fascinated with the faraway locations and the exotic people represented on the series. As for ChillOne, who knows, but it would seem from the outside to have to do with the ability to make the world pay attention to him.
Survivor asks us to speculate about what happened. It practically demands our predictions. Media scholar Mary Beth Haralovich and mathematician Michael W. Trosset describe the role chance plays in shaping outcomes: “Narrative pleasure stems from the desire to know what will happen next, to have that gap opened and closed, again and again, until the resolution of the story. … In Survivor, unpredictability whets the desire to know what happens next, but how that gap will be closed is grounded in uncertainty due to chance. … In its invitation to prediction, Survivor is more like a horse race than fiction.”7 At the same time, for those viewers who are most aware of the production circumstances, there is also an “uncertainty due to ignorance,” which is what galls these fans the most. Someone out there—Mark Burnett for one—knows something they don’t. They want to know what can be known. And that’s part of what makes spoiling Survivor such a compelling activity. The ability to expand your individual grasp by pooling knowledge with others intensifies the pleasures any viewer takes in trying to “expect the unexpected,” as the program’s ad campaign urges.
And, so, Survivor’s spoilers gather and process information. As they do so, they form a knowledge community. We are experimenting with new kinds of knowledge that emerge in cyberspace. Out of such play, Pierre Lévy believes, new kinds of political power will emerge which will operate alongside and sometimes directly challenge the hegemony of the nation-state or the economic might of corporate capitalism. Lévy sees such knowledge communities as central to the task of restoring democratic citizenship. At his most optimistic, he sees the sharing of knowledge around the world as the best way of breaking down the divisions and suspicions that currently shape international relations. Lévy’s claims are vast and mystifying; he speaks of his model of collective intelligence as an “achievable utopia,” yet he recognizes that small local experiments will be where we learn how to live within knowledge communities. We are, he argues, in a period of “apprenticeship” through which we innovate and explore the structures that will support political and economic life in the future.
Imagine the kinds of information these fans could collect, if they sought to spoil the government rather than the networks. Later, we will look at the roles collective intelligence played in the 2004 presidential campaign, and we will see signs that players of alternate reality games are beginning to focus their energies toward solving civic and political problems. Having said that, I don’t want to seem to endorse a very old idea that fandom is a waste of time because it redirects energies that could be spent toward “serious things” like politics into more trivial pursuits. Quite the opposite, I would argue that one reason more Americans do not participate in public debates is that our normal ways of thinking and talking about politics require us to buy into what we will discuss later in this chapter as the expert paradigm: to play the game, you have to become a policy wonk, or, more accurately, you have to let a policy wonk do your thinking for you. One reason why spoiling is a more compelling practice is because the way knowledge gets produced and evaluated is more democratic. Spoiling is empowering in the literal sense in that it helps participants to understand how they may deploy the new kinds of power that are emerging from participation within knowledge communities. For the moment, though, the spoilers are just having fun on a Friday night participating in an elaborate scavenger hunt involving thousands of participants who all interact in a global village. Play is one of the ways we learn, and during a period of reskilling and reorientation, such play may be much more important than it seems at first glance. On the other hand, play is also valuable on its own terms and for its own ends. At the end of the day, if spoiling wasn’t fun, they wouldn’t do it.
The word spoiling goes way back—or at least as far back as you can go—in the history of the Internet. Spoiling emerged from the mismatch between the temporalities and geographies of old and new media. For starters, people on the East Coast saw a series three hours earlier than people on the West Coast. Syndicated series played on different nights of the week in different markets. American series played in the United States six months or more before they broke in international markets. As long as people in different locations weren’t talking to each other, each got a first-time experience. But, once fans got online, these differences in time zones loomed large. Someone on the East Coast would go online and post everything about an episode, and someone in California would get annoyed because the episode was “spoiled.” So, posters began putting the word “spoiler” in the subject line, so people could make up their own minds whether or not to read it.
Over time, though, the fan community turned spoiling into a game to find out what they could before the episodes even aired. Again, it is interesting to think about this in terms of temporality. Most viewers experience Survivor as something that unfolds week by week in real time. The show is edited to emphasize immediacy and spontaneity. The contestants don’t appear publicly until after they are booted, and often they speak as if the events hadn’t already happened. They can only speak concretely about things that have already been aired and seem at times to speculate about what is yet to come. Spoilers, on the other hand, work from the knowledge that the series has already been shot. As one fan explains, “The results were determined months ago and here we wait for the official results. And a few people out there who participated know the results and they are supposed to keep it under lock. Hahahahahaha!”
They are searching for signs of the aftermath, trying to find out which contestants lost the most weight (thus indicating that they spent more time surviving in the wilds) or which came back with full beards or bandaged hands; they seek leaks who are willing to give them some “small hints” about what took place, and then they pool their information, adding up all of the “small hints” into the “Big Picture.” Ghandia Johnson (Survivor: Thailand) thought she was smarter than the fan boards; she would post what she thought were tantalizing tidbits nobody could figure out. It turned out that the community—at least as an aggregate—was a whole lot smarter than she was and could use her “hints” to put together much of what was going to happen on the series. More recently, a news crew interviewed a Survivor producer in front of a white board that outlined the challenges for the forthcoming season; the fans were able to do a “frame grab” of the image, blow it up, and decipher the entire outline, giving them a road map for what was to come.
On one level, the story of Survivor: Amazon was done before Chill-One arrived on the scene; his sources at the Ariau Amazon Hotel were already starting to forget what had happened. On another level, the story hadn’t begun, since the cast hadn’t been publicly announced, the show was still being edited, and the episodes wouldn’t air for several more weeks when he made his first post at Survivor Sucks (http://p085.ezboard.com/bsurvivorsucks).
ChillOne knew he had some hot inside information and so he went where the hard-core fans hung out—Survivor Sucks, one of the oldest and most popular of the many discussion lists devoted to the series. The name bears some explanation, since clearly these people are dedicated fans who don’t really think the show sucks. Initially, Survivor Sucks was a forum for “recaps,” snarky summaries of the episodes. On the one hand, a recap is a useful tool for people who missed an episode. On the other hand, the recapping process was shaped by the desire to talk back to the television set, to make fun of formulas and signal your emotional distance from what’s taking place on the screen. Somewhere along the way, the Sucksters discovered “spoiling,” and the boards haven’t been the same since. So, it was here—to these people who pretended to hate Survivor but were pretty much obsessed with it—that ChillOne brought his information.
Anticipating some reaction, he started his own thread, “ChillOne’s Amazon Vacation Spoilers.” Surely, even ChillOne never imagined that the full thread would run for more than three thousand posts and continue across the full season. ChillOne made his first post at 7:13:25 P.M. on January 9, 2003. By 7:16:40 P.M. he was already facing questions. It wasn’t until 7:49:43
