Get Your iForks and Torches Ready...

 It's been a great few weeks for the tiny fraction of the population who like their headlines to be about rodents and pederasty.
 First, Freddie Starr, he of hamster-eating fame, was accused of kiddie fiddling and then Phillip Schofield, having caused outrage by eating a guinea pig while on holiday, handed the Prime Minister a list of suspected paedophiles that he'd found online.
 If you ever predicted that so much of the news would be taken up with rodenticide and child sex, you're either a liar or some form of time traveller. Or a witch, who must be burned.
 The whole "eating rodents" thing I don't really care about. The old Starr/Hamster headline was obvious tabloid bullshit, and what Philip Schofield does while on holiday in a culture that habitually eats guinea pig is really none of my concern. Although it does make me wonder why we haven't heard from Gordon the Gopher in recent years.
 Internet vigilante justice, however, is a little more interesting.
 Sure, on the surface, Phillip Schofield's actions were childish and ill-thought-out; we don't need to listen to "who the internet thinks is bad" to form a system of criminal justice, not least because the main Google result for "childhood" and "raped" is probably going to be George Lucas.*
 None of this is news, except the surprising fact that people look for hard-edged, well thought out journalism on a breakfast show presented by the bloke who used to host kids' telly from a broom cupboard.
 Somewhere under the surface of it all, however, there's the faint glimmer of an idea.
 What would happen if we DID listen to the internet about matters of the law?
 Obviously, first and foremost, police would spend a lot of wasted time looking into alleged incidences of pwning, reported by people with names like DaveBigcock321.
 Underneath all that, though, there's a serious point: The internet is, for better and worse, a largely un-governed entity.Nobody edits or censors content, or at least not in any immediate sense. Things can be taken down, sure, but nothing can be stopped from being published.
 This means that there is no such thing as an internet injunction; no such thing as bribing people to keep quiet. Once information hits the net, it never truly goes away. This makes crimes increasingly tough to cover up.
 Demographics are also worth looking at.
 The internet, generally speaking, is populated by the young.
 Young people tend to be idealistic and left-leaning and reactionary.
 Whilst reactionary kids shouldn't necessarily be handed any power at all, I can't help but wonder what would happen if we put them in charge of the law.
 People like George Bush would get arrested for war crimes; Rupert Murdoch and David Cameron would almost certainly be arrested for perjury. Donald Trump would be arrested for harassment, wasting legal time and at least four billion counts of being an unutterable cunt.
 Scores of slippery, odious, corrupt people who have flouted the law for years would finally be brought to justice because there would be nobody left to hide behind. You can't pay people to look the other way when "people" means everybody, and they're looking from every direction. You can't bully cyberspace as a whole into letting you get away with things, because it is comprised of everybody and nobody at once.
 Most importantly, angry young men (and women) are hard to stifle.
 This doesn't mean, of course, that there is any truth whatsoever in Schofield's magic list of bad people.
 On the other hand, if there does prove to be anything verifiable in that list, it's going to be an interesting wakeup call to the legal orthodoxy.
 In the same way that the internet is slowly strangling print journalism, and a good many other forms of media besides, might it one day play a part in the justice system? In an increasingly digital society, can the will of the governed finally force its way to making a difference through the internet?
 Probably not. Most likely, the awful things about the internet will prevent the great things about the internet from ever achieving their true potential; the most we'll get is a positive but diluted outcome. Some progress, but not a revolution.
 Still, there are glimmers. Ten years ago, Ian Tomlinson would have been a newspaper vendor who died of a heart attack, because the police said so.
 Ten years ago, the students at various "Occupy" protests would have been maced because they were dangerous or threatening, or so we'd have been told.
 And for thirty years, child molesters would have been seen as upstanding members of the public.
 Now, we don't believe any of that, because we all know better. We've seen the evidence on youtube.
 The internet is all of us, and if all of us know something, sooner or later, it comes out.
 Maybe one day, if all of us know someone is guilty, they won't be able to sweep things under the rug.
 Just maybe, internet justice could be a force for something good.
 As long as we don't leave it in the hands of that bloke from "The Cube."
 


*That was intended as a throwaway joke; I then Googled it out of mild curiousity to see if it was true. All I got was some terrifying, terrifying cartoons from Japan.