Something Old, Something New, Something Rotten, and Something Awful

Gore, gamers, and goons - early internet geek humor from shock sites to Seanbaby

How Geeks Ate the World is the working title of a book that I’m writing, exploring the development of reactionary movements in geek culture (media, tech, and hobbies) since the internet era, and how these movements have come to dominate real world politics in pretty horrifying ways.

I will be publishing chapters and essays related to this project for paying subscribers around once a month. Unlike my regular newsletter, these essays will remain paywalled.

Episode 1 - How Geeks Ate the World
Episode 2 - Demons of Suspicion
Episode 3 - Backward Male
Episode 4 - The Californian Ideology
👉Episode 5 - Something Old, Something New, Something Rotten, Something Awful

I came to the internet later than some of my peers. I’m an elder Millennial, right on the cusp of Gen-X, and my cohort was the last to graduate without having spent any substantial amount of my school education with an internet connection. I completely missed the BBS years, newsgroups, and UseNet. From memory, the first time we had internet at home was 1998.

It was a very appropriate year for me to undergo McLuhan’s media transition from television to cyberspace. It was the year my two favorite TV shows of all time—The Simpsons and The X Files—both jumped the shark. The former died along with Phil Hartman, one of the greatest impressionist comedians of all time, in a murder-suicide by his own wife, orphaning his children and several of the cartoon’s best characters without a voice. The latter, in much less tragic circumstances, having swapped filming locations from gloomy Vancouver to sunny Los Angeles, swapping ceders and firs for palm trees and radically changing the show’s ambiance. It was the year Seinfeld ended, the year Sinatra died, and the year the Pokémon animation debuted in the west.

This new frontier, this new discovered continent, was open for colonization, but its native inhabitants were geeks—overwhelmingly male, and as Jon Katz would describe, viscerally libertarian. For a while, most of its new settlers would be geekishly inclined also. The jocks, mainly, would still not be seen spending their free time using a computer. This era of the internet is often looked back on, for those of us who remember it, as the “Wild West” internet.

Those geeks who were more or less compelled to keep their hobbies private suddenly found themselves in an open environment of like-minded individuals and were, for the first time, free to celebrate their interests unburdened. For many, it was the first time they were able to encounter large groups of people in their own fandom.

When I first logged on I was thrilled to find a huge community of young people who were big into Sonic the Hedgehog, a media franchise that, as far as I’d known up until that point, only myself and my cousin were interested in. With no social life outside of school and the occasional hangout with my cousin (he had a Commodore 64!), my knowledge of “the world” was largely hearsay. At the time I had a pen-pal in Scotland (and wherever you are today, Linda, I hope you’re doing well). We used to write letters back and forth to each other, sharing mundane details of our lives—neither of us were particularly interesting people, but the very existence of this conversation, between two individuals on opposite sides of the planet, was the novelty. How strange that idea of letter-writing would seem, just a couple of years later. I stopped writing letters to Linda once we got internet.

It wasn’t known as the Wild West in that time, as we didn’t know what we stood to lose, but it did feel a lot like stepping into Narnia—an entire second world inside of a small box. I’ve always suffered from social anxiety, but this wasn’t scary to me, because unlike the dangerous and uncertain world out in meatspace, everyone here was a geek. Everyone here was a friend.

This was how I started writing—Sonic fanfiction for a website called The Domain of NetRaptor (the nominal ‘raptor being the nom de plume of K. M. Carroll, now an indie fantasy author). Like every fantasy world, the internet had dark corners where unpleasant creatures lurked, and innocent pilgrims might be lured toward the shadows. The darkness waited but the Winter Revolution hadn’t come.

Those dark woods are tempting to wandering souls, though, and the libertarian early internet had very little restriction on its content. This was not for want of trying by the US Government—the Clinton administration in 1996 passed the Communications Decency Act, which sought to ban obscenity from the internet, but very soon afterward the Supreme Court upheld a ruling by federal judges that this violated the constitution.¹ The internet’s filth, at least for the time being, was protected.

This brief attempt to censor the internet, futile as it was in the face of the first amendment, was the first five-alarm fire in the internet’s fiercely libertarian founding population. It was the inspiration, allegedly, for the founding of Rotten.com shortly after the CDA passed in 1996.

