Future Tense

This is the first in a series on big data and its impact on society from CSPO co-director Daniel Sarewitz. It also appears on As We Now Think, a site edited by the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University. ASU is a partner in Future Tense with Slate and the New America Foundation.

Advances in real-time data acquisition, processing, and display technologies means that it is possible to design a toll road that can continually change prices to control how many cars are on the road and how fast they are going. These “hot lanes“ have just been opened along a part of the Washington, D.C., Beltway, the 10-lane, traffic-infested artery that to normal humans is a metaphorical boundary between the real, outside-the-Beltway world and the weird, political one on the inside. (For those of us who live around Washington and must drive on it, however, the Beltway is very concrete indeed, a daily flirtation with delay and frustration, homicidal instincts, and death itself.)

At a cost of $2 billion, a private sector partnership (which gets to keep the tolls) has built a 14-mile-long, four-laned section of highway, parallel to the main lanes of the toll-free Beltway, and has guaranteed to the state of Virginia that it will always keep traffic moving at no less that 45 mph along its length. They do this by continuously monitoring the number of cars (which must be equipped with EZ-Pass transponders) and their speed, and by raising toll prices as necessary to keep the number of cars on the road at a level that will allow the speed to stay at or above the guaranteed minimum. The dynamic toll prices are displayed on huge signs near the entrances to the smart-highway lanes, so drivers get to decide at the last minute whether they want to spend the money to go faster or not. As the traffic on the toll-free Beltway lanes gets worse, some drivers will be willing to spend more to go faster. The worse the traffic is, the more they’ll have to spend. (In the early days of this new technology, numerous accidents were caused by drivers trying to decide how much they were willing to pay, but no doubt this initial problem will sort itself out as people get used to driving-while-economically-rational.)

Of course economic rationality benefits some more than others. As long ago as 1973, philosopher Ivan Illich recognized that speed was an issue at the intersection of technology and justice. In his extended essay “Energy and Equity,” Illich observed presciently, if somewhat obscurely, that the quest for speed in transportation was an unrecognized domain in which technological advance itself led to increasing inequity of distribution of social and economic opportunity:

Unchecked speed is expensive, and progressively fewer can afford it. Each increment in the velocity of a vehicle results in an increase in the cost of propulsion and track construction and—most dramatically—in the space the vehicle devours while it is on the move. Past a certain threshold of energy consumption for the fastest passenger, a world-wide class structure of speed capitalists is created.

The Beltway smart-lanes perfectly illustrate Illich’s proposition in a technological application that he might never have imagined. Market rationality imposed on roadways that all people depend on for their livelihoods and social lives means that poor people will be increasingly required to travel more slowly than those with more money. Relative to the toll-paying classes, they will have less time to sleep, or for their families, or for their work. This is a problem that acts synergistically with other disadvantages, such as the realities that poor people often have long commutes, because they cannot afford to live in areas of high real-estate prices where many jobs are located, and that they often must drive old, less efficient automobiles, and so have to pay more for fuel.

The technology for the Beltway smart lanes is an impressive early example of how rapidly growing data collection and management capabilities can be applied in real-time to manage complex, if narrow, social problems—and, if we’re not attentive (which we seem not to be)—to reinforce, in another small way, the embedded inequities that are growing more serious and apparently intractable in American society.

The LAPD has assigned Bobby, a rookie, to a new squad—a ragtag group of young-ish people who have time-traveled from the ’80s and are undercover in the present day. In the first episode of Squad 85, Bobby meets the Chief, a white man who has been undercover as an Asian woman since 1987.

As a greeting, the Chief offers Bobby some tea.

“It’s a custom in my culture,” the Chief says.

“What culture is that?” asks Bobby, who is Asian-American.

“Asia, Bobby. Asia,” the Chief replies blankly.

