Most scams are only viable at a small scale. Strangers in Paris might fasten a “friendship bracelet” around a snatched wrist and then demand payment for it, but this trick can’t go beyond a few tourists losing tiny amounts of money. If it becomes too common –  with Av des Champs-Élysées flooded with grifters offering bracelets – tourists will get smart and the grift won’t work. There will never be a billion dollar friendship bracelet industry.

There are only about three or four cons that work at scale (thank God). The most prevalent is the bagholder con: borrow money from some people, use their money to inflate your perceived value, borrow a larger amount of money from more people, and then use their money to repay the first.

This scales very well. In fact, it has to scale. The moment there are no new investors – when Paul wants his money back, and no Peter exists to rob – the scheme falls apart.

Ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, MLM schemes, and stock market pump-and-dumps are riffs on this idea. Karl Marx identified capitalism itself as a bagholder con, requiring ever-increasing profits to support itself. Regardless of whether he was right, the con succeeds because it’s reminiscent of how real investment looks and works. “Today, you pay me x. Tomorrow, I pay you x(1+y).” This can be a healthy thing, rewarding risk-takers and people with vision. Done right, it is nothing less than fiduciary time travel, moving money from the future (where it’s useless) to the present (where it’s not).

“This thing will be worth lots of money tomorrow. If I just had enough cash to get it off the ground…” 

But in bagholder cons, the thing is worth nothing. It’s a lemon. It will have no value tomorrow, next week, next year; it is pluperfectly worthless except as the life support system for a speculation bubble. Sometimes there is no “thing” at all, just a wind-filled space. Charles Ponzi’s 1920 scheme (which involved the arbitrate of postal coupons) was exposed because it was physically impossible for Ponzi to be doing what he said he was doing: he’d have needed to mail hundreds of millions of coupons, exceeding all legitimate mail in circulation many times over.

The winners in such schemes are typically people who invest early, have the value of their share pumped by gullible “bag holders”, and then pull their cash out before reality reasserts and the price crashes to the floor.

The losers are the people who get in late, or those don’t sell – those who think that the price crash is some moral test the have to pass.

Technically speaking, anyone who invests in anything is a loser. There’s no way around it. Money has gone from your pocket to someone else’s. You might expect to regain it later, but until that happens and you cash out successfully, you have lost 100% of your investment. This is similar to how any money added to a poker pot should be regarded as lost money – until you win, it’s gone. But gambling is universally seen as either a fun game or a harmful addiction, while investment (at final evaluation, gambling with a business degree) is regarded as responsible financial behavior. You’re building the future! Maybe your own. Maybe someone else’s.

It’s psychologically interesting to watch scammed people in action. Some are innocent naifs who were duped into believing a bad investment was a good one (Charles Ponzi’s scheme was a good example). Sometimes, they’re doubly duped: they think they’re getting in on a scam’s ground floor when the actual mark is them (most MLMs fit this pattern). David W. Maurer’s 1940 book The Big Con describes how surprisingly few victims of cons actually believe the con was a legitimate way of making money. Instead, most believed they were being invited to rip off someone else.

But in either case, the mastermind behind the con does not want anyone to sell. This deflates the bubble, and the bubble’s the only valuable part. So you see conversational patterns cultivated that can only be called cultlike. Unquestioning devotion. Denial of any possible failure. Criticism isn’t tolerated. Questions aren’t asked. Delusional “yeah, we’re all at a party together! WOOO!” styles of rhetoric. There’s a specific way they talk that you don’t see from normal people.

I am suspicious when I see this sort of thing. Hype is a bad signal. It almost looks as if the hype is the entire point, and there’s nothing underneath.

(“hodler” in the second user’s name is affectionate slang for “holding” onto your Bitcoin instead of selling as the price starts to fall.)

In most cases, people with investments have little reason to talk about their investments. If I had a pirate’s treasure map, the last thing I’d do would be to brag about how cool it is to go looking for treasure, or how digging on remote islands will change your life. This can only hurt me, by increasing the odds that the pirate treasure will be found before I get there.

But suppose I didn’t have a pirate’s treasure map. Suppose my income actually came from selling fake maps. Then I might talk about it a lot.

But are cryptocurrencies Ponzi schemes?

The question illustrates a weakness in language. You can say no or yes and be right. Is it literally a Ponzi scheme? No. There are superficial differences. Ponzi schemes are centralized, run by a single criminal, and involve direct transfers of “new money” to pay off old investors. Bitcoin does not have these features.

But if you’re asking “does it share every interesting trait with Ponzi schemes”, I think this is the case.

Every promise of cryptocurrency having real-world utility has thus far failed to materialize. It’s slow, wasteful, expensive, and volatile. Mistakes are permanently written onto an immutable ledger, lost money can’t be recovered, and most solutions (such as “smart contracts”) involve tying the cryptocurrency back to a regulatory body, defeating its purpose.

