CASE STUDY, PART I

The thing he always remembered first was the loudness of it. The animal shock. Then the fact that in jumping backwards he’d torn the headphone jack out of its socket. Then, the mad scramble

for the keyboard, the ALT-F4 ALT-F4 ALT-F4 ALT-F4.

Then blankness.

After this painful series of mnemonic thunderclaps, his mind would go over it again, calmly, more methodically. It would start from the beginning.

It had been a Friday night. Henry had been browsing 4chan since he got home from school. Not long after dinner he opened a thread about creepy things people had come across on the internet. It was amusing and interesting. One person said the weirdest thing he’d seen was a schizophrenic woman’s YouTube channel devoted to documenting her ‘liposuction slaves’. Another set of anons had a brief conversation about a strange ‘Lolita virtual reality game’ they’d played together.

Then, tucked in the middle of the thread, there was a cryptic bait post. It was saddled—almost to the point of snapping, it felt like—with dozens of replies.

He flicked his cursor over some of them. One post asked ‘What’s with all the replies? Can someone explain?’ and another simply said ‘Don’t even bring that shit up man’ with a sweating

Pepe picture.

The post itself was strange. Used weird codewords he didn’t recognise, like ‘6@6@6@’. Henry scrolled further down. The thread ended abruptly. It refused to refresh. No new posts appeared. It must have been deleted immediately after he’d opened it. At the very bottom was a post containing nothing except three web links. It was addressed to no one. They can’t be replicated here, but this is vaguely what they looked like:

https://um.pl.xo.b/54341/

https://um.pl.xo.b/32894/

https://um.pl.xo.b/92346/

After a moment’s hesitation, Henry highlighted one of the links, probably the last one, right-clicked and pressed ‘Open in New Private Browsing Window’.

ANALYSIS

The links Henry opened are ultra-illegal. We shall have time to analyse what happened to him afterward, but first the phenomena with which he unwittingly involved himself should be explicated.

Colloquially they’re called ‘Hell streams’. They carry harder sentences on average than the possession and distribution of child pornography. Supposedly there is a unique livestream for every inhabitant of Hell (no one has checked them all, the number of links runs into the tens of billions), but, as Thomas Kunzendorf notes, the violently abstract content of the streams make this hard to verify, and no study has ever been able to firmly establish a connection between specific links and individual personalities. The spectacles offered by the streams are divergent in the extreme. What is uniform is their shock value.

It’s difficult to estimate how many people have actually seen Hell streams. Some have been exposed against their will, via ‘pranks’ and shock sites (a disturbing case involving a little girl aged 6 made to watch by her older brothers is documented in Dowd & Olson’s Hades and its Discontents, pp. 60-5). Numerous motives drive voluntary Hell stream consumption, the most common of which are morbid curiosity and sexual gratification.

The effect of watching a Hell stream has been described as ‘nauseating’, ‘hypnotic’, ‘traumatic’, ‘soul-shattering’, and ‘addictive’. Their most ‘dangerous and seductive’ characteristic, according to P.T. Aquilino, is their extreme novelty. While most people close the stream within seconds of opening it (even this ‘blast of colour’ is potent enough to have long-term psychological ramifications: see Garner & Cho), for those who keep watching, they are subjected to a spectacle wherein each new ‘development’ in the ‘action’ invariably outdoes the previous one. This results in users becoming ‘glued to the screen’; locked in a perpetual state of bafflement, incredulity, amazement.¹ It is, as one viewer said, ‘impossible to become habituated’. There is an exponential escalation in intensity that can go on literally for as long as the stream is open. Chronic watchers have described it as like having an ‘itch in their brain’—knowing in the back of their heads that the streams are always running, that there’s billions of them always going on, that every waking moment, even when you’re in fact watching one of the streams (for there are always a hundred billion more that you’re not watching), there is still ‘some amazing shit you’re missing out on’.

They are more stimulating than any piece of media created on Earth (this is now a scientific certainty: Clayton & Bhattarai).² In richness and variety they surpass all worldly entertainment. Nothing can match them for ‘power of invention’. Some of the language used by my patients verges on the transcendent. They have described ‘glimmering red nebulae unfurling in black expanses’, ‘skin-caverns animated by pain’, and ‘acts beyond all right knowing’.

