The footage, aka Lonelygirl15

[Tale]

William Gibson's most recent book, Pattern Recognition, involves people obsessed with "the footage", a mysterious set of film snippets making their way onto the Internet from an unknown source. It was written well before the YouTube-led video craze, which is typical of Gibson who wrote on a typewriter about "cyberspace" well before the Internet boom.

Last month, Gibson himself blogged "LONELYGIRL15 = FOOTAGE?". Well, LG15 isn't the footage, but it's a similar phenomenon gone mass market.

This weekend is crunch time for LG15, which you've probably heard of (it turned out to be a professional experiment in serialised Internet storytelling). It's been a bit boring since the creators went public, but here's a recap:

* Too-cute 16-year-old "Bree" (Lonelygirl15) posts first video blog. It's a little too well-lit and edited, but this is later explained as her friend "Daniel" (Danielbeast) helping out.
* People spend months debating whether she's real or fake. Many more videos go online. It becomes the most popular series on YouTube.
* A "tribute site" springs up at www.lonelygirl15.com, but someone discovers the domain name was registered before the first video blog appeared.
* Someone tracks down her identity as recently trained actress Jessica Lee Rose, and Danielbeast as actor Yousef Abu-Taleb. They and the creators do TV interviews, but the series continues.
* Stupid people who thought LG15 was real start hating the series. Others just continue watching.
* Plot evolves: Bree's family has a strange religion (picture of Aleister Crowley on wall, occult references to Thelema, Order of Denderah and so on). Romance between Bree and Daniel against her strict parents' wishes. Bree is being groomed for a religious ceremony. Bree ditches Daniel when he tries to come between her and the religion. Ceremony approaches ...

Clues in the videos suggested October 12, 2006 (Crowley's birthday) was a significant date and sure enough, that was the ceremony. Cue a Blair Witch-style video from Daniel as he is discovered at the ceremony and chased. And then a seemingly drugged and weak Bree with a bandage on her arm, frowning when she says she feels fine, trying to blog as normal ...

[Margalis]

That all sounds retarded. I had never even heard of this stuff until last week or so.

[Fabricated]

I wish the people who propelled this retarded LonelyGirl stuff to popularity would get hit by a truck.

[Righ]

Do you have any idea how much damage hitting that many people would do to a truck?

[Samwise]

There was a series on icebox.com somewhere around 1999 that was similar.  It was called "The Hanged Man." 

The premise was that a serial killer with a Tarot fixation planted a hidden webcam in his victims' homes, left it there for a day or two, and then killed them on camera, leaving behind a tarot card and a cryptic clue/taunt.  The show's website was part of the fiction, set up by the Hanged Man himself so that he could broadcast his work to the world, and included a live feed of the next victim's house, an archive of "highlights", and the Hanged Man's bizarre journal entries.  A link on the website led to the internal network of the fictional police department that was tracking the Hanged Man (theoretically the Hanged Man had hacked his way in so he could keep tabs on their progress), and through that we learned about the detective who was developed as the killer's frustrated archnemesis.

I thought it was pretty cool, but it definitely wasn't for everyone.  I think it was the only one of Icebox's shows that there's absolutely no trace of now.

[Krakrok]

I've always thought blogs were akin to Peter (?) and his sister posting under multiple pseudonyms to sway public opinion in the Enders Game series.

[Tale]

This is like if I mentioned my tie was made of nanobots and you said "that tie sucks". It's made of fucking nanobots.

LG15's story may be a bit deficient and now overhyped, but it's a new form of storytelling. They successfully developed a plot and an audience by inserting fictional, interacting characters among real people online. It made an unknown actress into a global star. That's so cyberpunk.

Remember the dramas in your MMOG server communities and how you followed them. The real ones, the ones exposed as fakes. People you've known on message boards whose life stories take twists. Bloggers who suddenly become the centre of attention. We've been following stories this way for years. Now it's being seen by Hollywood as a new medium for writers, actors, directors. Where does it go?

