With Cruelty and Malice for All

It's Dark Out There In the Blogosphere

Until now, you really couldn't get away with talking about somebody's mama. Yesterday, at the news that Kanye West's mother, Donda, 58, died of possible complications from cosmetic surgery -- reportedly including a tummy tuck and breast reduction -- blog dwellers stepped over an imaginary line of restraint. And stomped on it, again and again, monsters from the id coming out to play: "hahahah too bad," one taunted. "VANITY KILLS!!!"

One "fan" posting on Bossip.com took the time to compose a poem in her honor: Supersized menu at Mickey Dee's/No wonder I cant see my knees . . ."

Even New York magazine's Web site danced on her grave, posting the headline "Kanye West's Mom Goes Out Olivia Goldsmith Style," a reference to the best-selling novelist who died while undergoing plastic surgery in 2004. It later replaced the headline with this more neutral one: "Kanye West's Mom Dies During Cosmetic Procedure."

("We changed the headline because its tone was too casual for a post about the recently departed," said New York spokeswoman Lauren Starke in an e-mail.)

In popular culture as well as politics, snark has taken on a cruel new dimension, thanks to the brawling blogosphere. A new breed of celebrity-focused bloggers will take their luckless saps wherever they can get them, even if they happen to be non-famous schlubs who just happened to do something really embarrassing on tape. Remember Miss Teen South Carolina? The Crying Britney Boy? TMZ.com stalks tipsy, buxom babes stumbling out of Los Angeles nightclubs, recording every slurred syllable.

Perhaps such sites are the mutant kin of "America's Funniest Home Videos" or "Candid Camera." Except this is no gentle ribbing at universal human foibles. Increasingly, there's a tenor of mean-spiritedness creeping into public discourse, a gleeful maliciousness. Woe to those who are cast into the limelight, like Donda West's Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, Jan Adams, who suddenly found himself exposed to the hyper-scrutiny of TMZ.com researchers. Post after post detailed Adams's past peccadilloes, including malpractice suits and DUI arrests.

(Kanye West's agent at William Morris Agency said that the family would have no comment.)

"I don't know what it is about this particular moment in human history which lends itself to the sanction of miscellaneous and casual cruelty," says cyber-guru John Perry Barlow, vice chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Cyberspace, he says, "has a way of making us feel like other people are informational artifacts. If you cut data, it doesn't bleed. So you're at liberty to do anything you want to people who are not people but merely images."

As Chris Crocker, the notorious "Crying Britney Fan," told MSNBC.com after he was pilloried this summer: "The Internet is a place where haters can roam free, where psychopaths run free, and threaten lives. I've never had my life threatened, but I'm getting death threats now."

In the beginning, the Web was spun as a plugged-in Utopia, with everyone allegedly playing nice in a free market of ideas and goodwill. On the Well, one of the earliest Internet forums, posters were admonished, "You own your words." When the first batch of cyberspace flamers spewed venom in the early '90s, Netizens were shocked at the vitriol; it didn't fit into their self-image of a benevolent Infobahn.

But perhaps they should have checked out cyber-history. According to author Mitch Waldrop, the earliest incarnation of the e-mail was to be found at MIT in the mid-'60s, through a pioneering time-sharing system called Project MAC. By 1965 pioneer geeks were keeping in touch via e-mail. And almost immediately, pranksters were hacking into the system and sending each other nasty messages. (Indeed, the word "hacking" has its origins in MIT slang for the practical joke, the hack.)

"Bad behavior online goes back to at least the 1960s. As soon as possible, people were doing it," says Waldrop, author of "The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal."

There's a part of human nature that feels compelled to tear down others. In the days of the Inquisition, Venetians, under the cloak of night, would tiptoe to the Palazzo Ducale and slip unsigned notes detailing acts of their neighbor's alleged heresy into a slot in the door -- the better to guarantee said neighbor a quick trip to the torture chambers.

The cloaking anonymity of the Internet also provides a safe place for unleashing the id. Just about every message board, whether it's a support forum for women seeking fertility treatments or sites for reality TV fans, is on the alert for "trolls," mischievous souls who seem to delight in stirring the pot. Being banned for bad behavior only spurs them on: They create aliases and then counter-aliases, only to be found out and drubbed off the board yet again.

"There are folks who've been sitting in the upstairs bedroom where they're still living with Mom a little longer than is cool," Barlow says. "They've got a little too much time on their hands, and they spend it staring at the screen. They're frustrated with themselves and they take it out on other people."

Earlier this year, tech blogger Kathy Sierra says, she started getting death threats, including an anonymous blogger posting pictures of Sierra with a noose hanging over her head. Colleagues told her to blow it off. She called the police. "The cop said, 'Yes, you should be afraid,' " she recalls. "If this picture came in the mail to you, we would take this very seriously. But the problem was, nobody could find out who did it."

Because in the vast reaches of cyberspace, it's all too easy to hide.