A web bully will be drawn to others and will find themselves repeating similar conflicts.

Association is so important. I haven’t spent more than a few minutes now on most sites that are garbage. Gamer sites? That’s like waiting to be mugged. I truly can’t fathom gaming anymore. I already feel bad for the time games scored from me when I was a kid. Millions of people have been literally throwing their lives away.

Anyways, LarryJ and the trench knife incident are ancient history, but people remember any threat, real or suggested.

I seriously think the world would be a better place without the internet. The world, largely, just isn’t mature enough to handle it. The evil and waste it has spread seems to far outweigh its utility.

But genies are hard to put back into bottles.

You’ve been around a long time, mcfly. Remember the Trench Knife Incident with LarryJ lo those many years and software versions ago? It seemed so obvious to me that this technology was double-edged, that in facilitating and turbocharging our ancient primate social interactions (take a drink, I said “primate”), it would amp up the bad as well as the good. The net makes it easy for tribes of the like-minded to find each other; to align the tribe’s minds; and to attack their enemies’ minds through all the myriad social channels on the Internet.

Flashing a picture of a trench knife at somebody through this technological mindmeld makes that knife, in a sense, “materialize” inside the other person. LarryJ’s victim got to experience getting “virtually” knifed.

Or as Gamergate shows, the men’s right’s advocate assholes (MRAA) weaponized the net to martial powerful social forces to attack their enemies, always entirely virtually, and undeniably destructive in the real world.

I think this is a pretty good answer to all those people who told me at the time that it was “just a picture” and that things that happen on the Internet don’t matter in the “real world”.

Welcome to the real world. It matters here.