What Depravity Can Teach Us
ON MARCH 16, a 22-year-old man blew his own head off in the lobby of a Bronx housing project. The incident was captured on tape by one of the building's many surveillance cameras.
A short while later, the footage of the suicide appeared on what was described as a hardcore porn site aimed at users whose fetishes leaned toward the depraved.
In reality, the site in question was Consumption Junction, sort of a Rotten.comdepraved, certainly, but not exactly a hardcore site. Rather, it's a clearinghouse for a wide range of shocking, crude and tasteless what-notphotos, videos and jokes. Sunday is "All Scat Video" day!
Well, the young man's family found out about this, and they started making a lot of noise. Their justifiable outrage was played up in the papers, and police began searching for whoever was responsible for posting italso hoping to find out how that person got his hands on it in the first place. Not even the family was given access to the tape, despite repeated requests to the police.
Then last week, what had been an already weird story turned even weirder. Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, shocked and bothered by the story, decided to hold a hearing to find out whether or not having all these surveillance cameras everywhere might not somehow possibly be "invasive" to the privacy of New York's citizens. She even set up a telephone hotline.
Surveillance cameras have been a part of our lives for some time now. There have been legal challenges, there have been grumblings about civil rights, there have been protests when they were installed in city parks. There are even weekly walking tours that point them out. After the terrorist attacks, there was an explosion in surveillance technology around New York. It was estimated that on any given day, just going about our regular business, we are filmed close to 100 times.
One suicide is posted on one sleazy website and now C. Virginia Fields has finally started wondering whether or not they might be "invasive"?
God bless you, Consumption Junction, for showing C. Virginia Fields the light.