#maskpark

"Memories of Murder"

She lowered her head and swiped her phone. The lights in the subway car cast a small, flickering spot on the screen.

She just uploaded a selfie on social media, added a filter, and added a nonchalant comment, waiting for her friends to like it as usual.

She didn't know that the man across from her, who was also lowering his head, had a dark interface on his phone instead of a circle of friends. Her face had just been uploaded without any modification, becoming the latest trophy in a huge "material library".

The abyss stares back at you, and you don't even know it's looking.

[Posts calling for help and caution have appeared on Xiaohongshu to remind women who have been secretly photographed to pay attention]

Ghost Square: A Diffuse Evil

This Telegram group named "MaskPark" has been dubbed the "Chinese version of Room N" by some angry netizens.

I, too, thought at first that this is a label that is easy to understand and spread.

However, as the sickening screenshots and testimonies continued to pour in, I began to feel a deeper chill.

South Korea's "Nth Room" is a tightly structured criminal organization with a main culprit like "Doctor", a paid entry threshold, and clear coercion and enslavement of victims.

Its evil is clear and concentrated, like a hideous tyrant; you can identify him, hate him, and ultimately see his end on the guillotine of the law.

MaskPark is different; it's more like a square populated by ghosts. There's no single tyrant here, only 100,000 anonymous "ordinary people."

Their primary purpose is not to make a profit, but to "share" the pleasure of the women around them, whether it is secretly filmed under the skirt, or private videos stolen from the phone of the ex-girlfriend, or the naked body of his wife while she is sleeping soundly:

As a social currency, it is exchanged, appreciated and reviewed in the square.

[The title of the group chat is "来这里分享你的娇妻女友" ("Come here to share your wife and girlfriend").]

The evil of South Korea's Nth Room is commercialized and quantifiable; the evil of MaskPark is diffuse and everyday, suggesting a more terrifying possibility:

The threshold for doing evil has been lowered to the dust.

It may be worse than South Korea's Nth Room because every member there may be a "Doctor".

They call it sharing, but it is not sharing, it is dismemberment.

A carnival of 100,000 “ordinary people”

In this anonymous square, the darkest desires of human nature are infinitely magnified.

Circulating here are captures of unknown girls exposed on the subway, the faces of college girls sleeping in the study room, and even some members showing off how they had sex with unconscious women and recorded the whole process.

The most shocking one is a father, in a tone that is so calm that it is outrageous, who live broadcasted the process of sexually assaulting his own daughter.

When Hannah Arendt observed Eichmann in Jerusalem, she proposed the concept of "Banality of Evil," which refers to ordinary people who give up thinking and commit heinous crimes under the pretext of obedience.

The 100,000 IDs in MaskPark seem to provide the most contemporary footnote to this concept. They are not Nazi officers, but ordinary employees, students, husbands, and fathers.

They may be gentle and polite in real life, but behind the mask of anonymity, they feel at ease participating in a never-ending "witch hunt" against all women.

They encourage each other, teach each other secret photography and techniques, and transform their obsession with the female body into a display of power. This power does not come from money or status, but from the information gap between "I know and you don't", from a one-way gaze.

[Outgoing group chat history]

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault described a Benthamite Panopticon prison, where a central watchtower monitored all prisoners, and the prisoners were constantly self-disciplined because they did not know whether they were being watched.

MaskPark is a reverse panopticon:

Countless anonymous watchtowers jointly monitor the boundless prison cell of the entire society, and the prisoners - those women living in the sun - know nothing about it. Their freedom has become an illusion of being watched.

Am I reading too much into this primal evil? Perhaps.

But when the voyeurism of 100,000 individuals converges into a collective, organized force, it is no longer a simple "fetish" but a culture and a symptom.

| They are not just watching, they are consuming and devouring.

[There are even related real-life interactive games.]

The ecology of evil: technology, repression, and silence

The advancement of technology is always first appropriated by desires in the gray area.

Pinhole cameras are disguised as power banks, sockets, and clothes hooks, and circulated on e-commerce platforms at extremely low costs, turning every private space into a potential live broadcast room.

Encrypted software like Telegram, like an "anarchist" utopia built outside the law, provides a perfect shelter for these desires.

It was originally created to resist censorship, but now it has ironically become a den for hiding evil.

Is there a deeper social logic hidden behind this?

When the space for normal sexual discussion is repeatedly compressed, and when all literary and artistic works related to "sex" are labeled "inappropriate," will this repressed libido grow wildly in the cracks of supervision in even more distorted and destructive ways?

We are like a group of clumsy flood control workers who can only block the water but not drain it. In the end, the flood gushes out from the underground pipe network that we cannot see and submerges everything.

| Silence is another form of complicity.

What is more chilling than the carnival in the square is the silence outside the square.

When indignant netizens tried to push this matter to the forefront of public opinion, they found that the topic was restricted and the hot search was removed.

Out of considerations of "maintaining stability", the platform quickly used the algorithm's rag to try to wipe away this dirty stain, as if the sin does not exist as long as it cannot be seen.

This method of treatment is tantamount to a second insult to the victim.

It sends a dangerous signal: we can't hear your screams; it's inconvenient to show your wounds.

Those unscrupulous IDs in MaskPark may have seen through this and are so confident. They know that even if things are exposed, there will be an invisible hand to "reduce big things into small things, and make small things into small things", and everything will eventually return to "normal".

| This "normal" is a disease.

Ultimately, we have to return to the fundamental question:

Who are we? What kind of society are we becoming?

Lu Xun once described a group of numb spectators, craning their necks to watch their compatriots being executed with great interest.

More than a hundred years later, the spectators did not disappear; they simply moved from the execution ground to online, upgrading from passive onlookers to active participation, liking, and sharing.

The relevant screenshots have been leaked and shared on the Internet. Without revealing the privacy of the victims, we hope to attract attention.

MaskPark's 100,000 members are the largest audience group of this era. They not only watch, but also create the tragedy of being watched.

This has gone beyond the scope of "banality of evil". It is a kind of "positive evil", a collective carnival that feeds on the suffering of others.

When the power of the gaze is abused to this extent, when a society chooses to reduce the noise level in response to an infringement of such a scale, what we are facing is not just a public security case, but a profound crisis of civilization.

| When the gaze becomes a weapon, no one is safe.

South Korea's "Nth Room" scandal ultimately came to a temporary end with the main perpetrator sentenced and deep social reflection. However, the Nth Room scandal reappeared in 2024.

The Nth Room incident broke out again in South Korea, attracting domestic media coverage and attention

What about us?

When the man who took the secret photo in the subway still went to work in a suit and tie the next day;

When the husband who uploaded his wife's nude photos still plays the good guy at family gatherings;

When the father who sexually assaulted his daughter is still regarded as an honest man by his neighbors;

How should we face this ubiquitous yet faceless evil?

This may be much more difficult than catching a "Doctor"

Because this time, what we need to face is the vast and dark human heart hidden beneath the skin of countless ordinary people.

Special Statement: This article was uploaded and published by the author on NetEase's self-media platform "NetEase News" and represents only the author's views. NetEase only provides an information publishing platform.