P.S. My tie just rebuilt itself to suit the fashion.

[XboxGod]

There was a series on icebox.com somewhere around 1999 that was similar.  It was called "The Hanged Man." 

The premise was that a serial killer with a Tarot fixation planted a hidden webcam in his victims' homes, left it there for a day or two, and then killed them on camera, leaving behind a tarot card and a cryptic clue/taunt.  The show's website was part of the fiction, set up by the Hanged Man himself so that he could broadcast his work to the world, and included a live feed of the next victim's house, an archive of "highlights", and the Hanged Man's bizarre journal entries.  A link on the website led to the internal network of the fictional police department that was tracking the Hanged Man (theoretically the Hanged Man had hacked his way in so he could keep tabs on their progress), and through that we learned about the detective who was developed as the killer's frustrated archnemesis.

I thought it was pretty cool, but it definitely wasn't for everyone.  I think it was the only one of Icebox's shows that there's absolutely no trace of now.

That actually sounds pretty cool.

[Mr_PeaCH]

This is like if I mentioned my tie was made of nanobots and you said "that tie sucks". It's made of fucking nanobots.

LG15's story may be a bit deficient and now overhyped, but it's a new form of storytelling. They successfully developed a plot and an audience by inserting fictional, interacting characters among real people online. It made an unknown actress into a global star. That's so cyberpunk.

I quite agree.  And William Gibson is fucking MONEY.

[WindupAtheist]

Getting worked into a lather about "the internet revolutionizing stuff" is so nineties.  Yeah, let's all get bulges in our pants over "a new form of storytelling".  Then we can go watch Hackers, before piling in the car and driving twenty miles to the largest arcade in the state to don fifteen-pound VR goggles and play some shit game.  It's not very fun, but that whole cyberspace thing is the future.

[Big Gulp]

Then we can go watch Hackers

The fact that the evil, smarmy hacker badguy also rides around on a skateboard TO THE X-TREME is dope.

[WindupAtheist]

I just get tired of hearing "TEH WORLD IS BEING REVOLUTIONIZED! OMG CYBERSPACE! GIBSON PREDICTED THIS!" everytime some nimrod films himself taking a shit and posts it on YouTube.

[Margalis]

Isn't hypertext the new form of storytelling? Non-linear, branching, interactive novels?

Remember when people could say that with a straight face?

[stray]

Video games are the "new" form of storytelling.

That's pretty obvious though, especially considering where I'm posting at. 


Lonelygirl is just an online version of Ali G (or to sound more sophisticated: Antonin Artaud). Nothing new really.

[Tale]

Mister "UO is the only game for me" derides something as "so nineties".

Gibson's books this decade are not about cyberspace. The Myspace and YouTube sales happened for different reasons to the Internet start-up boom. I guess if your life revolves around the year 1997, you can't tell the difference. Your defence is to be cynical. Make a joke about Hackers and VR goggles. That kind of thing.

Non-linear, branching, hypertext novels? I write for a living, I was writing about the Internet for magazines at that time, and that never interested me. I couldn't tell you a story that way. This way, I could. It's a direction that artistic people could go in, as opposed to engineers.

[Murgos]

I just get tired of hearing "TEH WORLD IS BEING REVOLUTIONIZED! OMG CYBERSPACE! GIBSON PREDICTED THIS!" everytime some nimrod films himself taking a shit and posts it on YouTube.

You should probably read the story in question before commenting anymore.  You really just look like a dipshit now.

Listen up chucklefuck.  Gibson wrote a story about someone putting video clips into weird corners of the internet as a form of viral marketing.  Some one just did this.  It's a relevant comparison.

Also, Neuromancer was written in 1983.  It actually IS pretty impressive how much of the modern computer scene he was able to forsee; even if you're tired of hearing about it.

[Merusk]

I'm still awaiting my wetware eyes and  Spads & Fokkers games.   I'm getting impaitent.

