It really is quite easy to click on internet pornography by accident.
There’s a persuasive argument that the whole of the modern world, as shaped by the internet, is an accidental by-product of the insatiable global market for new, easier, cheaper, faster and more private ways of looking at bare boobies.
The clean and useful bit of the web is, in this account of it, but an apologetic cluster of barnacles hitching a ride on a great grizzled baleen whale of filth.
I look back on partygate (‘BJ punishment’) and the Libor scandal (‘rate pegging’) with a shudder.
Far and away the most plausible thing about Neil Parish’s account of himself, then, was his claim that he’d arrived on a pornographic website by mistake. There is the mortifying ring of truth about his claim that, in fact, he came a cropper while shopping for tractors on the internet: ‘I did get into another website that had a very similar name and I watched it for a bit, which I shouldn’t have done.’
Funnily enough, this very story – in a sort of brain-frying postmodern mise-en-abyme – caused me to navigate to a pornographic website myself.
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