Ask Matt Labash: Against Internet Challenges

That’s hard for me to say, as I sit here chewing my Tide pod, with my wet t-shirt still clingy and adrip after I helped eradicate Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis by taking the Ice Bucket Challenge. (Sorry ladies, no pictures.)

I might be a little late to the game on that last one, which can happen when you have a carrier-pigeon cable connection on a creaky HP laptop. Though even if I had Verizon Fios on a spanking new MacBook, it’s hard to keep up with the New Dumbness. Which the Internet helps make more of, every day, all the live-long day. Just to bring readers up to speed, the story you reference, according to a Washington Post account, involves a 12-year-old girl whose name I will not repeat, since the poor dear already has enough problems, like her body being covered in second- and third-degree burns.

It seems she’d had a couple of friends over to her house for a run-of-the-mill sleepover. Yet after pigging out on pancakes and doing whatever else it is preteen girls do these days—giggling about boys, comparing smart phone cases, huffing nail-polish remover—they decided to take what the Internet calls “The Fire Challenge.” Her mom heard a loud pop, and saw her daughter tearing down the hallway, covered in flames from knees-to-hair, yelling “help me!” Mom told the Post that her daughter “looked like a fireball.”

The girl is now at a children’s hospital, bandages swaddling her severe burns, while she relies on both a ventilator and a feeding tube. All because she took this attention-seeking Internet challenge, which involved pouring rubbing alcohol all over her arms, and having a friend set her aflame. (Though is any sacrifice too great—even a burnt sacrifice, as they used to call it in Leviticus—to garner more Instagram followers?)

The Fire Challenge is but the latest in a long list of stupid Internet challenges. There was the Cinnamon Challenge, which involved swallowing a tablespoon of cinnamon in 60 seconds with nothing to wash it down. As a former academic pharmacologist in Forbes told it, this resulted in nearly 200 calls to U.S. poison control centers in the first half of 2012, since “the combination of cinnamon’s caustic chemical and undigestible cellulose matrix makes the practice particularly damaging to the lungs”—the equivalent of inhaling powdered bark.

Then there was the Duct Tape Challenge, in which “friends” wrap you in duct tape as you try to wriggle free for the benefit of a YouTube audience. This had predictable results. One Washington state teenager, while trying to pull a Houdini, fell over and hit his head on a window frame, resulting in 48 stitches to his head, a blood clot in his brain, and the loss of sight in one eye.

If only he’d stuck with the Underboob Pen Challenge. Which, as advertised, involves posting videos or photos of you holding a pen under your boob. As of this writing, I’ve come across no debilitating injuries, except, perhaps, to people’s self-respect. Since in the name of virality, gullible women across the globe have posted pictures of their boobs all over the Internet.

Then there’s my personal favorite: the Condom Snorting Challenge. This entails snorting a condom through one’s nostril until it enters the back of your throat, then pulling it out of your mouth. Surgeon General Warning: Inhaling condoms provides no prophylactic benefits against brain rot for people who participate in stupid Internet challenges. (Here’s a news report from CBS News.)

We were all young and dumb once, of course (with plenty of us having grown up to be old and dumb). Back during high school, I clearly remember my pal Victor. During our senior trip, he thought it would be a cracking idea to take out a Zippo lighter, to hike his legs in the air, and to hold the Zippo flame in front of his tailpipe while letting loose. When his dinner had done its work, and the moment of truth came, his entire undercarriage briefly ignited. As he jumped to his feet doing a bizarre little fire dance, he looked like James Brown trying to impersonate a meteor shower.

Kids grow apart, and I lost track of Victor. So I have no idea if his children later came out extra crispy. But it is the duty of the middle-aged to compare and contrast themselves with the young, always to the young’s detriment, with pronouncements that tend to begin “in my day.” So I will play to type: In my day, we didn’t have the Internet. And though Victor was showing off for friends, he wasn’t trying to set himself on fire. He was trying to flame-throw. Setting himself on fire was just an unintended consequence, not the goal, as it seems to be now, when it is harder than ever to command attention, as everyone keeps upping the stakes.

Shortly after Al Gore invented the Internet, he said, “I hope we will use the ‘net to cross barriers and connect cultures.” (Or maybe Tim Berners-Lee said it. Why bother with precision? After all, this is just the Internet.) In a way, Gore/Berners-Lee got their wish. Though as with Victor’s fire dance, their hope manifested itself by way of unintended consequences.

The Internet has indeed connected people and crossed cultures. Every day, stupid people from all over the world find other stupid people, using the Internet to help compound their collective stupidity. Hence, the Fire Challenge. But while it’s tempting to mock the young for setting themselves on fire, aren’t they just literally acting out in meatspace what their older counterparts virtually do all the time on Twitter?

After all, that poor 12-year-old girl might’ve willingly set herself on fire. But it’s not sending dick pics, like a certain former New York congressman. Nor is it maligning an entire race or tweeting “kill more men,” like a certain New York Times editorialist. Internet attention whoredom comes in a variety of flavors.

Yes, it takes a special brand of dimness to think setting yourself on fire in an Internet challenge is the way to go about gaining attention. But maybe there’s hope. After all, doing so requires possessing a look-at-me streak bordering on a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a reckless disregard for propriety and good taste, and a complete lack of impulse control. Meaning that after this 12 year old’s wounds heal, she might make for an ideal future president of the United States.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected].