, murder, death
Recently a creator I follow, Jawn Louis, posted the following thought on youtube:
I’m someone trying to get into making cultural/political content. I don’t show my face.
Now I get where Jawn is coming from. I actually don’t think you should trust anyone, regardless of the amount of face involved, but I thought I’d offer my perspective on why I choose not to show mine.
Whenever I think about about this topic, I think about Yuu Yuu Hakusho. (If you’re not familiar, it’s one of the best anime ever made. It was on Adult Swim back in 2002. Go watch it.) The third of a total of four arcs in the series is called the Chapter Black Saga, named after an item in the arc called Chapter Black–a video tape containing thousands of hours of the absolute worst of humanity.
If you’ve been on the internet as long as I have, you have may have realized that Chapter Black isn’t really fictional. It exists today, right now, in the real world. It’s just that it’s spread out in bits and pieces across the internet. These pieces lurk like little spiders, waiting in these dark corners for unsuspecting victims to reach an exploratory hand into their lairs.
I got my first computer in 1999 when I was still in middle school. It wasn’t long before I was downloading songs off of Kazaa and playing them in winamp. By the time I was thirteen or fourteen I was introduced to a particular website, probably by edgelord teenagers from some online game I had been playing, that probably changed me forever: rotten.com. For some people just hearing that name is enough.
Rotten had extremely graphic images and videos of real violent deaths. Some of the images are still burnt into my mind twenty years later. Morbid curiosity got the better of me, and I would click through the images until I found something that disturbed me enough that I’d have to stop. I continued playing this game of chicken with myself until the time I saw a video of a man beating a woman to death in an elevator. The images on the site were one thing, but this video was another. I can’t really explain it. It wasn’t particularly gruesome, but it was extremely visceral. It can’t have been very long because my 56K modem wouldn’t have allowed it, but it felt like it went on for hours. It felt more real than anything I’d seen before. The night I watched it, I had nightmares about it. When I woke up, I still couldn’t get the images out of my head. I was shaken to my core. It was probably the first time in my young life that I felt such a deeply unpleasant, persisting emotion that I had no way to process. I swore the website off for good and spent my time desperately trying to take my mind off of it until it faded into memory.
Unfortunately that wouldn’t be the last time I’d see disturbing things. It was a wild west era of the internet. We take Rick Rolling for granted these days given the types of things people would trick you into clicking back then. I’m not even going into detail about what sort of absolutely vile things I saw downloading videos from limewire with misleading file names.
It’s not just disturbing imagery. Hiding in plain site in the lawless forums and chat rooms of the late 90’s and early aughts was the original evil that spawned the type of stuff we see in places today like 4chan and kiwifarms with which you’re probably at least vaguely familiar. Places in which the most reprehensible things anyone could possibly say to another human being are said. This just seems to be how some people behave when they think they can get away with it. Our own special version of Lord of the Flies is being acted out in real time. People may not be pushing rocks off of cliffs onto each other, but in some ways the reality is even worse.
Targeted harassment can last for years. During this time, the victims can be psychologically manipulated, toyed with, and tormented. This can very easily lead to tragedy. Mainstream news has been covering cases like Tyler Clementi and Megan Meier for over fifteen years, but the majority of cases go unreported and we don’t really know yet how much mental illness, suffering, and loss of life actually stems from things like this.
Tyler and especially Megan were younger victims of bullying, but adults aren’t safe either. For one of the most prominent examples I highly recommend watching Innuendo Studios’ video on Gamergate. FD Signifier’s deep dive on the topic also explains how it’s not relegated exclusively to right-wing trolls, but people on the left like Contrapoints and Lindsay Ellis also received this kind of hate from the very people who they make content for. It’s generally understood that you’re bound to receive death threats at some point if you make content. The vast majority are idle threats, but it only takes one to matter.
Even if you can deal with the death threats and harassment, doxxers can target your friends and family. People who have nothing to do with the content you’re putting out can be involved in harassment simply because they know you in real life. While I might be able to deal with people targeting me alone, I don’t feel like I would be able to deal with people going after my family. I also have mental health concerns to consider. Some can easily brush it off harassment off, but not everyone deals with things the same way.
Jawn also mentions Cointelpro, but I gotta point out… William O’Neal didn’t exactly hide his face from Fred Hampton.
As for being targeted myself, I’m not under the illusion that not showing my face is enough to keep the government from finding out who I am if they really wanted to, but I guess it feels like it’s better than nothing.
Ultimately this is all kind of a moot point for me. I’m nobody. This is my first video. I don’t have a following. Odds are I never will have one. If the FBI was going to pick someone to infiltrate the left or put on a list they’d probably start with someone with greater than or equal to one subscriber.
Some of my favorite channels like Shaun and Jose do have a following though, and I really think you’re missing out if you dismiss them out of hand because they don’t have a face cam.
I’ll end by reiterating a point I made in the beginning: you shouldn’t trust anyone, including me, regardless of if they show their face or not. Just because they show their face doesn’t mean they can be trusted, and just because they don’t doesn’t mean they can’t. It’s ultimately up to us to listen and make informed decisions for ourselves. Thanks for listening.
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