Squad 85, whose finale was last week, is heavy on satire and sure to offend. That makes it a perfect fit for YOMYOMF (You Offend Me, You Offend My Family), which is perhaps the most racially diverse TV network ever and a standout in YouTube’s premium channel initiative. With nearly 500,000 subscribers and 30 million video views, YOMYOMF is proving that diverse casting can deliver success, and that Asian-American viewers are just as marketable as any other group.

Justin Lin, who is best known as the director of several Fast and Furious movies, started YOMYOMF as a blog in 2009, and it debuted as a channel this year. Since this summer, the network has been churning out slick and funny series across genres, with help from stars like Jessica Alba and Community’s Danny Pudi. Outsourced’s breakout star Parvesh Cheena anchors Squad 85, and even Margaret Cho has made an appearance.

“When I heard about the idea for Squad 85 it was a no brainer,” YOMYOMF founder Justin Lin said. “When I was approached to build a network on YouTube, it was very clear to me it needs to be built on the philosophy of providing opportunities for talented artists with unique point of views an arena to explore and use their passion.”

Independent and Internet-grown voices are at the heart of YOMYOMF. Ryan Higa and Kevin Wu, longstanding members of YouTube’s creator elite, co-founded the network and appear in its programming. The network’s most popular shows include Internet Icon, an American Idol-type show produced by Higa, and KevJumba Takes All, where Wu participates in silly competitions like taking the SAT with Web star Felicia Day, creator of the franchise The Guild.

The channel has a slate of sitcoms and dramas that would have a hard time making it to your TV screen. BFFs casts four high school girls as a team of heroes who “fight the power of Suck,” breaking through stereotypes of Asian women as passive model minorities. Dr0ne gives Lance Reddick (The Wire, Fringe) a visually dynamic sci-fi action show of his own. Danny Pudi stars in The Book Club, which sends a team of nerds on a preposterous action-packed caper. The network even has a musical web series, Always You, featuring a soundtrack from YouTube stars like DeStorm.

By some accounts, it’s working. Dr0ne and The Book Club helped YOMYOMF rake in five nominations this month for the Streamys, the “Internet Oscars.” Currently, YouTube is determining what channels it will renew, and at least 60 percent of the more than 100 channels won’t make the cut. Analysts think YOMYOMF has a very good shot. While it doesn’t crack the top 10 in traffic, YOMYOMF’s focus on high-quality scripted entertainment is still rare for YouTube, which has been trying to move from “viral” videos to appointment viewing. And Asian-Americans remain an important demographic for YouTube.

If YOMYOMF gets renewed, it’ll be a vote of confidence for people who believe Web television should be different from traditional TV, a place where creators get more leeway to make decisions like casting than they would Hollywood.

“To the chagrin of my agent, I write colored folks as leads in most of my scripts, which make them hard to sell,” said Squad 85 creator and star Gregory Bonsignore, who is white.

With YOMYOMF, he says, “We got to tell our story, the way we wanted to. So it's weird and specific and perfect and a mess, but it's just as how we intended."

In 2012, stories about surveillance demonstrated just how difficult it has become to strike a balance between civil liberties and security. We’ve seen everything from a bizarre court case involving a Predator drone spying on a North Dakota farmer, to outrage over warrantless monitoring of American citizens’ communications.

Around the world, there have been major developments in advanced new spy technologies. Governments on almost every continent announced plans for controversial laws to better intercept communications sent over the Internet, while a growing dossier of evidence linking advanced tracking tools to human rights abuses has led lawmakers to rethink how technology exports are regulated. Even ex-CIA spy chief David Petraeus found himself ensnared in Big Brother’s web.

Below, I’ve compiled a list of some most significant stories of the year (with a few of my own posts thrown in for good measure). There’s been some really stellar reporting on surveillance issues across range of news outlets in the last 12 months—so much so that it was a real struggle to keep this list at a reasonable length. If you think I’ve left anything out that I shouldn’t have, feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.                                

"Supreme Court: Warrants Needed in GPS Tracking," Washington Post, Jan. 23.

