A couple of weeks ago I read an article on the BBC News site by technology reporter David Lee. The article (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17784232) is about the closure of ‘revenge porn’ site isanyoneup.com.

The article has stuck in my mind – not because of the content but because of the mentality of its subject, Hunter Moore.

Moore is quoted in the article as saying; “As sad as it is, hurting or ruining people’s lives as people say, is entertainment for some.” and “I just monetise people’s mistakes that they made and it’s kind of a shady business. But if it wasn’t me, somebody else was going to do it. All I did was really perfected the way to monetise people’s naked pictures.”

These highlighted for me the real darkest area of the internet – and a lot of our new technology – and that is the de-humanisation it appears to be having on us all.

Think about it. If Moore had taken these women and paraded them down the street naked and against their consent, all the time shouting through a loudhailer “she cheated on her boyfriend’ or “hello sir, is this your daughter? Did you know she’s a dirty little whore?” he would be arrested and branded a psycho.

The internet is equally as public an area as the street, the subjects of the photos are equally as vulnerable – if not more so as the scope of access is global. So why is it seen as acceptable?

I guess it’s the same problem as ‘comment cojones’ – be it on blogs, youtube, twitter, whatever. There are some amazingly disturbed responses that you can’t help but think – or maybe it’s hope – that no-one could be such a dick in real life.

And therein lies the problem. The internet is real life. The people being abused online, be it by people they once trusted flogging their intimate images, or by strangers telling them that they should kill themselves, are real people. The protection – or rather disconnection – of a screen seems to have made us, as a society, forget that.

Or maybe it isn’t that these guys are forgetting that the person on the end of their hateful barb is a real person. Maybe the issue is that they are forgetting that they themselves are a real person. We all know stories about people pretending to be someone they are not through the anonymity of the internet; well maybe this is another manifestation of that.

The majority of these guys are probably those whose sap has dried up, their Balls now merely decoration. They have lost any kind of Determination in their life and are unwilling to stand up for their beliefs – their Integrity is long gone.

But suddenly they have this opportunity to be aggressive and forward, and because it’s anonymous that means there is no Risk – their Balls aren’t on the block. These are inevitably guys who have bought in to the popular misconception that to be a Man means to be aggressive and to ooze testosterone. The fact that this isn’t an accurate description of them worries many guys to start thinking they are less of a Man.

Of course it doesn’t.

In fact, what does make them less of a man is the fact that they feel it necessary to belittle others and don’t even have the Balls to stand behind their statements.

Whatever the reason, it’s no surprise that we’re having trouble adapting to this fledgling method of communication. 100,000 years ago we bonded through grunts, gestures and sensing. Language started evolving around 50,000 years ago, and is still evolving now. Internet communication hasn’t yet reached its twentieth birthday as far as being accessible to the general public.

So we’re still learning, fine. Learning requires fuck ups.

But does it really require us to forget what it means to be human and start acting like dicks?