Many years ago, I took on a somewhat ‘special’ freelance job. It was for Jubii, the big Danish portal I also wrote newsletters for. They were planning to launch a new section called “Jubii Lir’kassen” – a large collection of all that ‘humorous’ stuff office workers forward to each other via Outlook. The raw material was a big, unfiltered lump of content pulled from Lycos, which owned Jubii at the time (2003). Lycos already had an “Absolute Viral Golden Collection” in several countries, and my task was to censor, categorize, and describe the content prior to the Danish launch. Looking back, it was very much the shape of things to come, and not in a good way..
At first glance, it seemed like a fun way to spend a couple of days. I can’t recall how many items there were in total – but we’re talking a lower-end four-digit number. The pay was five-digit, and I figured that if I could finish it in no more than three days, I’d walk away with a decent hourly wage. So, early that first morning, I cheerfully launched into the task, actually looking forward to a few unpretentious days as a metadata slave. Because of the content management system, the work had to be done on a PC – and even though such a Windows XP contraption had never set foot inside Tveskov HQ before, I managed to get hold of one thanks to my brother Thomas. So I settled in with my big coffee mug within arm’s reach, in front of the humming, buzzing machine with its big thick CRT screen, and began working through the pile of ‘content.
Very quickly, I discovered that a high number of people from corporate environments have a close relationship with their Office suite. A huge amount of funny cat pictures, death videos, and gag cartoons were buried deep inside Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and even Excel spreadsheets. People use the tools they know, and instead of simply forwarding a funny JPEG, many of those with a “PC driver’s license” embedded the images where they felt more in control. Good for them, bad for me – the constant switching between Office programs and the CMS system felt like wading through thick, sticky syrup, not a pleasant sensation with that much work ahead.
And of course, it’s never great to sit at a computer you don’t know well. The mouse feels off, the keys are arranged just differently enough to be annoying. Around lunchtime on day one, I began to realize the project would take significantly longer than I had expected.
But what really started to gnaw at me wasn’t the time. It was the stuff upon my screen.
I have never, in such a short span, seen so many people get hit by trains, buses, cars, bicycles, dogs, and other moving objects. There was also an overwhelming number of amazing soccer goals, kids falling in “funny” ways, vomit, broken limbs, and racy jokes, of course styled in Comic Sans and garnished with an absurd number of smileys. It was as if the entire decline of Western civilization passed through me, via small bite-sized nuggets of digital garbage.
Julia Allison (remember her?) once said that there are three things that bring success online: funny, boobs, and kittens. Oh Allison, if only you knew how right you were.
Gradually I realized it’s a rough life being a day laborer in the data mines deep down in the belly of the big portals. After day one, I was completely empty and numb, but still in fairly good spirits. When I shut down the PC on day two, I wasn’t so sure anymore. Especially after going through all the videos that didn’t get approved because they were too bizarre, too violent, or otherwise inappropriate for the general public. All that death and dismemberment. The whole thing started to feel like a deranged Word-based RPG where the gameplay couldn’t get sleazy or extreme enough.
Remember poor Alex at the end of A Clockwork Orange? It was like that.
That night I had evil, evil dreams – cats and puppies being brutally kicked into clip-art soccer goals over and over again by hyperactive Page 3 girls, while I flew off a motorcycle ramp surrounded by drooling, manically grinning babies with enormous eyes staring at me from all sides. And the next morning, it was back down into the data mine again. Fortunately, I’ve repressed most of what I saw back then. I do, however, still remember this little MTV gem I titled “Use the Force, Lorenzo.” Thankfully, there was some harmless and funny material in the pile – it just got harder and harder to spot as time went on.
Like a desperate jet pilot slamming “Eject, Eject” on the escape seat, I was clicking “Reject, Reject” in the CMS system just to make the images disappear. Eventually, it became really difficult to tell which videos crossed the line – a line that got fuzzier and fuzzier as my ability to think clearly faded, while the PC just kept buzzing away as if it couldn’t care less about what was passing through it.
That final day was like a simulated car crash in extreme slow motion. Visual distortions, nausea, and self-pity in equal measure. I was confused and numb. Synapses burned out. Too many inputs. Too much metadata to fill out. Overload. Wish I could forget what I saw. But I got through and got paid.
Game over, man. Insert coin.
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