The internet probably has better things than porn. We're j
Source: Jess Zimmerman
This chimp could’ve written you Hamlet by now, but he knew you’d rather read erotica. Photograph: Juniors Bildarchiv/Alamy
There was always going to be gay dinosaur porn.
It’s a very large internet, after all, and it’s long been known as a prodigious generator of adult material for every occasion. You know the theory about how if you put an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, one of them will eventually write Hamlet? Thanks to the internet, we have now tried this experiment with several billion monkey descendants. We didn’t get Hamlet, but we did get pretty much every kind of smut imaginable (including Hamlet parody porn). There’s even a name for it: Rule 34, which is generally stated, “if it exists, there is porn of it.” (Don’t bother looking up the other rules; they pretty much all suck.)
The internet isn’t precisely infinite �C there is a bounded, though huge, amount of data involved. (One estimate puts total web traffic this year at 966 exabytes, or 966,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes; that’s 193 million million times the space that would be needed for a text file of all the words ever spoken by humans.) But with the advent of social media, the internet became not just broad, but tall �C web sites continue to proliferate, and at the same time, we continue to pile new posts onto our existing little plots of ground. The internet is fractal; measuring it would be like measuring the coastline inch by inch. It might as well be endless.
And so, as with the infinite monkeys �C who would not only write Hamlet, but Paradise Lost and The Metamorphosis and David Ives’ Words Words Words and season two of The Wire and anything else you could think of because that is how infinity works �C the sheer vastness of the internet makes gay dinosaur erotica, which Buzzfeed investigated this week, not only unsurprising but inevitable. In an infinite universe, everything possible will happen eventually, and that includes every imaginable dirty fantasia. It’s like the Library of Babel, but for porn.
But why only smut? Why doesn’t the internet also host every form of brilliant literature? The answer: it probably does. We just tend not to notice, because our attention is elsewhere.
To realize that one of the monkeys has written Hamlet, there needs to be someone evaluating their work, someone with an eye for Shakespearean prose and ideally no sense of smell. And if she’s looking for Hamlet alone, this hypothetical monkey proctor won’t just toss out the nonsense and the dinosaur porn; she’ll also ignore the monkey typing Henry VI, Part I. On the flip side, she’ll probably find not only Hamlet but Halmet, Hamtel, Helmat and Thelma. We find all manner of dirty films and stories because we prioritize it by seeking it out; we pick through the noise to find it because we care. For the most part, I think the profusion of pornography can occasionally be delightful (did you read that gay dinorotica article?) and, at its worst be dangerous �C for instance, ridding the internet of child porn is like playing high-stakes Whac-a-Mole.
The internet also contains every kind of anger and ugliness, because we prioritize and seek that out too. We’re prodigies at outrage, capable of reaming each other out over anything from blatant xenophobia to infelicitous word use. That doesn’t need to be covered by Rule 34, because it’s Rules 1 through 1 Million: people gravitate toward forming factions, holding grudges, lashing out, proving themselves. It’s no surprise that the internet, a near-infinity of human creations, would feature rage and hate, and it’s not a surprise that we tend to bring it to the fore.
But the best of humanity is out there, too. In a nearly limitless internet, everything possible exists somewhere. This makes it a powerful engine for porn and yelling of every stripe, but it is also a powerful engine for aesthetics, for compassion, for stories and ideas. There are multi-year magical-realist humor-drama epics like Achewood. There are weird, emotionally wrenching gems like Mallory Ortberg’s Text Messages From a Ghost. There are genre-elevating parody Twitter accounts like @MayorEmanuel. (There is also, I guarantee, some smut out there that is beautiful literature, too.) There are any number of wonderful stories that couldn’t exist without the internet, and even more that exist in isolation, without an audience. We just have to go looking for them.
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