One young man compared it to the ‘consecutive split-second flashes of entire worlds’ one experiences while ‘on the knife-edge of sleep’.

Because they are livestreams of Hell, they are infinite. They do not stop. Everything only happens once. There are no ‘re-runs’. Their ephemeral quality is, to certain viewers, literally maddening. The deadly conjunction of ‘fleeting’ but ‘overpowering’

stimulus bleeds over into compulsive behaviour. A 60-year-old American man was recently sentenced to a dozen years in prison for recording and distributing hundreds of hours of footage he’d recorded on his work laptop. The desire to show others and communicate the gravity of what one has seen is common among viewers of Hell streams. It is a major reason why they get caught.

For some the fear of judicial punishment actually adds to

its narcotic tang.

There are several legal rationales underlying the criminalisation of Hell stream viewership, namely that it is offensive to human dignity, fundamentally sadistic, etcetera. Theologians are regularly called upon as expert witnesses at trials to emphasise the religious unacceptability of the practice. The harsh prosecution of streaming-related offences is not at odds with public opinion: Nagata estimates almost half the American population would approve of a sentence of life without parole for people caught watching Hell streams. Sociologist Judd Lamb has explained this primarily in terms of a revulsion toward—and a fear of—the confirmation of any person’s status as irrevocably damned. It would be mortifying, he suggests, for a grieving mother to hear, at the funeral, of her son’s restfulness, only to discover later, from the next-door neighbour’s son, that he is in fact languishing forever in undying flames. Alex Soresina, by contrast, attributes this widespread antipathy solely to the media’s construction of the average ‘Hell stream viewer’ as a particularly depraved kind of pervert.

Viewers offer a variety of rationalisations for their voyeuristic behaviour. Common arguments include: ‘They are in Hell, they deserve to be there anyway’, ‘If God did not want people to watch he would not have made them available’ and ‘It is morally no different from the visions experienced by saints and mystics in the Middle Ages’. Controversially, Donald Lutz has argued that these justifications hold water. ‘What has dictated theological consensus [on this matter] is not reason,’ he says, ‘but social propriety.’ A recent story from the papers illustrates an interesting diversity of moral opinion:

A young man in M—’s eastern suburbs has been charged with accessing and reproducing live images of Hell. 21-year-old Cory Pike, who was arrested outside his A— home last Sunday, says that he only wanted to, quote, ‘document a reality which everyone ignores.’ Police say he faces a minimum sentence of 18-months imprisonment if convicted.

Pike’s defence attorney alleges that his client ‘became obsessed’ with recording and archiving live-streamed footage of Hell out of a ‘humanitarian impulse—the same urge to bear witness that compelled US servicemen to take photographs at Auschwitz.’ Prosecutors counter that comparing base voyeurism to the actions of GIs in the war is misleading and offensive.

The internet serves, on this issue as well as many others, as a useful sounding rod for people’s more secret and, perhaps, more authentic thoughts. Counter-cultural and transgressive opinions about Hell streams are frequently expressed on anonymous forums and imageboards. References to one’s own viewership, however, tend to be oblique. As an example, in response to a post describing guilt about a nondescript ‘sin’ on a Christianity-themed imageboard, another anonymous user (with a ‘reaction image’ attached to his post showing a painted depiction of a sad, severe-looking Christian monk) began his reply with the phrase, ‘if you’re talking about having seen what I think you are . . .’ and proceeded to talk in circles around his own ‘struggle’ with the matter. Other posts assert the subversive social potential and even edifying effects of Hell stream consumption:

of course govt doesn’t want you to see it, they don’t want people to realise chirst [sic] is king and change their ways, don’t want them to stop being good little sinful consumers, controlled by their appetites

A popular superstition online (though to what extent it is taken seriously by the users is hard to tell) is that watching, or even seeing a screencap taken from a Hell stream, irrevocably damns or ‘reprobates’ you. A classic ‘troll’ is to fabricate benign images that ‘look like’ stills taken from a Hell stream. This has resulted in a culture of calling out such images as ‘fake and gay’—sometimes even ones that turn out to have been authentic.

