Satire and Tribe
(Note: This letter from a casual acquaintance is a follow-up to my earlier blog entry about Tribe. Please do NOT read this if you are offended by explicit language. This is what you did NOT learn from Wired.)
“Look at the picture in the [Wired] article.
There are two tribe avatar chicklets side by side. The one on the left is Sybil.
“Sybil [insert randomly changing last name here] was my monster
creation one evening six months ago. The concept: Create an alternate persona, operated by the funniest and most twisted minds on tribe I had found in my first year of being a user. As part of the premise, the character would be schizophrenic. That is, she’d be totally free to post in each operator’s unique style(s) without any form of concealment whatsoever (an obvious ‘alt’ as it were.) When I created her profile, her name was Sybil Nerfherder, and that picture (of Cindy Brady) was her first and only entry.
“The first two weeks in operation, her profile would change wildly. Her name would change sometimes 4-5 times a minute, her photo album grew massively with sexy and psychotic images, and her avatar image changed as fast as her name. She would respond to the same post differently, sometimes 3-4 times. Personal Messages were where the real fun was, however…
“You see, Sybil was a Nympho. Not just any nympho, but a really sick, perverted, often predatory and perhaps dangerous nympho. For some reason, this attracted the most sick and perverse of suitors. Any time someone sent a PM, it was often responded to by at least one, if not a half-dozen operators, each approaching the person from a different angle. The suitors seemed to find this behavior extremely intoxicating. Imagine: You have the attention of several personalities! I was totally blindsided by this angle.
“Anyhow, back to the Wired article: The thing that makes this so fucking funny, is: All the tribes they list are largely satire tribes and the concept is totally lost on the journalist. In fact most of the tribes listed were created by the person owning the avatar pic listed on the right, Michael! I know Michael! personally, he’s a nut, and quite normal, he’s just really fucking funny. For example, one of his tribes is ‘Fist Me Like a Muppet!’, and it has become overrun by hardcore fisting aficionados to the point most of the trolls (myself included) are no longer in the tribe.”