THE SHITLORD

She's pale, red-headed, with blood-shot eyes to match. "I just woke up," she says.

I point out that the sun is going down for the evening, and ask whether these are normal hours for her.

"Who the fuck keeps normal hours anymore?" she says. "That's some wage-slave shit. And I don't work for anybody."

Back in my junior and senior years of high school, all I did was fuck around on Reddit and 4Chan.

My mom was desperate for me to get out of the house. She thought I was a huge loser. But I had a knack for shitposting. I was legendarily good at it—people were starting to recognize me for it.

Could you explain "shitposting?"

Uh... I guess I've never seen the dictionary definition of it. But it's basically a specific type of trolling. A shitpost can be anything, but usually it's a lot of text. And pretty much any good shitpost has at least one or two levels of irony layered on top of it. The point of the irony is to create multiple possible interpretations for whatever it is you're saying.

Usually people who "get it," will just laugh at a good shitpost. People who don't get it might get upset, or confused, or grossed out. It doesn't matter what emotion you trigger with a shitpost, so long as that emotion is powerful enough to lure people into responding to it, or sharing it, or somehow interacting with it. You ever seen the Navy Seal copypasta?

That's the really over-the-top meme where the guy boasts about having a bunch of "confirmed kills" in Iraq, right?

Exactly.

You know, whoever originally posted that doesn't get enough credit for their shitposting chops. Like, how serious were they?

Obviously the post was a bluff, but was it an ironic bluff? How many layers deep was that thing?

When the poster misspelled "guerilla" warfare as "gorilla" warfare, was that bait?

I assume so, but we don't have the answer.

All I can tell you is that it was a god-tier shitpost, because so many tens of thousands of people have shared it, or variations of it.

You've thought about this a lot.

Oh yeah, it's a real craft. I first started honing my shitposting skills on gaming subreddits. I'd write a 5,000-word essay about how I wanted to eat Sonic the Hedgehog's farts, and then post that to some Sonic fan community and see what sort of impact I could make.

I knew I had a knack for this stuff, because even though most people could correctly recognize my work as shitposting, there was always—and I do mean always—somebody who took whatever I posted completely literally. They read somebody on the internet saying, "I want to snack on a cartoon character's booty berries," and they believed it.

It's like... when you or I see something outrageous or unbelievable online, we run it through several mental filters. We stop and ask ourselves for a second whether what we're seeing could be true, or if somebody is just kidding around, or saying things for some reason that doesn't necessarily involve truth.

Maybe we even do a bit of critical thinking. Like, "What else would have to be true for this to be true?" That sort of thing.

My theory is: Some people are just not capable of that. Now, look, I don't know the exact percentages we're dealing with here. I suspect it's at least 10 percent. Could it be as high as 30 or 40 percent? I don't know, but when I first started doing this stuff on videogame subreddits, I began to realize that if you construct multiple layers of irony atop one another, you can really freak out a high percentage of the people who read it. And the more original I got with my posts, the more people shared it.

The most popular ones were the ones that made other people upset. The people who "got it" shared those more than all the others, because it's fun to laugh at people who aren't in on the joke.

By the time I graduated high school and moved into a community college dorm, I didn't have much going on in my life besides shitposting. I'd pass out every night around three or four in the morning, wake up in the morning around ten, and sort of slog through a few intro-level college courses until I could get back to my dorm room and get online. Then I'd fuck around making shitposts until the early morning hours, and the whole cycle would repeat.

Some people shitpost on Twitter. Degenerates shitpost on 4chan. For me, it was always about Reddit. I really liked all the most extreme subreddits—the ones that were always flirting with getting banned. r/LateStageCapitalism, r/DonJr2028, r/conspiracy. These are the kinds of places where really innovative shitposting was being perfected.

People with extreme or "alternative" belief systems and ideologies tend to be more creative than regular Joes. And some of them are also much easier to fuck with. It became a game for me to dissect and discover which sorts of posts would really resonate with each sub's audience.

I still remember the first time I saw a post about reps. It was on r/conspiracy, of course. The thread was a link to a recording from this local Texas AM station radio show. The kind that real "salt of the earth" sort of people listen to. You know, hicks.

Some guy was calling in making these wild claims about a machine that could make copies of anything. Guns, booze, five-star meals.

