Anatomy of a griefer.

So, In jail I had the chance to meet a few people, and one of them was a boy, barely 14, who was going to to be tried as an adult for murder. This is pretty major here, It's not often a murder happens in our part of town at all. But that's the funny thing about this case, The victims weren't here, and the boy had never met the people he killed before. He killed 7 people who were on critical life support in a hospital in Chicago. Why? Well, according to him, because they were taking up critical resources the world needed, and because he could do it from his basement as easy as pi.

Lets rewind a bit. When computers were first made, back in the age of dinosaurs, the people who worked with them were nerds. And Nerds were picked on. Many of these nerds had latent anger from getting derided socially or beat up, and so when computer games were invented, many games involving shooting things or other violence evolved as catharsis for that latent anger. Some of these games had multiplayer, so you could try to beat up or shoot your friends. But be it a console game or over a LAN, you were playing with people you knew. Next generation: Multiplayer violent games over the internet. Now you were playing these games with people you'd never met except to play a game over the computer, and it's a game where you gain points by killing other people. You get together with people around the globe to shoot each other. A whole generation grows up where this is their primary social interaction online. Then we start to get the MMOs, the cooperative games. When these players cross over, they start PvPing and Griefing because they grew up in an environment where the goal was to destroy the other player, and they didn't transition well. Also, sometimes the inability to really affect the game world encouraged frustration which found an outlet. And these people taught another generation to play the same way.

Then, once real world stuff started to happen online, these people began to interact with these things, things like blogs, social networking, forums, online banks, etc, in the exact same way. Because the people on the other end of the internet were outside their monkeysphere in the worst way possible. The degree of separation is key to this. Noone can behave the way a griefer does to people's faces.

But that's not the whole story. These guys are generally intelligent people. And they are motivated to tackle hard problems. It was no easy feat hacking into that hospital, though the boy claims it was to prove he's a badass. I certainly couldn't have done it, and I'm no slouch as a computer jockey. If this boy had been on superstruct, he could have come up with solutions to problems we're butting our heads against no problem. But he didn't see that.

He told me, and I've seen it other places, that as far as he was concerned life sucked. There was no way to get from where he was to where he wanted to be, no matter how smart he was. I think you'll notice, historically, a sharp rise in griefing after the dot-com bubble. Once a smart computer geek could reasonably beleive that he could get rich from coming up with a great idea and working on it. When the dot-com bubble burst, these same guys were stuck with the rest of us, with no magic ticket to the top and no guarentee that being smart and having a good idea was enough to succeed anymore.

Sit down, kid. Big decisions are made by big people, and you sit in front of the TV and watch. Get yours while the getting is good.

Basically, what I'm saying is that these kida have been marginalized, made to feel eitehr useless to society or like a cog in a machine. They've been dehumanized by the top-down, consumerist controlled culture that leads to all kinds of depression, and they've got nothing but free time and nothing positive to work towards. And they have a computer.

School shootings are hard, and almost noone gets away with it or even lives. But greifing, oh, griefing is the WMD for the lazy and cowardly. The barrier of entry is low, and the risk is too, and you can do a surprising amount of damage. You can get on the news, which makes you a player. Now you matter, in a way that you were never given the opportunity to matter before.

Why am I getting into this psychobabble regarding what griefers may be thinking? Because I think this is the crux of how to end the outlaw planet superthreat. I think that griefers are motivated by a lack of interesting, productive things to do with their intellect. They want to change the world, but the feel shut down in their attempts to make it better. They wind up seeing the systems that control civilizations as the systems that keep them down, that prevent them from making a better world by their existence and inertia, and they need to go. A top down, centralized society can only have so many active contributers, and the more of us their are, the more we have people with the skills and drive to do things who are prevented from doing so because the system can't handle their input. But you can't block a force, only redirect it.

Griefing is the steam outlet of frustrated problem solvers who aren't allowed to solve real problems. This is an indirect result of a centralized societies inability to handle the number people who want to participate. Systems of governance, of authority, of organizing society and reacting to input from citizens, which are more open source, which are more able to coordinate large numbers of people, and to give people things they can do to change the world for the better, these kinds of societies won't have griefers. They'll have participants.

The boy I spoke to was very excited about the exchange, he actually wrote me the code I needed to make it work while we were there. I still have to test it, because we weren't allowed computers in there, but he just wrote it out on some sheets of notebook paper. Walked me through it and told me how to make it work. Genius kid. I told him about superstruct and he was very upset he didn't know about it. He's not regretful of what he did, he says it was a political statement that it's wrong to spend mroe resources on people in Comas than on migrants. But if he'd known a different way to help, he might not have done what he did. I'm planning on showing up at his trail. His name is Brian Meade.

I want to hear from other people on this. What do you think motivates greifing, and how can we change society so that it won't, for the most part, produce them?