Thursday, September 14, 2006
Mahir, lonelygirl15, and the Sexbots of the Future
"WELCOME TO MY HOME PAGE !!!!!!!!! I KISS YOU !!!!!"
With these words was born the age of the Internet celebrity, and Turkish journalist Mahir Cagri was immortalized as an icon of Internet kitsch by the homepage set up as a prank by one of his friends. The URL was passed around via email for a few days in 1999 before being reported in Salon by Janelle Brown. The persona of "Mahir", a naive, friendly creep whose homepage was populated with nuggets of broken English, frank sexual come-ons ("I like sex"), and pictures of him sunbathing in his Speedo, was simultaneously lovable and ridiculous; it later served as the inspiration for Sacha Baron Cohen's character "Borat" on Da Ali G Show. (It also bore strong similarities to other archetypes celebrated in America: the wise fools from Forrest Gump and Being There, for instance, both exhibit naive expressions of their sexuality as part of their charm.)
Flash forward to last week. A small group of filmmakers announced themselves as the creators of "lonelygirl15", a character in a series of YouTube videos that purported to be genuine self-portraits sent, like messages in bottles, out onto the Web by a cerebral, geeky, nubile young girl in small town USA. Not surprisingly, lonelygirl15 had gathered quite a following of smitten young (and, presumably, not-so-young) men. Some of them had even struck up correspondences with her, generated on her end by her creators, and many of her fans, smitten or not, felt betrayed by the reveal.
danah boyd summarizes the story quite well, including links to the New York Times coverage and other bloggers' reactions. One commenter on danah's blog compares the lonelygirl15 project to the viral videos at the center of William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition; ludologist Jane McGonigal points out that, rather than being derived from the novel, the lonelygirl15 project's surface similarities to Gibson's videos owe to their common ancestry in the Alternate Reality Game movement.
But I think McGonigal has overlooked a stronger precedent for lonelygirl15 in the novel: in one section of the story, a team of investigators tracking the videos create a fictional woman online to charm and scam one of their leads through email correspondence. The plot backfires when the real woman whose photo served as the template for the virtual vamp discovers how her photo is being used and insists on meeting the love-struck dupe. It's this moment - the encounter with the actor out of her stage makeup - that lonelygirl15's fans are trying to process now, just as the world had to process the reticence of the real Mahir after he was brought into the spotlight to explain away his flamboyant homepage as a prank and a hoax.
Max Barry, a writer whose novel Jennifer Government displays a wickedly sharp insight into the future of marketing, weighs in on the fan-base fallout with his take on the LG15 reveal:
(Personal note: I share Max's pet peeve about the free ride a "true story" gets, and I imagine that anyone who read A Million Little Pieces as a memoir rather than a novel can probably sympathize with the lonelygirl15 lonelyhearts. My annoyance over this gimmick accounts for my aversion to memoirs and to anything out of the Tom Wolfe "new journalism" movement: if something can't stand up as a work of historical scholarship or journalism, then I will read it as a novel. Accordingly, the only pseudo-fiction I've read and enjoyed in the past few years was The Devil In The White City, which was rigorous enough historically to let me enjoy the poetic license taken with the narrative account.)
Barry has hit the nail on the head: just because they weren't selling anything doesn't mean it's not marketing. lonelygirl15 is a proof of concept for viral sex-based marketing. (Is "sex-based marketing" redundant?) And it worked like a charm: Barry's post carries a pathetic quotation from one of lonelygirl15's ardent admirers who had corresponded with "her" via email and now feels personally betrayed. If the marketers had kept it up longer, they could have leveraged the LG15 brand to coax all kinds of things out of her "fans", including access to very personal information. Simson Garfinkel points out the risk of this kind of scam in his book Database Nation: his example deals with a chatbot impersonating a potential friend/sexual partner and gradually insinuating itself into its target's private life. Indeed, this kind of scam already exists on social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace; I myself used to occasionally receive messages from buxom young women who were new in town and wanted me to email them so we could party. And this, in turn, is just a refinement of the tried-and-true email scam, although plaintext is more suited to Nigerian millionaires than to dirty pretty things.
