Eyefucking

The other day I read a Story on Medium from Matter. It was called “It’s impossible to prevent someone from eyefucking you”. Eyefucking? Did I just become witness about the birth of a new fashion word?

The Internet is huge, trends climb high and fall deep, in a very shord period of time. It’s almost impossible to trace back a trend to it’s origin once it has become “stable”. Like new fashion words. Unless you are there right when it happens.

These “Happenings” are often born on boards like reddit or 4chan. Especially 4chan has brought out quite a lot of trends in the last time. Remember the “leaks”? Sure, that was a bad trend, but certainly a trend.

But what is a trend? A trend is something that has a fast rise, a short life and almost an instant fall. Only a few are long-lived.

Anonymous, the hacker collective, was also born on 4chan. But isn’t 4chan that awkward place, where the minor 1 percentage of humanity hang out? Why so do millions of young people, students, academics and activists follow and support collectives like Anonymous? A child from 4chan? Well, apparently such boards aren’t as bad as some people call them.

I don’t like to admit it, but to come back to the “leaks” I mentioned above. I was on 4chan right when it happened. I was probably one of the first 1000 people who saw them. I wasn’t proud of it in any way, I also wasn’t proud of 4chan or the hacker. But I got aware of something. A conclusion that I’d like to share.

Boards like4chan, reddit and all of their “clones” all have one thing in common. Most of the stuff on them is just plain useless. But then they also have another side. Some Posts, Threads or however they are called just say/show/demonstrate the truth. Uncut, raw, not edited.

Well, what did the leaks show us? That most of us aren’t aware of our privacy. We choose our passwords poorly and store our Data in places that we don’t really know exactly how they work or what they do. In this case, I mean the Cloud. A lot of people aren’t even aware of what a Cloud actually is. They just like it because it makes our Data available everywhere we are.

A Cloud is just a server (and a server is really just a pc with some different kind of software on it, connected to the internet) where we upload our data. And our Data gets stored in a folder on that server. Yes, in a normal folder. Nothing special. Just a folder, usually named like our username.

That essay you stored yesterday on your Dropbox could be in a folder just next to Jennifer Lawrence’s Pictures. The only thing that separates these two folders are access rights, in form of a password.

But I’m drifting away from my topic… let’s get on course again. 4chan. What is this strange place exactly? Well it is a place without any rules. No restrictions. Copyright you say? Never heard of that. This is 4chan in a nutshell. I’ve been there for 2 years now. As an Anon, as the users there are called. I’ve never posted anything, but seen a lot. Have I learned something? Well, apart from how to build a nuclear bomb, hack the NASA and cook the perfect Chicken Soup, not much. Except one thing. I like to call it the “Uncut version of today’s media”.

A lot of our conversations in the office, with friends and family and colleagues are based on what we see and hear from the media. But is it always right? And more specific, is it always the full story? Usually not. But usual stories also don’t need to be explained too exactly. We don’t always need all the details and facts. Sometimes we just want to know what happened and why ASAP. But in some cases that’s not enough.

The media is powerful in today’s world. It has the power to manipulate and trick the audience, falsificate stories and publish wrong or unconfirmed facts. And 4chan is a place where such things sometimes don’t happen.

ISIS is making a lot of trouble right now. They’re the medias daily bread. Media tells us that they’re bad. And indeed they are. But trust me, they are even worse than the media presents them and than you might think. On 4chan you can see uncensored videos of mass-executions. Over and over. If you see such a video, you lose faith in humanity for this day.

Of course CNN can’t show such videos on TV. That would be unacceptable. Imagine children seeing such things. Terribly. But this is just one example. There are thousands of them and If you are curious, well, 4chan and reddit are free.

Whatever back to my word. Later on I went to Urban Dictionary, an online glossary for fashion words and searched for “Eyefucking”, and was amazed. A guy called “ Eby ” submitted the word on November 14th, 2006. TWOTHOUSANDANDSIX. That’s 8 years ago. Considering I am from 97', this is quite a long time backwards for me (like half my life). For a moment, I felt some nostalgia (as far as a 17 yo can say that). A word that gets hyped in the context of a story on Medium was already used by some guy in 2006. I imagined how he probably used this word with a couple of his friends back in time and thought he could publish it on Urban Dictionary.

Now, don’t understand me wrong, maybe it wasn’t exactly this guy. But he stands as a substitute for the one who originally used it first. And isn’t even aware of what a trend he started. Remember when I said it’s almost impossible to trace back such a trend? There you have it by example. The origins of the word “Eyefucking” will remain in the dark, probably forever. Since it isn’t worth investigating in such a trivial thing. And nevertheless, I wrote a whole text on it. Oh irony.

Notes: I drifted away quite a bit from what I was originally intended to write. Excuse me for that. These are just some thoughts I have at the moment and that I wanted to write down somewhere.