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sorryforthephilosophy · 7 years

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Phoenix Jones Fights Wolfie Blackheart

To mangle a quote from 1984: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine Phoenix Jones fighting Wolfie Blackheart - forever.”

In 2010, San Antonio police searched the house of Wolfie Blackheart. Wolfie believed that he* was a wolf, spiritually if not biologically. He was a member of a growing subculture (therians or otherkin) of animal-identified people. Wolfie was the alpha of the Crimson Blood Wolf Pack and an amateur taxidermist. It has also been reported that Wolfie was a high school dropout and had Tourette’s. Members of Anonymous had alerted the police after seeing a photo of a severed dog’s head that has been posted to MySpace and feared that Wolfie may have killed and decapitated a missing dog from the neighborhood. Wolfie proclaimed innocence, saying that he would never kill a dog, that he found the dog dead in the woods and wanted to preserve its skull. News stories about the issue abounded, and Wolfie was subject to harassment, threats and doxing (personal information being revealed online, such as phone number and address). Even today, cultural conservatives use Wolfie as an example of the slippery slope of allowing people to identify as categories that don’t match their biology.

In 2011, Phoenix Jones, a real life superhero and the leader of the “Rain City Superhero Movement” was arrested under investigation of assault for using pepper spray to break up a fight. In court, Phoenix was forced to remove his mask and reveal his true identity. Phoenix is an accomplished mixed martial artist who wore a super-suit that included bullet-proof material. Phoenix has stopped several crimes, prevented criminals from fleeing the scenes of multiple crimes and has been shot and stabbed (or so it has been reported by Phoenix and others).

Wolfie and Phoenix have never, to my knowledge, met nor come into conflict. However, their stories are emblematic of the effects that the internet is having on our society and are instructive on what we can expect the future to be like.

The internet makes new subcultures and new identities possible. Cases in point: the real-life superhero movement, where people put on superhero outfits and patrol the streets of their cities trying to stop crime, and the otherkin/therian movement, where people identify as being (non-human) animals or as being spiritually or psychologically connected with animals.

Our cultures tell us the choices that we have for our identities. Modern western culture had, until very recently, only two gender choices: male and female. Other cultures have had more than two concepts of gender, and thus more than two choices.

Before the internet, people in western culture had a relatively small number of things they could identify as: gay or straight, nerd or jock, criminal or law-abiding, republican or democrat, urban or country, Catholic or Protestant, etc. There were some minority choices (rather than Democrat or Republican, you could be a socialist or a fascist, rather than Catholic or Protestant you could be an Atheist or a Buddhist or Wiccan), but most of these minority choices made a person subject to ridicule and prejudice. If you identified as a wolf in a human body, or wanted to fight crime as a costumed superhero, or thought lizard people secretly rule the Earth or were a heterosexual male who wanted to give up on women and go-your-own-way, it was unlikely you could ever meet another person who felt the same way as you, and attempts to do so would most likely result in ridicule and shunning. Today, anyone with any of these beliefs or desires can go on the internet and find a community and a culture. You might even find people in your city who share your beliefs who you can hang out with in person.

These internet-generated sub-cultures normalize identity choices that would have previously not seemed like choices. There have been superhero and werewolf stories around for quite a while, and doubtless many people fantasized about being a superhero or a wolf, but before the internet the number of people who chose being a superhero or a wolf as a lifestyle were small or non-existent. The lifestyle choices you believe you have change radically when you find find a community of people who are patrolling the streets in superhero costumes or who go to the mall in a pack wearing wolf tails.

Some people who have written about Wolfie Blackheart have described him as non-neurotypical. I do not know if that’s true, but let’s say for a moment that it is. It might mean that wolfie was born with a brain that would never have let him do any of mainstream culture’s standard identity choices very well. Maybe being a therian is closer to what his brain does well. Maybe all the different subcultures cater to certain psychological and neurological types (just as mainstream culture does). If clothes all came in medium but no small or large, and someone who could never find clothes that fit them found a weird subculture that had small or large clothes, they might feel they finally found a place they belonged.