Various companies adopted Bitcoin in light of the first bubble. Most eventually dropped it, some with frank admissions that it was not suitable for anything except a bubble. Stripe:

Our hope was that Bitcoin could become a universal, decentralized substrate for online transactions and help our customers enable buyers in places that had less credit card penetration or use cases where credit card fees were prohibitive. Over the past year or two, as block size limits have been reached, Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange.

Proper investment moves money from the future into the present. Cryptocurrencies do the reverse: move money from the present into the future. Tons of people are still “hodling” as we speak, trying to parlay their savings into a profit in the eternal tomorrow. Because they’ve been told to do so, by people who do not have their interests at heart.

You’ll notice that most cryptocurrency hype focuses, not on things crypto is doing now, but on things that it could do in the future. As David Gerard says, “could” is a misspelling of “doesn’t.”

But this is where we see the main difference between cryptos and Ponzi schemes. They’re bad differences. They

Charles Ponzi was one man. When he ended up in prison. Bitcoin, for example, doesn’t. It’s

Likewise, Ponzi proposed a simple. This could be readily tested against reality, and when it failed, his credibility vanished.

But Bitcoin has no way to fail. One almost thinks it was designed to have no way to fail.

There is no real endpoint Bitcoin is pointed toward. There are several. Evangelists say it will

• Bank the unbanked
• Separate money from the state
• Create a unified world currency
• Protect the economy from crashes
• Enable individuals to transact outside of a legal framework
• etc

Some of these ideas make no sense, and some fight each other. But that’s not the point. This multi-goal argument allows cryptos to continue to seem like a good idea no matter how badly a given prediction fails. It’s a decentralized Ponzi scheme. It takes the bubble and welds nearly unbreakable metal around it,  keeping the bagholders from selling.

Bitcoin is propositionally unfalsifiable. No matter how badly a given promise crashes and burns, there’s always going to be something else it could possibly do. You never have to look like an idiot for investing in Bitcoin. You do have to become an idiot, however.

Once, conspiracy theories were one-way traffic. David Icke wrote and his audience read, Alex Jones broadcasted and his audience listened.

Social media has changed this: most modern conspiracy theories are interactive affairs akin to ARGs, with the audience an active part of the process.^[1]If anything, traffic now goes the reverse direction, with memes and ideas flowing upward from the followers to the gurus. I used to read the Twitter feeds of people like The Praying Medic and … Continue reading A generation of seniors spend their golden years decoding “Q drops” instead of spending time with their grandkids. Armies of wine moms “research” the child trafficking epidemic going on in their neighborhood.

This participatory Scooby Doo-like quality – a group of friends, collectively solving a mystery – is addicting, and keeps people hooked. Instead of reading a David Icke book, you’re writing a David Icke book. You’re fed narratives that your research work is important, that you’re toppling dark powers from your armchair. Social media also lets you make friends with fellow conspiracists, forging an affinity network that’s hard to escape.

This social factor is particularly important, and the reason I don’t like the popular conception of cults as groups of crazy people. Many people inside them are there for rational reasons. ^[2]Branwen, Gwern. “Notes on Brainwashing & ‘Cults’ – LessWrong.” Less Wrong, 2013, www.lesswrong.com/posts/TiG8cLkBRW4QgsfrR/notes-on-brainwashing-and-cults. It’s where their friends are. If they leave the cult behind, they leave their friends behind. Fear and loneliness are powerful motivators, and ones we’ve all got to watch out for – I can recall times when I did things due to peer pressure that I wouldn’t have done otherwise, and I’m sure you can too. The default behavior of any group of humans – be it the #SaveOurChildren movement or a mainline church or a lawn darts league – is to gradually slide toward conformism and groupthink. It takes no effort at all to become a cult. It’s actually the reverse: a group must actively expend effort to not become one.

So where’s the line? Where does a group of friends “break bad”, and become a delusional, reality-denying cult? Is there even such a point?

A useful litmus test is to watch their reaction to having a theory disconfirmed. Do they accept it with humbleness and equanimity (“wow, I guess I was wrong!”)? Or do they shut their eyes, and jam their fingers in their ears?

You might explore a question like:

Did Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell – aka inmate number 02879-509, currently facing sex trafficking charges in Manhattan federal court – run a reddit account called /u/maxwellhill?

The theory’s details can found at the Daily Mail, and the Sun, and other places. It has existed for years, making the rounds whenever Ms Ghislaine’s perennial legal saga appears in the news.

/u/maxwellhill was a notorious power user, as powerful as a Redditor can become without actually being employed by the site. He was the user with eighth highest link karma, the first user to hit a million karma total, and the moderator for a slew of front-page subreddits (r/worldnews, r/politics, r/science, and r/technology). He had immense influence in shaping the site’s discussion, and his modding style was controversial.

