If you happened to be browsing the Internet's Newsgroups in October 2001, you would soon get the feeling that Osama Bin Laden is one unpopular guy. No matter which group you happened to be perusing, whether it be dedicated to model trains, stamp collecting or foot fetishism, a picture of Bin Laden was bound to have been posted by someone, somewhere. Nine out of ten of these pictures were hostile, and pretty much all of them were, at the very least, unflattering. In this chapter we look at a sample of these pictures – usually doctored photographs or crude homemade animations – in order to see the confluence between relatively new technologies (i.e., the Internet, imaging and editing software, etc.) and relatively old ideologies (i.e., racist stereotyping, propaganda, jingoism, etc.). These pictures are symptoms of an extremely grave global diagnosis, and we can see the accompanying exponential anxieties in their most “naked” form. American shock, anger, grief, and resulting cross-cultural resentments are expressed in literally pornographic terms, and this in itself reveals a great deal about the current apocalyptic condition.

Newsgroups are the most popular features of the Internet, which is comprised of more cyberspaces than the most visible World Wide Web. Along with ICQ, MUDS, MOOS, chat rooms and bulletin boards, Newsgroups allow people all over the planet to gather in a virtual space and share common interests. Much of the digital traffic is innocuous enough: advice on how to swap 1950's baseball cards, fanatical questions regarding the latest Star Trek episode, sound files recorded during coffee-shop poetry evenings, and the like. The mass of information, however, and the relative difficulty of monitoring such a large amount of Internet traffic, means that Newsgroups are also the notorious hubs of child pornography, amateur sleaze, bestiality, voyeurism, and other less-than-savoury hobbies. Newsgroups are thus considered the celebration of online community for the civil libertarians, and the very playground of Satan for the moral crusaders.

While much of the data traffic on Newsgroups is simply text (recipes, chess games, hacking advice, etc.), a great deal is also binary information, which when decoded with the correct program, reveals a digital picture.