On Reddit, people in the comments section were calling it horseshit, but of course there was that 10-20 percent segment that was totally ready to believe. I saw my opportunity here, so I started cooking up shitposts targeted at these guys. First I jumped into the comments on that thread to tell a super weird story about how I had a replicator and I was using it to make copies of my dick.

A bunch of people got a kick out of it, and there was that one little subgroup of believers going, "Hey man, what else can you copy??" So I sent those guys actual dick pictures that I'd found online. They didn't think that was too funny, and actually that got my account banned from Reddit. No problem, that happened every other week. I just made another one.

I made a few other replicator-themed shitposts over the course of the next week, and eventually people started to get tired of the gag.

But one day in early May, somebody posted a video that really changed the game. It was a post on some regional subreddit I'd never been to. I think r/Portland. The thread was called "PROOF THAT WORLD HUNGER ENDIGN MACHINES EXIST." All caps, with the word "ending" misspelled. It was created by a user named u/truthteller29. And inside the thread was a crystal-clear, super high-definition video of a guy using a replicator in his garage.

In the video, he's showing the camera this marble bust. Some Roman guy's head. And it's got all of these very distinctive chips and scuff marks on it. He holds the camera real close, so you can see the details. And then he picks up the bust and puts it inside this machine. It boops and whirs, and he's explaining that this thing can scan any object and make a perfect replica of it.

The display on the machine said "scanning complete," and u/truthteller29 starts printing out copies of the statue. No obvious cuts in the video, just one marble bust after another being pumped out of this thing.

After the guy recording the video prints out about five of them, he pans over each of them with the camera again, zooming in super closely so you could see that the scuff marks and chipping were identical to the first bust. After that, he just started using the machine to print out tons and tons of apples. Like, dozens of 'em. And that was the video.

What'd you think, when you saw that?

I thought the whole thing was so fucking fake. I mean, having more than one of the same thing on the screen at once? Who hasn't seen that special effect in a movie? People on Reddit were calling the video a "deepfake," but I figured it was probably some first-year cinema school student flexing his 3D animation skills. Video magic, sure, but not evidence of a real machine that can copy anything.

Well, a lot of people disagreed with me. Once the video got posted to r/conspiracy, the gullible contingent (which is obviously a bigger-than-normal portion of the readership in any community built specifically around conspiracies) was really buying into this, speculating about it.

And then the thing that really set everyone off happened.

The video got deleted.

The whole thread was gone, in fact, along with the account of the guy who'd posted it. u/truthteller29 had completely disappeared.

That kicked the Streisand effect into full gear. Posts about the "statues and apples" video were spreading like wildfire. It actually brought a whole new wave of subscribers to r/conspiracy, and these people were obsessed with finding out what happened to the OP. I was sort of amused by the whole thing—I figured the OP had probably just gotten tired of the attention and deleted his account. But then I noticed that the story had become a sort of crossover hit with the left-wing subreddits as well as more right-wing leaning subs.

People on the communist subreddits like r/latestagecapitalism were starting to unironically speculate about whether the replicator video was real, and like, whether the capitalists had come after him, because of how dangerous a machine like that might be to "the system." I realized that there was a real opportunity to make some shitposts that would resonate with a huge number of people.

That's when I set up my subreddit: r/BastilleDayII.

Tell me about the name.

I called it r/BastilleDayII because I figured it'd be fun to meme about killing rich people. I don't know much about the French revolution, but sort of associated Bastille Day with, like, chopping rich peoples' heads off.

I set up the sub on May 15, 2027. At first it was only me posting there—I had to set the tone for what it would be. So I was making stuff like propaganda posters calling for death to the rich.

"Liberate the tools of our salvation" with photoshopped images of the rep from that r/Portland video. All totally ironic, obviously.

Because at this point, you didn't even really believe in the existence of reps, right?

Right. But enough people did. And the "Bastille Day II: Electric Boogaloo" memes started getting traction on other subreddits.

The real, OG Bastille Day takes place on July 14th. So people started joking around that "our holiday" should happen either on that exact day or a month before.

A lot of the memes started to reference June 14, 2027 as the "day of reckoning for the capitalists." People on the communist subs were calling for it ironically at first and making memes to support it, and there would always be some portion of people responding to it literally, like, "No way, violence isn't the answer!" And, on the other side, there were some people who legitimately wanted to go out and fucking slaughter the rich.

