Applemilk1988 is offline

Perhaps the most lamentable quality of the popular internet is the forum it provides for, and the representatives it attracts from among, people who are just crude and vicious.

The accusation of expressing ignorant, hateful thoughts online has been abused by rightwing pundits as a means of putting down the progressive blogosphere: some of those thin-skinned, delusional pundits can hardly find a political opinion at variance with their own that does not set off their martyr complexes or promote a surge of unexpected solicitude towards a group they had villified only the previous day.

But it occurs quite a lot, either coming from the right, or in politically neutral settings.

Today I opened up youtube and saw that many of my favorite videos were gone. A few months ago I had gotten the account just so that I could favorite a few clips from a girl in South Florida named Emily. She had reminded me, in some superficial ways, of an old friend of mine, and the videos were entertaining in a modest way. Emily's videos have gotten probably a million views (I stopped adding the figures at half that) and have been the object of a lot of hype, fan mail, and -- to the point of this post -- hate mail. I wont compare her to Orson Welles or Stanley Kubrick, but for a teen (Her login name is Applemilk1988; I can only guess 1988 is her birth year) just doing these quick simple postings from the local mall or Starbucks or from the couch in her family home, they had a lot of humor and personality. Some were definitely better than others. Her best, an "intense" lesson in the Japanese language which spawned four sequels of varying quality, made me understand why she had fans. In contrast, she had regular posts in an entirely different, more natural and subdued persona, that invited a sense of familiarity and empathy.

At least for me. As I noted, Emily has gotten a lot of hate mail. I know because a huge amount of the hate mail is in the completely public form of open video posts on youtube. I continue to be shocked at the vicious character of some of the writing and posting about Emily. Just to give some idea, there is a lot of abusive language and epithets. I would guess that youtube probably deleted others because of use restrictions; either that, or the vloggers have maximized the hostility while evading those restrictions by design.

Anyhow, I noticed that the videos of hers that I'd saved were gone. Despite being a busy guy, I searched first youtube, which had still had others' videos about Emily, and then the broader web, and discovered that Emily's accounts on youtube and various other services had been hacked, apparently by people who specifically targeted her. This all happened just about a week ago, while Emily was (and maybe is still) in Japan. Their celebratory posts reveling in this attack should not have been surprising. Again, I would guess that use restrictions may have weeded out some that were more threatening or sexually graphic than what I see there, but yes, there are gratuitous references to her speculated sexual practices. They also linked to a (former)boyfriend's site, who included some personal gripes against Emily because, he said, they increased traffic to his account due to her fame. He sounds like a real prince.

Emily is such a minor celebrity, known to a fairly small segment of the public for a few short homemade videos. I don't even know her last name, or what city she's in. Nor do I want to know these, and while her more intimate videos invite some empathy with the events of her daily life, I really have no desire to know what she does in private. And yet, there is a following out there for material attacking her, calling her names, exposing her passwords, exposing her alleged doings offline, alleged failings, intimate matters, and who knows what next. This cottage industry of hate against a young woman whose worst crimes, as far as I can tell, are well within the bounds of small interpersonal matters where none of us are perfect.

This seems to me like an interesting case lesson in the proper bounds of discourse, as well as the perils of fame, and it reminds me of the Don Imus ruckus, but of course Emily's haters have not withdrawn their attacks or apologized, but let them persist and metastasize. They have gone to the point of silencing their enemy by force. And I don't see anyone defending her yet, but I'm not sure whether her fans know what's going on.