It’s a funny thing, the Internet. Online communities can become like mobs, united in opinion and righteousness over an idea. At midnight last night, the forumers at ytmnd.com launched a raid on the ebaumsworld.com forum, massively posting on their forums and generally causing a ruckus. Why? Well, it’s complicated. I think to start with, you should check out this flash show (warning, contains explicit lyrics). The gist of it is that Eric Bauman is accused of stealing other peoples creative works, slapping a ‘hosted on ebaumsworld.com’ watermark and making loads of cash. So it seems that many are unhappy with his apparent piracy, and when an image created on the ytmnd.com site was ‘stolen’, the above stated righteous fury took over and mob mentality ruled.
It’s an interesting phenomenon though when you think about it. Is it not akin to the villagers taking up the pitchforks and torches and going to slay the monster that lives on top of the hill? Is electronic vigilantism an ethical and moral way of dealing with the ‘lawless’ internet? I know there are other types of vigilante’s out there who take it upon themselves to target child pornographers, and some record companies seed p2p networks with bogus mp3 to stem rampant downloads, so the question is do the ends justify the means? Did they break the law, because technically, the were committing a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack on another server. Is this kind of thing something we’ll see more of in the future? As online communities draw together and split apart, will ‘opposing’ forums be seen as the battlefield of the future?