Nonsense, Absolute: The Penis Virus

For some time now I have been researching the internet for a series of internet-based poems I’m working on. Notebooks are filling up with varying degrees of weirdness and horror. In case you haven’t noticed yet the internet is scary.

To be sure, the internet is also an amazing tool. A kid in Texas can play a game of chess with someone in Iraq, more and more couples are finding one another thanks to dating sites, social network sites are connecting more people than ever before and platforms like Twitter have brought celebrities down to our level. You can now tweet “U r pomposity incarnate” at Kayne West without fear of major repercussions. Think about all the things you bought online that you never would have found in the 3D world. All the communities you have become a part of that you would never have found otherwise. Information (however inaccurate it can be) is literally at our fingertips. The list of advantages that the internet has created for us is endless.

But there exists a portion of the internet—a huge portion, actually—that remains hidden unless you intentionally go looking for it. This means that Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines hardly scratch the surface of the whole internet. If you truly want to see how vast and uncharted the internet is you will need to download and install alternate browsers like Tor. Once you do, you will find yourself on what is called the “Deep Web.”

Deep, dark and uncharted. Sounds adventurous, doesn’t it? You might even want to try it and see if you can find that obscure R-Rated item you can’t seem to find on the clear net. But this is my warning to you.

Do Not Go On the Deep Web.

Why not? Because you could be subject to a cyber attack. 

It happened to me and it could happen to you.

You might be asking “What were you doing on the Deep Web?”

Well, as I mentioned above, I was researching. I am a writer/artist and curiosity is one of my driving forces, so I fell victim to my own stupid urges and plunged into the murky depths. 

At first things seemed to be relatively tame. I avoided any links that looked like they led to drugs or child pornography or people offering free oral. Mostly I wanted to get a feel for the environment of the Deep Web and compare it to the clear net we use in daily life. Little did I know that hackers lurk in the shadows, just waiting for an unarmed visitor like myself. I was on a site that sold ostrich crap and mailed it to your desired receiver (someone I hope deserves to get a box of crap), when it happened.

What happened, you ask. I will tell you.

Suddenly my computer froze and began to download a mystery file. Using skills the fine people of Office Depot taught me, I hit ESCAPE instead of clicking anything. I thought I had averted the issue and quickly shut down the Tor browser so I could return my beloved Firefox…or Chrome, depending on my mood. I swing back and forth. But neither knows about the other, so don’t tell them.

When I closed out the window I noticed a shortcut on my desktop that had not been there before. If I squinted my eyes it looked like a phallus.

Now I have had weird harmless viruses before. There was a teddybear virus going around in high school that did absolutely nothing but sit on your desktop. It was kind of cute. A hacker somewhere decided to send out a teddybear to everyone who opened a certain email. 

But this was a phallus. Phalluses are slightly less harmless than cute teddybears. And “problematic,” for lack of another word. The last thing I want to see next to my Grad School folder is a giant dong. According to Freud, this would be my intense penis envy wishing to castrate the invisible male whose wiener now invaded my G-Rated desktop. 

I left clicked on the phallus and tried “castrating” it from my desktop.

Alas, what happened next is the stuff of nightmares.

Before I tell you what happened I must supply you with an important tidbit about my childhood. As a preteen, first discovering the magic of the internet, my grandmother would always step into the office where I played on the computer. It was hard not to know when I was on because we had ancient dial-up service and the phone lines died when I was playing. So it was not as if she was spying on me. She probably knew because she heard the noisy dial-up machinery sounds that always made the computer and the phone line sound like they were doing the robotic equivalent of choking and gurgling.

She would  poke her head in and look over my shoulder.

“You aren’t going on anything you’re not supposed to, are you?”

“No, Mawmaw.”

“You know the internet is how a lot of little girls get raped.”

And so this fear was conceived. Being a creature of intense, vivid imagination, I connected the dots in ways that most people would not have. My nightmare was that the internet itself was a rapist, just waiting to pull its trousers down and wag its junk out at me like the hapless victim I was.

Now, almost two decades later, a hacker had found my worst childhood internet nightmare.

The phallus on my desktop enlarged. Instead of the blue screen of death that most virus crashes cause, the gigantic phallus began wobbling around, blocking all my shortcuts so that my desktop was useless. (I figure if the Ancient Romans had computers this would be what most desktops looked like, but that’s besides the point.) Wherever I would try to click, the penis would flop. 

Enraged, I discovered that my menu bars and everything else was still functional. The only problem was my desktop had been utterly dick-ified. 

Try going in public with this.

I am poor. This should come to no surprise to other writers, artists and students. The hard fact is that sometimes you can’t even afford to get your computer fixed and when you’re in a bind you might have to put up with a “harmless” but annoying virus for a while. So, feeling dirty, I tried to keep my chin up and ignore the giant dick desktop.

Problems arose when I went in public. At one of my favorite cafes I made the mistake of taking my laptop out and accidentally gave the people behind me an eyeful of my dicky desktop. 

“That is so inappropriate!” 

(Remember: half-naked people on your desktop is fine. But a lone penis. That is unacceptable!)

 

I was scolded, humiliated, shamed. I needed at least four hours of crying before I was ready to suck it up (ew!) and take the computer to a cheap place to get it fixed. GeekSquad was out of the question since they would probably charge me the remainder of my student loan refund. So I went to the handy Office Depot people.

After a long time of laughing and trying to be professional, the folks at Office Depot decided this was fixable and warned me never to go to the Deep Web again. There’s no need to tell me twice. Eventually they were able to remove the virus. Thanks to a cloud that uploads all my files it was not a great tragedy to have the computer reset (though it was annoying regardless). 

Finally my desktop was sanitized again.  Just to be sure I also physically cleaned it with Windex and keyboard cleaner. By the way, there is a site that sells keyboard cleaner as a drug you inject directly into your veins. On the Deep Web. But don’t look for it. Because penises.

Unless you want a giant, wobbling phallus on your desktop, I would suggest you stay far away from the Deep Web. It is not all seedy underground but much of it is and it is not as secure as the clear net. If you want to be freaked out there are countless sites on the clear net that are sufficiently freaky enough and probably won’t infect your computer if you have virus protection.

If you are the hacker who made the Penis Virus, fuck you. That wasn’t funny.

Have a nice day.