(NB: I use “he” because /u/maxwellhill described himself in a 2010 Redditor of the Day profile as married 40 year old man. /u/hasharin, another reddit mod, has claimed that /u/maxwellhill lives in Malaysia, with the name being a reference to a local landmark.)

This all matters because the Epstein story involved a network. He was friends with the most wealthy and powerful people of the age – presidents, businesspeople, royalty. They flew on his plane and stayed at his island. How far did Epstein’s influence reach? Who knows what? Who did what? These questions are like maggots in Epstein’s corpse, wriggling years after his death, and if his girlfriend was esconced in Reddit’s inner circle and armed with a banhammer, then the 19th largest website lies inside the Epstein contamination zone too. A lot of Reddit’s main players – Alexis Ohanian, Steve Huffman, Ellen K Pao – become suspect, as do many past and current policy decisions.

If /u/maxwellhill was Ghislaine Maxwell, it would be “srs business”, as they used to say. Very well. Let’s study this serious business’s incorporation papers.

Believers cite the following evidence:

1. Ghislaine’s last name is Maxwell

2. Gaps in /u/maxwellhill’s post history line up with significant events in Ghislaine Maxwell’s life

2.a When Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested, /u/maxwellhill stopped posting.

3. A few biographical details kinda match.

4. /u/maxwellhill promotes child p*rn and wants to lower the age of consent

5. There isn’t a fifth one

You might find the above evidence persuasive. Or you might find it too thin to risk accusing an innocent of being party to child sex abuse. You might also recall (from your first day on the internet) that the person making the claim has to provide the evidence.^[3]Conspiracists have the perfect dodge for this, though – they’re “just asking questions“. They’re not making a falsifiable claim. They’re just idly speculating that … Continue reading

Regardless, do these claims hold water?

1. Ghislaine’s last name is Maxwell

“Everything is connected” is a common conspiracist trope, but it’s startling to see it appear so bluntly. Two people have the same name, so they’re the same person, I guess?

“Maxwell” is not a rare name; howmanyofme.com suggests there are 81,736 Maxwells in the United States. The number worldwide might run into the hundreds of thousands. My father’s middle name is Maxwell.

It’s not believable that Ghislaine Maxwell (faking an elaborate identity as a married Malaysian man) would commit such an elementary error as using her real name. Did she want to hide her identity, or not? If so, why not pick a fake name? If not, why invent fake biographical details?

I put this to a believer on Twitter, and he replied:

Lots of people have weak information security practices. Trying to throw people of your scent by changing a few details is a common tactic, and not an unreasonable one for someone who wasn’t (at that time) particularly high-profile.

Is creating a stealth account under your real name a “weak information security practice”? I’d call it the most obviously self-defeating thing you could possibly do. This is as plausible as a Michelin-starred chef performing the “weak culinary practice” of taking a shit in the cordon bleu sauce.

(As a side note, it’s claimed that “hill” is a reference to Ghislaine’s father, whose birthname is Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch. Hoch is supposedly German for hill. But the correct word for that is hügel; hoch just means tall or high.)

2. Gaps in /u/maxwellhill’s post history line up with significant events in Ghislaine Maxwell’s life

Question for believers: have you investigated this for yourself? Or were you told it by someone else and assumed it was true?

Here’s the argument in more detail.

The usage of the account lines up to Ghislaine’s public activities with an almost spooky accuracy. The rare instances where the account logged off the site for more than a day at a time align with big events in Maxwell’s life, including the wake of Ghislaine’s mother’s death. They were also MIA during the much-discussed Kleiner Perkins party where, funnily enough, former Reddit CEO Ellen K. Pao recently claimed she saw her in attendance. This lines up with u/MaxwellHill’s own statement in an interview the user gave to Gizmodo during this period, saying “I am also busy with a potential business venture that is taking a large part of my time, but I try to squeeze in the odd link when I have the time…” What better place to do business than at a party for Silicon Valley VCs?

So…two events. The Kleiner Perkins party, and the death of her mother. But they line up with almost spooky accuracy!

This user has an interesting definition of a “big event”. Does attending a party count? Ghislaine Maxwell was a socialite who attended dozens of parties a year. Note that the Kleiner Perkins party occurred in 2011,  at which point Ellen K Pao worked at an investment firm (she wouldn’t become Reddit’s interim CEO for another three years.)

Regardless, we have a testable hypothesis:

“Whenever Ghislaine Maxwell attends a party or an event, /u/maxwellhill goes silent.”

Here’s /u/maxwellhill’s comment archives. Tagged Getty Images photos allow us to partially reconstruct Ghislaine Maxwell’s public appearances. Let’s match them up and see what we find.

