I agree in so far as there have always been sadists, pedophiles, autists, people with horrifying behaviors and fixations.
I meant what I said moreso in the sense that 764 and similar groups are a product of a generation of those people growing up with unrestricted Internet access, being able to network with like minded people from a very young age, etc. Its the particular manifestation that I find to be uniquely zoomer.
That being said, I do think a generation of kids that grew up watching hardcore fetish pornography are more likely to develop into this kind of person. In, say, 1990, a kid might find a porno mag with naked women in varying poses, or maybe even normal vanilla sex. Nowadays kids can find literally any manifestation of human sexuality imaginable with ease.
I realize there were fetish magazines, and even CP magazines before it became widely illegal, but they were things that had to be special ordered and a lot of people would have no clue where to find that stuff. Chances are anyone with that stuff was an adult that was, say, heavily involved in some sex club and happened to link up with a degenerate that had the same horrid fixations.
It just seems like a uniquely post 2000s thing that somebody can type any fetish imaginable (aside from CP itself) into google and find millions of results. I also believe its a uniquely post 2000s thing to find somebody on twitter listing off a dozen kinks in their bio for the world to see.
Do you think this would be less prevalent if the lockdown never happened? There was always a dark, criminal underbelly on the surface web but it seems like it really took off after 2020 since more people than ever before were turned into terminally online antisocial freaks.
Reading up on groups like com/764 has me worried what will happen if another lockdown happens. I truly think it will be the death knell for society and we'll see mass terminally online insanity everywhere.
Replying to both of these as they both kind of relate to my thoughts here
Looking back I think there was a key change to the internet that I haven't seen talked about much. When we talk about the transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0, the difference people usually use to define them is that web 1.0 was static information put up and made available to others, whereas web 2.0 was a layer of interactivity applied to the web browsing experience. Things like forums, sites for hosting videos, ways of commenting on content, etc. Obviously, this was a big change, but I think that there was another change starting to take place as this transition was occurring that was maybe more consequential overall than "just" adding interactivity to the web.
I'm not aware of any discussions around this and so I don't have a good name for it, but I guess I'll call it communalization. For a lot of the early web 2.0 days, the interactivity was certainly a draw and it kept users interested, and some users became core members of a community, but these features either weren't intended to or maybe just weren't effective at
building communities, or maybe more specifically, drawing in a significant number of passers-by and turning them into active contributors
. As an example of what I mean by communalization, I'll offer a comparison. You can find porn on PornHub, and you can find porn on Discord, but the key difference is that porn servers on Discord are
communities whereas comment sections on PornHub aren't. I'm sure there's some freak out there who's the exception to this rule, but generally speaking, you won't find people building friendships or establishing community ties in the comments section of a PornHub video; at most you'll see a little back and forth "I would fuck her" "fuck yeah me too." On a porn Discord, the porn is surely a draw for the users who participate, but more than that, they seek to discuss and trade ideas with other likeminded individuals.
I remember years ago, as a boy, discovering gore videos online. Maybe I'm powerleveling a bit here, giving away my age, but I think this was around the mid to late 2000s, during the big wave of shock sites that you'd send to your friends as a sort of fucked up prank. Back then they had stuff like LiveLeak, DocumentingReality, and TheYNC, but I think that the interactivity offered to users on sites like this was more akin to the PornHub comments section I just mentioned. It was a place to make offhand comments about the content, maybe ask what the backstory of some beheading video was and hope for a reply, but it wasn't the kind of place that you went to to build social bonds. Over time though, communalization occurred, and now there are gore content communities rather than gore content hubs.
Modern tools like Discord have enabled much more effective communalization. They're high quality, easy to use, and centralized for easy access to the end user. Maybe this process really was just as simple as making it easy to attach photos and videos and a profile picture, or maybe there's something more complex going on that I'm not fully grasping. Whatever the cause, it seems to me that all across the internet but especially in unsavory communities like gore trading communities, the formation of strong communities has a profoundly negative effect. The content is bad for you, sure, but the community is really what makes the content it forms around so dangerous.
I don't really have a good conclusion for this except for to say that I think it'll probably get worse. More screen time, more addictive social apps, more extreme content becoming more and more available from even more places all across the world, etc. I'm not really sure what the solution is
