What the web is good for
besides cats, which are not inconsiderable
I love it when the Internet does a group project. Don’t get me wrong, I also love when people simply populate it with fun content, like cat pictures and memes and this video of a woman and her son hiding 200 tiny plastic ducks in her parents house, which I could have watched for an hour.
Or this very amusing story about one dad’s love for Olive Garden that is only slightly less funny for being fictional.
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But the best is when the web comes together to make something like the spontaneous Ratatouille musical:
Or even better, leveraging the wisdom of the crowd to identify songs they can only remember a snippet of, or were used in a single episode of a TV show.
There’s also a guy who has made a project of collecting and compiling via Spotify all of the Gap (and BabyGap, GapKids, etc) in-store playlists from the 90s and 00s. Which means just…finding ex-employees who happened to hang onto the print-outs of the playlists. He’s made a lot of them.
When a Texas man’s cat was kidnapped and then tossed by a Lyft driver, the Internet found it. When a Georgia woman’s dog was lost by the emergency vet, the Internet found it.
Yep, there’s a lot of Cool Stuff going on online. Here’s a website where they’re trying to write every single possible book all at once.
And this, more or less, is where the post was going to end. Fun group projects online for fun that I’ve found and which I found fun. Fun!
…but then came #PunchTok. An investigatory group project.
To quickly recap, in case you’re not caught up, for the past few months (but only becoming a recognized pattern in the last week or so), men have been…punching women in the face in broad daylight in New York City (and possibly London!), and then running away. People only realized this was A Thing when women started posting about their experiences on TikTok. Which also means it’s very possible that this is happening to a lot of people besides young women, but other victims aren’t on TikTok.
It’s so bizarre and random that it almost makes you laugh reflexively, but it’s very fucked up. A possibly co-ordinated campaign to make women feel unsafe outside. I’ve been simmering for days, it makes me so fucking angry. I want to start a hammer-wielding vigilante group to walk girls to and from their apartments, I want to buy every female in the tri-state area a big big knife. Don’t worry, I won’t.
As many of the victims weren’t filing police reports, it’s unclear if or how, without social media, this would have ever come to light. So far there’s been at least two arrests, and one theory is that there are multiple attackers, and that this is being encouraged on some online incel forum. Which is the double-edged sword of the Internet: you can organize for good…or for evil. See: Gamergate. In a way, the streets of New York now mirror the streets of social media: girls are going about their business until some guy decides to fuck up their day.
But if the arc of the moral universe is long and bends toward justice, the arc of the moral internet is pretty short and bends toward righteousness. And my sincerest hope is that whoever’s behind this gets caught, and that just one scrap of identifying information is made public. Because that’s all the women of TikTok will need to find him, and ideally, ruin his life.
When bro gets caught, I’m officially calling for an all-out campaign of destruction. Doxx him, threaten him, hack him. Within reason, but also, without! I have no qualms here. No mercy. Make his life, both online and off, as treacherous and scary as a dark alley in the financial district. Drive him to madness. It will be our greatest group project.
lizzie