Growing up as a teenager, like many others, I stumbled upon gore websites such as Rotten.com. It was the first time I witnessed the extremes of human cruelty, acts done by and to people: captured, catalogued, and shared online. It terrified my developing mind and left scars that never quite healed.
Today, a new generation faces the same horrors, only now through social media feeds instead of hidden corners of the internet. Children and young adults scroll past real death, violence, and despair. Uncensored, constant, and normalized. The lack and negligence censorship may be seen as honesty or an unfiltered window into the wicked world, but it can also erode our sense of boundaries, of what should shock us, move us, or make us stop and feel.
I can’t help but wonder what this will do to us as a society. Will it numb our hearts, or deepen our empathy? Does witnessing horror make us feel more, or feel less?
We wrote it as rott on.com to let it decay forever in the internet's archives.
