[Note to spammers: Although it mentions pornographic videos, and although this web site is anti-censorship, this web site does not endorse, recommend, or promote the use of images of living persons on the Internet even in fully clothed and wholesome scenes unless those people are fully compensated for the inconvenience of being "celebrities." This web site does not encourage using the Internet to share graduation, wedding, or retirement photos. If you want to post any pictures of living humans online for profit, move right along, there's nothing for you to see here.]
Are you a porn star? How can you tell?
If you're the typical person who friends/follows/reads my content online, outside of my family, you might answer the question in the title the same way I would have done last year: "Of course not. That's ridiculous. For one thing I'm a Christian/Jew/Muslim/feminist/introvert (or some combination of those) and for another thing I'm over age thirty...or sixty...or seventy..."
I certainly didn't pose for even any "artistic studies of the nude form" and haven't seen the videos in which real-world acquaintances claim my real-world image appeared. I've heard different stories about what the image that looked like me was supposed to have been doing. I told the police I wanted to press charges if they found a video involving any unwholesome images that appeared to connect me with "little girls." I've not heard from them so I've been guessing that either that claim was just bait, or the really vile videos have been suppressed. I have been teased with invitations to go to some man's house and see the video in which I appeared to be getting naked with a man, or men, whatever. I just say, "People can do anything with Photoshop these days, can't they?"
I've seen a relatively tame web site that purports to show all the best loved celebrities who died in the twentieth century, hanging out, surfing, and drinking on some subtropical island. "President Kennedy has divorced Jackie now and is married to Marilyn" was a typical caption. President Kennedy was in pretty bad condition even while he was looking youthful and chipper seventy years ago. I believe it's just possible that someone who might have played him in a movie, or even doubled for him while he was living, might still be alive. My guess would be that, if so, that old man wouldn't look as perky as the alleged President Kennedy at that web site, either.
Suggestion to readers: Don't even bother watching videos that appear to be of yourself as a porn star, especially not on an Android or similar phone. Those devices have camera apps that are easily hacked and can be used to get more realistic images of your face for future use in videos that might be used to discredit or even blackmail you, later on.
Someone shared an experience on Facebook. The man does have a nice face. He is about sixty years old and spends most of his time working to pay for a recent surgical operation. On Facebook he had occasionally chatted with people who posted pictures, allegedly of themselves, of attractive younger women. "But not often," he said, because he was usually at work. One day a co-worker confronted him, wanting to know not even so much why as how he managed to be doing all those things with younger women all across the length and breadth of North America. I don't know what he looks like naked, but I'd guess the pornographer grafted his face onto a young, unscarred body. I'm sure the porn videos of me don't show the deterioration of my figure since the salmonella-aggravated glyphosate episode, either. Not that a person who wants to discredit another person wouldn't use images that would make the victim less marketable as a porn star, but that the pornographers don't actually know their victims and don't have those images.
It's likely to be happening to us as more of us use Android-type phones, which are always snapping "selfies" programmed to focus on what appear to be human faces in their surroundings. (Frustrate them by storing them in a drawer, putting on gloves and a full face cover before you take them out. That should be easy: obviously the things aren't built for use as phones.)
Recently Twitter users have reported their accounts being hacked, presumably by apps they allow to post and follow for them. "Suddenly," a Real Twit says, "I'm following two thousand people who all seem to be Chinese and I can't find the people I actually do follow--mostly news reporters and a few close e-friends--in my Twitter stream any more."
Another Twit reports, "Five thousand Chinese bots are following me and I have no idea why." Person's concern is that having a large following in China may be used to discredit per U.S. political opinions. Regular readers may recall that, back in the Obama administration, this web site picked up some followers from the federal government who were interested in why I had a lot of Russian readers and my Yahoo e-mail had been used to send out spam from Turkey. I named the two completely innocent trusted readers whose e-mail had been used to worm into mine, and wished the government success in getting the Turkish hackers chained up under the jail somewhere, as the disgusting dastards had "updated" my e-mail format and Yahoo refused to undo the damage. I still don't know about the Russian readers, except that they seemed to be attracted to my LiveJournal, which was of course based in Russia, because "Priscilla King" was the name of a character in some online game they played...I am glad that, in the current state of relations between our governments, Google seems to have stopped publishing the Russian edition of this web site.
