121–130 of 133 posts
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It's kind of a miracle that most of us people who got exposed to all that stuff are still sane.
Would you put watching an arm breaking contest (something I still dont know if it's made up, and don't want to research) in the "sane" category?
I didn't realize why until much later into adulthood, but I was one of those teenagers fascinated with rotten.com, and all the other weird sites out there during this time. Looking back it was innocent exploration, but if I did what I did then today, I might get put on some watchlist. And today I can barely watch an arm breaking contest without cringing. Anyone else remember orsm, b0g? They rarely get mentioned among…
Still, despite my dislikes, I would fight against censorship of these sites. Somehow I feel a kid seeing a corpse or a video of people dying is less psychologically damaging than, for example, getting into political or religious extreme communities.
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The uncomfortable truth is that monkey see monkey do is a real phenomenon. The majority of people who play violent video games and watch violent movies and watch real snuff vids online won't commit these acts. That said, to say they do not influence you in any way is to deny all of advertising, if not the basic reality that the stimuli to which we are exposed in life are the primary thing that shape us beyond our gen…
> to deny all of advertising I don’t think that is true. Advertising relies on manufactured needs, portraying the hawked goods and services as things one needs to live a comfortable, easy, pleasurable or socially worthy life. None of that resonates with shock content. As an extreme example, you supposedly can’t sell guns by showing pictures of gun suicide victims. This is also why some governments require tobacco pro…
From another angle, OP's article mentioned something akin to sexual awakenings related to the content they trafficked in.
You can see how popular suicide drone footage out of Ukraine is, there is a large contingent of people eating that stuff up, cheering it on, despite watching a man desperately beg for his life as a drone circles him, toying with him, before going for his head and the feed blacking out being about as grim as it gets.
People are creating games now to replicate the experience. People want to drive drones into other people's heads, all along a spectrum from watching it on youtube, playing a video game, to joining the ukrainian effort and actually performing the act in real life.
My experience is you can find a customer for just about any content, including shock content. Some messages have broader appeal for sure, but even the worst thing you can imagine will have someone with whom it resonates.
It's clear that people are influenced by their environment, and things that were once considered grotesque and unacceptable can be watered down over time with exposure to where, for example, rapists and pedophiles can openly win presidential elections and be placed on the Supreme Court. To where large portions of nations rationalize and support genocide, or any horrible thing you can imagine, even when presented with images of the suffering inflicted.
Humans are malleable and you don't have to have a perfectly crafted advertising campaign to have some people decide they like what they're seeing and want to replicate it, no matter what it is.
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Do you think the number of people who have tried to reproduce the photo, specifically because they saw this photo, is 0?
Feels like it would be 0 or extremely close to 0.
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Feels like it would be 0 or extremely close to 0.
I'm in a cafe but I'm putting it in my notes to search for a goatse.cx replication album when I get somewhere more private. I will send you my therapist's bill.
It’s not really something anybody could just replicate on a whim. It is not like ordering taco bell
I didn't realize why until much later into adulthood, but I was one of those teenagers fascinated with rotten.com, and all the other weird sites out there during this time. Looking back it was innocent exploration, but if I did what I did then today, I might get put on some watchlist. And today I can barely watch an arm breaking contest without cringing. Anyone else remember orsm, b0g? They rarely get mentioned among…
LiveLeak, Ogrish.com, Disinfo.com... man, and those are just the ones I can remember.
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It's kind of a miracle that most of us people who got exposed to all that stuff are still sane.
No, I think that it actually shows that the idea that information can cause "trauma" or another kind of "harm" unless some third party forcefully restricts your access to this information, is completely insane. Of course, this "third party" knows better, right.
My kids do not need to see beheadings and exploding people. I could have done without that exposure. It was certainly traumatic.
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> to deny all of advertising I don’t think that is true. Advertising relies on manufactured needs, portraying the hawked goods and services as things one needs to live a comfortable, easy, pleasurable or socially worthy life. None of that resonates with shock content. As an extreme example, you supposedly can’t sell guns by showing pictures of gun suicide victims. This is also why some governments require tobacco pro…
I think there's a lot at work psychologically in advertising, but "kids in those countries have started collecting and trading those images" kind of undercuts your point that shock content doesn't resonate with an audience, create demand or a potential desire to emulate what's depicted. From another angle, OP's article mentioned something akin to sexual awakenings related to the content they trafficked in. You can se…
My point was that it doesn’t resonate with the principles of advertising. Certainly shock content can resonate with an audience, as well as create demand and desire to emulate: just look at the success of the Jackass franchise.
The kids aren’t buying tobacco because of the images, though — very few if any adults are either. I would assume they’re cutting out their collections from discarded packaging, and that they would not want to emulate lung cancer even if they saw pictures of it.
Purely guessing here, but it doesn’t seem likely that content on rotten.com would have led anyone, let alone masses of people, to become human butchers: in the OP article, the desire to emulate was limited to building narratives around the content.
Crime scene investigator or trauma surgeon, maybe those are more likely outcomes.
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Both are absolutely horrific and evil but I don't see why that one would be worse than the one the comment above you mentioned.
Not really answering your question, but the Belgian Congo photo is probably more notable and consequential. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nsala_of_Wala_in_the_Nsongo_Di...
Perhaps adolescents were attracted to this content as a reaction to the sanitized upbringing in western culture. In my experience, these sites were compelling because they showed what was "beyond the veil". Teenage me was invincible, my own death unthinkable, so exposing myself to this content was almost a rebellious reactionary activity. Now the current crop of curious teens are watching drone drops and soldier suic…
I prefer old style stuff like Omen. Where the dread is more part of it than just straight goriness.
I expect war films will go the same way.