(Click the below image to open the file in Google Sheets. Most original data by /u/f_k_a_g_n on Reddit, with formatting and corrections by me)

No clear pattern emerges from the tea leaves. /u/maxwellhill posts 30, 37, and 39 times on dates coinciding with Ghislaine Maxwell events. He posts zero times on a date (2015-01-05) when Ghislaine was apparently just hanging around her Manhattan townhouse.

It’s hard to see why attending a party would mean you can’t post on Reddit for 24 hours. Don’t parties only occupy part of the day? Doesn’t even the busiest socialite have moments of free time (when travelling in a plane or limo, for example?) Aren’t most people constantly on their phones at parties anyway? Wouldn’t a rich person hire a PA to grind out links even on days when they were busy, or use a tool like Buffer to queue up posts in advance?

Nevertheless, this is the theory the conspiracists have provided. If you think it’s stupid, blame them, not me. Either way, it doesn’t survive contact with reality.

3. A few biographical details kinda match

/u/maxwellhill says he was born in December, just like Ghislaine Maxwell. This is an amazing coincidence: very few people are born in December. Probably less than nine or ten, total.

The theory is internally inconsistent as always: if Ghislaine was going undercover (fake age, fake sex, fake place of residence, fake marital status, etc), we’d expect her to provide a fake birth month, not a real one.

Ghislaine had an interest in environmentalism, founding the NPO and possible tax scam The TerraMar Project. /u/maxwellhill was also interested in this – /r/environment was one of his most frequent haunts.

But you can’t focus on this similarity and ignore the ways their interests differ. /u/maxwellhill mostly posted about US politics, from the vapid center-left “Orange Man Bad!” perspective that constitutes Reddit’s background radation. (click to enlarge).

Ghislaine Maxwell is on record – literally – as claiming to be Donald Trump’s friend.  “Maxwell bragged that she was friends with “lots of famous people” like Prince Andrew and former President Donald Trump, Kate said, according to reporters in the courtroom, corroborating last week’s testimony from an alleged victim who said she encountered the two men while being trafficked by Maxwell and Epstein as a teenager.” They’ve been photographed together numerous times.

But we’re supposed to ignore this. When Ghislaine’s interests match /u/maxwellhill’s, it means something. When they don’t match, it means nothing (either that or it still means something – /u/maxwellhill is trashing Trump as a deliberate disinformation strategy. Dig deeper! We’re through the looking glass here!) This is classic conspiratorial thinking: we’re supposed to remember the hits and forget the misses.

Don’t go to a casino if you’re persuaded by stuff like this. You’ll leave wearing a barrel.

3a. When Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested, /u/maxwellhill stopped posting

This is the big one. The entire reason the theory exists. On 28th of June, 2020, /u/maxwellhill posts publically for the last time. Ironically, he’s promoting a conspiracy theory himself.^[4]RussiaGate

On the 2nd of July, police raid Ghislaine Maxwell’s New Hampshire estate and place her under arrest. /u/maxwellhill is never heard from again. After posting dozens of times a week for over fifteen years, he’s gone. No goodbye post. No “I’ve gotten bored of Reddit and I’m taking a break” explanation. Just silence.

If this was true, it would be the strongest piece of evidence so far.

But it’s not.

I’m sorry to tell you this, but /u/maxwellhill did post after the 2nd of July. Just not in public. He continued to perform moderator duties, interact with staff members, and answer private messages. Here’s a conversation between /u/hasharin and /u/maxwellhill that happened on the 9th.

Additionally, here’s evidence that /u/maxwellhill made a post inside a private subreddit, nine days after the “Tr45son” one.

This seems pretty bad for the theory. With Ghislaine Maxwell in jail awaiting charges, /u/maxwellhill is casually swapping PMs with reddit moderators and spitballing around policy ideas. How could they be the same person?

“Ghislaine Maxwell is a wealthy woman, bankrolling high-powered attorneys. She could easily contrive to have unmonitored internet access for a few moments.”

Maybe. She has odd priorities if this is how she spends them. I’m imagining a scene from an upcoming biopic.

INTERIOR – METROPOLITAN DETENTION CENTER – NIGHT.

GHISLAINE is wringing her hands in a dimly lit JAIL CELL, begging her LAWYER to let her use his phone.

GHISLAINE: “Please! It’s urgent! I…I…I have to moderate /r/technology! People are spamming it with dickbutt! Fucking dickbutt! /u/hasharin needs me!”

She sobs uncontrollably.

(I’m sure /u/hasharin regrets sharing these messages, based on how his Twitter replies are full people accusing him of faking them and being part of the Ghislaine/Reddit pedo ring. No good deed goes unpunished.)