[Llava]

I'm not into cyberpunk that much, but I will be /all over/ wetware stuff.  Can't wait.

[WindupAtheist]

Isn't hypertext the new form of storytelling? Non-linear, branching, interactive novels?

Remember when people could say that with a straight face?

Chose Your Own Adventure books were awesome.

Listen up chucklefuck.  Gibson wrote a story about someone putting video clips into weird corners of the internet as a form of viral marketing.  Some one just did this.  It's a relevant comparison.

Also, Neuromancer was written in 1983.  It actually IS pretty impressive how much of the modern computer scene he was able to forsee; even if you're tired of hearing about it.

A month or two back I was browsing around the "Something Weird" section of my cable company's on-demand service.  Mostly it's burlesque shorts from the forties, Cold War duck-and-cover school films, shit like that.  What I happened to put on was a little ten minute promotional cartoon from the sixties about the future of telecommunications, produced by... some company, I forget.  I figured it would be worth a chuckle.

None of the names for things were right, and the producers couldn't help throwing in a little "flying car" bullshit to show that this was the future.  But it showed Dad sending faxes from the office, Junior getting his lessons from what appeared to be a little desktop PC, and Mom... well... shopping online.  I mean she had what looked like a TV remote instead of a mouse, but there she was clicking to browse through pics of dresses. In a cartoon from the fucking sixties, back when computers were still just huge beasts you'd only find at a university or military base.

So yeah, Gibson predicted a mildly clever online marketing scheme of 2006, all the way back in 2003.  Whoop-dee-fucking-doo.

[CmdrSlack]

"Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one."


Clearly, LBJ was predicting WUA's emergence.

[Murgos]

A month or two back I was browsing around the "Something Weird" section of my cable company's on-demand service.  Mostly it's burlesque shorts from the forties, Cold War duck-and-cover school films, shit like that.  What I happened to put on was a little ten minute promotional cartoon from the sixties about the future of telecommunications, produced by... some company, I forget.  I figured it would be worth a chuckle.

Did you actually just offer up an anecdote relevant to the topic as proof of why relevant anecdotes shouldn't be used as a basis for something being interesting or worthy of discussion?

Good luck with that line of argument.

[Morfiend]

I'm thinking about getting robot legs. It's a risky operation, but I think it's worth it.

[Lantyssa]

I'm thinking about getting robot legs. It's a risky operation, but I think it's worth it.

Digitigrade ones? Totally.

[Margalis]

Isn't LG15 just an online version of the Blair Witch Project?

What annoys me as an engineer is when people think something is new just because it is online.

Fiction posing as reality is new? That was Blair Witch. Our government puts out propaganda pretending to be news stories all the time. Porn stars on MySpace pretend to be average people. James Frey put out a fictional memoir amongst a mass of real ones. Men in WOW pretend to be women. "Astroturf" campaigns in message boards.

The only thing that stands out about LG15 is that it is popular, not that it is somehow new and different. I highly doubt that this is a new form of storytelling - it's a "new" form of marketing. And not new at all.

At a basic level it's not really any different than Sony Pictures inventing a movie critic to give their movies good reviews.

[Krakrok]

Speaking of interactive storytelling...

[WindupAtheist]

[HaemishM]

New forms of storytelling, same old stories.

[Krakrok]

I'll top your puny little VR helmet with the Toshiba Walmart security camera helmet.

[Kitsune]

Gibson didn't foresee anything, at least not in the technological department; he barely knew the first thing about computers when he wrote Neuromancer.  In fact, I believe he mentioned having written it on a typewriter.  He has a keen eye for social trends, which translates well into predicting what people will do with all of the technology available to them, but trying to directly link any piece of technology to Gibson requires a loooot of stretching.

[Righ]

What he said. And the picture above that? Must be a new Residents album.

[Tale]

Gibson didn't foresee anything, at least not in the technological department; he barely knew the first thing about computers when he wrote Neuromancer.  In fact, I believe he mentioned having written it on a typewriter.  He has a keen eye for social trends, which translates well into predicting what people will do with all of the technology available to them, but trying to directly link any piece of technology to Gibson requires a loooot of stretching.

