The Empathy Gym
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio
This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In May 2007, an artist living in Chicago moved into a new place. It was a small room with white walls. The interior design was minimalist. There was a bed, a desk, a computer,
a lamp and a paintball gun. Affixed to the gun was a webcam. It livestreamed the room to the internet. Anyone could look in, and anyone could take control of the gun, aim, and fire. At all hours of the day and night, the paintball gun would spring to life and begin shooting yellow pellets into the room.
Some hit the walls or the furniture. Some Hit the artist. I was shot at 70,000 times and I received 80 million hits on the internet from 128 countries. Wafa Bilal spent one whole month in the room, targeted tens of thousands of times by random strangers around the world.
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