Rotten.com was the internet’s original shock site, established by former MindVox developer Thomas E. Dell,² who had later worked for Netscape.³ According to Dell, he had written a hobby program to identify every word in the dictionary that was not yet registered as an internet domain, and snatched up “about a dozen” of them, including “rotten,” and so the site emerged as a post hoc justification for having acquired the address.⁴

At other times, though, Dell would allude to a more moralistic purpose. On a version of the “about” page on Rotten.com published on the 10^th September in 2001 (with no way of knowing that this would be the final day of an entire chapter of American history) he explicitly refers to the CDA and states “our mission is to actively demonstrate that censorship of the Internet is impractical, unethical, and wrong.” Furthermore, it stood as “a vigilant defender of civil liberties for all, for as long as we are able.”⁵

When Marshall McLuhan predicted that the media of video and television would produce the content of the next major medium, I can, with a fair amount of confidence, assume he wasn’t imagining Rotten.com. McLuhan was of a higher literary caliber. Dell’s internet carnival of the obscene followed the tradition of the cult classic VHS series Faces of Death, being an aggregator of gore and extreme pornography generally banned from mainstream publication. The site published extreme shock images with little to no concern for their context or authenticity. One of the most famous photographs, depicting a man whose entire face beneath the eyes appears to have been shredded, the entire lower jaw and nose missing, was published very simply as “motorcycle.jpg” with Dell later admitting he had published the image under the filename that had been sent to him, which later became the subject of a legal dispute revealing that the image was a failed shotgun suicide. The victim survived, but so did Rotten.com.⁴

Dell, who went by the online handle “Soylent,” was often referred to as an activist rather than a pornographer, and he was an early prominent example of a type of character who would become all too familiar as Silicon Valley’s influence expanded—the so-called “free speech absolutist.” The First Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees protection from government censorship or persecution for speech or expression, but the advent of the internet expanded the frontiers of possibilities for human expression to an extent the Founding Fathers could never have imagined. Many ideologues, particularly of the right-libertarian tradition that would produce the Californian Ideology, saw this as the most sacred of human rights and became zealous in its protection on principle, even beyond government involvement.

Regularly, however, the always anonymous articles on the website (Dell always wrote in plural, though other members of his staff, if they existed, have never been identified) would cite its primary purpose as “to upset people.”⁴ This would in time become a common routine for those regarding themselves free speech absolutists, and it always remains an open question as to whether upsetting people deliberately is the tactic used by such activists to prove a point about free speech, or whether it’s the primary desire, with free speech used as a shield for the thrill of committing psychological harm.

Rotten.com gained international attention in 1997 when it published what were purported to be photographs of Princess Diana as she lay dying at the scene of her fatal car crash. Though a statement was released on the site denying that they had willfully encouraged speculation on the victim’s identity, the incident was an early example of the culture shock of the internet’s bleak and radical libertarianism making it into the mainstream news. New York Times journalist Amy Harmon, who would go on to win the Pulitzer eleven years later for her reporting on the tech industry, covered the affair in one of her first assignments for the Paper of Record. In what might go down as one of the great understatements of history, she wrote: “the [internet], which enables anyone with a computer and a modem to broadcast information to a global audience cheaply and instantly, often carries bad information.”⁶

The notoriety from this and similar incidents made Rotten the most important test case of this era regarding the First Amendment in how it would be applied to the internet—even after the CDA was struck down, a number of further attempts were made to curtail online speech, such as 1998’s Child Online Protection Act, for which lawmakers specifically used Rotten as a prominent example of why such a law needed to be made.⁷ This, also, was struck down on appeal on First Amendment grounds.

It’s worth noting, maybe, that the people pushing the hardest for these laws were, for the most part, conservatives, not liberals.⁸ The battle for the internet was waged more or less between separate factions of the right: The puritans, on one hand, the Christian fundamentalists who opposed pornography and obscenity and feared the internet would hasten Western Civilization’s descent into un-Godly depravity and degeneracy. On the other hand, the free speech absolutists, acolytes of the Californian Ideology, for whom the only God was the Market, and His Invisible Hand would decide what content propagates on the World Wide Web.

The American Constitution was not the only legal threshold the internet faced. Given its broad protections, that would be too easy. The problem very soon encountered by content curators like Thomas Dell was that anything on the internet, while forged in the United States, was now accessible by anybody in the world with a modem and a service provider. Obviously, every nation on Earth has its own laws, and very few have such enshrined lenience on speech and expression as the USA. Sites like Rotten originated legal precedent about whether American citizens could be extradited or punished in any way by countries whose laws prohibited content produced legally in America but made internationally accessible.

