authenticate those images on the basis of weather conditions, tide level, and other geographical details. Over and over, people said they wouldn’t have believed ChillOne if he hadn’t been able to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that he had actually been to the production location.
Over time, the Sucksters develop an intuition about whether alleged “intel” smells right or not. Shawn, a longtime spoiler, explained:
If it is a first time poster, it is normally written off as not very credible. You don’t trust first time people. You have to wonder why NOW of all the times they could have posted. If the person has posted before and has been involved with the spoiling before, that would add credibility to their posts. … Nobody can know for sure the poster is lying until after the fact but once that person is found to be lying, they are never trusted again and they are pretty much blacklisted.
Many people felt that ChillOne knew the form and rhetoric of spoiling a little too well for a first-time poster, even one who had lurked for a while, and so they were convinced that the name, ChillOne, was a second identity—a “sock puppet”—for a longtime poster. Tell us who you really are, they begged, so we can check out your previous posts. ChillOne, however, never indulged such requests and continued to give bits of information. The community wasn’t going to be satisfied with some tidbits about the location and a few photographs, though. They wanted the “good stuff,” and they had every reason to think ChillOne was holding out on them. The issue was already on the table with the very first response to his original post: “Were there any Survivors that stayed at the hotel (i.e. loser lodge)? Were you able to get any leads on who might have been on the show?”
And then, at 7:55 P.M. on January 9, just a few minutes after his first post, ChillOne opens a can of worms:
As far as contestants … Yes, I do have information on this as well. What I can share is that you will find your first physically handicapped contestant on S6 … a woman who is hearing impaired (deaf). I will share more contestant information over the coming months. I will tell you that I do NOT know the entire “cast list.” I do NOT know last names either. I only know the first names of about a handful of contestants and the basic descriptions of a few more.
From there, the next response from the Sucksters is predictable:
I don’t want to cause you any burden or trouble, but why wait? Can you tell us.
Why are you holding out on the contestants’ names and descriptions? Let’s have ’em!
It would be fantastic to have the first names before the official release on Monday.
If you do not wish to release the names that you do know, then could you give us a hint to whether any of the speculated contestants we have are on the show?
Spoiling follows a logical sequence. The first phase is focused on identifying the location, because the impact of the production is felt first where the series was shot. The second phase is focused on identifying the contestants, since the second impact is felt on the local communities where these “average Americans” come from. The collective has its feelers out everywhere and responds to the slightest brush. As Shawn explained, “The locals can never keep their mouths shut.” Milkshakey hears a rumor that a girls PE coach at his local high school might be on Survivor and starts pumping her current and former students for any information he can get. A small-town newspaper hints that some local might have been in the running for a million dollars. Sooner or later, it comes back to the Sucksters.
Sometimes, it takes a little effort. The Ellipsis Brain Trust tracked down the name of the person who designed the CBS Survivor Web site, hacked into their hotmail account, and found a single entry, a list of URLs that were to be acquired immediately, sixteen in all, each bearing the name of a man or woman. (There are sixteen contestants on each series of Survivor.) From there, the members of the EBT divided the listed names and began to investigate to see if they were real people. In most cases, there were many people who had that name, some deceased, some young and healthy, and the task was to find out as much about each of them as you could. In an age when all information sources are interconnected and when privacy is breaking down at an alarming rate, there is an immense amount that a team of several hundred people can dig out about a person, given enough time and determination. Armed with their hacked documents, the EBT successfully confirmed all sixteen contestants before CBS released a single name. Sometimes, though, the spoilers get the names wrong and spend lots of time collecting data on totally innocent people. And sometimes, people seeking attention leak their own names just so they can watch the community talk about them.
And even when the spoilers get it right, there is a thin, thin line here between investigating those who have chosen to insert themselves into the public spotlight and stalking them at their home or workplace. For example, one ambitious fan found out where CBS was running the initial interviews for Survivor: Pearl Island, booked time at the hotel before CBS did, and refused to move when they wanted to buy out the hotel for the weekend. She was able to take photographs of everyone interviewed, using a long-range telephoto lens, and her photographs were used to check any names that surfaced. The community spends a great deal of time debating exactly where you draw the line.
Sometimes, spoilers really hit the jackpot during this phase. Quartz-eye showed up at the used car lot where Brian (Survivor: Thailand) worked, pretending to want to buy a car, and took pictures of him standing next to the vehicle. Once the group compared her pictures with the official publicity shots, they could see that he had lost an enormous amount of weight, and it was then clear that he had been out there in the wilds for longer than most. Someone looked on the corporate Web site for Mike Skupin (Survivor: The Australian Outback) and found a picture of him standing with a business associate, his arm in a cast, and that led the group to detect early on that there was going to be an accident. Some local Photoshop experts remained unconvinced, diagramming various ways the image could have been doctored. As it turned out, Mike fell into a fire and had to be evacuated for medical attention.
With each season, Mark Burnett, CBS, and the production team have tightened security, further closed off leaks, anticipated hackers, and made it that much harder to play the game. For Season Six, the community had been working hard trying to get names and coming up largely empty handed. They had a few confirmed names—Heidi, the gym teacher, most prominently—and some of the ones being currently proposed later turned out to be wrong. (The community places a high standard on confirming names. Only once has the community confirmed someone who did not appear in the show, and only rarely does the group discard the name of someone who turns out to be a real contestant. During this early stage, however, many names are proposed and investigated.) So, when ChillOne implied that he knew at least partial names or might be able to confirm some of the names that were already in circulation, the group went wild. Here was the breakthrough they had been waiting for, and it came only one day before the official announcement.
But ChillOne played with them, saying that he didn’t want to post inaccurate information, that they would have to wait till later in the day when he could get home and double-check his notes. Later, some would find this timing suspicious, wondering if he had access to early copies of TV Guide or USA Today accounts that would be released in a matter of hours, or if he had a source at The Early Show, where the official announcement was going to be made. Maybe he was stalling for time.
“Gated [Knowledge] Communities”
“If you are eager to share information but are hesitant to spill it all out here, I suggest contacting someone privately,” a poster suggests early in the process, nominating themselves for the task. The most sensitive personal information about the contestants doesn’t get aired on Survivor Sucks, where it could be read by anyone with Internet access. Over the first five seasons, “brain trusts,” which may be as small as twenty people or as large as a few hundred participants, had emerged as offshoots of
