Recently I’ve been spending some time on the newly super-popular chatroulette.com.  Wow, what an idea! In the short time it’s been online (less than 6 months), its user base has expanded exponentially, with hordes of people searching for random face to face, or face to crotch encounters.  It’s a wild place, and like art itself, full of surprises.  I’ve come across humble housewives, a couple smoking cocaine in a Cincinnati living room, college frat parties, an armless grandfather of 7, Taiwanese military, 12 year old hipsters, a Russian engineer, and–not surprisingly–lots and lots  of horny 20 or 30 something males, all of whom seem either to be searching for a rare pair of exposed female boobs, or else jerking their own johnsons cam-side.  The site strikes me as another way the Internet reveals the best and the worst in us.  But whichever way you cut it, most of what you discover on chatroulette leads to a revelation about what people are like when they don’t have to be accountable for themselves, and can dismiss anybody they want – forever- with the click of a mouse.  Throw out all manners and  politesse.  The site shows us just how crudely animalistic we can be when we’re allowed.

So how do we find what’s killin it about chatroulette?  Here’s one way: the site will help you deal with rejection. That’s right.  By the time you’re done with even a briefchatroulette session, you’ll have been passed over every which way to Sunday by a large percentage of the people you get randomly connected to.  In reality, life is that way.  There are very few people who will see you for who you are (or who even want to see you), it’s just that social graces and physical accountability normally protects from the swift and brutal judgment that chatroulette facilitates. So at bottom, the site reveals a useful if unpleasant truth, and trust me when I declare that we could all use some strengthening of the muscles we need to resist the weight of rejection.  On a brighter note, in contrast to all the skip-overs, it feels especially  killin’ it when you do finally land on someone who’s using it in a positive way, connecting with people through humor and/or creativity (see video posted below). These experiences really do expand your view of the world, and restore faith that if you sift through the muck, you’ll always find a couple gold nugget souls that persist in killin’ it.