I'm not trying to pull a New York Times-style "Internet Scare" move here: I realize that the damsel-in-distress gambit is one of the oldest and most successful meatspace scams around. The Internet has simply made the scam much more effective, for the same reasons that spam is more effective than traveling salesmen: the pitch can be delivered to millions at a time, and the shill is protected from discovery and accountability by his or her physical remoteness.
For this reason, I expect to see a lot of lonelygirl15-style marketing in the future. The marketers will probably employ real models and actors (witting or unwitting) for their photo and video content. We will see a convergence of the email spam scam, the "reality" TV show, the virtual pop star, the fraudulent personal ad (see the recent Craigslist sex post controversy), blogger payola, astroturfing, and buzz marketing in this new hybrid form of fraud. It will be employed for rip-and-run attacks (identity theft, credit card fraud), product marketing, blackmail, malicious humiliation, political smears, and most insidiously, slow infiltration of people's private lives for surveillance and consumer profiling. Its effectiveness will depend on exploiting people's compassion, loneliness, curiosity, and friendliness. And it will produce a society of scarred, embittered, suspicious human beings.
I've written before about the plastic nature of identity on the Internet and the willingness with which young people compromise their privacy online; both of these topics have been flogged to death by better writers than I. But it seems to me that the road from Mahir to lonelygirl15 is a particularly poignant allegory for the Internet's loss of innocence: the transformation of the Internet celebrity hoax from light-hearted joke to annoying publicity-grab to calculated marketing ploy.
With these words was born the age of the Internet celebrity, and Turkish journalist Mahir Cagri was immortalized as an icon of Internet kitsch by the homepage set up as a prank by one of his friends. The URL was passed around via email for a few days in 1999 before being reported in Salon by Janelle Brown. The persona of "Mahir", a naive, friendly creep whose homepage was populated with nuggets of broken English, frank sexual come-ons ("I like sex"), and pictures of him sunbathing in his Speedo, was simultaneously lovable and ridiculous; it later served as the inspiration for Sacha Baron Cohen's character "Borat" on Da Ali G Show. (It also bore strong similarities to other archetypes celebrated in America: the wise fools from Forrest Gump and Being There, for instance, both exhibit naive expressions of their sexuality as part of their charm.)
Flash forward to last week. A small group of filmmakers announced themselves as the creators of "lonelygirl15", a character in a series of YouTube videos that purported to be genuine self-portraits sent, like messages in bottles, out onto the Web by a cerebral, geeky, nubile young girl in small town USA. Not surprisingly, lonelygirl15 had gathered quite a following of smitten young (and, presumably, not-so-young) men. Some of them had even struck up correspondences with her, generated on her end by her creators, and many of her fans, smitten or not, felt betrayed by the reveal.
danah boyd summarizes the story quite well, including links to the New York Times coverage and other bloggers' reactions. One commenter on danah's blog compares the lonelygirl15 project to the viral videos at the center of William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition; ludologist Jane McGonigal points out that, rather than being derived from the novel, the lonelygirl15 project's surface similarities to Gibson's videos owe to their common ancestry in the Alternate Reality Game movement.
But I think McGonigal has overlooked a stronger precedent for lonelygirl15 in the novel: in one section of the story, a team of investigators tracking the videos create a fictional woman online to charm and scam one of their leads through email correspondence. The plot backfires when the real woman whose photo served as the template for the virtual vamp discovers how her photo is being used and insists on meeting the love-struck dupe. It's this moment - the encounter with the actor out of her stage makeup - that lonelygirl15's fans are trying to process now, just as the world had to process the reticence of the real Mahir after he was brought into the spotlight to explain away his flamboyant homepage as a prank and a hoax.
