Digital Warfare

January 24, 1999

By Morgan Carlson

Disclaimer: In this letter, I'm going to use a quote from an on-line friend of mine. The quote is: "you're forever spitting feeble rounds from the Pez dispenser of your ignorance." I wanted to use that line in this letter, but I don't have the gall to pretend I created it personally. The line, though, is too good to waste, so I will use it as inobtrusively as possible. Thank you.

I've discovered a new passion.... debate. Not worthwhile, philisophical debate, mind you..... but picking on the ignorant folks that dwell inside of chat rooms. Easy laughs and easy targets, that's my motto.

Most chatters, like regular people, believe the following:

- I am always right.

- if more people agree with me then with the person I'm arguing with, I must be correct, even if the people agreeing with me have been my friends for years and are only backing me up out of loyalty.

- calling someone a 'faggot' or 'queer' is acceptable. Calling them a racist term is not. Also, bestiality jokes are funny. Pedophilia ones are not. Because of the eternal tie-in between the Web and child pornography, Internet fans will do anything to shake the pedophilia rap, even if it only applies to about .00001% of the folks on-line.

- people who are older "have seen a lot" and are therefore smarter than younger folk, who need to "grow up" and "live it to learn it." However, age does NOT guarantee wisdom, trust me. Old people tend to be bitter, stubborn, and conservative. Young people tend to be rash, emotional, and pointlessly liberal. In a way, we're all fucking morons.

Now that list wasn't meant to be funny - it was merely an illustration as to why debate on the Web is a waste of time. Unless, of course, your only goal is to start fights and piss people off. Then, the 'Net is PERFECT for you.

Usually, I wait for my favorite victims - 'suppies.' My friend and I coined the term. A 'suppie' is someone (always male) who enters the room and says something like: "'Sup, ladies..... the man you've been waiting for is here, so hook me up with a message."

Once I've stopped laughing (it's twice as funny when you see it in a chat room, because that's a REAL guy who thinks women are impressed by lines like that), I'll toss out a comment, such as: "hey, HardDude, it's hard to imagine you're single with a repertoire of come-ons like THAT little gem." My pal The Write Stuff, my tag team partner in the debating realm, will follow it up with a line inplying that HardDude is quite bold for someone who still lives with his mother.

Guys like HardDude are easy to pull into a fight. Their egos are huge and they have raging inferiority complexes. Also, people like them are INSANELY concerned about what others think about them, even if those others are twenty-one total strangers in some silly chat room. HardDude, feeling the digital eyes of the room glaring into the back of his head, will lash out with a: "shut the fuck up, you cow-fucking queers." (Technically, all cows are female, so you can't really be gay by fucking a cow. You'd have to fuck a bull, and I don't think I have the energy for that endeavor.)

The battle lines have been drawn. HardDude will have backup, of course.... all of his fellow 'suppies' - who adhere strongly to the pack mentality and won't let one of their own get brought down by a couple of jackal queers like me and Write - will leap into the fray, using as many obscenities as they can without compromising sentence structure.

"Yo, fuck you both, you fucking suck. For a bunch of fucking queers, you both fucking fuck each other all the fucking time."

Sure, that sentence didn't make any sense. But a goal was achieved - mass obscenity. And on the Internet, that's what passes for intelligent discourse, anyhow.

So, what can we learn from the Web?

- America no longer has grammar and English programs in its public schooling.

- the words 'fuck', 'queer', and 'imbred' are automatically funny and require no context or set-up.

- people who use punctuation are a bunch of fucking imbred queers.

- Morgan -