"Just Business: How Russian Technology Provides the Eyes and Ears for the World’s Big Brothers," Agentura, Jan. 25.

"The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)," Wired, March 15.

"Your Eurovision Song Contest Vote May Be Monitored: Mass Surveillance in Former Soviet Republics," Slate, April 30.

"FBI: We Need Wiretap-Ready Web Sites—Now," CNET, May 4.

"Jamming Tripoli: Inside Moammar Gadhafi’s Secret Surveillance Network," Wired, May 18.

"Did a Surveillance Drone Help in the Arrest of a North Dakota Farmer?," Slate, June 12.

"NSA: It Would Violate Your Privacy To Say if We Spied on You," Wired, June 18.

"Wireless Firms Are Flooded by Requests To Aid Surveillance," New York Times, July 8.

"Cyber Attacks on Activists Traced to FinFisher Spyware of Gamma," Bloomberg News, July 25.

"Oops! Air Force Drones Can Now (Accidentally) Spy on You," Wired, Aug. 5.

"How Governments and Telecom Companies Work Together on Surveillance Laws," Slate, Aug. 14.

"Trapwire: It’s Not the Surveillance, It’s the Sleaze," Wired, Aug. 14.

"How Government-Grade Spy Tech Used a Fake Scandal To Dupe Journalists," Slate, Aug. 20.

"Software Meant To Fight Crime Is Used to Spy on Dissidents," New York Times, Aug. 30.

"Crackdown on Sale of UK Spyware Over Fears of Misuse by Repressive Regimes," the Observer, Sept. 9.

"LAPD Spy Device Taps Your Cell Phone," LA Weekly, Sept. 13.

"Members of Congress Who Reauthorized Warrantless Wiretapping Bill Don't Understand What It Does," Mother Jones, Sept. 14.

"Watch Your Tongue: Law Enforcement Speech Recognition System Stores Millions of Voices," Slate, Sept. 20.

"The Economics of Surveillance," Wall Street Journal, Sept. 28.

"Spyware Leaves Trail to Beaten Activist Through Microsoft Flaw," Bloomberg News, Oct. 10.

"EU Plans Groundbreaking Project To Monitor Internet Censorship Around the World," Slate, Nov. 6.

"Petraeus Downfall Illustrates Scope of Feds' E-mail Snooping Powers," Arstechnica, Nov. 14.

"Judge Questions Tools That Grab Cellphone Data on Innocent People," Wall Street Journal, Oct. 22.

"The Hackers of Damascus," Bloomberg Businessweek, Nov. 5.

"Google: Government Surveillance Requests Are Way Up—and the U.S. is the Leader," Slate, Nov. 14.

"U.N. Report Reveals International Protocol for Tracking People Online," Slate, Dec. 4.

"How Foreign Firms Tried To Sell Spy Gear to Iran," Reuters, Dec. 5.

"U.S. Terrorism Agency To Tap a Vast Database of Citizens," Wall Street Journal, Dec. 12.

"Ban Surveillance Tech to Repressive Regimes, says EU Parliament," ITnews, Dec. 13.

So long as the same momentum keeps up, the months ahead are certain to yield yet more interesting and important developments. I predict that the domestic use of military-style drones will become a major issue next year, aggressive government attempts to wiretap the Web will cause renewed outcry and protest, and we’ll see fresh scandals involving Western companies supplying spy technology to dictators.

Here’s to 2013 ...

In addition to being a great source of breaking news and bon mots, Twitter provides us all the opportunity to bask in the failings—or, in tweetspeak, “FAILS”—of random strangers. Sometimes these #FAILS will come from a celebrity like Kim Kardashian, who last month strayed from her typical schedule of tweets about the Kardashian personal fragrance line to post ill-advised commentary on the Gaza war. Other times they will come from social media managers who accidentally tweet something really dumb from a corporate account when they meant to tweet something really dumb from a personal account.