If you follow "celebrities" on social media you know how easy it can be to lose sight of them. They delete and purge one official account, then start another under the same name, and although you're a faithful fan you're not following them any more. I liked some of Melania Trump's outfits and followed at least three different Twitter accounts, at different times, all with the Twitter name FLOTUS and the blue check, but for whatever reason she didn't seem to keep one account as FLOTUS for a month at a time.
One man has a theory. Pursuant to this web site's consideration of a hypothetical Worst Friend a middle school kid might have, he named his own worst school friend. "He grew up in the same small Southern town where we live now, but after graduation he lived in a big city up North. Had a good job before he was convicted of a violent crime and sent to prison. He can be cruel and vindictive. He and a man who was drinking with him made passes at me; I dodged. I'm 90% sure they are the ones who 'cloned' my picture on the Internet."
It would be nice if all the hacking of online accounts were being done by people's rejected admirers, and probably some of it is. When I first heard about "my" career as a porn star I thought it might be another thing the Professional Bad Neighbor would be able and likely to do. But as this kind of thing is becoming a pandemic, I find myself suspecting a more sinister motive.
Most of us who are active in cyberspace, other than as employees of electronics companies, like the Internet because of the freedom of communication. Anybody can say anything to anybody, and in most cases--where crime is not involved--the worst consequence is that you might damage your relationship with a reader, or readers. You might harm your brand. And if you do that, of course, you can always e-die and return to e-life with a different brand. An amateurish move, but what the bleep? It's the Internet. A lot of us are amateurs.
Having alienated potential customers is not, of course, the only reason why Internet impersonality is so valuable. Another reason is that people have different brands for different enterprises. People who want to read your publications don't necessarily want to see your jewelry, or vice versa, so it's nice to have separate accounts with separate names.
Another reason is personal security--no matter who you are, you do not want criminals to know when you're planning to travel, receiving payments, receiving any deliveries of anything; and if you do anything worthwhile, you also have haters, whom you want to keep in confusion about which side of town you live on.
A big reason for some of us is the classic, "On the Internet no one knows you're a dog," Nobody knows what you look like. I didn't push it with the sixty-year-old man chatting with the thirty-year-old women, but why would those women want to talk to a sixty-year-old man if they really were thirty? Well, if he were writing a blog, of course, there'd be all kinds of non-sexist, non-sexual reasons. If you blog about furnace repair, you could receive messages from anyone who has a furnace. But this man wasn't writing a blog; he was using Facebook mostly to keep in touch with relatives, and after his Significant Other died, these cute chicks popped up on his page wanting to chat and get acquainted. Hello...sixty is not old enough to attract real gold-diggers who prefer men over eighty, but it is too old to attract real thirty-year-old women who can get dates with men their own age. Some of those "young women" may be phishing, maybe some of them have some sort of obsession with grey hair, but the most likely profile is a woman who is sixty or seventy and has assumed all the attractive male faces on Facebook belong to thirty-year-old men who want to chat with thirty-year-old women. That would be the type who appreciate a face that says "I'm a nice, kind, cheerful grandfather."
That one's obvious, and should be a deterrent to anyone looking for dates on the Internet. There are other reasons why people post disinformation about themselves. The Internet has always been good for sociological experiments. People who fear discrimination may try, like the Bronte sisters, publishing under names that suggest they might belong to the dominant group. I've known several Black people who wanted to find out just how racist White people really are, so even on the phone they would try to "put out feelers" by trying to sound like White bigots. People who are gender-confused, or think they might be, try to "get in touch with the side" of their personality that they think is closer to the other gender stereotype. Recent studies of interpersonal psychology have focussed on the social penalties certain behavior and personality traits incur when some people display them, but not when others do: a woman who wants to vent anger may be more acceptable with a male-sounding pseudonym, a man who wants to verbalize grief may be more acceptable with a female-sounding pseudonym, a person who's into online games may find it easier to relate to other players with a younger-sounding pseudonym, and so on.
What about women who have no trouble finding dates in real life? We've been wanting the rest of the world, including other women, to "look at us less, and listen to us more" for a long time. On the Internet you'll find some of us, baby-boomers who feel that our looks are gone forever, using our graduation pictures as avatars while we blog about being grandmothers or cultural dinosaurs. Others use flowers, animals, objects, brand logos, or images from the distant past. Because, well, when some of my e-friends used actual recent pictures showing that they're well preserved middle-aged modern women, their Twitter streams filled up with pictures of pathetic, desperate men.
