“Only a stereotypical feces-eating faggot would get this emotional over celebrity gossip,” reads comment number 57 under Chris Crocker’s emotive “Leave Britney Alone!” YouTube clip. If nothing else, you’ve got to give the writer credit for fastidiousness. “Feces-eating”? How many hatemongers properly hyphenate? Usually their syntax resembles that of commenter number 83: “You fucking queer ass, go stick a dick up ur ass,” or number 12,064: “You truly a retarded dick sucking mindless sheep. get aids and die!” Then there’s the particularly miffed number 182,720: “ALL you fucking fags should be killed by terrorist! DIE FAGGOTS!!”
Crocker, the androgynous performance artist who last year parlayed his plea for Britney sympathy into 15 minutes of fame, clearly struck a nerve. Within days of its upload on September 10, “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!” was bumping Iraq coverage off ABC News’ website and spawning dozens of YouTube parodies. Crocker gave interviews from an undisclosed location, claiming he’d received death threats. Ten days after he posted the clip he reportedly signed a deal for his own reality TV show. His video has been gawked at over 15 million times.
But what truly set Crocker’s post apart from YouTube’s other surreal megahits was the viewer feedback it sparked. As of this writing it has generated over 209,000 comments—the second highest number for any single video in YouTube history—and many comments echo the antigay hostility quoted above. Tens of thousands have logged on solely to voice their opinions on exactly what horrific way Chris Crocker—and, by extension, all gay people—should die: AIDS, terrorism, bludgeoning, a bullet to the head.
You don’t need to hop the A train or stroll through Golden Gate Park to hear a crazy bigot ranting about sinners and Jesus these days. Just fire up Internet Explorer and peruse the comments sections on the country’s most popular websites, which are aflame with homophobic hate speech so descriptively violent they would shock the members of Fred Phelps’s Westboro Baptist Church. Reading through them, you begin to wonder whether this hatred is representative of America. Does the Internet’s cloak of anonymity reveal what straights would really like to say to our faces?
“It’s called John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory,” says Clay Shirky, a journalist and New York University adjunct professor who studies the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. The theory is based on this simple equation: Normal Person + Audience + Anonymity = Fuckwad.
“There’s a large crowd,” says Shirky, “and you can act out in front of it without paying any personal price to your reputation,” which creates conditions most likely to draw out the typical Internet user’s worst impulses. The Fuckwad theory is the modern-day equivalent of the dilemma described by the late ecologist Garrett Hardin in his 1968 essay “Tragedy of the Commons”: How do you manage a communal resource when everyone who uses it has an interest in sustaining it but also the opportunity and the incentive to abuse it?
William Sledd lives in Lexington, Ky., where, he says “it’s church, church, church, Wal-Mart, church.” Sledd hosts the web series Ask a Gay Man, which started out as a humble homemade YouTube project before being picked up by the Bravo network and given an online perch at OutZoneTV.com. With a title like that, naturally, Sledd’s posts are magnets for hateful comments. The feedback from his Halloween episode ran the gamut, from an evocative “Someone drop a piano on this fat ugly faggot” to a simple and succinct “I hate gays.”
Sledd says the antigay comments on his YouTube posts at first were few and far between, but once his show blew up, “I started getting lots of comments. It happened all at once, and it really bothered me. I was like, I’m just not going to make videos anymore.”
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