Exactly right. He isn't predicting anything when he writes, he's just making sense of things and where they might be headed, via writing novels. The world just happens to go in similar directions to the concepts he thinks up - or maybe people read them and think "that would be cool" and he influences it. Neal Stephenson does the same kind of thing in a different way (although lately he writes more alternate histories than futures).

Gibson actually blogged on Friday about the typewriter you mentioned.

As anyone knows who's ever looked at any bio notes on me, Neuromancer was written on a typewriter. This is often presented as evidence of weird lotek eccentricity on my part, but in 1981 I didn't know anyone who wrote on a computer. All the hotshit professionals had the IBM Selectric, which turned out to be the endpoint of typewriter evolution. Stephen King may have already had his Wang, which was the first I heard of anyone writing fiction on a new-fangled "word processor". Me, I was writing on a  Hermes 2000. Mine was identical to the 1933 example mid-way down the page. It was built by E. Paillard & Cie. S.A., Yverdon (Suisse) with all the precision of a Swiss mechanical watch. That precision, plus the rigidity of the small but heavy steel frame, made it one memorably fine writing tool. I had inherited it from my wife's step-grandfather, who'd been a journalist. I wrote all my short stories on it, Neuromancer, the first half of Count Zero, and then some crucial doohickey broke. There were absolutely no NOS 1933 Hermes parts available, in Vancouver. I made do with a really horrible manual office machine, all I could afford at the time, until Bruce Sterling's dad gave him an Apple II and I started hearing really a lot about that. But if the 2000 (I'll bet they were thinking about the year, Gernsback Continuum style) hadn't broken, I'd probably have gotten into computers even later.

[Tale]

Isn't LG15 just an online version of the Blair Witch Project?

What annoys me as an engineer is when people think something is new just because it is online.

Fiction posing as reality is new? That was Blair Witch. Our government puts out propaganda pretending to be news stories all the time. Porn stars on MySpace pretend to be average people. James Frey put out a fictional memoir amongst a mass of real ones. Men in WOW pretend to be women. "Astroturf" campaigns in message boards.

Good post. I think it's different from Blair Witch because of the audience interaction, the creation of a persistent online property (they could sell some serious ads, probably for years), and the way the character was hatched into the online world before the story started. They inserted two artificial kids into the Myspace and Youtube generation. Their online lives existed for weeks before people really noticed them, and then their story. Zero promotion was done.

It's slow like a persistent world. It's not over in a couple of hours, it could go for years and could go in any direction, into other media and back. That's got to be of immense interest to marketers due to the ongoing exposure. Blair Witch was a movie and a talking point. LG15 seems more versatile.

[Daeven]

None of the names for things were right, and the producers couldn't help throwing in a little "flying car" bullshit to show that this was the future.  But it showed Dad sending faxes from the office, Junior getting his lessons from what appeared to be a little desktop PC, and Mom... well... shopping online.  I mean she had what looked like a TV remote instead of a mouse, but there she was clicking to browse through pics of dresses. In a cartoon from the fucking sixties, back when computers were still just huge beasts you'd only find at a university or military base.

Ook ook! Flying car bullshit!

[Roac]

People have been dreaming up what they'd like from the future since Jules Verne, Leonardo da Vinci, or even further back.  It's intelligent but not genius to figure out what one would like to do with the future, especially if you don't have to worry all that much about how to make it practical.  Flying cars show up because people think they would be cool, as does warp travel and so forth, but it's not likely.  It's not so much predicting the future as it is wishing on it, and sometimes finding out that what's possible more or less lines up with what you want. 

[Ironwood]

I always find it interesting how many imaginings of the future have actually made it into reality tho.  Even if you imagine something as fanciful and asstastic as Star Trek, the amount of stuff that has since come to pass is a little strange.