Men really should know that, until a very intimate and very passionate relationship has formed, images of naked male bodies do not excite women. To young, timid girls they look like threats. To women who've been around long enough to know how fragile those parts of the male body are, they look like pleas for mercy. Seriously. Guys. If you want any actual female to be attracted to a little flat picture, you'd probably have better luck using a picture of your car. The bodies might still be diseased but at least they'd be female rather than trans,
But even men have been known to weigh in on the bottom line: Even when the "look at you" messages aren't "I'm a sex maniac," they are boring! For so many of us in cyberspace, if we never hear any of the following remarks in another conversation, it'd still be too soon:
"Are you all right? You look tired."
"You're not sick! You don't look sick! You just want time off to go to the lake!"(To which the ideal response would be, "Think so? Thank you....BAAARRRRFFF.")
"Sit up straight!"
"So basically you're saying your grandmother died. Sorry. Y'know that shirt's not the best color for you."
"You look angry. Was it something I said? Why deny it? The body cannot lie! Maybe you were suppressing a sneeze because you were angry!" (To which the ideal response is, "Right. Now I'm angry. At myself, for wasting time talking to you. Now get out of my life.")
"You do too like it when I talk dirty! Your face is flushed!"
"Well I don't want to talk about it. You look as if you're not going to listen."
Really. I don't share the autistic blogger's reaction to even printed images of eyeballs, to which I linked last year, but I can see how the way some people distract themselves with all this looking would instill that kind of phobic reaction to anything resembling one of those looking people's faces. Anything else about them, really. If you are a looker, and you catch the words "you look" plopping out of your mouth, my advice is to wrap black tape over a pair of sunglasses, completely covering the plastic, and put them on before you attempt to make conversation. Or do your conversation by phone. Or Internet.
What all those obnoxious "you look" comments have in common is a single message: "I'M NOT PAYING ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU SAY. INSTEAD, I'M STARING AT YOU, AS A HOSTILE DOMINANCE DISPLAY."
(Introverts' relationships aren't as hierarchical as extroverts' relationships are. Many of us don't make dominance displays, or make them only in anger, but that's not to be interpreted as acceptance of other people's dominance displays. Rather, to us, all dominance displays are hostile. When we want to make a good impression we display respect; and extroverts who want to make a good impression on us need to study the ways we do that, so they can display respect to us.)
The Internet blocks that whole relationship-killing habit. All you see is the words, or pictures or music, people choose to post. It's not possible to block out the message by staring at the person, even at the person's eyes. (And any time anyone is saying anything but "Look at me," a lot of people feel that it is rude to stare even at our eyes.) Your choices are to respond to the content or not to respond to the content.
Thousands of people enjoy our e-friends for that very reason. They may not like what we're saying. They may not want to answer our questions. They may be confused. They may not read the entire post. They may miss a post because they weren't online, or were doing something else with their online time, that day. But in any case they will never dismiss our words, or pictures, or music, with one of those "look at you" idiocies that make us think that really God gave some people more eyeballs than they ought to have.
For us, it's about boundaries. For Google, Bing, Twitter, and the other corporate interests who decry the impersonality of the Internet...it is not about security. We've all seen, recently, that when a criminal is incompetent to post evidence of his crime on Facebook, that helps the local police find him and lock him up. The rest of us didn't need to know the lunatic's name in order for that to happen. The police didn't even need the images of himself the fool was sending out. All they really needed to know was that a criminal was active on such-and-such street, and there they were. All they had to do was find the address and look for the fool with the gun and the Android. Online anonymity helps fight crime.
No, corporate babble about anonymity enabling bad things online won't hold water. That's not the corporations' concern. What they're interested in is profit. They imagine that if they just knew a little more about you and me, they'd be able to sell us more stuff and/or at a higher profit.
Well, what they need to know about me, from their point of view, is that I am totally turned off by "personalized" marketing. In real life I don't mind that so much--if there's no aggressive "selling" involved. I don't mind walking into a store and having the storekeeper say, "That book you were asking about? It's come in." But I instantly don't want to buy something if the company directs me to a web site that demands any information about me before displaying a price. I don't want other people to be getting a better price than I am, nor do I want to be getting a better price than other people. I want to know the price that is fixed, equally applicable to everyone without discrimination. If there's not such a price, I prefer to do business in a place where there is.
