I’ll be nice and warn you that this essay links to disturbing images. That is, THIS ENTRY LINKS TO VERY DISTURBING IMAGES SO IF YOU LIKE EVERYTHING TO BE A VARIATION OF KITTENS LICKING EACH OTHERS EARS YOU ARE GOING TO THE WRONG PLACE. PLEASE GLIDE ALONG QUIETLY TO THE NEXT OR PREVIOUS WEBLOG ENTRIES WHERE YOU WILL BE A MUCH HAPPIER PERSON.

Everyone gone? OK, good.

I mentioned in a previous entry about the happy-go-lucky adventure of the massive downloading of a single image on textfiles.com, one of a cheery Grim Reaper holding a glowing hourglass. It was quite popular, and I talked about the situation where I had seen downloading of this image go from nothing before April 2006 and it had quickly unseated all other comers by a factor of 100 to become the most downloaded file out of the millions in the textfiles.com family of websites. This was, I mused, some sort of payback for when I was a youth and a leech, and so I let it go. Incredulity was the order of the day in the comments, with a few people speculating that since my website doesn’t know where the source of my files always are, I might in fact be considered compelled to do this sort of charity work to atone. Others thought that I was brave to allow hotlinking at all.

Both, it turned out, were wrong. Idly sitting around during the holiday season, I went to go check how that popular ol’ Grim Reaper image was doing. The answer: very very well for Mr. Reaper. Not so well for Jason’s bandwidth.

I said that in September of 2006 he was downloaded 212,000 times. For the month of December, he was downloaded 401,000 times. This was going to get a lot worse, I could see that immediately.

The problem wasn’t just academic anymore, either. You see, I’ve been lucky enough to host with a number of good providers over the years, who have treated me well, and eventually I have outgrown them. When that happens, there’s a mad scramble to find new hosting and I have to often host it locally, to the detriment of everyone. Additionally, I am scrambling for the privilege of spending lots of my own money. While this is all fine with me, the “service” I am doing by allowing the hot-linking of images by Myspace is really no service at all.

Myspace is roughly the 4th most visited English language website, according to reports. It is owned by News Corporation. News Corporation is fucking huge. My dad used to work for News Corporation, so I am very appreciative of that but not to the point of happily whistling a tune while they bleed my generous hosting company’s connection dry. Everything, you see, has limits. I hope it’s not like hearing there’s scant evidence of Tooth Fairies to know that I have some of my own.

So, sleepy with egg nog and considering what to do next, I decided I would replace the image.

Initially, I thought an ad for Notacon or Blockparty or the documentary would be good. But the fact is, the vectors just don’t line up. People who are on Myspace are hardly going to be swayed by an ad for something one way or another, and it felt icky.

So I goatse’d them.

If you don’t know what I mean by “Goatse”, then let me go on the record, right now, as saying this is just what Wikipedia is good for. You can go and read up on the history of what “Goatse” is. If you don’t have the time or patience and yet still don’t know what I mean, let me say that it is a disturbing image of a gentleman (it is clear he is a fellow) using almost yoga-like skills to display the eye-watering sight of the inside of his own rectum. If that sounds horrible, it is. It is truly, truly horrible.

This is interesting on its own levels; I don’t know why we didn’t think this through in the early stages of Internet, but the fact is so obvious that to hear it makes you think you always knew it: the pipes can back up sewage. The same open door that gives you a world of knowledge and communication is also a piping hot shit-gun of horror. Like looking to see if a rifle is loaded by peering down the barrel, your screen can turn from a breathtaking visage of insight into a Gatling Gun of mind-scarring infinity-pain within the literal blink of an eye.

Or, as they say: ONCE YOU CLICK, YOU CANNOT UNCLICK.

If you are truly fine with this, then go ahead: See what I replaced the Grim Reaper with.

Anyway, on with the show.

Assuming you find the idea of some errant myspace numbnut faced with a gaping ass entertaining, then you will become first giggly, and then fall aside laughing to know that within an hour I had “goatse’d” 400 people.

Within two days it was 25,000. Twenty five thousand.

