Samantha, Aech, and Shoto received their fair share of online hate, too, of course, but they took it in stride. They were somehow able to bask in the adoration of their billions of fans while ignoring the ire of even their most vocal detractors. I appeared to lack the emotional maturity necessary to pull off that little trick.
Yes, I knew the haters’ opinions were utterly meaningless, and had no effect whatsoever on our real lives. Unless, of course, we let it. Which, of course, I did.
And yes, the rational part of my brain knew that the vast majority of the people who trolled us online were acting out, due to crushing disappointment with their own miserable lives. And who could blame them? Reality was completely miserable for a vast majority of the world’s population. I should’ve taken pity on the sad, pathetic souls who had nothing better to do with their time than vent their frustrations by attacking me and my friends.
Instead I went on a rage-induced troll-killing spree. Several of them, actually.
The superuser abilities I’d inherited from Halliday allowed me to circumvent the OASIS’s strict policy of user anonymity. So when some snide douchebag using the handle PenisvilleH8r posted something nasty about me on the meed feeds, I pulled up his private account profile, pinpointed his avatar’s location inside the OASIS, and waited till he set foot inside a PvP zone. Then, before PenisvilleH8r even knew what was happening, I made my avatar invisible, teleported in, and zeroed his ass out with a ninety-ninth-level Finger of Death spell. Now that my avatar wore the Robes of Anorak, I was both omnipotent and invulnerable, so there was literally nothing anyone could do to stop me.
I gleefully zeroed out hundreds of trolls in this fashion. If someone talked shit about me, I found them and killed their avatar. If someone posted something hateful about Art3mis or her foundation, I found them and killed their avatar. If someone posted a racist meme about Aech or a video attacking Shoto’s work, I found them and killed their avatar—usually right after I asked them the rhetorical question, “Who run Bartertown?”
Eventually, people began to accuse me of being the untraceable, undetectable, ultrapowerful avatar behind the killings, and the resulting online media backlash, dubbed “Parzivalgate,” destroyed my public image. Thanks to my robes there was no hard evidence against me, and of course I denied everything, but even I had to admit that the circumstantial case was pretty strong. Gee, a bunch of avatars get killed by an undetectable, all-powerful avatar, and the only thing they have in common is that they trash-talked the one person most likely to have an undetectable, all-powerful avatar…
A petition calling for official sanctions against me was digitally signed by hundreds of millions of daily OASIS users. A few dozen class-action lawsuits were filed against me. In the end, none of them amounted to anything; I was a multibillionaire with unlimited resources and the world’s best lawyers on my payroll, and there was no proof of wrongdoing on my part. But there was nothing I could do about the anger I’d caused.
Finally, Aech took me aside for a long talk. She reminded me how fortunate—and powerful—I was now, even if on the inside I still felt like that underdog kid from the stacks. She told me to grow up, and let it go. “Cultivate an attitude of gratitude, Z.”
I reluctantly took her advice and went into therapy. I could’ve afforded a real-life human therapist, of course—but I found it easier to share my innermost thoughts with a computer program than with another person. A virtual therapist couldn’t judge you, or share your secrets with its spouse for laughs. It would never repeat anything I said to anyone, and that was the only sort of therapist I could bring myself to confide in.
After a few sessions with Sean, I’d realized that the best thing for my mental health would be to abandon social media altogether. So I had. And it was the right choice. My anger abated, and my wounded pride began to heal.
I’d finally gained enough distance from my addiction to realize something. Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network comprised of billions of people. We were designed by evolution to be hunter-gatherers, with the mental capacity to interact and socialize with the other members of our tribe—a tribe made up of a few hundred other people at most. Interacting with thousands or even millions of other people on a daily basis was way too much for our ape-descended melons to handle. That was why social media had been gradually driving the entire population of the world insane since it emerged back around the turn of the century.
I was even beginning to wonder if the invention of a worldwide social network was actually the “Great Filter” that theoretically caused all technological civilizations to go extinct, instead of nuclear weapons or climate change. Maybe every time an intelligent species grew advanced enough to invent a global computer network, they would then develop some form of social media, which would immediately fill these beings with such an intense hatred for one another that they ended up wiping themselves out within four or five decades.