Tower of Omegle

Black Sheep

The Tower of Babel story always confused me. Far from teaching me how wonderful God is, it just left me concluding that God sounds pretty shitty. I don’t know, maybe I missed something? This is how I remember the story:

In Old Testament times, everyone spoke the same language, there was no separation or barrier between nations or cultures – sounds pretty good so far. Given that everyone spoke the same language, collaboration was easy, someone gets the bright idea to build a tower to the heavens. But this angered God because, I don’t know, they’re that insecure? Or was it because ‘go forth and multiply’ was meant horizontally and these builders were thinking vertically? Regardless, God destroyed the tower and to make sure nothing might rival the Almighty’s power in this way again, created different languages. People could no longer work together but instead would be isolated, separated and divided.
Is it just me or does it sound like the message here is we must separate people to prevent them achieving what they want instead of what power wants? God forbid people actually start working together, they might just be able to change the world. It feels like the ‘sin’ here is some kind of superiority belief that we mere mortals could ever know better than God. I suppose this is where I find issue, I despair at anyone’s autonomy being restricted by people who think they know best. Punishing people for working together with like-minded motivated individuals to create that better world. Where is the sin?
It probably doesn’t help that the people telling me this story were hardly likely to give the original, arguably anti-imperial interpretation. That this was not punishment at all but liberation. Sure, one big tower is well and good for people who like towers, but for everyone else, it’s just dogmatic enforced conformity. Diversity is far more exciting than uniformity. What even is collaboration if everyone thinks the same? The Hebrews writing this story, constantly facing enslavement, had to fight conformity to protect their own distinctiveness. Fighting conformity doesn’t often get taught in Catholic schools, for obvious reasons. In fact, schools in general enforce the opposite. It’s no wonder teenagers rebel.
I can hear you wondering how this relates to a notoriously predator-rich online talk to strangers website? Don’t worry, I’m building up to something here.
Omegle was a website that randomly connected two strangers from anywhere in the world to converse. It was founded in 2009 and shut down in 2023. Unlike most of the internet where the first thing that people do online is try to find ways to fuck, in the early days it was mostly filled with isolated souls looking for connection in a place that felt safer to them than the outside world. You could communicate about anything without fear of rejection, so it became a ‘safe’ place to get away for many young people. A way to cope when there were few options. You could understand different points of view or get unbiased, unfiltered opinion through simple discussion with someone who owed you absolutely nothing and to whom you owed nothing in return. Fostering understanding, tolerance and appreciation of our similarities over our differences. Hell, I guess I’m a romantic.
To me, the shutting down of Omegle felt similar to God destroying the tower. Like God who thought They knew best how the earth should be inherited, this legal team thought they knew best how to protect young people. Omegle was one of the few places on the internet that ironically didn’t exploit users. Your intimate details were not being data mined to sell you coffee, nor did you have to put up with endless junk mail after being forced to subscribe. Sadly, places like this cannot go on forever. Places like this are only as good as the people who use them.
I can’t talk about this romantic ideal without taking into account the other very prevalent, very despicable part of this: online child abuse and exploitation. As I am a victim of such abuse, you should probably ignore what I have to say. Alternatively, perhaps I’m the very person you should listen to. I’m not going to tell you Omegle was a haven, and it should still exist; just that we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking Omegle was the cause of CSE. It was merely a symptom of a wider sickness. Was it a threat vector for child abuse? Yes. Is the internet a safer place now it’s gone? Not really.
The debate between freedom and safety, autonomy and control, has no easy answers. Young people need protecting, but they also need to be given more credit. They need to be heard. One of the reasons I visited Omegle was so that someone might listen to me. I wanted to feel accepted by someone else for who I was because that security was missing in my real life. That is sad as fuck. We need to get away from protecting young people from themselves, they are not masochists, or lost causes. When one reason young people become vulnerable to this type of abuse is from a feeling of powerlessness over their own lives, we don’t fix that by tighter control.
Personal autonomy is a huge puzzle piece of what puts young people at risk. Although we’re talking about CSE, we’re not talking about children, are we? They sure as shit don’t consider themselves children. When young people in care are recognised to be at higher risk of exploitation, yeah, there’s an issue here.
The discussions about what should be done are too often held without hearing the voices of those affected. They often get decided arbitrarily by all-powerful entities hoping to solve problems without having to understand them.
Omegle wasn’t to blame for the evil out there, evil is just out there, and I hate to break it to you, it is still out there. We cannot rely on easy solutions or deny the complex nature of the reasons these issues exist in society. Gods’ destruction of understanding to force people to do it Their way, or the shutting down of Omegle as an almost tokenistic disapproval of online grooming don’t tackle the causes, and like weeds they will keep sprouting until we root them out. It is simply reductive to blame tools because of how they are used. Banning hammers because they break thumbs ignores the real problem of not looking where you are swinging.
Caring for each other is everyone’s responsibility and will require all our efforts, sharing some hard truths. We need to examine and tackle the motivations not just the means behind these situations with equal vigour. From legislation, education, within the home and, vitally importantly, in social care.
If you have been affected by the content of this piece, it is not your fault, you are not alone, help is out there.