In 1999 the eponymous owner of the popular proto-blog Stile Project wrote a post called \u201cThe Mercury Effect.\u201d<\/p>\n
In it Stile described receiving a video from some fans who had, if I remember correctly, tortured a stray cat to death in his honor; they appeared to have been inspired by the other shocking material he\u2019d posted and solicited. Stile briefly discussed the despondency into which this event had plunged him and his failing hopes for the human race. The title referred to the madness visited upon haberdashers by an invisible force, something to which he perhaps sensed a modern analog.<\/p>\n
He concluded: \u201cSomething wonderful is going to happen at midnight.\u201d That night, he turned on his webcam\u2019s live broadcast function, stepped onto a chair, and hung himself.<\/p>\n
Or appeared to. A few days and a great deal of speculation later, it was revealed that the whole thing was a hoax, something Stile was fond of perpetrating \u2014 though this one was especially cruel. All this material has passed from the internet\u2019s memory (even Archive.org\u2019s), but I\u2019ve never been able to forget it.<\/p>\n
This horrible little episode seems a to me a spiritual precursor to this weekend\u2019s all-too-real socially promoted murder, and the issues that have resurfaced in its wake. But for all the talk about content moderation, machine learning, flag-monitoring algorithms, the problem isn\u2019t the platform, and it isn\u2019t one that can be solved by the platform. That\u2019s because the problem is people.<\/p>\n