It is my feeling that the biggest way in which the internet has changed us as a society has been to turn us into a bunch of obnoxious jerks. A wealth of information has made us think we know it all, and anonymity has made us unafraid to say so. Bring up any topic at all with someone online and they’ll flash their opinion like a business card, whether or not it was asked for…and whether or not they actually know what they’re talking about. Rarely do these opinions arise from real expertise or, failing that, a reasoned, dispassionate assessment of the matter. Even the ability to form an opinion like that has become a lost art…but then again, so has knowing the difference, or that there even is a difference. We’ve been taught that we all have a voice, but not any temperance in using that voice.

Instead, people default to being cynical and caustic, because it’s easier and more fun to (try to) be clever when one is bashing something. Everything sucks; nothing is good enough. If it used to be good, then it’s come so far downhill. And if you like it, you deserve ridicule and embarassment, which in turn it is those other people’s job to dispense.

I don’t know why the free exchange of ideas on the internet gave rise to this smugness, this constant need to feel superior to everyone and everything and to make that superiority loud and clear to anyone who will listen. A kind of deep-seated insecurity, I’d guess. I do know that we’re seeing a damning example of it this very week.

Tomorrow sees the release of the seventh and final novel in That Series About The Boy Magician. My handful of longtime readers may remember my previous adventure two years ago in this area, which I will be repeating this time around, having made my peace with being out-geeked by the Potter crowd. I will be there to obtain the book only, and will not be participating in any of the in-store festivities. And in spite of the best efforts of certain people online, the ending is still a mystery to me. So far.

On the internet, the ending of the final Harry Potter novel before its official release is a worse-kept secret than the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, in spite of a larger and more expensive mobilization trying to keep people in the dark. Hey, no big deal: in spite of the publisher’s best efforts, the book was going to leak, websites would publish the secrets and spoil the finale. We all knew this, and it’s anything but a surprise.

But this is where we wrap back around to my original point, and where this story intersects with the obnoxious know-it-alls. Many of those who have not been swept up in Potter fandom simply don’t understand why it’s so important to fans that they unwrap the story’s secrets with their own fingers. But for some, this lack of understanding breeds contempt, and this in turn leads these people, in all their sneering self-satisfaction, to feel it is their duty to spoil the fun for the fans they regard with such derision.

So, instead of a few out-of-the-way websites containing easily avoided spoilers, we have a roving gang of cackling assholes fanning out across the web, posting story information, photographed pages from the book, and of course the ending itself in public areas where unsuspecting fans will stumble across them without warning and have the surprise ruined for them. Why do these people do this? Because in some moist, rank chasm of their empty personalities it reaffirms their sense of self-superiority. So they just think it’s funny, and their own entertainment is all they care about.

This has resulted in Potter readers fleeing the web in droves until they’ve finished the book, lest they encounter spoilers there they least expect them. For my own part, I can’t ever bring myself to go entirely offline, but I did curtail my loitering in various public forums, just in case.

When I think about the practice of slowly inserting drywall screws underneath a person’s fingernails, I think about two things: how much agony it would cause, and how much I would enjoy for these Potter-spoiling goons to feel it, even if only for a few minutes. That’s my primal reaction to what these people are doing, but when I really stop and consider objectively (practice what you preach, after all), I really just feel bad for them.

A franchise so well crafted as Harry Potter is a thing that fills the sails of a healthy imagination and sends it gliding to new places, but those sails must be open. That smug sort of person who has to constantly bash what they don’t understand, and who can’t respect the desire of its fans to unravel its secrets the way they were meant to be unraveled, is a person with a dead imagination. I feel that’s a far worse thing to live with than those drywall screws.