I’ve heard it argued that maybe Ghislaine Maxwell delegated the account to an assistant. This defense destroys the original argument: if /u/maxwellhill was not controlled by Ghislaine Maxwell, what does her disappearance prove? And why wouldn’t this supposed assistant at least post a few messages in public to completely discredit the theory?

None of it adds up. Unless you consider the most boring and obvious answer. Then all of it adds up.

So where did /u/maxwellhill go? I don’t know. It’s possible that thousands of PMs from insane people calling him a pedo have soured him on Reddit. There’s no point in him posting publically again. Anything he says now will be slammed with downvotes, because half the internet is convinced he’s secretly Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend and will likely remain convinced regardless of the evidence.

The conspiracy theory is like their toy. They’ve invested a lot of time into it, and they don’t want it taken away.

4. /u/maxwellhill promotes child p*rn and wants to lower the age of consent

No. This is a lie, then another lie.

The venality of the internet still surprises me. /u/maxwellhill was a news junkie who posted thousands of stories. It’s inevitable that some would involve child sex abuse. To quote one or two out of context and claim they mean he approves of child abuse isn’t even dishonest in a clever way. It’s just embarrassing, like scrawling “/u/maxwellhill is a poopie head!” on a toilet wall.

Specific claims:

“[he] posts articles about why we should legalize child exploitation material” – this is an /r/worldnews submission about a noteworthy figure who has made a controversial statement. There’s no indication that /u/maxwellhill agrees with or approves of Mr Falkvinge’s statement.

“[he] gripes about over-zealous child protection laws” – nice well-poisoning by calling it “griping”, as if it’s unreasonable to not want innocent people accused of crimes. I hope people continue to “gripe” about that, as it’s a real problem that happens all the time.

[…] within hours, 111,000 people had seen the post. Farhad said the massive backlash he received saw him sacked from his job, his house spraypainted, a brick thrown through his window, and attempts made to petrol bomb his home, adding people also threatened his girlfriend and his pet. 

[…] Dure — who runs an online group called TRAP which uses sting operations to catch pedophiles trying to meet with underage children — was later arrested and admitted to falsely accusing Farhad of grooming teenagers at the Southampton Magistrates’ Court in August. He was jailed for 15 weeks by the presiding Judge Lorraine Morgan.

The message explicitly condemns pedophilia, by the way.

“Discusses age of consent in various countries here and here“ – wording as strategic as a Spassky chess move. This user doesn’t actually quote what /u/maxwellhill said about the age of consent, just that he was “discussing” it. He knows you’ll imagine the worst. He knows you won’t click the link.

I have, though. The first link is a selectively screencapped thread that removes /u/maxwellhill’s first reply, where he expresses shock that the age of consent is so low in certain states. “13 years old?! The mind boggles.” In the second link, he hopes that the Italian police will prosecute someone for pedophilia. In neither link does /u/maxwellhill endorse pedophilia – in fact, he’s doing the opposite.

Here’s a question for believers: do you think Ghislaine cared what the age of consent was? 

Seriously, are you smoking crack? Do you think Ghislaine and Epstein needed anyone’s permission to abuse children?

Neither he nor she gave one fuck about the law. The did whatever they wanted to whoever they wanted, counting on their wealth, power, and societal connections to shield them from consequences. And given that it it took decades (and enough victims to fill three entire schoolbuses) before some semblence of justice was served, were they really wrong?

Creepy people with strong opinions on age of consent laws exist. Neither Epstein nor Ghislaine fit that profile. They weren’t standing on a soapbox advancing a pro-ephebophilia agenda – millionaires have more effective ways to do that than to thanklessly moderate /r/technology for ten years. I doubt they thought about the morality of their actions at all, any more than Ted Bundy arrived at a morally calculated decision to murder hitchhikers. The only questions he asked were “will I enjoy it?” and “will I get caught?” Bundy’s relationship with right and wrong was the relationship a blind man has with the colors red and blue. An intellectual, unfeeling one. Bundy, like Epstein, was a sociopath.

(Irresponsible speculation hour: although allegations of sexual abuse exist have been directed specifically at Ghislaine, I don’t believe she was a pedophile. She seems to be a completely amoral individual who went along with her boyfriends’ wishes to gain access to his money and network. The details didn’t matter – if Epstein’s kick had involved sewing cute little bobble hats for pugs, she would have helped him do that instead.)

There is a manic, irrational tone to the way people talk about child abuse online. Something about the topic just incinerates peoples’ brains. If patriotism is the last refuge of the vicious, “think of the children!” is one of the first, though it’s interesting to contrast the fanatic posturing above (“linking to an article about pedophilia proves you’re a pedophile!”) with the fact that it took so long to bring a real pedophile to justice.

Remember the #SaveOurChildren types I linked at the start? How many actual children have they rescued? How many actual pedophiles have they caught? It’s probably a number bounded tightly around zero. Their activities consist of waving signs and accusing celebrities. The police want nothing to do with them. Everything they do is pure theater. They’re not actually helping the problem.