On the deep web, on imageboards hidden from web scrapers, where taboo or illegal topics can be discussed more openly, conversation, by turns heartfelt and farcical, on the problem of evil, the nature of sin, and the morality of damnation, as well as therapeutic discussions about the deep impact Hell streams have had on

people’s lives, take place without fear of social retribution. Many credit it with motivating them to go to church. Others describe themselves as irreparably damaged, and blame exposure to Hell streams for the disintegration of their mental health and their relationships. Once or twice in my research I have encountered threads where people claim to have identified someone they knew—

a deceased relative, or an old acquaintance—on the streams.

Heated religious debates are endemic. Because Hell streams constitute the only direct and broadly accessible empirical evidence for the supernatural, a subset of users (known colloquially and somewhat affectionately as ‘autists’) spend their free time poring over stream content in order to discern which religious tradition best accords with the observable facts of Hell, or, more often, to cherry-pick evidence in favour of their pre-existing view (and against the views of others). Imageboards devoted to Hell stream subculture are divided into religious factions or cliques, each of which have developed their own corpuses of ‘infographs’ and ‘copypastas’ meant to prove their creed and disprove the others. Christian and Muslim faithful constitute the majority of posters, but there are sizeable minorities of Buddhists, Jews, Sikhs, Gnostics, and even atheists, who maintain that the objective existence of Hell or a ‘Hell-like’ realm does not necessarily prove the existence of a theistic God: the agent responsible for its creation could just as plausibly be a powerful but cosmically contingent entity or, if the universe is a simulation, an artificial intelligence.

(As an aside: the Abrahamic doctrine of man’s fallen nature would not fail to gain some credibility in the mind of anyone who browsed these forums. Petty arguments about the racial, national, sexual and religious ‘make-up’ of Hell are common, and posters often tarnish the damned with offensive race or sex-based slurs. Sexually perverse commentary is not uncommon. Users talk of becoming devoted to particular ‘victims’ they find attractive. One anonymous poster confessed to his obsession with footage of a boy undergoing extreme ‘cosmic pains’. The fact that damnation was eternal meant that he would never be lacking for novel tortures involving his ‘favourite’. For this user, all earthly sexual stimulus paled so much by comparison that he failed to be aroused other than when he was watching footage of his ‘beloved’ boy being subjected to unimaginable cruelties).

By this point the reader might be growing curious as to whether or not I have ever seen a Hell stream, and if so, what I thought of it and what its effects on me were. I have. At the University of

M—, under police supervision and with a coterie of counsellors in attendance, I and a group of undergraduates from various disciplines were treated to a rare ‘random viewing’ of an in-progress stream (as opposed to a carefully selected, pre-recorded one). Obviously we all had to go through numerous psychological exams in the months leading up to the viewing. On the actual day our supervisor warned us about the potential content of the stream, what our reactions might be, and gave us several chances to withdraw. After we’d been lectured for about two hours and had signed all the waivers and disclaimers they handed us, the lights dimmed and the stream finally began.

In our lives we have all seen things that are specifically offensive to our constitutions, almost hand-picked by fate to throw us off balance and disturb us. I call these ego-dystonic memories. They are sights or sentiments we are annoyed at ourselves for having seen or overheard and that we would prefer to forget. I won’t bother to list any examples since they are often highly personal and what might seem significant to me will be banal to you and vice versa.

For my part, the footage I saw not only replicated this sensation but multiplied it a thousandfold. In my mind I’d had lurid ideas about what the content of Hell streams might be. I anticipated certain obvious and stereotyped images. In retrospect my expectations were a cartoon. Those fifteen minutes have filled me, permanently, with a deep sense of the poverty of the human imagination. Above all, I shall never forget the noise.

