Who the heck cares about the internet, anyway? I don’t. But apparently Proclick does. Proclick.biz is a video amalgamation blog run by local creative people Brad Tinmouth, Jordan Darville, Lili Huston-Herterich, and Stephen Stanford where they post weird videos that are fun to watch at night when you’re alone. They’ve recently expanded into film, putting together a 60-minute feature length piece that incorporates some 1600 YouTube videos, and is set to launch on December 9th. Conversation got a bit heated (and NSFW) when I spoke to them on Google + Hangout, but maybe they’re asking for it by trying to bring their website into meatspace. What is Proclick? Lili: It’s a really dated blogspot dot com that takes a while to load. Brad: It’s an internet website where we share YouTube videos. Jordan: It’s a pillar of our friendship. Steve: It’s a reliquary of funny videos. Brad: It started during the York University strike of 2009 where we’d send each other videos and we decided we should put them on the internet. What was the point of posting funny videos on the internet? Steve: There’s a litany of other websites on the internet that just show post funny videos, like Ebaumsworld. Once YouTube came out, entities started to exist within YouTube itself like Fail Blog. Most of them are just videos of people being injured, like America’s Funniest Home Videos. It’s nothing new. America’s Funniest Home Videos did all this in the early nineties and it’s totally indistinguishable. Lili: The difference is that we hate ourselves. Brad: The difference is that we don’t post videos that are funny. Proclick is for showing each other videos that we like. Steve: The videos are funny because they’re not funny. They’re funny because somebody sat down in front of their computer and created them. Jordan: A lot of the videos tell a story about the people who originally posted them on YouTube. Steve recently posted a four-second video of this bug eyed 13-year-old  girl saying, “I’m gonna rape you.” I learned so much more about her than I would have just sitting down and talking to her about 4chan, which is probably what she does all day. Brad: It’s also a look at folk art. There’s a theory that says that folk art has switched from handy crafts to internet, because it offers tools that are easily available to you. For example people will add credits to their videos using these blue Windows Media Player credits.There’s this one video of this girl throwing carpets out of a window with a Nickelback (ed note: it’s actually Three Days Grace) song playing in the background, and then it cuts to credits that are as long as the video. Steve: When you buy a webcam it comes with YouTube. It’s like plug it in, hit play. A lot of people post videos on YouTube without editing. Brad: There are these surreal and immediate thoughts being expressed without an internal filter. Lili: It’s unconscious and instinctual, where they’re not considering the ramifications of the upload. Steve: People don’t understand that when you do that, if it’s stupid, funny, or bizarre, someone’s going to hold onto it and re-upload it. For example, there’s a video of two young girls dancing in front of the camera, which is something little girls have done forever, but they’re also in some weird Midwestern basement with this obese child in a diaper who falls off the couch and they start kicking him. YouTube’s not your home video cabinet, but some people think it is. Jordan: I agree with Steve, though, that one of the most interesting things that we do is chronicle a generation that doesn’t have a filter outside of its own body, with the home videos, especially. They don’t realize that when they open up their computer and open up a browser they’re connected to the entire world and the entire world is connected to them. Steve: And sometimes it explodes into something obscene. Last year there was this 14-year-old who posted these videos where she said explicit things and put it on 4chan. Her father, seeing that she’s being totally abused for being stupid on the internet makes a video addressing the internet as a whole telling everyone to stop. There’s a misconception of the technology and people don’t understand how immediate and how massive it is. Even something as innocuous as putting a video of your dog on YouTube can be targeted. Jordan: I’m not sure if its ignorance or if its apathy. Lili: I think its apathy. Even if people understand that there are forums and trolls, do they care? What are trolls? And this majority who post videos of their dog, who are they? Steve: Trolls are latent sociopaths. The oldest adage that there is about the internet is that the anonymity enables you to behave however you want. Trolls are the legions of people out there who have a lot of rage and take pleasure in hurting or toying with other people. Brad: When the people who post videos of their dogs get trolled, they get confused. Jordan: With the rise of Anonymous, if you do something that a group of people don’t like, they can find out a lot more about you than what you’ve revealed in the video. What’s the rise of Anonymous? Steve: Anonymous is this general term for a group of people mainly from the website 4chan who victimize people. The famous example of Anonymous comes from this news story about a 13-year-old kid who got his iPod stolen, and killed himself. He had this memorial website where someone in the comments had called