*Hmmm. I'd been wondering when the malignant and bloodthirsty "collective intelligences" would show up.
*Of course you knew they had to. Kind of a no-brainer there. Literally.
*I wonder if the renrou sousuo yinqing could gain enough oomph to start a good-old-fashioned Pearl Harbor cyberwar – black out the Eastern Seaboard, and all that stuff. Obviously the gangs described here are not any major departure from 4chan, online partisan blogs, card-thief black-markets, convergence-culture fankids and similar well-established net phenomena, but the fact that they're Chinese... Yeah, they're Chinese and alien and there's a zillion of them... That's always enough to frame the issue quite differently.
*I'd be guessing this article is blowback from the Sino-Google dustup. People still wanna see spooks in the closet there: some hidden, formal institution to blame. In cyberwar, there may be no there there – any more than Al Qaida ever had Iraqi state support.
*Maybe when Americans realize that their own most solid, severe, respectable and conservative public institution, the Grand Old Republican Party, has itself dissolved entirely in a seething Oolong teapot of renrou sousuo yinqing... And that's no coincidence... Do people even have it together to realize that, one wonders?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Human-t.html?hp=&pagewanted=all
(...)
Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath.
The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results.
There is no portal specially designed for human-flesh searching; the practice takes place in Chinese Internet forums like Mop, where the term most likely originated.
Searches are powered by users called wang min, Internet citizens, or Netizens. The word “Netizen” exists in English, but you hear its equivalent used much more frequently in China, perhaps because the public space of the Internet is one of the few places where people can in fact act like citizens. (((That's a great insight. Everybody still has it figured that online street-mobs are all 1989-liberatory, but totalitarian street-mobs are just as exciting and they get all Kristalnacht in a jiffy.)))
A Netizen called Beacon Bridge No Return found the first clue in the kitten-killer case. “There was credit information before the crush scene reading ‘www.crushworld.net,’ ” that user wrote. Netizens traced the e-mail address associated with the site to a server in Hangzhou, a couple of hours from Shanghai. A follow-up post asked about the video’s location: “Are users from Hangzhou familiar with this place?” Locals reported that nothing in their city resembled the backdrop in the video. But Netizens kept sifting through the clues, confident they could track down one person in a nation of more than a billion. They were right.
The traditional media picked up the story, and people all across China saw the kitten killer’s photo on television and in newspapers. “I know this woman,” wrote I’m Not Desert Angel four days after the search began. “She’s not in Hangzhou. She lives in the small town I live in here in northeastern China. God, she’s a nurse! That’s all I can say.”
Only six days after the first Mop post about the video, the kitten killer’s home was revealed as the town of Luobei in Heilongjiang Province, in the far northeast, and her name — Wang Jiao — was made public, as were her phone number and her employer. Wang Jiao and the cameraman who filmed her were dismissed from what the Chinese call iron rice bowls, government jobs that usually last to retirement and pay a pension until death.
“Wang Jiao was affected a lot,” a Luobei resident known online as Longjiangbaby told me by e-mail. “She left town and went somewhere else. Li Yuejun, the cameraman, used to be core staff of the local press. He left Luobei, too.” The kitten-killer case didn’t just provide revenge; it helped turn the human-flesh search engine into a national phenomenon. (((Man, there's nothing so potent as an Internet kitten. Someday a lolcat will be President.)))
AT THE BEIJING headquarters of Mop, Ben Du, the site’s head of interactive communities, told me that the Chinese term for human-flesh search engine has been around since 2001, when it was used to describe a search that was human-powered rather than computer-driven. Mop had a forum called human-flesh search engine, where users could pose questions about entertainment trivia that other users would answer: a type of crowd-sourcing.
The kitten-killer case and subsequent hunts changed all that.
Some Netizens, including Du, argue that the term continues to mean a cooperative, crowd-sourced investigation. “It’s just Netizens helping each other and sharing information,” he told me. (((Sharing information such as, "hey, where are the wikis for terrorists, drug dealers, kidporn and the Triads?")))
But the Chinese public’s primary understanding of the term is no longer so benign. The popular meaning is now not just a search by humans but also a search for humans, initially performed online but intended to cause real-world consequences. (((That's just great, too. Imagine crossing one of these multi-headed lynch-mob monsters because of identity theft.)))
Searches have been directed against all kinds of people, including cheating spouses, corrupt government officials, amateur pornography makers, (((They must be stopped at all costs))) Chinese citizens who are perceived as unpatriotic, journalists who urge a moderate stance on Tibet and rich people who try to game the Chinese system. Human-flesh searches highlight what people are willing to fight for: the political issues, polarizing events and contested moral standards that are the fault lines of contemporary China....