It’s good that witches didn’t exist in the Middle Ages. The witchfinders probably wouldn’t have caught any of them.

Other Observations

I’m >95% sure that /u/maxwellhill is not Ghislaine Maxwell.

If she is, then large numbers of people (the /r/worldnews mod team, for a start) are lying and/or forging evidence in the most incompetent way possible. It would also require Ghislaine to be both insanely cautious and stupid at the same time, the equivalent of someone locking their front door with three deadbolts and leaving the house keys on the doormat.

…And all of this is necessary to merely overturn the negative evidence, bringing us back to square one. A positive case still hasn’t been built. We don’t have much of a reason to think that Ghislaine controlled this particular Reddit account.

Naively, the chance of someone excelling in two different fields (being both high-profile socialite and having the 8th highest link karma on Reddit) seems small, particularly when there’s no way to parlay success in one to the other. It’d be like if the world’s fastest touch-typist was also a world-champion swimmer. Possible. Certainy not probable.

What about stylometry? Can that shed light on the matter? Are there stylistic parallels between /u/maxwellhill’s comments and Ghislaine’s writing?

Here are four things she’s written:

When the Oceans Failed^[5]“It’s December 2031, and my hand is tingling with an alert from Apple’s latest wearable technology…” – if God is just, the only wearable technology tingling in 2031 will … Continue reading

New Year, Old Challenges… For Climate Change

The New ‘Bait and Switch’ on Seafood

Tide Is Turning for Ocean Conservation

It’s not enough. Stylometry’s real-world successes all involve either highly distinctive writing styles (linguists catching Ted Kaczynski), or AI-based tools crunching through giant corpuses of writing (Stylo exposing Elena Ferrante as a pen name for Domenico Starnone). Without those things, you’re basically just performing statistical astrology, building pearls around meaningless grit and dust.

Little things stand out. For example. Ghislaine uses “—” (Unicode U+2014) for her em-dashes, while /u/maxwellhill prefers the minus sign “-” (Unicode U+2212), as you can see here.

This doesn’t prove anything; Ghislaine could have written articles on one device and Reddit posts on another, or the articles could be ghostwritten, or Medium/HuffPo’s CMS might automatically convert minus signs to em-dashes, or [insert a half-dozen other explanations].

A more profitable vein to mine would be to figure out /u/maxwellhill’s timezone.

You’d scrape the timestamps off his posts using Reddit API, plot them on a 24-hour chart, and see where the humps are. Do they plausibly coincide with the wake/sleep schedule of a person living at GMT-5, Eastern Standard Time? Malaysia is 13 hours ahead of NY, so we should be able to geographically “place” the account with some accuracy.

But it doesn’t matter and isn’t worth the effort. Nobody convinced by the theory would be unconvinced by this. They’d have some locally plausible but globally ludicrous explanation, like Ghislaine deliberately posting her Reddit messages at weird times to throw off pursuit. All while posting under her real name.

Many people are an emotional tail wagging a rational dog, and will believe because they want to believe, ignoring all evidence. They see disconfirmation as a test of faith to overcome, like an athlete powering through a tough spot on a marathon. In the immortal words of Steven Kaas, “You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going “a most judicious choice, sire”.

Here’s the boring truth.

/u/maxwellhill goes away on a holiday. He returns to find six thousand PMs screeching at him and calling him every name under the sun. He’s already very busy, and this is the final straw, killing his desire to contribute to Reddit. There’s no way to win, no way to prove he’s innocent. Anything he says will be spun and misrepresented as still more proof of a conspiracy.

So he does a little more moderation work behind the scenes, ties up loose ends, and then flushes this Reddit crapshake for good. A wise decision. If only we all were that strong.

…is an episode of The Simpsons, but also an odd video.

Few have seen it. Those who have might actually understand it less than those who haven’t. Watch it and you’ll see what I mean. It’s a comprehension black hole.

Here’s the thing about the weird internet: words don’t work. The more I describe something the more confusing they become. Light doesn’t illuminate their darkness, it deepens it. Chernobyl has special radiotrophic funguses that resist radiation; the internet has special funguses that resist explanation. There’s stuff that just seems broken, barely existing in reality, and well-meaning “explainers” all seem like mathematical treatises on four-sided triangles.

Goatse.cx is a good example. Although I can tell you what it is – a long-gone website which hosted a photo called hello.jpg, showing a man stretching his anus to the width of a toilet’s outflow pipe – I can’t capture its essence.

