Now, you might wonder who would place such things on the Internet. This question is, of course, a very valid and pertinent one. And to answer such a query, I'll let the fine men and women of rotten.com tell you themselves.
This site is depraved. Clearly. It is unsettling. Undisputedly. It serves as an electronic panopticon so we can watch others and pass judgment upon them. Undoubtedly.
Our judgment--or the anticipation of it--has no effect on the behavior of those we might watch (unlike a more efficient panopticon). If we take the staff at its word (in the FAQ), we see that it no longer actively searches for material for the site; the site has taken on "a life of its own" via Internet users sending in unsolicited photos. The staff at rotten.com merely weeds through the material it receives, publishing only that which is verifiably "authentic" (not doctored), and removing any product logos that may upset well-heeled corporations.
Mr. Walker, Mr. Weitzel, and I were fascinated by this phenomenon: people divulge--willingly--their most intimate, embarrassing, and/or gruesome moments to an unknown public. Why? These moments, according to any idea of "good manners" or "good taste" put forth by our elders and betters, should not be talked about and certainly should not be seen; they are instead the moments at which silence and denial should prevail. Amazingly, silence and denial do not.
This failure of silence and denial, of course, returns us to Michel Foucault. While he postulated that systems of control work to keep individuals within Western society--to "discipline" them--Monsieur Foucault also wrote that discipline goes beyond institutions and surveillance, that it affects individuals to their very secret core. That training, over the course of several centuries, urges a type of confession, a laying-open of self, an exposure of one's soft belly. Rotten.com presents us with an ongoing reiteration of confession; "the meat," "the living, breathing, paying-bills bodies" who create text (pictures, words, language) desire to confess themselves; to describe their actions; to reveal themselves in all their most intimate, gruesome, and embarrassing moments that either involve them as the subject or as a peripheral player. The contributors to rotten.com want to show themselves, they want to be known, they desire qualification, quantification, judgment.
The world, to paraphrase Monsieur Foucault, is perverse because it is perverse. We have, however, been trained over the centuries to fear perversion and its "disruption" of the norm. But perversion is no disruption; we are always already perverse, and rotten.com does not make us more so. On the contrary: rotten.com only serves as a sounding board. In this new digital space where our consciousness, our texts, ourselves can be displayed, here where we bring over the discipline that has written itself in and onto our bodies, here where we can ensure that we continue--here we have the brave new space of the electronic world in which we police ourselves and make ourselves vulnerable to coercion and manipulation.
In short, we create the Internet in our own perverse image. Rotten.com only creates a space where we sad upright monkeys can confess, see others confess, judge, and be judged in turn. With rotten.com as an example we, Mr. Bailie, Mr. Walker, and Mr. Weitzel, feel that you can truly understand when we exclaim this site is FUBAR! We proudly present our first installment of our wonderful column, and hope you return for many more.