"Marketers" need to know this about people: Probably about as many of us are hard-wired introverts as are positively extroverts. The claim that three-quarters of humankind are extroverts rests on outdated tests that confused introversion with social phobia, which is a different thing. Accurate data gathered by testing for conscience, perceptivity, precision, etc., has yet to be gathered but I'd guess that brain wiring forms a bell-shaped curve, something between 30-40-30 and 40-20-40. You make a good impression on introverts by showing respect. One way you show respect is that you don't ask for more information than you're given. If you want to sell more flatware, you don't want to know what I eat or what color my kitchen curtains are; you need to tell me about the quality and/or the distinctive look of your flatware.
But after all "marketers" do know that the money is most easily gathered from the pockets of stupid people. Stupidity is a choice, not an I.Q. score and not a disability; we all have moments of stupidity but extroverts have more of them than other people. So the marketers want to be able to pin down, e.g., which people would be likely to rush out and buy whole sets of new flatware if it were advertised in a picture with food that activated their appetites enough. That you and I might want to make sure we never buy anything from anyone who'd try to sell us flatware with irrelevant images of food is the kind of data Google et al. think they want to gather. Their fantasy is that advertisers can "target" the most susceptible people and get them to mortgage everything they've got in order to rush out and buy every kind of rubbish the advertisers are being paid to sell.
So they want to use the Internet as a "social credit system" where it's possible for those who pay enough to learn everything about any given individual's shopping, reading, viewing, and listening behavior. If the person uses the Internet only two or three times a year and only from public places, that makes it more interesting for them to know what the person does in that scanty Internet time.
And of course the result of losing Internet anonymity would be...turning the nice impersonality of the Internet into Gossip World. The people who built the Internet would abandon it in droves. Sometimes I think that would be a good thing.
Anyway my suspicion is that, by making it possible--or even paying--hackers to tamper with our nice impersonal social media and e-mail accounts, the corporations are building up a demand that the nice impersonal Internet become completely personalized. Everything would have to be activated by biometric scans. If someone who was paying enough didn't like what you were saying, nothing electronic would ever work for you again, or at least the sites that person was paying never would. If a corporate employee sold your information to haters or criminals, the burglars could reach your house before your plane took off, the hired gun could be waiting to meet you at the rent-a-car lot. The totally personalized Internet would implode the Internet itself and would temporarily produce a major reset on civilization. In some ways even that might be a good thing, but I still prefer that it happen after my lifetime's over.
"If I knew for sure that those two 'gay' 'friends' of mine did that..." the man who suspected them of having hacked his account indulged in a few fantasies. It's important to understand that this is not a hater. This is a goodnatured, easygoing fellow, one of a minority of men our age who ever use "gay" and "friend" and a first-person pronoun in the same sentence. He is reacting to what he perceives as a personal attack that could endanger his career, if he weren't so close to retirement already, because in our town that's what it is, and what he knows the "gay" friends who've lived in big cities are likely to see as a joke. His privacy has been violated, in any case, even though it's probably not his nakedness that's been displayed to the world on Facebook. His anger is understandable and justifiable. And I have faith that, in real life, what he'd do would be to spread the word that they defamed his character because he rejected their advances. In a small Southern town that's probably still a serious punishment.
But I recommend that people learn to laugh off this kind of attacks on the Internet. Find those web sites that nobody's going to believe, the tabloid-type content (I don't recommend doing this with a device you use for serious online work) that shows Howard Hughes partying with Jimmy Hoffa. If anybody finds an image that looks like you doing something you never did, or an account somebody's using to post things you wouldn't say in your name, or even a bot army of followers you know nothing about, shrug and say, "People can do all kinds of things with Photoshop these days."
Do not take it seriously. Taking it seriously will only feed the actual "marketing" monster, and the potential "social credit as a means of social control" monster.
And, before beating up old school friends with sick senses of humor, be aware that the harassment may be coming from servants of the Evil Principle in a Chinese sweatshop. If corporate interests are paying foreign students with computer skills to harass us, you know those students are clever enough to think of things that look like something an old friend of yours might have thought would be funny. If you give an old friend a couple of beers and, without further prompting, he volunteers a confession of having hacked your account, then blame him. Otherwise, assume it's a corporate-paid, desperate foreign hacker.
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