Shitstorm by the Sea -- The Sean Parker DIRA, by Charles Carreon -- Rapeutation

The DIRA kicked off by Sean Parker’s wedding was like wood shavings soaked in diesel — easy to ignite and sure to burn hot: “Napster/FB billionaire destroys pristine redwoods to indulge Tolkien fantasy wedding wish of gold-digger wife.” Tweet that to a few thousand people, get a dozen retweets and a couple of faves. It’s a sign of truly bad times that people will stoop to this kind of activity not even for money, but just for clicks. Parker is right that he got served up as “link-bait,” although very few people other than Sean Parker and the rest of the digerati success-stories make any substantial coin from all of this traffic flying around dishing dirt. Which adds to the perfection of Parker and his wife as perfect rapeutation targets. He can’t complain — he created this monster!

Parker could do no right in his situation. He paid a million in fines for environmental violations he did not commit, and tossed another $1.5 Million at environmental causes, but none of it could buy him out of the kill-zone set up by the social media DIRA squad that put him in the crosshairs.

The only thing Parker could have done was ignore everyone and turn his mind to other matters, like Charles Carreon. Take that iPad and that expensive phone, and throw them into the recycling (tossing them off the Big Sur cliffs would obviously be a very evil thing to do and initiate a DIRA such as might crash the Net itself). He’s rich. He could ignore them. Lots of people told him to do that.

But no! Sean didn’t earn billions so he could hide away like any other person who’s been pelted with shame. He wants to have fun, wants his wife to have fun, wants to use the Internet like everyone else without seeing his name being drawn and quartered, becoming the butt of derisive jokes by people who don’t make as much in a year as he makes in ten minutes. He doesn’t want the pity from the politically correct, or the sympathy from his diminishing stock of friends.

Sean didn’t want to have to explain himself. But he did it anyway, out of a desperate desire to shout at the whirlwind. But the whirlwind heareth him not.

Sean thinks he got DIRA’d due to the petty avarice of bloggers-for-profit who want to ride the traffic-whale of his hateable celebrity (already set up to be knocked down by the unflattering depiction of him in “The Social Network”). Now seriously, how much do bloggers make? Not much, but like most hopeful online click-mongers, they will do anything to pump up their pathetic hope of someday having actual earnings beyond beer money. But no one needed to be paid to make it worthwhile to burn Sean Parker. The story of him and his elf-bride indulging in geeky, sybaritic pomp was an irresistible meme to those anonymous millions who thump the tubs in the echo chambers of social media.

But at least now we’ve seen what happens when a TechCrunch insider is hit by a DIRA. No one can protect them from it, but once it happens, they get all the digital ink they need to talk back to their rapeutationists. I mean, this is Sean Parker, who created Napster, that turned hundreds of thousands of copyrighted songs into everybody’s free music store through the magic of file-sharing. Who plowed those winnings into Facebook, from which he graduated as a cool billionaire. Who gave those pizza-and-soda-smeared zombies the landscape across which they now gaily rampage like bacchantes drunk on digital wine. They burned him! They destroyed his $4.5 Million fantasy wedding experience and made him cry out loud for mercy, because whatever you call it, that’s what his June 2013 posting on TechCrunch was. It was the cry of pain of a wounded human animal who has been gouged by the cruel speech of hundreds of thousands of people that he would much prefer liked him.

The DIRA zombies who lusted for Parker’s brains were fed a pro-environmental schtick that painted Parker as a plunderer of redwoods and destroyer of trout streams whose lavish fantasy-themed wedding in Big Sur was a symbol of everything wrong with cyberbillionaires. This easily-communicated meme slathered in hate-speech, passed through the information network like E.Coli in a batch of hamburger. The zombies who ate it don’t know they’re sick, though, so they’ll keep consuming the same shit, and calling it delicious.

It may be that the handheld mobile device is the most dangerous vector for transmission of the DIRA zombie virus. The physical evidence is overwhelming. Every day we see young people whose vulnerable brains have been entirely taken over, walking through the mall with that rigid step, slow and directionless, as they receive directions from their handheld, positioned exactly fourteen inches away from their eyes, their fingers stroking the glassy surface with a hypnotized stare. Their breath is shallow, as if their thoughts were being edited by an outer force, which they are. They don’t emerge from their trances no matter how long I watch them.

While talking back to zombies is futile, in Sean Parker’s case, because TechCrunch, a key DIRA-node, gave him a podium, he was able to solicit some sympathy and reasoned responses from people who realized that pissing off a billionaire might not be the best thing for their future careers. That sort of thought can snap even a zombie out of its trance. And I bet reading the occasional sympathetic comment improved Parker’s mood. But the zombie-to-human ratio is still skewed against Parker, and the echo chamber of hatred drones on, with brutal efficiency.

In response to Parker’s apologia pro se, the shit-slinging shifted tone, as exemplified by the title of an article at ValleyWag.com: “Sean Parker: Still an Asshole 10,000 Words Later.” This article, by Sean Biddle, fails to fulfill the promise of the headline. Biddle’s article doesn’t convict Parker as an asshole, unless stating your position in terms favorable to yourself makes you an asshole, because Biddle merely argues that Parker has spun the facts in his favor. All the invective is in the title. Why did Biddle inject the word “asshole” into his headline, the use of which, in the wrong bar, could get your teeth knocked out in a Texas minute? Because putting “asshole” in your title punches it right up there in the Google rankings, silly! Or to use the language of the day, “It’s click-bait, dumbass!” Biddle wouldn’t have his job pushing digital ink if he didn’t know how to do that.

Parker is proof that a billion and membership in the digerati won’t save you from a DIRA that has all the required elements for igniting that neuronal bonfire in the brains of thousands of social network zombies, who will start spewing digital spitwads when the implanted suggestion is triggered. Frankenstein destroyed by his monster.