More than swinging chat rooms or low-grade videoconferencing, violence really brings people together online. It's wholesome, fun, and fosters a healthy sense of community and connectedness. Of course, it's only simulated violence, directed at pixels rather than people. But what lies on the far side of this bridge to the 21st century?
Looking to the future of virtual interaction with an outlook equal parts childlike wonder and bloodlust, it's easy to see QuakeWorld becoming a museum entry alongside Pong, and more complex forms of non-contact evisceration emerging over time. Today, every-man-for-himself is the norm, but a more sophisticated level of active community - the lynch mob - may be ascendant. The finest example of this may be the recently retooled People's Court, now adjudicated by former New York mayor Ed Koch and broadcast across the Web. Doug Llewellyn has been served with a restraining order, but the theme song is intact and the litigants are as venal, hare-brained, and hilarious as ever. What's really different is the audience.
The blunt-muddled street onlookers corralled to comment on each case display dependable solidarity in their Zen-like inarticulateness, but their eyes show even greater unity - a righteous desire to gild the victors and punish the malefactors with the nearest police-issue toilet plunger. The sidewalk jury provides a necessary balance offsetting Koch's indulgent demeanor, which lacks the hard-ass theatrics Wapner contributed to the show's first incarnation. The digital tribunal doesn't get to mouth off (yet), instead simply watching the cases via VXtreme or RealVideo, and pumping the vote button in strict accordance with the basic tenets of street justice.
Nobody gets killed, but vengeance is preserved, and that always counts for something. Picking winners always implies a loser, and spectacular defeats rank high on the entertainment value spectrum. If humiliating loss can please crowds via the legal arena as easily as the theatre of combat, perhaps the digital converts at the (WWW)WB Network can cherry-pick other TV concepts from yesterday and re-engineer them as spectator sports. Though Family Feud's polling methodology screams for appropriation, the ultimate digital resurrection might well be The Gong Show - which the Web has mimicked since its inception, minus the voting. People will always claim for themselves the right to reveal their inadequacies. In the networked playground, the least we can do is reclaim our right to lop off their heads.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