Twitter FAILS are occasionally deliberate and malicious, but more often than not the incompetence is accidental, the result of misreading the public mood at the worst possible moment or simply saying something that would be better left unsaid. Twitter FAILS are symptomatic of the unprecedented opportunity Twitter and smartphones give all of us to belch out our most banal, potentially idiotic thoughts for the entire world to see without first using the God-given filters known as our prefrontal cortexes and mouths. They are also becoming more and more common, so this year we inaugurate “The Failies,” our first-ever Future Tense awards celebrating the worst Twitter FAILS of the year.

If you think we missed anything, please tweet us with the hashtag #2012Failes!

Worst Excuse for a Twitter FAIL: Louis C.K., @louisck

After Daniel Tosh was widely chastised back in June for joking that he’d like to see a heckling audience member be gang raped, Louis C.K. seemingly came to his defense with the above tweet. After taking some well-deserved lumps for this initial #FAIL, Louie went on The Daily Show to say that the tweet was misconstrued. He claimed that he didn’t mean to send Daniel Tosh words of encouragement at just the exact moment when he was being knocked upside the head for insensitivity—it only appeared that way. C.K. was on vacation in Vermont at the time and claimed he was largely offline, completely unaware of the furor surrounding Tosh. The excuse seems too coincidental to have been true, and while it might have been part of a larger social commentary about the roles of bloggers, comedians, and feminists in public debate, it didn’t past the #FAIL excuse sniff test.

Worst Celebrity Fail: Chris Brown, @chrisbrown

Generally, calling women “hos” is a bad idea, but it becomes even worse when you FAIL at spelling. Worse still is when you tell them to suck your dick. And worst of all is when you’re a known domestic abuser. Chris Brown, understandably, quit Twitter temporarily after this #FAIL of epically misogynistic proportions.

Failiest Political Judgment: Dana Loesch, @DLoesch

Dana Loesch was one of Todd “legitimate rape” Akin’s earliest, stupidest, and (sort of) staunchest defenders despite the overwhelming and immediate evidence that Akin’s cause was a lost one. Over the course of her months of Akin tweeting, the conservative CNN contributor also proved herself to be an enormous hypocrite, flip-flopping back and forth and back again in her Twitter defense of Akin. (Disclosure: After I confronted Loesch about her hypocrisy, she told me that I was wrong, dumb, and “high.”) Despite Loesch’s on-again, off-again “unwavering” support, Akin lost by 16 points. Mega-FAIL, Dana!

Failiest Misinformation Campaign: Shashank Tripathi, @comfortablysmug

During Sandy, false rumors were being tossed around the Twittersphere like a dangling crane in a tropical storm, and Smug was the worst offender. His irresponsibility and true identity were exposed by BuzzFeed shortly after the hurricane, and he quickly stopped tweeting in the wake of his #FAIL.

Failiest Campaign To Expose Someone’s Bias and Wrongness That Only Exposes Your Own Bias and Wrongness: John Podhoretz, @jpodhoretz

The New York Post columnist and Commentary editor led the Twitter campaign to castigate poll aggregator extraordinaire Nate Silver as a biased leftist hack. Podhoretz’s tweets were often funny, but that didn’t make him any less wrong. He cleverly referred to Silver’s enigmatic mathematical model for predicting the election in the third-person, and gave it human characteristics, like alcoholism and a penchant for fighting Lindsay Lohan. Silver’s model proved to have a head on her shoulders, though, predicting all 50 states and the District of Columbia correctly. Podhoretz’s model didn’t fare so well.

Failiest Premature Attempt To Break News: CBS Sports, @CBSSports

Joe Paterno is dead. No he’s not. Yes he is.

Worst Failed Accidental Tweet from a Corporate Account: Stub Hub, @StubHub

Worst Failed Intentional Tweet from a Corporate Account: Celeb Boutique, @celebboutique

This was also the biggest post-Aurora shooting spree Twitter FAIL. A close second goes to the official journal of the National Rifle Association, NRA Rifleman, for Tweeting “Good morning, shooters. Happy Friday! Weekend plans?” Honorable mention goes to Kenneth Cole for trying to take advantage of the Egyptian revolution to sell blazers while Cairo burned.

