THERE IS NO TIME IN CYBERSPACE
THERE IS NO TIME IN CYBERSPACE.
or, how multiple years sucked into the world’s worst forums caused a total split from reality
Becoming a self-imposed exile was far easier than it should have been. There were only two structures imposed on my life at the time: work, a constant, seizing my time for six-to-fourteen hours a day, and the demands of cyberspace. The greediness of the forums was far less simply defined. It swallowed all time like a black hole, causing hours to pass like minutes, allowing the sun to rise and set without me ever taking a step out of my bedroom, which resembled a nuclear fallout shelter more closely than it did a sanctuary of sleep. Considering I didn’t sleep, not for days at a time, this was apt.
I could trace my obsession back to the seventh grade. It started on the school bus. My assigned “bus buddy” was a boy named Emmanuel, who I had a hopeless crush on. He spent most of his bus rides watching Pewdiepie, listening to Eminem, or showing me the most grotesque things he had found on the Internet as of late. The first time he spoke to me, I was sitting quietly, book in my hands, trying not to peek at his phone. He noticed my wandering eye and asked, “Wanna watch?” Wordlessly, I nodded, carefully accepting his offer of an earbud. We stared into the glowing abyss, and what stared back at us was news footage: specifically, footage of the beheading of a journalist by ISIS. I was enraptured. Breathlessly, I asked him, “Where did you find this?” His disaffected answer shocked me: “YouTube.”
Before Emmanuel, I had never seen a YouTube video. My Internet browsing consisted entirely of going to the Wikipedia pages of horror films I was too afraid to watch and printing them out so I could read their synopses whenever I wanted. I had no personal phone, and my family shared one computer, kept in the living room so our Internet access would be monitored at all times. I knew this would not be the place to start hunting down videos like the ones Emmanuel showed me. We made a pact: every day after school, while waiting for the bus, we would go to the library together and share one school-owned computer. It was there that Emmanuel opened my eyes to a whole new world: not just news footage and accidental captures of accidents, but forums such as rotten.com, bestgore.net, and the like, where we gleefully watched cartel killings, freak accidents, and, once, a deliberate act of murder.
Soon after our ritual began, I was given my very own electronic device: an IPod Touch. I was thrilled. Now I could scour the depths of the Internet in total privacy, with nobody looking over my shoulder to try and catch me in the act of transgression. This would end up becoming a necessity, as Emmanuel and I were banned from the school library after our librarian caught us watching another beheading on the school computer. The IPod was not allowed to come with me to school, which made it more special, in a sense. I found myself spending countless sleepless nights locked into the mystical beam of the screen’s light, under my covers, trying to avoid being caught by my parents, who were growing aware of my early-onset addiction and frequently entered my room in hopes of catching me awake and online. I consumed endless amounts of fanfiction, began roleplaying online, and, of course, remained devoted to my gore fetish.
I began to shape my offline life around my online one far later in life. Tired of hiding my desperate compulsions, I started to seek out the transgressive in every other form I could: through literature, through film, through music, and through works of art. This was an accepted quirk by society at large. My friends endearingly referred to my sick taste, largely because they knew very little of what was going on in whatever I was reading, watching, or listening to, but could tell it was violent and disturbing and therefore something to be avoided. I was proud of my taste, and flaunted it openly. That is, all except for the very real content I sought out. Nobody knew that I watched real violence, real death, and was in fact even addicted to it. Nobody knew how much time I spent on 4chan, in the dregs of /x/ and /b/, trying to uncover the darkest truths about the world I could find. Nobody knew that I had started to fear I was losing my grasp on reality.
The dreams had started in high school. I was a junior, and I had not yet fully developed into the somewhat depraved person I would later become. Most of my Internet usage at the time revolved around an obsessive roleplaying habit, which I fostered on Tumblr and then flourished into on Discord. It was relatively harmless, all surrounding damaged OCs who spent a lot of time having sex. I thought, at the time, that I was cured. When the dreams began, I realized I had simply sublimated my urges to a degree where they could only be expressed in cryptic visions and scattered memories. The dreams began to creep into my head during waking life: in class, at parties, while I was doing my homework. I panicked. I begged my parents to let me talk to a psychologist. They reluctantly agreed, but she blamed my intrusive thoughts on stress. I found this rational line of thought ludicrous: I was hardly stressed, and not at all enough to be suffering the nightmarish visions I was having.
As I retreated further into the womb of the Internet’s underbelly, my loose grasp on reality began to slip completely. I experienced a total break from reality, my own conceptions of life and death shaped entirely by a nebulous online void in which it was acceptable and even encouraged to become a voyeur of the spectacle of violent death. In this world, there were no laws beyond not being a pussy and following the rigid code for engagement within the forums. If you failed to commune with your fellow travellers properly, you would be doxxed and banned. SWATing was rampant, as were elaborate hoaxes surrounding would-be murderers. When this became my reality, my real life slipped away from me. I failed to interact with actual human beings, preferring the alienation provided by my online peers. I had no conception of what normal conversation consisted of. I became haunted by the specters of the crimes I had witnessed. I began to fear that I, too, was capable of unspeakable horrors.