him “an hero.” Anonymous thought everyone associated was a bunch of “shitbirds” and found the address and phone number of the kid’s parents and started calling saying “haha, your son is dead.” Jordan: They also fight against political injustices. Steve: They’re not the merry men, dude, they’re a bunch of idiots. Where do you find these videos? Brad: We do research. We’ll take something from a forum or from someone’s Facebook. Lili: Do you think eventually people who will be posting on YouTube will become inherently conscious of trolls? That there will no longer be people surprised that their video is being taken out of context. Brad: I think that people will look back this time and wonder why people revealed so much about themselves. I think we’re in the Wild West right now. The Wild West theory says that when a new technology comes out, for the first thirteen years it’s in the unlawful, unsurveilled “Wild West.” For example pirate radio stations were free for the first ten years or so and then they went corporate. With the internet, we’ve now got the cloud and that may end up controlling everything from a space that everyone has access to. Steve: The only thing that’s going to stop it is if some sort of new leadership or ownership of the internet that’s going to censor it or curtail it, like not allowing children to put up YouTube videos. Lili: Why do you position censorship above consciousness? Technical control is impossible. You don’t let kids post, but what happens when a video of a mother bathing her nude toddler gets posted? That can become something pornographic. It’ll become people being conscious of how video exploitation works on the internet and being conscious of what they post. Brad: But there will always be some desperate person who wants to make a mockery of themselves. Jordan: The “I’m Gonna Rape You” girl was probably so desperate for attention, she was stimulated by it. She’s getting more recognition than she ever did her in life. Brad: When you get those hits, it becomes an addiction. Is Proclick about sharing the mythologies of the everyday person, then? Steve: It’s not a mythology. It’s a documentation of the birth spasms of total mainstream internet being everywhere at once, of communities that exist on the internet in every household now. That’s only happened in the past 5 or 6 years. Brad: YouTube is from 2005. It’s six years old. That’s insane. Jordan: What I like most about Proclick is that its a way to figure out what different lives are like. You find out a lot about peoples lives by them not talking about it. And by what they don’t say in their blogs. Brad: There’s an explosion of trivialized moments in one video and you start to wonder why this is important to them. Do they want to be famous? Do they want people to see it? Do they genuinely care about these things? Do they care about themselves? Jordan: There’s a very human need for our lives to be important, like getting a katana blade from Japan and wanting to share it with everyone. Steve: A lot of the people we put on the site like katana dude, there’s this air of self-importance. Brad: And that smug shit is the best. Steve: There are these communities where without the existence of something like YouTube, or forums software or anything like that, would be so fucking marginalized to the point of non-existence. Brad: And then the internet allows them to feel special. Steve: Stuff like bulletin boards systems go back to the mid-to-late eighties, but it was so expensive to get the kind of hardware to actually do it, when your average PC would cost $5000-$6000. But now there are these communities of amateur pundits that go on YouTube and talk about political issues and its these insane viewpoints and no one would ever take them seriously, except on YouTube. Jordan: Politicians that best utilize the internet for their political agenda usually tend to attract the most insane unintelligible acolytes. Ron Paul supporters are lunatics. Steve: That’s just “internet shit”. I use that phrase in conversation now where I refer to something like sword play or like LARPing or sex dolls or Libertarianism. It’s shit that wouldn’t enter into a reasonably intelligent discussion or debate in any real environment if it wasn’t for the internet. Then what is the relationship between these microcosmic cultures and real life? Is the internet separate? Steve: There isn’t one. The internet is separate. That’s the problem. Jordan: For some people this is all they have and it shows in their videos. Brad: For us, it’s just a little thing we look at. Lili: You’re forcing a minority on marginal communities, and Proclick is attractive to a marginal community as well. You can’t just be like, “Look at us, presenting to you these marginalized communities, which are so bizarre that they couldn’t exist without the internet,” because technically, Proclick couldn’t exist without the internet. We have 4 readers. Brad: One of our largest traffic sources is people searching “fuck horses” or “wet holes.” Jordan: Proclick is something that no one wants. We’ve been doing it for three years and nobody is interested in it. That’s why we have to tag all our posts with weird sex, because that’s the only way we get traffic–and because its funny. Brad: Proclick is just funny. Grab a copy of the Proclick DVD at their launch party at Double Double Land this Friday, December 9th. Listen to their 3rd podcast here.