01/03/2007 23:36

285 Desensitized to Everything?

I remember the first time I watched someone die. I was barely in high school and heavily into the Macwarez scene. Having first discovered the Mac underground on America Online, I'd branched outward as I'd grown more experienced. After a few years of strictly-AOL warezing, an application called Hotline had just come into existence, exploding upon the Mac world like nothing prior. Hotline was an incredible peer to peer filesharing program that got its start long before the term "P2P" would ever be coined. With Hotline, you could operate a quasinonymous file server that was either open to the world or locked down tighter than a twelve-year-old. Most Hotline servers were wide open, and bragged about it. In those days, no one had ever heard of the RIAA or the MPAA, and the BSA only came after you if you were selling software you didn't own. Piracy was the standard operating procedure. Warez groups (and "couriering") were rampant, and some participants even used their real names with no true fear of repercussions. Times have changed drastically, but don't they always. I'm going to say it was somewhere around 1994, the first time I watched someone die. As Hotline gained popularity, the content available became less about the software and more about what the crowd felt was mainstream. You'd login to a server and find the requisite Macwarez and porn, but certain files unrelated to these popular categories started to find their way around the network, in the sort of viral fashion that YouTube clips do today. Hotline wasn't just P2P ahead of its time, it was social networking ahead of its time. Where it originated, I will never remember. It was a Quicktime video file. Morbid curiosity spread it like wildfire, and soon, if you ran a Hotline server and didn't have a copy of the movie (we Mac users called all QuickTime files "movies" back then, not "videos" or "clips" or anything else), your Hotline server must have sucked ass. You had to have it because everyone wanted it, and once you noticed the filename, you had to watch it. Once, at least once. And if you were lucky, only once. The star of this particular movie was a gentleman named Robert Dwyer. As of late 1986 and early 1987, Mr. Dwyer was the Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Having been accused and eventually convicted of bribery, Robert called a press conference, and the news cameras arrived. The specific camera that filmed the press conference for all humanity was a black-and-white sort, which is probably better, when it all plays out. Robert said a few words at his press conference. Then he held up a paper sack, and reached inside. Robert pulled a pistol from inside the paper sack, and shot himself in the head. Robert collapsed, dead, blood gushing. The cameras rolled. It was repulsive. I remember the first time I watched someone die. I remember knowing then, at that moment, that once was enough. Never again, I thought. Yet the same morbid curiosity that spread that video, that made me view it just one time, called upon me again in recent days. I watched the grainy cameraphone footage that you've probably seen. I watched a man die. And as I once said to myself more than a decade ago, I say to myself now, never again. Never again.