I’d have to write reams about the surrounding culture, how it became an easy-bake recipe for trolling and griefing, how some scrub would ask for CS hacks on IRC and you’d link him to goatse.cx and laugh while imagining his face, how it then became the flashpoint for various internet dramas (the scrabble to secure the goatse.cx domain name after the Christmas Island authorities intervened, the search to identify “the goatse dude”, etc), and eventually became a shibboleth for the weird web: something you either “get” or don’t.

For many of us, goatse was a shock, a loss of virginity, the moment the safety rails fell away and we realized just how terrifying the internet was. It’s a humbling reminder that no matter how weird you think you are, you’re probably pretty normal in the grand scheme of things. But I don’t think I’m making much progress at explaining goatse. In the end, it just exists: this awful, inexplicable thing that everyone knows about but nobody talks about, a cancer the internet is slowly dying from. A few days ago, the Toronto Sun put this on their Twitter feed, and everyone went “haha” without even acknowledging what it was. That’s the correct way to experience goatse. Wordlessly.

Bart the General is a similar case. It can’t be done justice. This Youtube comment by “Fudgaboutit” sums it up.

Have you ever been scared by something as a kid because you can’t comprehend what you’re seeing, but you know something is wrong? It is so strange to be feeling that again as an adult.

It’s a deliberately bad animated The Simpsons parody created in 2005 by a UK art collective known as Famicon (most particularly, someone called GHXYK2). Their other “work” is varied: books, music, videos, comics, and homebrew PC games. Bart the General was animated in Multimedia Fusion 2, with sprites apparently drawn in MS Paint. It shares a name and nothing else with the fifth episode of The Simpson’s first season, and I assume GHXYK2 titled it that way to trick people searching for the actual episode. When viewed in a blurry 320×240 thumbnail, Bart the General kinda looks like the Simpsons.

It begins with an ear-bleeding, distorted remix of Danny Elfman’s Simpsons theme. You’ll want to mute your audio. There’s a loudness war, and this is its A-Bomb. Hallucinatory imagery flashes on the screen. Animated gifs loop in corrupt circles, distorted by digital filters. It’s an uncomfortably long introduction, but what follows is beyond uncomfortable.

An Australian convict called Toadfish shows up on the Simpsons’ street. He throws Ned Flanders out of his house, gruesomely murders Scott and Todd, and then enters the Simpson home for reasons unclear. I should note that Homer is “Omarn”, and Bart is “Burton”, but GHXYK2 occasionally refers to these characters by their original names, and so will I. Lisa is mentioned several times but never seen, and Maggie doesn’t seem to exist.

Toadfish out-alphas Homer (“Oi’ll break yorr legs!”), and seduces Marge with his antipodian charm (“thought you were the daughta, ya so fit”). He moves in, and Homer is thrown out of the house and forced to live in a crackhouse with Ned, where he cries incessantly. Even his son Bart begins to persecute him.

This has an odd air of pathos – as though the creator is taking it half-seriously. You feel sad for Homer. Generally, tragedy takes a Shakespearian form (the hero’s downfall occurs because of their mistakes or personality flaws), and a Grecian form, where the downfall is unavoidable, the will of the gods. I’d call Bart the General a Grecian tragedy. Homer hasn’t done anything wrong. Stonefish has just walked off the street into his life and taken everything from him. It’s arbitrary fate, unearned and cruel. But this is merely the polar inversion of the regular Homer Simpson.

It’s often observed (even on the show itself) that Homer makes no sense. How could a man that stupid work as a nuclear safety technician? How could a man that selfish have a loving and loyal wife and family? In its own way, it’s as mind-breakingly wrong as anything in Bart the General. Homer doesn’t deserve to lose everything. But nor does he deserve to have everything. The symmetry is fearful.

The final thirty seconds are incredible. Homer stops bewailing his fate and returns back home. Maybe he thinks that it’s all a bad dream and life can still return to normal.

But as he enters the house, he sees Marge having sex with Toadfish on the iconic brown Simpsons couch, and suffers an emotional collapse. He groans “Marge…you’re breaking my heart!” in such hard-rending gravity that you might think it’s a reference to The Room (which it probably isn’t, that film achieved fame a year after Bart the General), before sitting down and scooting his ass back and forth on the carpet, moaning like a broken vacuum cleaner.

Then it ends.

Toadfish, by the way, is a character from the Australian sitcom Neighbours. This meaningless yet oddly specific detail typifies Bart the General. Why is Toadie in the Simpsons? And why is he so different to the original character? Jarrod “Toadfish” Rebecchi was a class clown who was later recast as the show’s voice of wisdom, but he was never a brutal sociopath. It does explain some creative decisions, though. For example, this digitally defaced man is Neighbours actor Ryan Moloney atop a picture of tetractenos glaber, the Australian toadfish.

The original video has gone down, but re-uploads exist. Bart the General has a hydralike tenacity. It probably has more fans than the Simpsons episode it stole a name from, which was a tepid and safe effort from a show whose writers were still gaining confidence.