Faliest Human Being: Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump

Depending on whom you ask, Donald Trump is either the biggest troll on Twitter or just really dumb. Either way, the above tweet was the lowest moment of a very disgraceful year, and won him top individual honors for Failiest Human Being of 2012. While the bodies were still being counted from the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in his hometown of New York, Trump renewed his already despicable attempt to extort the president of the United States into releasing his college records.

Twitter FAIL of the Year: NBC Sports and Twitter

The top prize overall goes jointly to NBC Sports and Twitter for their bafflingly dumb attempt to censor Independent reporter Guy Adams, who painstakingly chronicled NBC’s many Olympic broadcasting failures. What got him in trouble was a post announcing the already public email of the president of NBC Olympics, Gary Zenkel. NBC reported Adams to Twitter, which deleted his account even though he had not violated any of the site’s rules. Twitter ultimately backed down, reinstating Adams’ account and offering a milquetoast defense of its actions. It’s all very likely that this was an Olympic-sized misunderstanding on the part of Twitter, but what made it stink of London circa 1858 was the fact that NBC and Twitter were official Olympic corporate partners. And thus, NBC and Twitter share FAIL of the Year for 2012.

Congratulations to all of this year’s winners/failures! May your FAILS be even more #EPIC in 2013!

Instagram on Thursday rolled back the most controversial clause in its proposed terms of service, and National Geographic, for one, was satisfied by the change, announcing Friday that it would resume posting on the site. But the storm isn't over yet.

A San Diego-based law firm said Friday that it has filed a class-action lawsuit against the Facebook-owned photo-sharing service, seeking an injunction to prevent the new terms from going into effect. William Restis of the firm Finkelstein & Krinsk LLP told me he filed the complaint in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Friday on behalf of Instagram user Lucy Funes.

A copy of the complaint shows the plaintiffs alleging that Instagram's new terms amount to breach of contract, unfair business practices, and violation of California business codes. Restis told me the suit won't be slowed by the company's backtrack this week on a much-hyped clause that specified how advertisers could display users' photos in promoted posts on the site. Instead, he zeroed in on a different sentence, which I highlighted in a post about the changes earlier this week. That clause gives the company a "transferable, sub-licensable" license to use your content, as opposed to the "limited" license outlined in Instagram's current policies. That phrasing is common to several other big social-media sites, but new to Instagram.

Restis told me he believes it amounts to an unlawful taking of users' property rights, particularly when coupled with several other new stipulations that limit Instagram's legal liability. For instance, under the new terms, users would waive their right to file class-action lawsuits—which is precisely why Restis said Funes filed this one today. He called the new policies "a smash and grab" by Facebook and Instagram that breaks "new ground on how companies can take valuable property rights from their customers while making sure those customers can't do anything about it."

Whether the case has legal merit, I can't say. But now that Instagram's new policies have been tried in the court of opinion, it would be interesting to see them tried in a court of law.

Instagram representatives could not be reached for comment Friday evening.

Update, Sunday, Dec. 23, 4:30 p.m.: A Facebook spokesman said of the lawsuit, "We believe this complaint is without merit and we will fight it vigorously."

National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre on Friday decried the violent video-game business as "a callous, corrupting, and corrupt shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people." He should know. After all, the NRA has worked with that industry to produce a few firearm-filled titles of its own.

In 2006, it brought us NRA Gun Club for the PlayStation 2, billed as a "non-violent target shooter allows gamers to enter the shooting range, steady their nerves, and take aim at the bull's-eye." In contrast to the video games that LaPierre decried, no one in NRA Gun Club returns fire—the targets are all inanimate objects. This makes for a gaming experience that critics called "unbearable" and "abysmal," and which a typical Amazon reviewer said "could very well be the single worst game in the history of games." (Wonder if he ever played Kindergarten Killer?) But hey, at least it's kid-friendly: Unlike the games LaPierre blasted on Friday, NRA Gun Club is rated for use by children as young as 10.

