6 Inspiring Ways Internet Mobs Have Come to the Rescue

With over 10,000 carjacking cases per year in South Africa, you're probably just as likely as not to get street-ganked on your way to work every morning. One South African man learned this the hard way in April 2012 when he set off in his Volkswagen Golf only to be robbed, carjacked, and forced into his own trunk by two armed men northwest of Johannesburg.

Luckily for the victim, these criminal masterminds forgot literally the only thing you have to remember when taking someone hostage -- they left him with his cellphone. The man immediately texted his girlfriend to explain what had happened, and true to the era in which we're living, she sought help, not from the police, but from her Twitter followers:

These twitterers then retweeted the tweet until it spread throughout the twittersphere (oh God, what is this shit doing to our language?) until it reached a popular tweeter by the name of PigSpotter (the account is normally used to warn drivers of police speed traps and road blocks around Johannesburg). When PigSpotter started retweeting, the alert reached 100,000 followers, including a large number of private security forces who had vehicles spread out all across South Africa. At that point, an Internet crusade became a real-life crusade: A volunteer security group called Riga Rescue lent its hands to tracking the victim's cellphone signal, and a company called K9 Security eventually caught a visual of the stolen vehicle.

Ironically enough, the car was stopped at a police roadblock 150 miles away from where the original crime had taken place (you know, one of those roadblocks that PigSpotter became famous for helping his followers avoid).

The test for strep came back negative, but drawing on his years of schooling and medical experience, the doctor proclaimed that "He looks really streppy" and sent the Kogans on their way with a prescription to treat streptococcus. Leo's symptoms only got worse, and while doctors played pin the tail on WebMD with their diagnoses, Deborah continued posting photos of her ailing son on Facebook. Comments were beginning to stack up, some of them helpful, although many were probably something like "YOU CAN EXPECT MORE OF THIS THANKS TO OBAMA."

But then Kogan was contacted by someone who urged her to take Leo to the hospital -- his symptoms, she observed, matched those of her own son, who had once been diagnosed with something called Kawasaki disease, which sounds like crude police slang for a lethal motorcycle crash but is actually a potentially fatal condition that can cause deadly aneurysms.

Kogan disregarded the pediatrician and followed the advice from crowdsourced social networking instead. Guess which one was right?

Leo was swiftly treated for Kawasaki disease and made a full recovery. Kogan later called the family doctor to explain what had happened, and he replied, "Bravo, Facebook," which was the classiest way he could admit to having been out-doctored by a site that is usually only useful for letting us know our aunt earned the "Vegetable Virtuoso" ribbon for her virtual farm.

A tourist in St. Peter-Ording had decided to wander outside to take some photographs of the sunset. Being that the North Sea was entirely frozen at the time, the photographer just kept walking until he realized he was standing on the ocean and couldn't figure out which direction land was. With the sun going down, any attempt to start walking was destined to end in him falling through the ice or freezing to death, or some combination of the two.

So, he did the only thing he could think to do under the circumstances, which was to use the flash on his camera in the hope that someone would see it up on the shore. But no one was there to see it. His only audience were faceless Internet viewers who under normal circumstances would worry only about how to turn his frozen corpse into a humorous image macro.

Instead, this anonymous watcher hundreds of miles away called the police and somehow was able to explain why these weird flashes she saw on a webcam feed justified a rescue effort in the area. The police headed out and realized that this was not some arcane 4chan prank, but an actual stranded hiker out on the ice. They were able to lure him back on shore by flashing their own lights at him to show the way. Then he probably went home and made a rage comic about it.

For all our modern 21st century medical accomplishments, cancer still pretty much has us beat. The treatments involve a whole menagerie of chemicals that may or may not be effective depending on what kind of cancer a patient has. These millions of variables are what have kept an effective "cure" for cancer so elusive. Puzzling through it is the kind of task that would require a whole bank of supercomputers ... or simply harnessing the power of the Internet's boredom.

Cancer Research UK created an online interactive database called Click to Cure that invites Internet users to aid in the fight against cancer, as long as they're willing to do a boring, repetitive task for free. Well, shit, that's what we were doing anyway!

The idea came from projects developed by astronomers to use crowdsourcing to document millions of galaxies. And even though slides of human tissue are, as a whole, a lot less enthralling to look at than the eternal mysteries of the deep cosmos, people seem to be taking up the cause. When users log in to Click to Cure, they are met with a quick tutorial that demonstrates how to racially profile the cancer cells by identifying their irregular shape and yellow color. After this, they're shown a series of slides and asked to identify what they see in each and note the proportion of irregular cells that exist. This information gives crucial insight to researchers in determining which treatments are effective for each different type of cancer cell.

Remember, this is time that people could spend looking at free porn and YouTube videos of animals doing amusing things that they have instead been dedicating to trawling through boring images of cells and rating their yellowness. Hey, it's still better than working.

At the time this article went to print, the combined force of cancer hatred on the Internet has analyzed over 700,000 of these cancerous images, and Cancer Research UK is convinced that a major cancer breakthrough is buried somewhere within their data. They estimate that they can condense research that normally would have taken years into only a few months. Hell, if they could have found a way for us to masturbate while doing this, cancer would have been cured already.

On May 31, 2012, John Resig, co-owner of photo entertainment website TheCHIVE.com, took a break from posting his usual content of attractive women in skimpy bikinis to post the story of Taylor Morris. Morris had been in the U.S. Navy's Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit, the team that disarms al-Qaida's improvised explosive devices so that the military don't get themselves blown up -- precisely the job that was popularized in The Hurt Locker.

In early 2012, near Kandahar, Afghanistan, Morris was leading a team of Army Special Forces when he stepped on a bomb and was put in the very unenviable position of having to watch all of his limbs fly off. After returning to the hospital to recover, Morris would have to adjust to living the remainder of his life a quadruple amputee, which is basically getting a full house in a game of Sucks To Be You Poker.

Morris' expenses were fully covered by the Navy, but in a conversation with Resig, he mentioned that it had always been a dream for him and his girlfriend to own a log cabin in the woods on a lake. Resig could have nodded and replied that he'd like to own a houseboat made of cocaine, but instead he went to the CHIVE to describe his friend's plight.

The goal was to raise $30,000 for a down payment on Morris' dream home. The actual raised amount 12 hours after the Chivers started donating was $250,000, which was more than enough for Taylor to build his dream home, as well as meet the president and be fitted with prosthetic limbs. This Internet thing might work out after all.

Jeff Sloan would like to follow you on his Twitter machine, and will also thoroughly consider being your friend on Facebook.

For more reasons the Internet isn't all that bad, check out 13 Awesome Photos That Will Make You Happy to Be Alive and The 12 Most Strangely Satisfying Videos on the Internet.

If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out 6 Things We Already Know About the Next Iron Man Movie.

Want to know how to go mano-a-mano with a president? Daniel O'Brien can help with How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country.