Max Barry, a writer whose novel Jennifer Government displays a wickedly sharp insight into the future of marketing, weighs in on the fan-base fallout with his take on the LG15 reveal:
lonelygirl15 didn’t succeed because it told a compelling story. It succeeded because people thought it was real. Without the deception, there’s nothing special. The filmmakers knew this; they went to a lot of trouble to keep up the pretense, to the extent of posting personal replies, as Bree, to people who wrote in. They built fake relationships with fans...
This is what makes it marketing, not storytelling. Storytelling doesn’t abuse its audience. Without the bit at the start that says, “This is made up,” it’s not storytelling; it’s just lying...
Every fiction writer in history has probably been annoyed by how much more power a “true story” seems to have. But that’s the deal we make: we admit up front that our tale isn’t true, then we desperately try to make it as authentic as possible. Doing it the other way around—claiming to have a true story and filling it with fiction—that just pisses me off. Storytelling? A new art form? Give me a break. When you agree to the deal, then you can be storytellers. Until then, you’re marketers.
(Personal note: I share Max's pet peeve about the free ride a "true story" gets, and I imagine that anyone who read A Million Little Pieces as a memoir rather than a novel can probably sympathize with the lonelygirl15 lonelyhearts. My annoyance over this gimmick accounts for my aversion to memoirs and to anything out of the Tom Wolfe "new journalism" movement: if something can't stand up as a work of historical scholarship or journalism, then I will read it as a novel. Accordingly, the only pseudo-fiction I've read and enjoyed in the past few years was The Devil In The White City, which was rigorous enough historically to let me enjoy the poetic license taken with the narrative account.)
Barry has hit the nail on the head: just because they weren't selling anything doesn't mean it's not marketing. lonelygirl15 is a proof of concept for viral sex-based marketing. (Is "sex-based marketing" redundant?) And it worked like a charm: Barry's post carries a pathetic quotation from one of lonelygirl15's ardent admirers who had corresponded with "her" via email and now feels personally betrayed. If the marketers had kept it up longer, they could have leveraged the LG15 brand to coax all kinds of things out of her "fans", including access to very personal information. Simson Garfinkel points out the risk of this kind of scam in his book Database Nation: his example deals with a chatbot impersonating a potential friend/sexual partner and gradually insinuating itself into its target's private life. Indeed, this kind of scam already exists on social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace; I myself used to occasionally receive messages from buxom young women who were new in town and wanted me to email them so we could party. And this, in turn, is just a refinement of the tried-and-true email scam, although plaintext is more suited to Nigerian millionaires than to dirty pretty things.
I'm not trying to pull a New York Times-style "Internet Scare" move here: I realize that the damsel-in-distress gambit is one of the oldest and most successful meatspace scams around. The Internet has simply made the scam much more effective, for the same reasons that spam is more effective than traveling salesmen: the pitch can be delivered to millions at a time, and the shill is protected from discovery and accountability by his or her physical remoteness.
For this reason, I expect to see a lot of lonelygirl15-style marketing in the future. The marketers will probably employ real models and actors (witting or unwitting) for their photo and video content. We will see a convergence of the email spam scam, the "reality" TV show, the virtual pop star, the fraudulent personal ad (see the recent Craigslist sex post controversy), blogger payola, astroturfing, and buzz marketing in this new hybrid form of fraud. It will be employed for rip-and-run attacks (identity theft, credit card fraud), product marketing, blackmail, malicious humiliation, political smears, and most insidiously, slow infiltration of people's private lives for surveillance and consumer profiling. Its effectiveness will depend on exploiting people's compassion, loneliness, curiosity, and friendliness. And it will produce a society of scarred, embittered, suspicious human beings.
I've written before about the plastic nature of identity on the Internet and the willingness with which young people compromise their privacy online; both of these topics have been flogged to death by better writers than I. But it seems to me that the road from Mahir to lonelygirl15 is a particularly poignant allegory for the Internet's loss of innocence: the transformation of the Internet celebrity hoax from light-hearted joke to annoying publicity-grab to calculated marketing ploy.