In fairness, perhaps the game's unplayability is a testament to the NRA's commitment to its principles. After all, they couldn't have paid too much money to Crave Entertainment to make this stinker. Which is good, because as Mother Jones points out, Crave titles like Trigger Man and Bad Boys: Miami Takedown are more the sort that the NRA's LaPierre was talking about when he ripped the national media on Friday as "silent enablers, if not complicit co-conspirators" in the violent-entertainment industry. But, LaPierre added ruefully, "rather than face their own moral failings, the media demonize gun owners." The NRA president, you see, cannot abide hypocrisy.

Are you looking for another reason to be mad at Facebook? Of course you are. 

The social networking giant is now engaged in a little experiment in which a “small number” of non-friends, strangers, and maybe advertisers can pay $1 to send you unsolicited messages on Facebook. According to the announcement on Facebook's blog, the move will fix problems with its message-filtering algorithm and “discourage unwanted messages” by “imposing a financial cost on the sender.” For now, the test is being conducted outside the United States.

Forbes privacy blogger Kashmir Hill tweeted that thought the news was “a joke at first,” and the Huffington Post’s Bianca Bosker sees it as a “a tax on being social.”

Or maybe it’s something of a ransom.

As you may not be aware, Facebook has two message inboxes—basically, one for those you are connected to, and one for those who its algorithm deems strangers (though this varies a bit, based on your privacy settings). The “other” message bin can be easily overlooked, so you might never realize you have a message from, say, someone you met once at a party or a friend of a friend of a friend who wants to talk to you about a job. Paying the $1 fee, says Facebook, will ensure that the message goes to the person’s primary folder, so he or she is more likely to see it.

Facebook says the purpose of the “other" folder is to clear up your “social inbox” for messages from your friends. But the site hasn’t done a good job of letting people know that it exists, so often users aren’t aware that important messages are gathering dust in another section. Last year, Elizabeth Weingarten wrote in Slate about how she almost didn't get her lost laptop back because messages from the good samaritan who found it were routed to this “obscure” folder that she had never heard of. The 63,000 “likes” on that article suggest a lot of other users aren’t familiar with the “other” folder, either.

Maybe instead of charging for the ability to send messages and have them arrive at the destination you want and need them to, maybe Facebook should work on rewriting the sorting algorithm instead?

Oh, right, because Facebook is a business and selling your personal data to consumers isn't making them enough profits. 

On Thursday, just one day after Judge Robert Bork died, the Senate voted in favor of relaxing legislation passed in the wake of his intense confirmation hearings. Assuming the president signs the amended version of the Video Privacy Protection Act, which was approved by the House earlier this week, it will soon be easier for Netflix and other online video purveyors to connect to your social media profiles.

For years, Netflix had a feature that allowed you to peek at the queues of friends. (It was called, of course, “Friends.”) As Sam Kean discussed in Slate in 2006, this was problematic: It alerted you to the terrible taste of those you previously respected. Some of his friends, he wrote, “had given perfect ratings to productions as various as Deliverance, Pretty in Pink, Edward Scissorhands, Madonna: Truth or Dare, and Xena: Warrior Princess (Season 3). Who were these people, I wondered, and what kinds of unholy amalgamations were their movie tastes?” In part because people don’t really enjoy being judged, one assumes, less than 2 percent of subscribers were using Friends when Netflix killed it in 2010.

But Netflix never gave up on the idea of subscribers peeking at one another’s picks. The company has long wanted to take advantage of “frictionless sharing,” in which your activity on one site is automatically posted on, say, your Facebook wall. Frictionless sharing already used widely by news organizations (like the Washington Post’s Social Reader) and other sites. Though plenty of people (including Farhad Manjoo) hate it, Netflix has been keen to get in on the action—but federal law has kept the site a mercifully frictionless-sharing-free zone.

