I’m 11, a boy at school is hunched forward over a computer, trying to find a working port to plug a drive into.
He succeeds, the video opens. A man is tied to a chair, his arms taped to the armrests.

A hammer comes down, the man screams but there’s no sound. His mouth becomes a ragged hole, I quickly turn away.

I’m 16, phones don’t have keyboards anymore, someone slides a screen across the table, a woman with her face in pieces, cut up or dug into.

I’m 20, in a barrack block, the latest meme is a video of a snake. The snake is in a box, a man lifts it out, turns it over, forces his penis inside of it. I guess I don’t really feel anything, the other lads are laughing, so I pretend to find it funny.

I’m 24, up too late, mindlessly browsing, a man is being stomped to death in one window, I’m looking for shoes on Ebay in the other.

I’m 26, there’s a war on, people are talking, speculating, they’re swapping pictures and videos, playing at intelligence work. Someone shares footage the group hasn’t seen before, dismounts in line abreast, walking across rubble that used to be a town. One of them treads on something, and three of them disappear.

Most of the talk is technical, factual, what kind of device, where was this taken?
Mixed in there’s less useful commentary, how’d he miss that, how high do you think he flew?

Someone posts a gif of a man eating popcorn, it gets a few laughs, the mods take it down.

I’m 28, there’s a war on, there’s always a war on, I’m looking for info, poking about, bored. This war is too long, too attritional for the evening news, they’ve moved on.
Part of me is enthralled by the sheer amount of information, a constant stream, often provided by the fighters themselves, direct, real time updates; interviews and posts from company and senior level officers, helmet cam footage, memes, vox pops from the troops themselves, maps and tables and presentations from interested observers.

Everything is gore now, I scroll past bar charts and close portraits of corpses, videos of men playing with unit mascots and men burning to death, drone footage of entire platoons dying set to shitty techno and Benny Hill music.

The people that love it are out in the open now, they run groups and channels dedicated to the best gore, the funniest videos of human misery.

As I parse this content I’m dimly aware that these people have always existed, but I don’t remember them ever being so prevalent or so open.
Something stirs in the back of my throat, a thought bubbles up, maybe I’m one of them? I don’t think I’ve ever laughed at this stuff, never collected it, but I don’t really mind it anymore, here I am mindlessly pawing through it, bored, looking for a distraction.

I tab out and bring up something less stimulating, I know I’ll end up back there again, how can you avoid it?

I’m 29, there’s a war on, this one’s new, but its also not.

People around me really care about this one, or they do for the first couple of months, then they go passive again.
This war is asymmetric, the casualties are very lopsided, the overwhelming majority of deaths are civilian.
Everyone says killing civilians is bad, but most people seem to believe that this is only true for civilians they like, so they call the ones they don’t care about colonists, or terrorists, or other, more straightforward words. Its OK to laugh at those ones.

I don’t really watch the videos from this war, I’m cutting down, trying to get out of the habit, so I don’t see the endless footage of women and children being turned into meat, but the photos are unavoidable.

People I know in real life, people with better things to do than lurk forums are now starting to seek out this content, or are having it pushed on them. Some of them say its important to watch videos of children being ripped to shreds, to bear witness.

Some of them might even believe that, but most of them are doing it for the same reasons I used to.

At some point near Christmas I observe my nephew scrolling tiktok: games games porn food porn gore gore gore.
He doesn’t even seem to notice.

I start trying to limit how much time I spend trawling for info, when I do, I look for the maps, the text, talking heads, whitepapers. Inevitably something piques my interest and I get diverted, off into a side channel, or a new thread, off the normal sources. The thing that brought me in there might be worthwhile, the rest of the stuff in there definitely isn’t. I might browse a couple then browse off.

I’ve decided by this point that looking at this stuff is bad and I don’t want to do it anymore, but there’s no depth of feeling behind it, its just one of those things, like not eating dessert or going to the gym more.

The wars are still going, will be still going, are being joined by new wars, sequels, reboots.

Earlier this year, I’m bored, again, up too late, again.
I am arguing with someone in IRC, just for something to do.

I am looking around for something to prove a point, or maybe the conversation is just not stimulating enough for me, I find what I’m looking for and copy the link. As I often do I browse a few more posts before tabbing back to the channel. I hit play on a video.

This video is from a drone, the dropper type, not an FPV.
It is bright and cold wherever this is, the air clear, the sky grey.
On the ground beneath the bird a man is lying in a shellscrape, he’s wounded already, movements clumsy, he’s shaking, he collapses, tries to rise, can’t, he rolls over, stares at the hovering drone, his skin is blotchy, grey-pink, mottled. His uniform is too big for him, his helmet has fallen off.

As he stares at the bird the weak winter sun crawls across his face, his eyes become pools of silver light, seeming to glow out of his ragged face.

The drone drops its munition [Auxillary Light ON]
The man’s face and torso disappear in a cough of dirty smoke.
When the smoke drifts off he lies dead, eyes still shining, blood streaming from his nose.

I get up from the computer and go stand outside in the night air and don’t come in until I physically can’t stand the cold. I unplug the computer without looking at the monitor and go to bed. When I wake I still feel sick.

I resolve not to look at anything like that again, never to use human beings in pain as entertainment again.

I relapse, but rarely.