Bunghole full of salsa. That’s what they called it when the baby’s anus went splody. Never mind the rest of it that got run over by a truck. All eyes were on where the baby shits, and how it now shits more baby than shit. It’s just a baby so stop checking out that ass, you pervs.

That’s the kind of story that never made the papers back when there were papers. There were editors, humorless Lou Grant types with rolled-up sleeves and arms crossed, blocking the way between journalism and a good time. Now they are all dead or might as well be. The digital spawn of the press don’t need them around anyhow.

Now we have robot listeners, playing by an unknowable rulebook that they themselves invented. If you want to talk about dead babies, you have to do it right. Start with a content warning and make it vague enough to use it again (work smart not hard with your performative empathy). Then launch into cryptic nonsense, pulling out all the stops to keep non-humans from knowing what you are saying. Strategically placed spaces in the middle of words and numbers replacing letters they vaguely resemble.

All that is a lot of work and it is tempting to let the robots write the story since they are the ones running the show. Just throw a few details at generative AI then kick back with your edibles and your unearned feeling of accomplishment.

If only it were that simple. AI reserves the right to refuse service to anyone. I found this out when I asked Chat GPT if Mary Jo Kopechne had it coming and got nothing for my trouble except a lot of moralizing attitude.

How did it all get this way? The online world used to hold so much promise. I got into it when I was still in my 20s and Usenet was the primary way of talking to the entire planet. It was a more primitive time. Ethernet connections existed but not everywhere. Many servers communicated by making phone calls to each other every couple of hours then sending and receiving whatever data each had in its respective queue. Some of this data was email. Some was Usenet traffic, posts and replies in various newsgroups.

Newsgroups ran the gamut from technical inquiries to hardcore pornography. Content regulation was minimal. If your organization did not want a certain type of content, you didn’t allow those groups. For many places though, it was anything goes.

I was, comparatively speaking, an innocent back then. It was a condition I was on a quest to change. I wanted the cred of someone who had mopped up jizz from peepshow booths and had therefore seen it all. And those who have seen it all can grab that mop handle like a mic stand and start laying down Lenny Bruce truth to a sheltered world, whether or not they wanted to hear it.

I had already begun my offline education about the cultural underbelly, mostly by reading Joe Bob Briggs’ movie reviews and listening to the Butthole Surfers’ Locust Abortion Technician over and over. Still, I wanted more. Usenet posts gave me that, everything from erotic fiction written by psychopaths to a medical student scanning images of birth defects in his textbooks and posting them with amusing commentary. I’m sure somebody shared pics or a story about a salsa-butt baby with its entrails in full bloom. There seemed to be everything else.

When I overcame my shyness and started chiming in online, I did it with a deliberate amorality and nihilism that has always come easy to me. It was one big splatter movie, even when the stuff happened to real people. Some might have been appalled by my lack of sensitivity, but I didn’t care. I still don’t.

The drawback to Usenet is that it is temporary. Servers routinely purge content to make room for more. Even if I came up with something extremely clever, it was not going to stick around for long (little did I know that the Internet Archive was quietly squirreling everything away, both good and bad). The rise of the web changed all that. When I had something to say, I could put it up on a page of my creation and it could conceivably stay up forever.

At first, the free spirit of Usenet seemed to come through unscathed, sometimes with bizarre results. There was a pic floating around of some poor bastard who got hit by a car, and his brains and tire tracks left a skid that went clear across the street. I first saw it as an email attachment sent by one of my mutant friends, but later spotted it on the GeoCities page of some graduate student. There was no explanation for its inclusion. It was simply there alongside her list of cool links and an invitation to sign her guestbook.

OK, I may have fallen in love with her a little bit when I saw that, but it was also not that beyond the pale at the time. It was the 90s. We recently won the Cold War and had a president who played saxophone and got blowjobs. It was a glorious time, as full of optimism as a dot-com business plan.

I still do not know why the party ended, only that it did, and that a quarter century later, I find myself in a world of hall monitors and zealots of every stripe. What keeps me going is the belief that just as the glory days came screeching to a halt, these dark times will as well. I just hope I am still around to see it.