That’s because during Bork’s failed confirmation, a Washington City Paper reporter named Michael Dolan talked a video rental store clerk into giving him the jurist’s account records. There was nothing particularly interesting there: As Dolan recalled in the New Republic yesterday, “Bork enjoyed whodunits and Brit films, costume drama and otherwise; he and his hadn't rented anything remotely salacious enough to rankle patron Reagan's buds in the Moral Majority.” But legislators were horrified (presumably, more-rankling titles lurked in their own rental histories), so in 1988 they passed the Video Privacy Protection Act to prevent anyone from disclosing what titles you had checked out.

Though Hulu has argued that the VPAA does not apply to online video, Netflix took a more cautious approach and lobbied for the law to be updated. With the Senate vote, Netflix comes much closer to implementing frictionless sharing, as it has already done for subscribers outside of the United States.

Netflix says that updating the VPAA will give “consumers more freedom to share with friends when they want.” But as soon as it launches, I know I’ll use the tightest security options available. Because I want the freedom to watch a bad movie without my friends knowing it.

Guns don't kill people, fictional guns kill people. That was one takeaway from NRA President Wayne LaPierre's press conference on Friday in response to the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Here are LaPierre's words:

And here's another dirty little truth that the media try their best to conceal: There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people. Through vicious, violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse. And here’s one: it’s called Kindergarten Killers. It’s been online for 10 years. How come my research department could find it and all of yours either couldn’t or didn’t want anyone to know you had found it?

Ah yes, Kindergarten Killer—the real culprit behind our nation's epidemic of gun violence. So insidious is this game that no one has ever heard of it, let alone played it. The NRA blames the media for that. Because when the media aren't busy corrupting our moral fiber by promoting violent entertainment, they're corrupting our moral fiber by not promoting violent entertainment.

Duly shamed by LaPierre for their previous ignorance (or willful suppression) of Kindergarten Killer's existence, some of us in the media are at last performing our civic obligation to publicize this game to a wider audience. And what a game it is.

You can tell from the start that this is a title built to lure kids in and not let them go until it has turned them into ice-blooded slayers, because the first thing you see when you load it in your browser is a message telling you it probably won't work very well even on the lowest-quality setting. Those who want the game to function properly are helpfully directed to a different website, which as far as I could tell no longer exists.

Once you ignore all that and begin, you're immersed in a (poorly) hand-drawn world populated with cartoon images of kids whose faces you must click on as quickly as possible to fire your cartoonish double-barreled shotgun at them. Succeed in killing them all and you'll make it to the office of the principal, who inexplicably has the head of Arnold Schwarzenegger and utters phrases such as "I outta kill you" (sic). I'd tell you more about the game, but it got so old and repetitive after five minutes I couldn't stand any more.

This all makes more sense when you consider the game's origins. Buzzfeed's John Herrman reports that it was first posted in 2002 to a site called Newgrounds.com, then a haven for shock-value jokes that was "a sort of small-scale 4chan of its day." Kindergarten Killer was most likely intended not as actual entertainment, but as trollish provocation aimed at those who would blame video games for tragedies like the Columbine shooting. In other words, the target audience was not kids, but people like LaPierre.

Consider LaPierre trolled. (As was a Finnish gaming site, which removed Kindergarten Killer after a school shooting there in 2008.) But that's only half the irony. Having first labeled school shooters "so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them" (emphasis his), LaPierre attributed to them the rationality to target schools because the lack of guns there makes them the "safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk." His solution: more guns in schools. But wait: In Kindergarten Killer, the game that supposedly turns kids into mass murderers in the first place, every single person in the school is armed and fires back. As with just about every violent video game, the challenge of trying to shoot your victims before they shoot you is the whole point of playing.