Alex Lee

A teenager from Frisco, Texas, rocketed to fame in just two weeks because of a picture of him posted on a Twitter account with the comment “YOOOOOOOOOOO.”  Now more than 2.3 people follow him on Instagram.

And, of course, he’s mentioned on this blog.  

Now Alex and his family have received death threats.  His family’s Social Security numbers, phone records, and bank account information have been posted.  What kind of a world do we live in where a teenager receives death threats from anonymous people who never even met him?

Rebecca Solnit in an essay in Harpers discusses a 1984 Superbowl ad in which a young woman runs into a room full of workers watching a giant screen.  She spins around with a hammer and launches it into the screen.  If you are old enough to have seen the ad, you haven’t forgotten it, though you may not remember that it was for the Apple Macintosh introduced days later.

Solnit writes that Apple, far from liberating us, is part of the problem.  Underpaid Chinese factory workers manufacture Apple products, probably looking much like the people in the ad.  Instead of watching one big screen, literally millions are glued to small screens.  Apple’s iPhones are trackable at all times.  

Solnit continues that the Internet and Apple “...will savage privacy, break down journalism as we know it, and create elaborate justifications for never paying artists or writers--an Internet that will be an endless soup of grim porn and mean-spirited chat and rumor and trolling and new ways to buy things we don’t need while failing to make the contact we do need.”

Of course, my very writing depends on this same Internet.  Nonetheless, I don’t think it is being used well.  In fact, it may be corrupting both our communities and our souls.