Star Wars Kid

~ the obit ~

The clip reached turkey the way everything reached turkey then, as a file passed between machines, off a p2p client or a messenger transfer or the shared folder on a cafe computer. Nobody watching it in 2003 was told where it came from or who was in it. That is the part i keep coming back to. i knew the video for ten years before i knew he had a name.

Ghyslain Raza was fourteen, a student at Séminaire Saint-Joseph in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. On 4 november 2002 he used a studio at the school and filmed himself swinging a golf ball retriever, the way a person swings something when they believe they are alone in a room. He left the tape there. Months later a classmate found it in a basement, a friend turned it into a computer file, and on 14 april 2003 it went online under the filename jackass_starwars_funny.wmv.

It was everywhere inside weeks. People added lightsaber effects and soundtracks, and each edit traveled further than the one before it. The blogger Andy Baio gave it the name that stuck. By november 2006 The Viral Factory put it above nine hundred million views, which made it the most watched video on the internet at the time, and almost all of that happened across peer-to-peer networks and mirror sites rather than on any platform that could have taken it down.

There was no mechanism to stop it and no vocabulary for it. He was a child, the footage was taken without his knowledge, and the internet's entire answer was that it was already out there.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the lawsuit ~

In july 2003 the Raza family sued the families of four classmates for 250,000 canadian dollars. The case was set for trial on 10 april 2006 and settled out of court three days before it, on terms that were never made public. It stands as one of the earliest attempts to make anyone answer in a courtroom for putting a private recording of a minor onto the internet, and it arrived years ahead of the law that would eventually cover it.

~ what it cost ~

Raza left the school. He finished that year out of class, in a psychiatric ward for children, which is a fact that belongs directly next to the view count. When he finally spoke, in may 2013, he described what had been written about him as mean and violent, and said people had been telling him to kill himself.

He also said he had spent a decade turning down talk shows, because the invitations were offers to appear as an exhibit rather than as a person. That is an exact reading of what the attention was for. The clip was never really about him in the first place. He was the material.

~ what it changed ~

The interviews ran in L'actualité and Maclean's in may 2013, ten years and one month after the file went up, and he gave them in order to say something about cyberbullying rather than about himself. He had studied law at McGill by then and was president of Patrimoine Trois-Rivières, a heritage society working on the city he grew up in. In 2022 he took part in a National Film Board documentary about the whole affair, called Star Wars Kid: The Rise of the Digital Shadows.

The meme is dead, and it is dead because he came back and put his name on it. You cannot keep laughing at a boy with a stick once he is a named adult explaining what 2003 cost him. Most of what the internet later worked out about consent, and about what happens to people who never asked to be looked at, it worked out late. Some of it it worked out from this.

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