China’s Human Flesh Search Engines

I’m not super into straight-up repostings of other people’s repostings of links, but I am sufficiently skeeved by an article in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine that I can’t help it.

It’s a piece about a practice, apparently (the evidence is compelling but anecdotal) increasingly common in China: somebody gets caught doing something awful, or apparently awful, on video. The video is posted online. Crowdsourced sleuthery identifies the person in the video, and then people are encouraged to find and harass the person.

The example that this (excellent) piece leads with is a sex video of a woman stamping a kitten to death with spike heels. Apparently the video was real, people deduced the identity of the woman, tracked her to a small town in China, and ran her out of said town.

What’s compelling about the piece is that my first reaction was, yay, the kitten-stamper got what was coming to her. Followed moments later by boo, this is an Internet-fueled flash lynch mob. The boo reaction got more pronounced when I read about this same treatment being handed out to a woman, an undergrad, who attempted to mediate between pro-Tibet and pro-China protesters. That monster! Why didn’t she just stomp a few kittens while she was at it!

But it’s not hard to see why this happens. What is hard to believe is that it will remain a primarily Chinese phenomenon. There are a couple examples from the U.S., and they’re probably not the last.

Anyway read the piece.

You Can Pre-order the Samsung Galaxy S III Now, but It’ll Cost You

It’s “friggin’ huge,” as my colleague Jared Newman recently quipped, and Samsung’s Galaxy S III is also going to be friggin’ expensive if you’re in the U.S. and want firsties. While the phone’s stateside launch date is still “early June,” Amazon has started taking pre-orders for the international version.

pasteeater

Lynch mobs are essentially crowdsourced vigilantes, and the Internet allows fanatics to unite, or, apparently, non-fanatics to swing to the fanatical side of the spectrum. If the pendulum swings too far this way, there will be a backlash. You simply need to make sure you don’t find yourself somewhere where your footprint could lead to this. Unfortunately, the Duke undergrad was torn between the contrasting sensibilities of the university system and culture of protests in America and the reality that Pro-Tibet views in China are potentially dangerous. Though our American liberties allow me to pontificate on the situation between Israel and Palestine, I’d be remiss to think that a trip to the area after participating in a pro-one-way-or-the-other rally would be perfectly safe — people regularly die for their beliefs there. There is a reason why modern civilization generally frowns on vigilantism; we’re taught to believe in the rule of law, and lynch mobs just don’t care about that.
http://theuselessinformationfile.wordpress.com wolvenspectre

You might be interested in this Search Engine Podcast from August of last year:

http://www.tvo.org/podcasts/searchengine/audio/SE_Full_20090810_800696_HumanFlesh_0x0_40k.mp3

It has a report direct from Bejing by a correspondant.