In the campy sci-fi classic Logan’s Run, our eponymous hero, in a funk, decides to put himself on the “The Circuit,” a cross between a television and a transporter. From the comfort of your living room, The Circut brings you face to face with a random sucession of fellow surfers looking for anonymous sex.
Chatroulette, the latest crazy thing to do on the internet, bears more than a passing resemblance to Logan’s machine. The site connects you to a series of video chats with randomized strangers, and you flip to a new partner with a cold “next,” just like in the film, but the similarities don’t end there. As described by Sam Anderson, in an arresting piece in New York Magazine, Chatroulette channels some of the same nihilistic boredom, sexual longing, and bracing loneliness as the fictional Circuit. It is also fueled by the same hope, however desperate and unlikely, that we can find real connections in impersonal, virtual spaces.
The stories he tells are funny, creepy, touching, and strange. If you’re tempted to interact with Chatroulette’s users, already 20,000 strong, be forewarned: “one out of every ten chatters is a naked masturbating man,” Anderson writes, and your lack of control (beyond that ever present “next”) leads to several flavors of unpleasantness. Still, he says, the effect is powerful, and the site not easily written off. Some interactions are quite affecting. And then there’s the possible evolution of this idea:
I found myself fantasizing about a curated version of ChatRoulette—powered maybe by Google’s massive server farms—that would allow users to set all kinds of filters: age, interest, language, location. One afternoon I might choose to be thrown randomly into a pool of English-speaking thirtysomething non-masturbators who like to read poetry. Another night I might want to talk to Jets fans. Another night I might want to just strip away all the filters and see what happens. The site could even keep stats, like YouTube, so you could see the most popular chatters in any given demographic. I could get very happily addicted to a site like that.
If you want to check out the messy, unfiltered reality, give it a try. Full disclosure: I loved this article but have no desire to wade in, not in this form. But who knows where this idea will take us? I can imagine a real demand for randomized social contact, with significant implications, if in the future people feel boxed in to a narrow demographic. Nothing like a roulette to shake up group-think and other social stasis.
Logan certainly learned how disruptive it can be. When The Circuit pops Jessica 6 (the lovely Jenny Agutter) into his life, she refuses sex and instead leads him to an adventure involving love, the Library of Congress, and a homicidal robot named Box. It upends his whole world, and ends up freeing the human race. So, you know, anything could happen.
This Joyful Noise 