We are now up to nearly a hundred thousand viewings of this file in its new ass-o-rama version. I am sure that through libraries, schools, colleges, cubicles, offices, warehouses, the sound of someone’s throat reflexively making a sound not unlike “Uuuuaaaaaghhhghh” has filled the air. The amount of time lost in horrified stares and frantic jabs at the keyboard and mouse to get away, far away must be into the realm of hours by now. Maybe days! Days of slack-jawed horrified faces staring into a big square eyeball. I don’t know, that gets a chortle out of me. I’m easily entertained.

But after the initial thought of this Towering Tidal Wave of Tweener Terror, I started to consider how it had gotten to be so bad in the first place.

And this is where it gets interesting.

Any entity interested in what is called “market share” must eventually expand out into regions of people far outside those would normally patronize that entity. Not to ensure survival, but to ensure growth – which eventually supplants survival as a metric of health. An excellent example of this is air travel: whereas the original passengers on a plane in the first decade of air travel had a reasonably good chance of knowing how to operate that plane (the pilot and his passenger, two air enthusasts trying out a new machine), we are now at the point that we can have 300 individuals inside a jet and less than a handful could possibly operate the thing. That is, less than 1% of the people inside a machine, whose lives depend on that machine and who are paying to use that machine, have any idea how to make it work. This is, ultimately, fine: air travel is very safe and we have lots of safeguards in place so that generally the whole shebang doesn’t explode. Still, you cross a line and the trends will be for even more people packed into an airplane, not less.

This isn’t evil, per se… it’s just how this whole growth thing works. And eventually, this came to the Internet. As college students were dumped onto Internet connections, they faced, essentially, a sea of pilots; people trained to operate the craft who followed some levels of lore and rulesets to keep things running smoothly, if jarringly Libertarian. As these college students flooded the gates around the month of September, they would eventually get assimilated into the Way of Things by a month or two, or sulk away and watch things from afar. Either way, it kind of worked.

And then America On-Line dumped everybody onto the Internet at once. This phenomenon was so marked in Internet history that it even has a name: The September that Never Ended.

There’s a story from that time, which I love to tell, which will have meaning in this entry shortly. Someone put up a webpage about America Online, criticizing the company and the service it provided. It advocated untoward behavior on AOL and generally represented a typical “slam site”, which I myself have been known to take part in from time to time. After the time that AOL was fully loosed on the Internet and sending people willy-nilly around, this site got a letter that I think really underlines the problem with this sort of culture class. An AOL moderator, that is, a guy whose job is to look for troublemakers on the AOL service, contacted this webmastrer, and told him he was violating the AOL terms of service and to cease his website immediately. As far as this mop-head was concerned, AOL now “owned” the Internet and anyone on it, even someone running a site not in any way connected with the AOL service (except in discussing them) was under its jurisdiction. The webmaster did the logical thing: he posted the letter for all to see, garnering ridicule and some thoughtful chuckles.

Myspace, and sites like it, also have to take a tactic similar to the airlines. The somewhat large barrier-to-entry of hosting a website has already been reduced a great deal, but social websites remove it entirely; you only need an e-mail address to be able to host and provide content. And now the whole part where you have to learn enough HTML to be able to make it render in a browser is wiped clean. It is possible, very possible, to go from Tweener at Hot Topic to Webmistress of the Dark and Foreboding Webpage of Sin without ever using a single bracket.

Is this bad? On the one hand, people who would never have had a voice before are given one. On the other, that voice is occasionally droning, illiterate, and borderline schizophrenic. And multiplied by tens of thousands. However, Myspace (and News Corporation) has market share, and that’s the primary goal of the whole activity.

Part of hosting a website is providing the content. While it’s possible to use the internal templates to at least indicate what hobbies you have and whether you like to smoke. folks are naturally inclined to upload pictures, change the color of the background, and add design schemes that make Holly Hobbie look like Prada. To help them, a little cottage industry of templates are now around so that instead of making that huge step into markup languages, patrons can simply copy and paste designs into their own pages.