However, the internet puts these various subcultures on view for people from the outside to view. And thus we see culture clashes, because what seems to be a valid choice within the subculture doesn’t always seem like a valid choice outside. To Wolfie, it may have seemed normal to take the body of a neighborhood dog who was a friend of his and who had been run over, and cut its head off so as to preserve its skull as a memorial to the creature. To Phoenix, it may have seemed normal to pepper spray a group of people engaging in a fight. To the people who saw the dog’s head on MySpace, it was evidence of animal cruelty and occult animal sacrifice. To Seattle law enforcement, trying to break up a fight with pepper spray is evidence of being what a Seattle City Attorney called a “deeply misguided individual.”

In China, Human Flesh Search Engine is when people use the internet to find criminals and people who break societal norms, stripping these offenders of their anonymity so they can face legal action or social sanctions. When a video was posted to the internet showing the feet of a woman in high heels stomping on a kitten, the Human Flesh Search Engine tracked down the woman and revealed her name, causing her to lose her job. When a woman posted on Chinese internet forums about her husband’s infidelity and then committed suicide, the Search Engine made the husband famous around the Chinese internet, forcing him to quit his job and subjecting him to harassment on the street. In the West, groups like Anonymous use similar tactics and for similar reasons. It was Anonymous members that first got involved in the Wolfie Blackheart case when a picture of the dog’s severed head was posted to 4chan.

Yet it’s not just members of our nation’s default culture who take vigilante action against others on the internet. When feminists tried to post their opinions on video games to the internet, and proved they had an audience willing to view and even pay for these opinions, anti-feminist gamers (a cultural minority, no matter how much their constant loud whining on the internet makes them appear to be a majority) resorted to the same tactics: campaigns of harassment and doxing.

So what will the future look like? The internet will continue to create new subcultures, and these subcultures will grow larger, older, deeper, will grow even more different from the mainstream culture. People who were raised in these cultures will come of age. There will be second-generation real life superheroes and therians. There will be splintering of existing sub-cultures into sub-sub-cultures. Therians and otherkin and furries will all think of each other as weird and wrong.

More of us will be in one or more of these subcultures. The mainstream culture, to the extent that it exists at all, will be a sort of lingua-franca, like the pidgin languages that allow people to communicate and trade in areas of dense lingual diversity. Mainstream culture will mean that while you are in the office you won’t wear your tail or your mask, and you won’t say your theories about lizard people or the earth being flat, but this is just a shallow code of conduct you adopt only until you can leave work and be around your own people again.

On the whole, this may make the human race happier. Perhaps we are almost all neurodiverse, some of us are just better at hiding it than others, and when given a choice most of us will abandon mainstream culture for something that suits us better.

Yet for all the potential joys of fitting in, culture clashes are going to increase dramatically. Actions that seem normal and sane from within the confines of subcultures will be viewed from outside by people who don’t understand the cultural context. Many subcultures will seem, to outsiders, to be strange and sinister and possibly dangerous. We will fear that therians will kill our pets, that real-life superheroes will pepper spray us for no reason, that feminists will ruin our video games. The same internet communities that help people connect with each other also make concerted vigilante action not only possible but easy. Subcultures will fight subcultures, each attempting to wield social systems (e.g. the police, the school system, the mainstream news media) as weapons against each other. It won’t be a war, it will be a lot of little skirmishes, weirdos versus weirdos. It will be Wolfie Blackheart with a set of surgically implanted fangs fighting Phoenix Jones with a kevlar super-suit, forever.

Sources: Mostly Wikipedia. Also: https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/Shadow https://www.forbes.com/2008/11/21/human-flesh-search-tech-identity08-cx_cb_1121obrien.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN7lBDxWhvs http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1792621/?ref_=nv_sr_8 http://horrorfanzine.com/wolfie-blackheart-and-the-severed-dog-head/

*In 2011, reports listed Wolfie’s gender as female. Wolfie, to my understanding, currently identifies as male.

A note on quote marks: In this article I resisted the urge to use quote marks around the terms people use to describe themselves. Quote marks, like the terms “so called” or “self-proclaimed,” carry with them the implication that someone uses that term, but I as the author normally wouldn’t. There’s a huge difference between saying “Sam, who is a trans-man….” and “Sam, who is a ‘trans-man’...” No quotes implies that this is a real or legitimate category. And since this post is about that tension between what one person considers a legit category and what another doesn’t, I thought it would be hypocritical for me to include those quote marks.

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