But I’m not anymore. The competition’s just got too varied- besides, I’m trying to take my time away, talk to family, see a therapist. But for anyone back on the forum in the old days, here are your answers: I was Versphil, the highest total up there on the leaderboard for over two years. I’ve decided to come out of hiding now. I want to get it out of my head.
I got introduced to the site back in college. There was this guy, Jamie (not his real name, you’ll get why) who I knew. Not really a friend, but we would talk: he was the sort of guy who was always tripping over himself, who couldn’t get around his own awkwardness. He was into me. Never said anything. Probably why I was so alright to come with him to his shitty dorm room, to sit on his crusty mattress and watch as he loaded the site up onto his Dell. That’s how old it was.
I remember sliding into him- he was a big guy, the mattress sunk under his weight and pulled me into orbit- as he loaded up the site. Even back then it was a nightmare to run. This was the old UI: when the page came up I got hit with super-saturated red-on black text, urging in Helvetica to type your username. Jaime’s hand twitched as he stroked the enter key, not quite looking at my face.
“Are you sure you want to see this?”
Of course I said yes. The site flickered, a loading wheel flashed up; then the screen filled out in red. Huddled in the darkness of that little room, we saw some of the worst things you could do to somebody else.
That was the whole conceit of Gore Patrol. Very few want to sign up for jobs in Controversial Content Moderation, having to watch through videos of beheadings, rape and torture- the real ‘dark web’ shit, the sort of thing you’d think you need a Tor browser to see. I never got told who GP’s clients were, but you could guess it was the big ones (youtube, facebook) paying to get that dirty laundry off their sites. And all of it was there, only semi-censored, when the computer could pick up a penis or obvious wound. Back then, it missed a lot. Anyway, the online anonymous- who just needed an account to get stuck in- could be paid a few bucks to watch and flag the content, instead of an actual employee. I bet I could sue them now, if I wanted, but back then there was this whole thing about consent: you couldn’t expect GP to track down and profile each one of its users, to pay for their therapy bills. We weren’t there because we had to be. We made the choice to watch.
Jamie did the clicking, whilst just I sat there and saw it. Each new piece that came in could be judged by ‘is this explicit?’, with a ‘no’ or ‘yes’ to answer. That first evening, Jamie didn’t get long through anything before clicking on the little red button, enjoying the cool relief as we waited for the next one to load. I still don’t know why he wouldn’t stop- I would look over and he’d be gripping the edge of the mattress, face white and blank and sick- but he still kept clicking, until the screams became a background noise, a blur and wash of gore.
I, sat next to him, was numb. I always have been, a little- I’ve always found it hard to cry at funerals, to get up the energy to feel something like grief. Watching, I felt the same. I knew, objectively, what I saw was horrible: but it washed over me, left me cool and still. Not to say I wasn’t affected, but-
You know in movies, where the main character picks up a set of drumsticks for the first time, or starts to draw? That was me. For the first time, I had found my thing, my gift. I wish it could have been anything better.
I was shaking when I walked home that night, knowing I’d seen something like the end of the world happen. I’d said goodbye to Jamie, who still looked grey as I left him. I’ve spent years wondering why he showed me that video- I think it was the same urge that makes small boys chase girls around the playground with worms. The desire to excuse yourself, to be aligned with the gross and squirmy and writhing. He went too far. We didn’t talk much after that; he thought I was disgusted and avoided me preemptively, to spare himself the emotional pain. Me? I was only ever neutrally grateful.
After all, he had introduced me to Gore Patrol.
It took me two weeks to get on the site proper: I was a college student, I was broke, and that was my rationale. I didn’t want to consider my actual reasoning. At first, I needed to see what my limit would be, what finally made me stop watching. I never found it.
This was before they set a time limit on how long you could spend per day, so I spent two hours each evening- which, according to the latest version of site policy, is five times over the maximum- wedged up between my bed and the wall, hoodie drawn, my computer angled tight so nobody could see what I was doing. I felt a lot of shame in those days; I worried what it meant for myself, that I didn’t feel at all affected by these things. All my friends had crappy cafe jobs, working in mcdonald’s or retail, and came back with horror stories about all the bullshit they’d been through. GP, at least, was always behind the screen. Maybe it seems extreme, but I reasoned- for me, right now, this is the best way to make money.
Beheading. Beastiality. Baby murder. Each evening the images flashed up on my screen. My mind honed in only on the clicker; my world was thought in binary. ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. I sorted and parcelled, waiting for the next thing to load. They added in Unsure. For a while, for extra cash, you could add in why it was inappropriate for data purposes; then they made that feature compulsory, site-wide. My world got bigger.
Crushing. Child porn. Cock-and-ball torture. I got a job: suddenly I was working wages, and Gore Patrol wasn’t needed any more. I kept going. It was what funded my coffee, which I drank a lot in those days. Caffeine kept me awake long enough that- when I would sleep- I was out so cold I couldn’t even dream. They added in the leaderboard. Users on the old Gore Patrol Forum wondered how many nightmares I had, and the answer was very few: I staved them away, and when I woke up cold and sweaty, it was because I had another dream about the site. That was what I was keeping away, to be honest. Not the nightmares; not the visions; but the wretched realisation that GP found me in my sleep.
I was rewarded a little gold star next to my name, alongside a couple of other long-term site users. By the time that happened, I had a pretty decent job at an accounting firm: I didn’t tell people about my hobbies, nor my life at all. When I wasn’t on GP, I took naps, my insomnia replaced with long-overdue narcolepsy. I’d stolen a lot of time away from sleep by then. For a while, to stop from being such an enigma, I made up a cat using images from my parent’s old thing, a mog called Misty- if I needed a quick conversation, I would drag her up, to prove I was normal. It made me feel better that the cat was dead. I found it hard to look at living animals, because to have me see them was to have them be defiled. I still can’t pet dogs- I feel too much like I make them dirty.
One evening, after a long and uneventful day at the firm, I loaded up GP, which I often did after work. This was just after the layout change, and the switch to Web 2.0 still had me wincing, my dry eyes unaccustomed to the new blue website. Alongside the update, they had re-jigged the censorship AI, and made it much too overzealous: it annoyed me, so I found an extension to remove it. Now I saw the site fully naked. I found the link on the old GPF, and the comments on the thread kept congratulating OP, in the same way old men compliment each other for having young wives. Definitely scummy. But what did I care? I was pond scum, absolutely.
This all goes to tell you that, when I saw it, I saw it undressed.
I wasn’t in the habit of stopping and fixating too long: I knew the shape of a hanging by then, and the man dangling naked from a tie-noose wasn’t anything new to me. But something told me to look closer, lean into the screen; my eyes drew past his flaccid penis, to his blue and fish-lipped face. He was heavier, more stubbled, but it was Jamie. I understood it like it was a fact that had been told to me. There are plenty of men who have
another dream about the site. That was what I was keeping away, to be honest. Not the nightmares; not the visions; but the wretched realisation that GP found me in my sleep.
I was rewarded a little gold star next to my name, alongside a couple of other long-term site users. By the time that happened, I had a pretty decent job at an accounting firm: I didn’t tell people about my hobbies, nor my life at all. When I wasn’t on GP, I took naps, my insomnia replaced with long-overdue narcolepsy. I’d stolen a lot of time away from sleep by then. For a while, to stop from being such an enigma, I made up a cat using images from my parent’s old thing, a mog called Misty- if I needed a quick conversation, I would drag her up, to prove I was normal. It made me feel better that the cat was dead. I found it hard to look at living animals, because to have me see them was to have them be defiled. I still can’t pet dogs- I feel too much like I make them dirty.
One evening, after a long and uneventful day at the firm, I loaded up GP, which I often did after work. This was just after the layout change, and the switch to Web 2.0 still had me wincing, my dry eyes unaccustomed to the new blue website. Alongside the update, they had re-jigged the censorship AI, and made it much too overzealous: it annoyed me, so I found an extension to remove it. Now I saw the site fully naked. I found the link on the old GPF, and the comments on the thread kept congratulating OP, in the same way old men compliment each other for having young wives. Definitely scummy. But what did I care? I was pond scum, absolutely.
This all goes to tell you that, when I saw it, I saw it undressed.
I wasn’t in the habit of stopping and fixating too long: I knew the shape of a hanging by then, and the man dangling naked from a tie-noose wasn’t anything new to me. But something told me to look closer, lean into the screen; my eyes drew past his flaccid penis, to his blue and fish-lipped face. He was heavier, more stubbled, but it was Jamie. I understood it like it was a fact that had been told to me. There are plenty of men who have another dream about the site. That was what I was keeping away, to be honest. Not the nightmares; not the visions; but the wretched realisation that GP found me in my sleep.