At this time, there was no technology yet available that could block content geographically, and so attempts were made by foreign nations to hold American webmasters culpable. Dell was subjected to direct legal challenges from overseas jurisdictions such as Britain, which has its own obscenity laws, and Germany, with very strict laws against content that questions the Holocaust or defends or promotes Nazism.⁷

Dell survived these challenges more or less unscathed, either by legislation designed to shut Rotten and sites like it down, or legal challenges baited by Dell deliberately, presumably for fun. In 1998, Dell registered the domain “matell.com” to exploit a common misspelling of “Mattel” and redirected it to Rotten.com, quickly resulting in a lawsuit threat from the Mattel toy company.⁹ And in April 1999, very shortly after the school shooting at Columbine High School, he registered “trenchcoat.org” as the purported website of the “Trenchcoat Mafia,” the school gang that the shooters were allegedly associated with. This website comedically implied that the gang was officially affiliated with Burlington Coat Factory, which promptly drafted a cease and desist upon becoming aware of the prank.¹⁰

Though Rotten almost always complied with these demands to avoid costly and pointless lawsuits, it nevertheless gained a reputation as a kind of haven for controversial speech under attack in the internet’s formative years. Dell was far from the only website proprietor in these early days to dabble in dark humor. Sites like Bonsai Kitten—a hoax website that purported to provide instructions on the "lost Eastern art of sealing kittens inside rectilinear jars," extending the Japanese gimmick of square watermelons to the absurd notion of raising cube-shaped cats—fell afoul of puritans who either didn’t see the joke or didn’t appreciate it. This was one of a number of unconventional comedy sites that wound up seeking refuge under the Rotten banner when threatened.⁷

Unconventional comedy was a prominent feature of this early internet and not all of it was shock humor. Geeks discovered a newfound freedom of expression and potential for an audience for subject matter that had a very limited reach offline. What emerged was a unique blend of comedy and pop culture journalism developed by talented amateurs with little to no experience in professional writing.

One of this era’s most prominent success stories is Harry Knowles, who was a community college dropout in 1993 when he invested in a computer and an internet connection. Knowles suffered badly from depression and extreme obesity, two afflictions which no doubt worsened each other in a feedback loop.¹¹

The internet alleviated both conditions. In a world where nobody knew what he looked like, Knowles was able to come out of his shell and finally feel like somebody who might engage in social interactions without judgment or baggage. Moreover, unlike his offline community in Austin, Texas, the internet was full of geeks.¹²

Knowles is not a first-generation geek. His parents, Jay and Helen Knowles, ran a comic book store and memorabilia business and a permanent booth at Austin’s famous City-Wide Vintage Sale street market (then known as the City-Wide Garage Sale). Harry had, by extension, been known to the local film enthusiast scene for most of his adult life.¹³ His parents immersed him in their hobby from an early age—he first attended the San Diego Comic-Con as an infant in 1972. By the time he was 7, he had been to over 50 film festivals.¹⁴ According to Knowles: “I was their experiment … They unleashed everything on me. I saw porn, all the Universal monster movies, all the Charlie Chan films, all the Sherlock Holmes things, all the Fred and Ginger movies. Film for me became how I related to everything else.”¹¹

A love and hate relationship developed between Knowles and the internet after his mother, who he had lived with for some years after his parents’ divorce, died in a fire in the early 90s and he moved in with his father. In one interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2013 he would recount it having broken him out of his depression after striking up a long-distance online romance with a girl he met in a chat room and losing 200 of his 500 pound body weight. But a more contemporaneous interview with the New York Times Magazine in 1997 quotes him: ''It was, like, the worst thing … I got hooked. It was addictive. You get on the Internet and have no life. I was spending every waking hour on the computer.”¹⁴

A severe injury he suffered in 1995 while helping his father move a large dolly of movie collectibles at an exhibition left Knowles temporarily paralyzed from the waist down. Bedridden and not knowing whether he would ever walk again, he again plunged into depression. Taking advantage of the only avenue for expression he had available while confined to a bed, he began Ain’t It Cool News.

Continued after the paywall: The geek media explosion - Old Man Murray, Seanbaby, Maddox, Tucker Max, Portal of Evil, Cracked, and Something Awful.