What are some of the funniest things you've seen on sites like chatroulette omegle etc?
Yeah, I've actually seen some really really really strange things. I remember when I was in Africa on assignment a few years ago, I watched a guy get beaten up by his own kind. And then he watched as his kind was kind of kind of dispersed, like in this map, this is the High Middle East region. He watched as the size of the high-flier wings and the number of women involved diminished and then he watched as the high-flying kind of petered out. So that was really interesting. And then I watched this guy kind of sort of stream, like this, like, 200 girls a day, okay? And I was just fascinated by that. I mean, it was like, all he was doing was watching these girls being brutally punished, but he was kind of simultaneously enraptured in that and horrified by it.
The thing that struck me about all of these different sites is that they are, in a way, trying to recreate the human urge to seek pleasure. All of these different sites are kind of trying to reconceptualize what a relationship should be. So for instance, Tinder -- I mean, it's just a simple camera and paper and you are asked to type the Tinder description. But it's kind of like this other thing, too. Like, Omegle -- this is a real site -- is kind of trying to rethink what a hookup is. Like, Omegle didn't even have an interface. All it did was just allowed you to just type in your Web site and then somebody at the server -- who happens to be me -- kind of kind of coded some JavaScript to take some of the magic out of it, to kind of make it more like a regular Web site. But the idea is the same. It's basically just this idea that if you are on the Web in this kind of scenario, you are there to have an encounter, and you are being invited to meet somebody that way. And it sort of tries to recreate the human impulse to meet somebody in the most unconventional of settings.
So these are all attempts to recreate what it means to be human. And it turns out that they work. You can take any old human and turn him into a machine. And what's amazing is that even with all of that, even with all of the magic in these systems, even with all of the other stuff that's going on inside them, even with all of the extra capabilities that are provided to users, the human brain still needs a little help.
The most that I've seen people actually do with this is they take their regular boring lives, and they try to reinvent them in this video game kind of a way. And what they come up with is incredibly elaborate stories about how video games make you better person, make you more trustworthy, make you more empathetic, make you more adventurous, encourage cooperation between people, make you