I was rewarded a little gold star next to my name, alongside a couple of other long-term site users. By the time that happened, I had a pretty decent job at an accounting firm: I didn’t tell people about my hobbies, nor my life at all. When I wasn’t on GP, I took naps, my insomnia replaced with long-overdue narcolepsy. I’d stolen a lot of time away from sleep by then. For a while, to stop from being such an enigma, I made up a cat using images from my parent’s old thing, a mog called Misty- if I needed a quick conversation, I would drag her up, to prove I was normal. It made me feel better that the cat was dead. I found it hard to look at living animals, because to have me see them was to have them be defiled. I still can’t pet dogs- I feel too much like I make them dirty.
One evening, after a long and uneventful day at the firm, I loaded up GP, which I often did after work. This was just after the layout change, and the switch to Web 2.0 still had me wincing, my dry eyes unaccustomed to the new blue website. Alongside the update, they had re-jigged the censorship AI, and made it much too overzealous: it annoyed me, so I found an extension to remove it. Now I saw the site fully naked. I found the link on the old GPF, and the comments on the thread kept congratulating OP, in the same way old men compliment each other for having young wives. Definitely scummy. But what did I care? I was pond scum, absolutely.
This all goes to tell you that, when I saw it, I saw it undressed.
I wasn’t in the habit of stopping and fixating too long: I knew the shape of a hanging by then, and the man dangling naked from a tie-noose wasn’t anything new to me. But something told me to look closer, lean into the screen; my eyes drew past his flaccid penis, to his blue and fish-lipped face. He was heavier, more stubbled, but it was Jamie. I understood it like it was a fact that had been told to me. There are plenty of men who have his sort of face, but that feeling in my gut sensed that, out of all of them, it was him. It was a livestream. On the screen, I could see a few pixelated comments scrolling down- probably congratulating him. I moved on.
I never pursued the matter further, resigned that was him who had been that blue, dangling creature. People at work told me I looked tired- more than usual, I was back on insomnia- and even though I told them nothing, I suppose I was in mourning. I looked at every emotion through a long telescope, back then. Things like death felt very far away from me: they were always behind the glass, grieving through the screen.
Rape and death and violence and torture, men shoving things down the urethra, women being split from vagina up, whipping, hitting and so many awful things happening to dogs-
One day, I was walking down the road, far away from my computer monitor. It was a busy weekend and plenty of young couples were out, children between them; I had to look away. This was not long after GP put on their first time limit, though The Article had pretty much damned the site to death by that point. So much had been attributed to the company: any regulation except shutting down the site wouldn’t be enough, and people were baying for blood. There was this one quote from it- The Article, I mean- that always stuck with me. If anyone was on the GPF before it shut down, you’ll recognise it. It was one of the last circle-jerking in-jokes they had, from that therapist they interviewed:
‘We still don’t know the effect of such unmonitored, constant violence on the human psyche. It is comparable to any other PTSD: though the violence is behind the screen, we still see and hear it.’
I knew the effect. I think that something in my mind- though it may have always been weird- has been twisted irreparably by that site, left me unable to look at cuts and wounds, scared to touch a kitchen knife. Less so than others. But I remember that day in particular: a crisp spring morning, where the birds chirped, the flowers sang, and a woman fell into the road.
I heard it from behind me and looked over. The first car had already crashed into her side, leaving the second to roll over her body like massive roadkill. People gasped and cried out, still watching as the first car stopped. The second car crashed. Behind them, the line-up waited and held their engines, the street crowding and watching as one. The woman, from the time I saw her, was a mass of red, that abstract mess of guts that is impossible to reconnect with a human body; people swarmed, children cried. Most of the crowd looked at it like carrion, hard to look at, harder to look away. The corpse pile steamed on the road. I felt chill: a familiar numbness washed over me, that cool mask to guard my empathy (what’s left of it).
This isn’t an official statement. I don’t want to be interviewed, or called up by a lawyer, or offered a therapist. I’m doing all that on my own terms.
But I’d like to know what GP did that, seeing that bloody mess of a person sprawled out on the fresh-paved road, I took out my phone-
And clicked record.