[LouieG]

Late last year, my friend Breadcrumb and I conducted an experiment in online viral marketing. Inspired partly the insane attention given to Tuth's "5 Reasons to Date a Girl with an Eating Disorder," we wanted to see whether we could create an online viral hit totally from scratch, using made-up pen names with no followers, no platform, and no means of promoting what we created.

We were curious if social media entrepreneurs would make a cause out of anything that struck them as controversial—no matter how obscure or irrelevant it might be. Because if so... that says something about the real motives behind their crusades.

After the experiment, I drafted an article explaining what we did and why, but then work picked up and nothing ever came of it. Eight months later, it's too late to publish on RoK or someplace like that, but since I think it may still have some relevance to things discussed on RvF, I'm putting it here.

Fair warning: this is long as hell, and unedited.

###

Anatomy of a Troll Job: The xoBang Gang and the Business of Rage




Felicia Sullivan is a blogger, memoirist, and social media marketer. Though Felicia lives in New York, like me, and probably runs in the same techie-journo-bobo circles I do, I never heard of her until one Wednesday last December, when she called me an ignorant, inbred troll.

That Wednesday was, on the surface, an unlikely day for Felicia to make my acquaintance. According to her Twitter account, she was on vacation in Australia. She seemed to be enjoying herself. At one point, she shared a set of pictures taken in Melbourne:




Later, she tweeted her plans to finance the purchase of a pony by selling internal organs of unspecified provenance:




At 10:25 PM EST, Felicia made a lighthearted crack about hypothermia:




All was well; just another fab day in the life of a blogger-memoirist-marketing professional—until Trouble reared its 140-character head.

After joking about death by exposure, Felicia noticed some Twitter friends venting about a “sexist” article published recently on the internet, of all places. Though she identified herself as a feminist—in her Twitter bio, no less—Felicia had yet to view this particular instance of online sexism. Her curiosity was piqued.

Humdrum though it may seem, this was a pivotal moment for Felicia. She was in a foreign country, surrounded by people and places she might never see again. The sun was shining, the air was warm. Internet sexists weren’t going anywhere; Felicia, however, was going back to New York in a few short days.

Felicia didn’t need to look at the sexist article. Outside the narrow screens of her Apple devices, a wide world full of real people and real experiences beckoned. All she had to do was turn the power switch to ‘off.’

Oh, but it’s hard to say no:




With that tweet, Felicia embarked on her journey across a sea of hurtful words. Of course, we already know how that story ends; you just had to wait for it…

…wait for it…

…wait f—




The sexist article had so incensed Felicia that she couldn’t help but send the tweet above: ALL CAPS, two “fucks,” one allegation of sexism, and a hyperlink so that you can experience it too!

Think any of Felicia’s four thousand nine hundred thirty six Twitter followers might’ve clicked that link?

Attention whores: take note.

###


"Would Bang," by Breadcrumb - originally published in "xoBang"

I’ve heard the hardest part of a creative venture is making anyone else care. But writing “xoBang: The Typists of xoJane, Ranked by Bangability”—the article that upset Felicia so—couldn’t have been easier, and it sure made a lot of people care.

Frankly, when my friend “Breadcrumb” and I sat down to write the piece, we didn’t have a plan, nor even a concept, and not much concern what the final product looked like. All we cared was that it would piss a lot of people off.

Now, anyone who’s lived a day in his life knows the easiest people to piss off are women, and the surest way to piss them off is calling them “ugly.” The only insult that approaches ugly is “slut,” and that one has lately to become a badge of honor.

As for our targets, we needed chicks with enough cachet to raise an e-lynch mob…but not so much cachet that they had better things to do than gnash and wail about us.

So, girl bloggers.

Among girl blogs, xoJane’s Selfie-In-Every-Post policy makes it uniquely convenient to judge the looks of the blog’s writers. xoJane also has the virtue of being “surpassingly stupid,” as we noted in xoBang, which lessened any pangs of conscience Breadcrumb and I experienced while criticizing the women responsible for it.

With targets acquired, it was only a matter of copy-pasting the photos of some recent xoJane contributors and writing down what we thought of their looks. As we went, we lumped the girls into three broad groups—”Would Bang,” “Could Bang,” and “Could Not Bang”—and arranged them within those groups in rough order of attractiveness. In our haste, some uggoes surely got classed among the hot chicks, and vice versa—making our ranking strictly accurate wasn’t the point.

Sitting in Breadcrumb’s living room, my fingers flew across the keyboard as he and I offered praise and shame for our subjects. More than once, we hearkened back to the vernacular of our high school hallways for just the right insult: ug-mug, f.u.p.a, fattitude. To expedite the writing process, we codified a few standard criticisms that applied to many xoJane contributors: slovenly attire; obsolescence (i.e., old age); willful disfigurement of self (i.e., pixie cuts, tattoos, fatness).

At the time, Breadcrumb was working on a series of drawings of obese women; he tossed a few of those together to create the art that accompanied xoBang. Meanwhile, his girl fixed us a lasagna (scrumptious). Breadcrumb finished the drawings. We added them to the piece and hit publish. Not two hours after we began, our work was done.

For some initial traction, we registered a Twitter account and tweeted the link to a few bloggers. Heartiste, arguably the most influential “Manosphere” blogger, retweeted it without comment. Within an hour of publication, “xoBang: The Typists of xoJane, Ranked by Bangability,” written by “Cornbread” (my pen name) and illustrated by “Breadcrumb,” had 40 views. Not bad.

I thanked Breadcrumb and his girl for their hospitality and walked back to my apartment. It was the evening of Tuesday, December 10.

Throughout the day Wednesday, I watched the stats on our article creep up: 100 views, 200, then 400. Around 7 PM, we hit 800.

I texted Breadcrumb: “We’re close.”

“Any minute,” he wrote back.

If 800 views in 24 hours doesn’t sound like much, keep in mind that the author named “Cornbread” and the illustrator named “Breadcrumb” never existed before xoBang’s publication. We invented those identities for this story. Before the article went live, no one ever heard of them. They had no platform from which to publicize their work. They had a strange little article calling a bunch of New York blogger chicks ugly, and literally nothing else.

So what Cornbread and Breadcrumb needed was somebody to handle publicity for them. Heartiste’s re-tweet helped. But to send their page views suborbital, they needed someone even bigger.

With the view counter holding steady around 800, I left for a dinner date. When we returned to my apartment, I checked Cornbread’s email, which was synced to my own: three Twitter notifications. I read them one by one.






I texted Breadcrumb: “Look at the Twitter feed.”

“I guess they noticed,” he wrote back.

“You cool if we take the piece down?”

It took Breadcrumb a while to respond, and I knew what he was thinking. Although we had agreed to pull xoBang before it could really blow up, it would be interesting to see how far our little hit piece might go, if we didn’t un-publish. How many impassioned wowjustwow’s and what in the actual fuck’s could we inspire? I was certainly wondering that.

But, after a couple minutes, Breadcrumb agreed: “We got our proof of concept. Take it down.”

I went back to my computer, deleted the original text of “xoBang,” and pasted in our prepared retraction. Then I republished it, and went to bed.

(Those interested in reading “xoBang” can find the full text, minus identifying details of most typists, at NAPALM, Breadcrumb's site. The version posted on Medium will remain retracted.)

(CONT'D)