The experience has given me two contradictory impressions about the people who watch these things. On the one hand, I have no idea how a human being can possibly enjoy that. When I had more naïve ideas of what Hell streams involved (and I thought my ideas back then were extreme) I could sympathise, to a degree, with people who derived pleasure from watching them. Who satisfied not just their curiosity, but all manner of other desires. They seemed at least like human impulses. Dark, but human. When I saw what actually goes on in those streams, I lost all ability to relate to those people. That sort of thing, I thought, could only be the preserve of a very remote kind of life, such as what Aquinas wrote of fallen angels. On the other hand, I now understand, intimately, the irresistibility of it. Almost something you are compelled to do irrespective of any personal feelings. It is like a portal into the unimaginable.

CASE STUDY, PART II

Henry had no way of knowing, of course, that ISPs immediately flag all connections to IP addresses that host Hell streams. Generally, there is a certain lenience. If the connection happens only once, the incident is treated as a mistake and no action is taken.

Two months later, Henry visited the site again. This time he opened not only one link but several. He sat and watched for several hours and took screenshots.

The juvenile court sentenced him to two hundred hours of community service and mandated that he undergo therapy. On that basis he was referred to my care.

With every patient I begin by asking a variety of questions. Among other things I asked Henry whether he felt any shame about what he’d done (Yes), whether he was suffering from nightmares (No), whether he was anxious about his future (Yes), whether he took any sexual gratification in watching the streams (No; actually Yes; actually it’s complicated), and whether any of his relationships had suffered as a result of his actions (Yes). I asked him to explain to me what had made him go back and watch the streams a second time.

Henry told me that he found the fear intoxicating. The heavy breathing before he opened the links, the anticipation. He asked me whether I had ever, as a child, been traumatised by a scene from a movie or TV show. I said yes. He then asked me whether, as an adult, I had ever tracked down said pieces of media and rewatched them. I said yes. He told me that the sensation is similar, but much more heightened.

I looked down at my clipboard. ‘Do you think,’ I began, ‘that when you have access to a computer again you’ll be able to—to resist the urge?’

He was silent for a time. He looked out the window. I looked with him. We watched the cars pass. They trailed long shadows in the late afternoon light.

I will close this essay with a passage from Thomas Kunzendorf, who took an intimate interest in the altered mindsets of compulsive Hell stream viewers. It records his final conversation with an anonymous young man who later mysteriously went missing:

. . . He [Kunzendorf’s patient] saw the world now, he said, as a sort of thin skin—of the kind that might develop over a glass of milk left out for hours in the sun—laying above a much more pungent, viscous, bubbling reality. The world of pencils, mattresses and traffic lights was so threadbare, he realised, that it barely counted as an individual existence at all. The slightest knock against the glass would tear it open and dissolve it.

He said, continuing, that he couldn’t help but have a mutated outlook on life, considering what he had seen. Even the most marginal, unimportant city bum was potentially—would probably become—a black category of life that outclassed, in its volcanic alienness, all the chthonic deities of ancient cultures. The dullest personalities were under-rated in their terrible future splendour by even the most esoteric descriptions that human hands had committed to paper. Cashiers, accountants, cheerleaders, were all eternal horrors in gestation. For a very brief period, incomparably, impossibly brief, people lived like people. In reality these people were eggs, tiny, tiny, tiny eggs, the size of mites or lice, that would give birth, at one point in time, all of a sudden, to writhing monstrosities beside which whole galaxies would seem like dust motes and to whom the entire lifespan of the universe repeated 100100 times would not even begin to seem significant. An entire universe of suffering-but-mortal flesh would never, under any calculation, be able to match a damned soul for total amount of pain experienced.

Before we finished I asked him how I should digest this insight into reality that he had gained by grazing inferno with his fingertips:

‘Go to a beach and watch the future grotesques frolic in the water.’

1. This ‘gape-inducing’ quality lends itself to social propagation. Strizver has documented the existence of ‘dares’, ‘challenges’ and ‘reaction’ videos. Basic MS Paint images listing ‘rules’ for ‘games’ (such as the dubious ‘find your fetish’ challenge) are regularly uploaded by users onto forums and image-sharing sites.

2. It is possible to apply for stream access on legitimate academic, scientific or theological grounds. The hazards posed to researchers have gained more attention in recent years following the shock suicide of Jane Beversluis.