GHXYK2 made three more Bart the Generals. They didn’t recreate the success of the original, and didn’t try to. Instead, they took an already-weird story even further into a landscape of nightmare.

Bart’s voice completely changes. A few Simpsons characters appear (Mr Burns, Otto the busdriver), along with Dr Gregory House and still other characters I cannot identify. There are Lynchian touches – such as the entire fourth episode, which has a reddish tinge suggesting sundown, or a spiritual and perhaps actual apocalypse. Not even the length of the videos makes much sense. There are sophomoric gross-out touches, such as a plane with a shitting anus on one wing-tip.

Homer’s troubles only get worse. Toadfish’s brother Stonefish arrives at the house (“I’m fucking ruining your life from this day on!”), and joins in the bullying of Homer.

Stonefish doesn’t even look like his Neighbours character. He also possesses magical powers. One of Bart the General’s most gruesomely effectly visuals involves Stonefish electrocuting Homer and then literally pouring himself down a phone line (link because it’s possibly seizure inducing, and too annoying to have on the page).

Other subplots: Marge is pimped out by Toadfish and stars in porn videos. Bart sells these videos of his mother to buy fuel for a sports car he has purchased somehow. Dr House falls out of a plane. The Simpsons house is taken over by a gang of terrorists led by a panther-headed figure with a British accent. Bart loses his car, returns to Homer, and apologizes by performing oral sex on his father.

All of it is fairly incidental. Plot threads just begin and end, usually unresolved. But you see the cracked remnants of TV plotting. The terrorists (who kill someone, leave, and are never seen again) are your classic villains-of-the-week, for example. And Stonefish is the “worse bad guy appears after hero defeats the first bad guy” season 2 plot device. The fact that it’s all wrong – Homer hasn’t even defeated the first bad guy, and Stonefish and Toadfish join forces! – make it all the funnier.

It seems different artists created different parts: as they vary a lot in style, quality, and tone. Will there be a Bart the General 5? Time will tell. The fourth installment ends with a big “TBC”. But the fact that it was made thirteen years ago (and nothing since) probably mean this was just trolling on GHXYK2’s part.

Bart the General received hundreds of thousands of views when originally uploaded, although not all of them were organic.

In 2006 Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka (of SomethingAwful fame) took the somewhat gay step of trying to turn it into an internet craze.

So I was wondering if the power of the SA Forums could be used to turn this seemingly unpopular, random video into a meme, into some viral Internet sensation which will immediately become played out and obnoxious. Here’s the general outline of how these things happen:

1) Video is linked ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TezHbHnPXZw )
2) The link is passed around through blogs, emails, and IMs.
3) Photoshops and parodies of catchphrases from the video start popping up.
4) Video collections of the photoshops and parodies pop up.
5) News media outlets catch wind of it and talk about it in their “lighter side” part of the newscast, before “panda gives birth” and after “cute kittens play with yarn”
6) Merchandise cashing in on the original media starts coming out.
7) Everybody associated with the original media expresses their desire to kill themselves for ever being involved.

As he later put it:

“I was curious to see how difficult it would be to artificially manufacture a viral Internet fad. I didn’t really have any target until I saw this video: This is one of those things so completely random and messed up that, I figure, it’d be the LEAST likely to ever turn into a meme or successful viral Internet fad.”

But if you were doing that, you’d pick a video that’s actually boring.

Bart the General isn’t boring, not by half. Nor is it “completely random”. There’s obviously a degree of thought behind it, obviously a desire to entertain. The fact that it works different beats to most mainstream entertainment doesn’t make it meaningless:  9223372036854775808 seems random to the casual eye, while a computer scientist sees the values for a signed 64-bit integer. To those who “get it”, the video is extremely fascinating and rewatchable. Kyanka’s edict to spread this “unpopular, random video” is like a viral campaign to get people to look at porn. The video is great on its own terms, not because of some ironic gesture on Kyanka’s part.

Regardless, the SomethingAwful “goons” followed Kyanka’s instructions and obligingly spammed the video everywhere they could. You can see the remnants of their publicity blitz here, along with idiots ruining the gag by talking about FYAD and whatnot. It saddens me, and cheapens the video, I think. Just like when I see people on Youtube posting banal comments and upvoting each others’ feeble jokes (“still better than ‘Lisa Goes Gaga‘, am I right guys? Hurr hurr.”) It’s like watching chimps handle a Joseon porcelain vase. Bart the General is too good for them, and for Kyanka, and for me.

I’m fascinated by the reactions – or non-reactions – internet commenters have to Bart the General. Some return to it because they’re fascinated by it. A lot of them are burned out, 40 year old goons who remember Lowtax’s campaign.  But they all keep coming back to it. I am just glad to live in a world where it exists.