sites. Think of these “brain trusts” as secret societies or private clubs, whose members are handpicked based on their skills and track records. Those who are left behind complain about the “brain drain,” which locks the smartest and most articulate posters behind closed doors. The brain trusts, on the other hand, argue that this closed-door vetting process protects privacy and ensures a high degree of accuracy once they do post their findings.
One question Lévy never fully addresses is the scale on which these knowledge communities may operate. At his most utopian, he imagines the whole world operating as a single knowledge culture and imagines new modes of communication that would facilitate exchange and deliberation of knowledge on this scale. At other times, he seems to recognize the need for scalable communities, especially in the first phases of an emerging knowledge culture. He has a deep-seated distrust of hierarchy of all kinds, seeing democracy as the ideology that will best enable knowledge cultures to emerge. Lévy writes, “How will we be able to process enormous masses of data on interrelated problems within a changing environment? Most likely by making use of organizational structures that favor the genuine socialization of problemsolving rather than its resolution by separate entities that are in danger of becoming competitive, swollen, outdated and isolated from real life.”10 The brain trusts represent the return of hierarchy to the knowledge culture, the attempt to create an elite that has access to information not available to the group as a whole and that demands to be trusted as arbitrators of what it is appropriate to share with the collective.
The Paradox of Reality Fiction
Spoiling is only one activity that engages Survivor fans. Like fans of many other series, Survivor fans also write and post original fiction about their favorite characters. One fan with the unlikely real name of Mario Lanza was inspired by talk about an all-star reunion series of Survivor to write three whole seasons’ worth of imaginary episodes (All Star: Greece, All Star: Alaska, and All Star: Hawaii), featuring the fictional exploits of these real-world participants. Each installment may be between forty and seventy pages long. He unfolds these episodes week by week during the off-season. The stories follow the series’s dramatic structure, yet they are even more focused on the character motivations and interactions. Lanza compares this process of getting to know the characters with police profiling: “I tried very hard to get into these people’s heads, and I thought if I am going to play this game again, what am I going to change, how would I do this, what do I know about this person, how do I know them, how do they talk, how do they think.”1 While spoiling tries to anticipate how contestants will react to the incidents depicted in the series, the fan fiction takes this one step further, trying to imagine how they would respond confronting challenges and dilemmas that they never faced in real life.
So far, this may sound like the way any other fan fiction writers approach their task—get to know your characters, remain consistent with the aired material, and speculate based on what you know about people in the real world, except in this case, the characters are people who exist in the real world. Lanza’s stories have, in fact, become very popular with the Survivor contestants themselves, who often write him letters telling him what he got right or where he misread some participant’s personality. For example, he said that Gabriel Cade (a contestant on Survivor: Marquesas) was so flattered about being included in one of the allstar stories that he wanted to get more involved in the writing process: “He’s really interested in how his character is going to come off, so he’s told me all kinds of gossip about what these people are like, what they do, who likes who, and how they get along.” As a writer of reality fiction, Lanza has been getting fan letters from his characters.
With Survivor: Greece, Lanza sought to tell the stories of those contestants who had been bumped early in the runs of their series. Because so little aired material dealt with these characters, he drew much more heavily on what he could learn by interviewing them and their teammates. After arbitrarily choosing Diane Ogden (Africa) and Gabriel Cade (Marquesas) as team leaders, he contacted them to see which players they would have selected to be on their teams. In some cases, he asked actual contestants to write their own “final words” as their fictionalized characters are voted out of the game. Chris Wright interviewed some of these players and found that they often felt Lanza’s fiction more accurately reflected their real personalities and strategies than the television program itself because it was less reliant on stereotyping. Many of them felt a vicarious pleasure or psychological boost in watching their fictionalized characters overcome problems that had blocked them during the actual game.2
Lanza also wanted to preserve the show’s fundamental element of chance: “I have talked to a lot of the survivors in real life over the phone or on e-mail, and this is one of the things they consistently bring up over and over. It doesn’t matter what your plans are or how smart you are or how strong you are. So much of the game is based on luck. … I wanted that to work out the story somehow. As a writer, I didn’t want to be able to cheat.” So, as he started to write the challenges, he rolled dice to determine which team or player wins and then wrote the scene accordingly. A single roll of the dice could wipe out weeks of plotting, much as it did for the producers of the television series, and as a consequence, the stories are full of surprise twists and turns that capture something of the spirit of the series. One of his series ended with an allfemale final four, something that never happened on the air. As he explains, “That’s just the way the story happened to go.”
Perhaps because of this close interaction with the contestants, Lanza has become a sharp critic of spoiling, which he says becomes too intrusive. As he explains, “People take it way too seriously. It’s just a TV show.” Only a few minutes later, however, he adds, “Get me talking about Survivor and I will talk forever.” As they say, Survivor sucks.
Most spoilers argue that these brain trusts serve a useful purpose, but they can be paternalistic as hell. As one Suckster explained, “Everything we have is also theirs because we’re open, everything they have most definitely is not ours because members of the gated communities may or may not feel like dropping in and sharing it. They have sources we do not, and they like to hoard information, which is what the private groups are all about.” The trusts tend to dump data with no explanation about how they got it, essentially cutting the plebeians out of the process and constructing themselves as experts who are to be trusted at face value. Many of the brain trusts are rumored to have secret sources, often within the production company.
ChillOne posted everything he knew in the most broadly accessible discussion list and let the vetting take place in public view. The brain trusts were working behind closed doors to see how far they could push his intel, but ChillOne himself wanted everything to remain out in the open. Some of the brain trusts sought to discredit ChillOne, urging Sucksters not to put their full faith in what he was saying, but they wouldn’t say why. Some believed such warnings because the brain trusts had access to so much inside information; others suspected they were trying to discredit a rival.
But as of day 2, ChillOne wasn’t revealing the contestants, and the group was watching the clock tick down before the names would be publicly announced. If that wasn’t annoying enough, ChillOne closed his post with a bombshell: “Here is a little ‘teaser’ … the deaf girl is 22. I don’t know her name but, she does make it to the Final 4.” For the first time, ChillOne implied that he might even know who won the game.
By the end of day 2, ChillOne started to deliver the core of his intel and offer some hints about how he accessed it. ChillOne wanted to protect his sources, he said, so he wasn’t going to disclose much. He spent time buying people drinks at the hotel bar and asking them questions, but not too many questions since he didn’t want them to clamp down. At least some of the people he talked with spoke only Portuguese, so he had to rely on translators. In the following weeks, he was asked about the gestures they used and the tone of their voice, whether they had thick accents, and how comfortable the translator was with colloquial English. He did spell out a theory about how knowledge