After a few days of this, the moderators of all the commie and conspiracy subs got tired of Bastille Day II memes clogging up their pages, so they started pointing people to my sub for "further discussion."

At what point did you actually start to believe in the existence of reps?

Probably only like a week before the Kobek demonstration.

The r/BastilleDayII subreddit had sort of become a hub for people with any level of interest in the reps. So all the believers were congregating there, using it to spread any evidence that reps might be real.

I started seeing new videos of actual reps in action getting uploaded. Not all of the videos looked like the original one from u/truthteller29. Different camera setups, different backgrounds. But they were showing similar sort of things. People printing out guns, ammo, cash.

At first, I dismissed these as being just more edited videos. But then I noticed that the posts were disappearing almost as quickly as they went up. That started to really freak me out, because I was the only moderator on the subreddit—supposedly the only person with the power to remove posts. And I could tell from looking at logs that the OPs weren't removing the posts themselves. Somebody else was doing it. That's when I started to think that maybe this was real. And that somebody with power didn't want anyone to know about it.

These videos were just a trickle at first. Maybe one or two per day. But in the final days leading up to the Kobek demonstration, it turned into a flood. Dozens of posts. Videos showing reps in action. And they'd all get deleted just as soon as they went up.

Other people on the subreddit had started to notice by this point, and it became a sort of sport for people to just sit there, mash refresh, and try to see how fast videos would get taken down after popping up. For everybody on r/BastilleDayII, it basically became an open secret that reps were real and the federal government had gone "full China" on deleting posts sharing evidence of them.

The craziest thing happened in the early hours in the morning of May 28th. Around 2:00 a.m., the posts stopped getting deleted. It's like, whoever had been tasked with taking them down just stopped. So for six or seven hours, these things were going bananas. People from all over the country were uploading videos of their reps in action, not just to my sub, but a ton of others, too.

For whatever reason the videos still weren't showing up on Instagram, or Twitter, or Facebook. Just Reddit, and a few of the less regulated sites.

That lasted until a little after 9:00 a.m., when James Kobek went on Good Morning America.

Kobek changed everything.

At first the other big social media sites tried to take down re-uploads of the Kobek demonstration, but there were so many that they just sort of gave up. By that evening, it had sunken in that we'd turned some sort of corner, and there was no going back. The videos started getting left up.

How quickly after that did r/BastilleDayII go from a joke to a serious place to plot organized violence?

Some changes were immediate, but it took a couple of days for the new lay of the land to really sink in.

Hundreds of thousands of new subscribers poured in. At first, there were some highly-upvoted threads from people making impassioned, articulate pleas for or against the idea of actually going through with a French Revolution-style day of action against the elites.

Obviously any posts that called for violence would be in direct violation of Reddit's policies, so the people who wanted blood quickly figured out that they needed to coat their posts with a few layers of irony, for the sake of plausible deniability in case the cops started coming. But pretty much anybody born after the year 1980 had the cultural literacy to read through the memes.

Personally, I think Bastille Day II was inevitable. By early June, there was no more denying that this thing was going to end in blood.

The blame for what happened on that day gets placed at a lot of different feet.

Sure.

You're the person who named the day and created the environment for people to organize it and plan it. What do you say to–

Whoa, I didn't create the environment. Are you kidding me? I created a subreddit. The environment that led to Bastille Day II was complicated, and it involved a lot more than just my little subreddit. All I did was shitpost.

Fair enough. But what do you say to those who argue that you could've done more to stop it?

I say go fuck yourself.

Look, you want to talk about the environment that led to Bastille Day II? It was called global capitalism, alright? It was called the post-imperial West. The era of scarcity. The pre-replicator economy. Decades of stagnant wages and pointless wars.

People who blame some asshole shitposting on a website are idiots. These people are blind. They didn't understand the world as it was before the replicators, and they don't understand it now. "Oh, if only she hadn't made that subreddit! All of it would have gone so differently, and we'd all live in harmony and jerk each other off while singing kumbaya!"

Fuck those people.

I couldn't have done a goddamned thing to stop Bastille Day II. Nobody could have.

One last question: What did you personally do on June 14, 2027?

Ha! You're keeping my name out of this book, right?

Sure, as per the terms of our agreement.

Well then. All I'll say is that June 14 was the first day in a long time that I went AFK.