Here, then is the source of this sudden interest in my website’s artscene section; someone created a “design” that directly hotlinked to the artscene.textfiles.com website and used the image as the background. The design, by the way, is absolutely horrible, and I don’t know how anyone ever found it readable in the first place; the default font color was red, with a line through the text! This said, I’m sure I have a number of pieces of clothing that call into question my qualifications for a fashion police badge.

Soon after I converted the image from Grim Reaper to Grim Ripper, one of the thousands of people getting eye-lashed by the image saw the “textfiles.com” mention at the bottom, figured out how to mail me, and did so:

Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2006 21:45:40 EST From: Motorjames1@wmconnect.com To: jason@textfiles.com Subject: myspace hacking Hello. Someone is hacking into myspace profiles and claiming to be "textfiles".com.If you are unaware of this, they are using your web-name to be quite offensive. I thought you might like to know. It's a pretty childish, sophmoric stunt {easily cleaned up,} but annoying.If it happens to actually be you doing it, You should really hope we never meet- you will end up looking worse than the photo you have been posting-

This is a fascinating character study on several levels. First of all, there’s the immediate assumption that someone “hacked” myspace. The fact that I used the deadly spell “mv” to shift a few things around on a machine I own is not a possibility as far as Motorjames1 is concerned. Next, just to make sure all bases are covered, he threatens me. Ostensibly he is indicating he will punish me by doing something traumatic to my ass. Perhaps, however, he merely means he will do something to my face so that it will be as horrifyingly offensive as the Goatse ass. Either way, I question his diplomatic skills.

Communiques were quiet on my side for days, and I assumed that people were figuring out how to remove the image and replace it with something else, which is the “cleaning up” that motorjames1 had indicated. Nobody, it seems, was inspired to seek me out. So, I went on a little fact-finding mission of my own. Checking the referrer logs of my webserver, I found places where people were writing helpful notes to their friends to perhaps figure out how they too had been “hacked”. Granted, a lot were in the form of “WHAT T FUK WITH U BACKGROUND??????”, but the essence was clear.

Hotlinking in itself is not so bad, in my book. I certainly get people hotlinking to my textfiles and directories, skipping over my introductions and context to provide others with information that I’m hosting. I even have people link directly to images on the DIGITIZE sub-site to prove a point about catalogs or old computers or so on. But in all these cases, the hotlinking is in the course of providing knowledge. Someone is trying to inform others about a subject and my library is being utilized to share. I feel like this is right and good, and I encourage it.

But what is being done by myspace is that this data is not being used for knowledge. It’s being used as decoration. Beyond that, it’s being used for inefficient, meaningless, taste-lacking decoration, just to give someone’s poorly-written “website” a “dark feeling” by putting a visage of death on it. Maybe that’s an odd, arbitrary line to draw, but after being at the ass-end of that line, if you will, I think I have to consider drawing it.

I was idly wondering today where to go with this, whether to simply refuse to allow myspace pages to hotlink to any images whatsoever, when I received this in my inbox:

Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2007 20:46:11 -0800 From: HotFreeLayouts COM To: mailbox@textfiles.com Subject: hardcore porn pic - take down asap please hi, you really should take down ASAP www.textfiles.com/artscene/mirrors/GRAPE-DEMO-ARCHIVE/graphism/rs/razorback/ razorback-the_grim_reaper.png somebody is flodding our server with that / posting it on myspace etc. -- HotFreeLayouts.com Abuse Team

And here we are, back full circle. “Hotfreelayouts” is one of the sites that offers up these design templates for downloads (along with ads, of course), and these fellows, the pilots of the current generation if you will, were utterly unable to do anything about my “flod”. Or my flodding.

Consider, then, what was going on here. Myspace, a site which is being used by people who don’t know how to host or design, ends up with a gaping ass provided by a design firm which can’t understand the nature of hotlinking (or of spelling), who have written to someone who can host, design and spell but are doing so with a demand that this person take action.

And this, my friends, is ass.

2008 Update: Since this weblog entry was first written, it has easily become the most popular entry in the weblog’s history, with hundreds visiting it years later. If this is the first time you’ve read it, be sure to read the related postings:

The Ass-Termath

Goatse II: The Widening

The February Goat Update

Goatse Metrics

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