“Knowledge is love and light and vision,” Helen Keller wrote in her autobiography, a lofty enough statement to merit a prominent spot on a wall in the computer center at the city’s main library. In the “computer commons” on the third floor at the Harold Washington Library Center on a recent Monday afternoon, nearly all the terminals were occupied, their monitors covered with dimmer screens that provide almost complete privacy. You can’t see what’s on them unless you stand directly behind the user. Patrons are so intensely absorbed that you can stroll past the tables, peer over shoulders, and take a measure of what sort of love, light, and vision people are partaking of publicly.
Video of a man’s head bobbing up and down on an erect penis.
There are 133 computers on the floor, and about every 12th monitor was displaying some flavor of smut: eatmyblackmeat.com, “results for ‘blindfold me,’” laythekat.com, “Contains adult content! Stop!” The ratio was hardly offset by the young man reading the Koran online, or the middle-aged woman taking notes from a Bible site. There were also plenty of gamers, like the thirtysomething fellow playing Pac-Man and the teen a few chairs down absorbed in RuneScape. Except for the woman in the fuzzy pink jacket playing at freeslots.com, all the gamers were male, as were all the porn watchers.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Among the computers are a few benches and tables where people read the paper, sleep, and socialize in low tones. Four middle-aged guys were hanging out there, talking and laughing louder than they probably should have been. One of them, a bald man in a blue windbreaker, got up and took a walk, checking out the screens. Then he turned to his friends and pointed at the back of AutoZone’s head, laughing. He continued down the aisle, alerting his pals every time he came across something naughty. When he got to Professor Straightgoesgay he waved his arms to get his pals’ attention, then ran back to their table to encourage them to see for themselves.
Aren’t there some people who can’t wait to take care of business?
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Liz Tamny.
