…because of this.
It certainly sounds like a movie plot: hiring an Mexican hit-man over the internet. But there’s a dark and sinister truth at play here…
If you die at the hands an internet Mexican hit-man, you die for real…
The dark and sinister truth is that no matter how you try to ham it up, there’s nothing funny about killing for hire or murdering the innocent.
What is shocking is that it happens on my internet, the one with homestarrunner and slashdot and the happy moron. That happy meme-filled place that connects me to my friends and that provides me with all the technical information I’ll ever need at my job. There aren’t any real dark corners on the internet; homestarrunner and a contract killer are neighbors. They’re a world apart in philosophy, but they’re only a click removed in a browser.
What we all want, of course, is an internet where the bad people aren’t allowed to join. The problem with this is that the internet is a global network. Across the globe, there is a great deal of disagreement as to who the bad people are.
The internet’s greatest strength is that it connects you with everyone else. The internet’s greatest weakness is that it connects you with everyone else. You have a global pool of buyers for your ebay auction, but you’re forever scouring peoples rankings to see if they’re trustworthy.
The fundamental problem is authenticating people as good people or bad people, sifting the wheat from the chaff. More generally, it’s a problem of distinguishing the people you want to be connected with from the people you don’t want to be connected with. Every single forum, store, social networking website or blog suffers from this problem.
The greatest kick in the teeth is that even if you solve this problem, you haven’t removed the bad people from the internet. You’ve just hidden them. Additionally, you’ve empowered them, because if you can hide your blog from the bad people, the bad people can use your approach to hide their blog from the police.
Ultimately the problem is that the internet reflects the kind of people we are. The reason Mexican hit-men advertise online is because there are people who willing (and wanting) to hire them.
You can’t get rid of the bad people, we are the bad people.
