themselves ever went there: he implied that the information had come from the “boat guides” who ferried away the contestants once they were voted off the tribe. “Since there are only a small handful of ‘boat guides’ most of them working long hours driving the S6 crews in/out of the jungle, thus, enabling them to witness the filming. I’m sure that over the 3 months, they rapped among themselves and with the help of the English-speaking staff, figured out what was going on.” ChillOne never actually said a boatman was his source. He let the spoilers draw their own conclusions, and in the weeks ahead, an enormous amount of speculation and mythology grew up around the boatman. ChillOne refused to confirm or deny any of the theories. He said he didn’t want to cloud the water by engaging in speculation. Some think he was messing with their minds.
“Here’s what I know … it’s not much,” he said with classic understatement. He knew parts of everything—the first four boots, the final four, the location, the details of contestants and their behavior, some of the highlights of the series. He knew that for the first time the tribes would be organized by gender but that they would “merge much earlier … possibly after the first 3 or 4 contestants are gone.” He knew the women would dominate the early challenges and that several of the first boots would be athletic young men who had fumbled in the competition. He knew that one of the contestants would strip down to gain an advantage. (It turns out that both Heidi and Jenna went skinny-dipping in return for chocolate and peanut butter during one of the immunity challenges.) He knew that a certain kind of local insect would be the gross food challenge. Some of what he knew, even some of what he was certain about—like the claim that the “deaf girl,” Christy, was part of the final four—turned out to be dead wrong. Some of it turned out to be so vague that it could be massaged to seem right no matter what the outcome. But the general pattern of his knowledge held true. He got the order of the first four boots wrong, but in the end, his four were among the first five folks kicked out of their tribes. He misidentified one of the final four, but Christy did make the final five. The odds of getting all of that right without inside information are astronomical.
As for the outcome, he knew, or claimed to know, that it came down to a contest between a woman who was called “Jana” or something close to it and a man who was in his twenties, had a “strong build,” and had a “tight haircut” that was combed to the side. The Oracle at Delphi spoke with greater clarity. First of all, the name “Jana” didn’t perfectly match any of the contestants, and on a season where the women’s names included Janet, Jenna, Jeanne, and Joanna, there was certainly room for confusion here. Matthew the globe-trotting restaurant designer might meet his description of the man, more or less: he certainly had a strong build and he did part his hair to the side, but he had longish hair going in and was apt to have even longer hair by the end, and he was a good deal older than twenty-six, so perhaps they were thinking about Alex the triathlon coach or Dave the rocket scientist. Before long, even the gawky nerd-boy Rob was starting to be put forward as someone who could have refined his muscle tone over a two-month stay in the rain forest. There was more than enough here to keep the community busy for the coming months, and for the most part there was enough that could support multiple theories and arguments.
Several people wanted to delegate tasks, rally the troops, and see what they all could put together before the season started. That is, they wanted to exploit the full resources of a knowledge community rather than put all of their trust in one previously unknown individual. One of the would-be leaders explained, “There is LOTS we need to know about them and could be compiling. Basically build a dossier on each of them. Pics from outside of Survivor, vidcaps, bios, descriptions (how friggin’ TALL are these guys, exactly?). What hints have Jiffy [Jeff Probst], MB [Mark Burnett], and others made about them, what allusions to them exist? … Eventually, more clues are going to pop out at us. Pieces will fit together. The puzzle will start to make sense. A tremendous amount can be done in this way BEFORE the show airs.” But ChillOne had refocused the spoiling community’s efforts; everything was directed toward proving or disproving his theories—and nobody was searching in other directions. Over time, ChillOne’s intel would spread outward to all of the other boards and discussion lists, until you couldn’t turn around without running into an opinion about his veracity, whether you wanted to have contact with spoilers or not. You couldn’t put forth an alternative theory without having someone dismiss you for going against what the group “already knew” from ChillOne.
Contested Information
Almost immediately, the skeptics on the listboard began to circle, because something about all of this didn’t smell right, something here was too good to be true.
Not that past history means *a lot* but how many times have we received legit contestant spoilers like this from somebody that just happened to be around where filming took place. I guess there’s a first time for everything.
It is, of course, still possible that ChillOne is MB and that he is establishing credibility by leaking good information a few days early only to slam us with a bad F4 prediction.
MB is definitely the type of person that would have his lackeys make up fake spoilers and such during their lunch breaks.
They would continue in that manner for the rest of the season. Spoiling is an adversarial process—a contest between the fans and the producers, one group trying to get their hands on the knowledge the other is trying to protect. Spoiling is also adversarial in the same sense that a court of law is adversarial, committed to the belief that through a contest over information, some ultimate truth will emerge. The system works best when people are contesting every claim that gets made, taking nothing at face value. As one skeptic explained, “People with doubt should be welcomed, not scorned. It helps everyone in the long run. If I poke at holes that look thin, they either get firmed up (a win for you), or they become bigger holes (a win for me). Bigger holes could lead to other things. Either way, some resolution is forthcoming eventually.” As participants struggle over the nature of the truth, things can get pretty nasty.
If enough contradicting evidence could be found to fully discredit ChillOne, the discussion list would be able to close off his thread and attention would be routed elsewhere. ChillOne wanted very much to keep his thread alive for the whole season; his rivals wanted to shut him down. There were the two camps in this struggle over ChillOne’s claims. First, there were the absolutists, who believed that if any part of the ChillOne intel was false, it proved that he was lying: “If a person says four distinct things are going to happen and then the first one doesn’t, that means he’s wrong. Whether anything is right after that is irrelevant. … You can’t ‘partly’ win. You either nail it or you don’t. … [Otherwise], that person merely met the mathematical probability of being correct.” And then there were the relativists, who argued that memory could be imprecise or that data could be corrupted: “Where do we get you people from? … People unable or unwilling to acknowledge any correctness in some elements, if there is incorrectness in any other elements.” There was too much information here that came close to the facts for the whole thing to be fabricated.
Soon, the absolutists and the relativists were enmeshed in philosophical debates about the nature of truth. Think of such debates as exercises in popular epistemology. As we learn how to live within a knowledge culture, we can anticipate many such discussions centering as much on how we know and how we evaluate what we know as on the information itself. Ways of knowing may be as distinctive and personal as what kinds of knowledge we access, but as knowing becomes public, as knowing becomes part of the life of a community, those contradictions in approach must be worked over if not worked through.
At one point an exasperated ChillOne defender summed up the competing theories: “He was never in Brazil. He works for someone in the know. He’s not quite right, he’s working the perfect scam, he’s one of us that got amazingly lucky.” The poster continued, “To me, a spoiler as grand as this one opens the author to legitimate questions about his identity, his true sources of information, his true purpose, and so on. In other words, the author himself becomes a critical part of the spoiling information.”
