The rise of the web's gross-out culture began, ironically, with a government crackdown on Internet obscenity. In 1996 the US Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, which criminalized the use of any "interactive computer service" to display "patently offensive material" where it could be viewed by minors. A group of anonymous troublemakers took the CDA as a challenge. Within a few months, they launched what soon became the world's largest clearinghouse of patently offensive material: the now-legendary shock site Rotten.com.
Rotten's power to disgust came from the radical shifts in context made possible by the web. It was a curator of filth, plucking the most striking content from obscure archives of fetish porn and crime scene photos—stuff that had been traded for years on Usenet newsgroups—and shoving it in the faces of naive Internet users. Rotten soon came to represent the underbelly of the web, sparking international condemnation that peaked when, in 1997, it posted what purported (falsely) to be a photograph of Princess Diana's fatal car crash. Naturally, all the denunciation that followed made the site a must-read for a generation of curious college students.
Later that same year, the CDA was ruled unconstitutional. But by then the furor had hardened the battle lines between those who wanted to civilize the web and geeks who reveled in its rawness. Goatse, the infamous photo of a man stretching his anus to the diameter of a grapefruit, brought precision-targeted disgust to this battle. In the mid-'90s, a hacker group called the Hick Crew found the photo circulating on pornographic Usenet groups. (The man in the picture is believed to be a veteran penetration fetishist who goes by the name Kirk Johnson.) The Hick Crew was so impressed that it began spamming the image into Christian chat rooms for fun.
In 1999, a Hick member placed the photo on the website Goatse.cx. "Goatse-ing" quickly caught on as a proto-rickroll-style prank, where people would fool others into clicking through to it. So disgusting was Goatse that anything remotely resembling the spectacular stretch became contaminated. "Accidental Goatses" spotted on road signs and product packaging were passed gleefully among the initiated like sightings of the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich.
More than a prank, Goatse-ing became, in the words of blogger Anil Dash, "a hazing ritual." It established an instant bond among those who could stomach it even as it instantly repelled those who couldn't. Goatse was the perfect totem for a burgeoning web culture that prized free speech and unpredictability. The early 2000s brought scores of Goatse knockoffs: Shock sites like Lemonparty.org, meatspin.com, and tubgirl.com each enshrined a single, nasty piece of porn for the delight of the savvy.
As with many subcultural movements, the shock sites were ultimately overshadowed by their own success. In 2007, the disgusting video "2 Girls 1 Cup" became an unexpected pop sensation, a sort of Deep Throat for the Internet era. The reaction videos, along with the horrible thing itself, spread all over YouTube, which made the "2 Girls 1 Cup" phenomenon both less aggressive and more inclusive than Goatse. Grandmas, celebrities, and US marines were all shown freaking out as they watched "2 Girls 1 Cup," and the diversity of gaping faces revealed that the web's ever-widening demographics had not dampened its thirst for the obscene. For a few solid weeks, the whole world seemed to be reveling in a piece of online scat-fetishist pornography. Congress tried to protect Americans from Internet filth, but the rise and persistence of gross-out web culture has proven that we prefer to take care of our own eyeballs—even if it means they sometimes see a few things that can never be unseen.
