A week into news about AOL’s ginormous data dump and investigators have yet to tire of mining the minds of AOL users. As mirror sites spring up to face server overload as a product of morbid curiosity, the tales, well, inferences mostly, become darker and darker.
Silicon Valley fence post Valleywag, with tags reading “YOUR PRIVACY IS AN ILLUSION,” devoted a large portion of news coverage to finding the creepiest AOL users as they were discovered. Suddenly it moves from quaint to what the?.
On The Sublime “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”
–Edmund Burke
As you scroll through the thoughts and concerns of other people, it becomes more honest, jarring, and disturbing than a reality showto the point one recalls the morbidity of Sylvia Plath or the sad, lonely torture of Emily Dickinson.
And it’s difficult to stop scrolling, as you discover the three-month development of an unmarried woman’s pregnancy saga: discovering the signs of pregnancy; researching maternity clothes and diet tips; seeking advice about what to do when he doesn’t want her to keep it; researching what the Church says about it and the extent of its forgiveness; and finally, clinics in Charlotte.
You give them a face, even if they never show it to you.
Then you find out somebody else thinks dogs are sexy.
Slate dutifully categorized seven different flavors of searchers, based on revelations found in one of the many mirror sites. Dog Lover there takes his pigeon hole among other “pornhounds.” The rest of Paul Boutin’s list consists of the Manhunter, the Shopper, the Obsessive, the Omnivore, the Newbie, and the Basket Case.
And I can’t stop looking at it. It’s what people are thinking and not saying. This is the most fascinating and horrible thing. It’s truly sublime.
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