Big Surprise: Apple Watch Flooded With Dicks

Let's call it Diggler's Law, after the famous character who had one special thing: any Internet-based image-transmission system will quickly be flooded with penises. That's why Apple has strict rules about who gets to send doodles to your Apple Watch.

But early Apple Watch ($300.00 at eBay) adopters are a little lonely, it seems. Both Wired and The Verge have reported that Apple Watch users are forming ad-hoc social networks to be able to try out the watches' doodle-sharing and heartbeat-sharing functions, both of which require you to know other Apple Watch owners. So, they opt in with a bunch of other cheerful early adopters—and the dick forest erupts.

The dicks are probably unsolicited. If you read through Reddit's r/lonelyheartbeats, it seems to be full of kind, friendly people who are sending each other wonky Hello Kitties and stuff. But the subreddit's moderator told Wired that once people get connected, penises are "the norm." People lie in wait, get someone on the hook, and pow: Dick.

The dicks appearing on the Apple Watch aren't actual dick pics, so they don't come from the bizarre psychology that leads guys to think that women think their penises are the most attractive parts of their bodies. Rather, they're doodles, the same dicks that pop up in any video game with user-generatable content or, heck, in roadside graffiti. The video-gaming site Kotaku did an in-depth examination of why people draw dicks in video games and came up with some decent biological and psychological theories. You should read it, although it has a lot of cartoon dicks in it.

I know there's been a theme in my columns recently that people are generally selfish and gross, although I'd love it if that were not the case. The dicks are yet another reminder that given anonymity and a lack of accountability, people are awful, and that everything on the Internet probably ought to be moderated somehow. Everybody likes to make a dick doodle (or, apparently, take a dick pic) but, at least among people I know, very few people actually like to look at them: a sent (or posted, or graffiti'ed) dick is almost always an imposition, a statement that "I can do this whether you like it or not; my preference matters more than yours. So there." It's a dick move.

As a non-woman, I can't speak with knowledge about how women feel getting unsolicited dicks all the time, but it's probably safe to say that it doesn't feel like a kind, friendly, and inclusive way to make friends and communicate.

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Wired ran a horrible story a year ago about the office full of traumatized superheroes in the Philippines who are basically the world's dike against a flood of dick pics, and beyond that, unsolicited gore, porn, and general awfulness. "I get really affected by bestiality with children," one cloud-storage moderator tells Wired. Ya think? Clearly, those Apple Watch owners are getting off easy here.

Apple hasn't done anything wrong here. It got things right by demanding that people only exchange doodles with their close friends, because then, any dicks shared would at least have some context. (Beyond that, sharing your heartbeat with an actual significant other could be quite romantic.) And it got things right by demanding that people only share doodles and heartbeats, not photos, as you really can't get too gross with a doodle. The Apple Watch simply isn't meant to be a public, unmoderated message system. Because, at the end of the day, people are dicks.