After having read about some arrests relating to an underground network of people who purchase and view videos of monkeys being tortured and killed, for pleasure, and those who shoot and provide these videos... I'm beginning to wonder whether the internet itself was a good idea.
It would be important to know what they would be doing without the Internet. Are those desires as such that if they don't get outlet, they explode and so something worse in real life, or does being able to consume it on the Internet normalize it for them, pushing to seek for more.
It would still happen with or without the internet, so long as there are video cameras. First is back-alley vhs or cd's then dvd's. Take video cameras aways and you have secret handshake underground viewing parties. I've finally come to terms with the idea that: humans are gonna human. And it allows me to focus on the more positive things that have also come from the internet, because then you get to find the positive, kind ways that humans are gonna human.
One of the unpleasant side effects of the Second Amendment is that it has put firearms within easy reach of... well, just about everybody. Despite tighter controls over gun purchases, the gun used in the Sandy Hook shooting, for instance, was legally purchased, and not through some gun-show loophole. It belonged to the shooter's mother. She never suffered from any mental-health issues and, except for autism and anxiety, neither did he, nor did he have a criminal record.
He just... snapped, and there were guns within reach, so he used them. Were the guns not so easy to acquire and use, he might not have committed so many murders (or any at all), simply because they would have been too much work and risk. This, by the way, is why I'm in favor of repealing the Second and enacting comprehensive gun bans and mandatory licensing and registration of firearms -- you know, like civilized countries do.
Now as to how this relates to the monkey torture videos. Yes, there might have been people who sought this material out in the past, but the internet put it within easy reach. The videos were shot in Indonesia and made available to Western clients through brokers in the UK (two of whose arrest was described in the article I read). Before the internet, this kind of international coordination in order to satisfy someone's sick deranged urge would have been prohibitively expensive and difficult. Only very wealthy, dedicated perverts would have been able to even contemplate arranging it. And maybe some of those would have been dissuaded because the slow, risky communications put them at greater risk of getting caught. Maybe monkey-torture fetish was such a niche interest before the internet that it would have been difficult to find other monkey-torture fetishists, and hence put together a large enough market to justify producing these videos in the first place. But with the internet, it's easier than ever to find like-minded monkey-torture fetishists, form discussion groups and the like, and associate with each other in sufficient density that there's a market large enough to justify going into business producing and selling monkey-torture videos into that market.
The pieces are in place, it's just nobody has put them together.
AI /will/ be a net-benefit for humanity, even if it stopped progress as it currently is.