The plot to send Justin Bieber to North Korea
You may, if you’ve looked at the Internet at any time in these last few months, have become aware of one Justin Bieber – a 16-year-old heartthrob pop sensation, responsible for bunching more teen female panties than any act since the Hanson brothers.
This Bieber character is a big deal amongst young girls of a certain age; he’s clean-cut, baby-faced and in possession of quite a famous haircut – the Internet has essentially gone guano for him. We in this country have been spared the worst depredations of Bieber Fever, but he’s legitimately and unfathomably huge in the States, almost solely amongst that key 8-14-year-old girl demographic, though he also finds favour with a certain tranche of the lesbian community.
Musically speaking he hits the sweet focus-grouped spot between battery-farmed pop music and asinine r’n'b. He is also chaperoned by the great and the good of the US chart establishment, taking Usher as his mentor. He would be instantly and refreshingly forgettable, were it not for the insidious forces of tween-powered Twitter. Even though the World Cup broke the service a few times last month, young Bieber more or less constantly topped the ‘trending topics’ on the pointless microblogging service – at least until the techs changed their algorithm in May, to the sane world’s relief.
His insistant ubiquity remains, however, and wars are raging back and forth across the face of the Internet right now, on blogs, forums and sleb goss sites, wars to determine the very future of Bieber on the web. Early blows were struck by Twitter and Greg Leuch’s extremely handy Shaved Bieber programme, which eradicates all mention of JB.
A new force has now emerged, harnessing the power of the so-called ‘Internet Hate Machine’, 4Chan. A loose confederation of hackers, pranksters and young digital ne’er-do-wells who largely keep themselves to themselves, making in-jokes, uploading porn and generally rolling around in their own muck, I strongly counsel you NOT to Google them as NO good will come of it. It’s enough for you to know they exist.
In the main, 4Chan are harmlessly insular, but sometimes something coalesces from the ooze, allowing the infighting to cease and momentum to build towards a collaborative effort of mischief making. You may remember from a few years ago a brief fad for masked kids picketing Scientology buildings, and you may have encountered Operation Titstorm, a game effort to paralyse Australian government websites in reaction to a new law banning small breasts in pornography.
Well, they’re striking again, and this time it’s Bieber in the crosshairs. Anonymous (the term they use for themselves) pooled its collective nerd-craft to game Google and set light to an unfounded rumour that he had syphilis, an act that briefly upset many a demented, snot-nosed teenaged girl. The nature of Google trending being what it is though, the rumour quickly slipped away.
That was but a preliminary skirmish – they’ve come up with a much more damaging plan – to send Bieber to North Korea. Foolish, foolish Bieber has started a competition for countries to vote for him to come and tour them. Called the Justin Bieber My World Tour Contest, it has now been thoroughly highjacked by Anonymous – at the time of writing, North Korea is in second place by only a few thousand votes. Unless the current leader Israel can get its act together, it should be overtaken by lunchtime.
How do we know this is a plot? Well, seeing as most residents of North Korea won’t have heard of Justin Bieber, or the Internet, it’s probably a safe bet to assume that nearly 300,000 of them won’t have used said Internet to bring him to their shores. What’s more, there’s an organised campaign on the 4Chan website showing you how to rig the votes. I’m not posting a picture of it; it’s rude.
To get real for a second, this will obviously never actually come to pass. Quite apart from anything else, Western music is banned in North Korea, and Bieber’s management will summarily ignore the vote anyway. It’s just nice to see the Internet working as intended for a change.
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