hyalineskies

Most of us have heard about YouTube star lonelygirl15 more than we’d like to have as of late: the production company behind the runaway-hit faux-vlog played into the vulnerable emotions of thousands of sympathetic teenagers, horny geeks and hopeless romantics. Even after the world of lonelygirl15 — whose actual star, New Zealander Jessica Lee Rose, is hardly lonely now — was blown wide open as a fake, the lonelygirl episodes are as popular as ever. Those behind lonelygirl15 episodes have been relentlessly producing new episodes for the hungry masses, turning YouTube into a true network for scheduled “television.”

Lonelygirl15 viewers, however, have uncovered another dimension of Bree’s saga, one hidden in plain sight of the webcam. Numerous cryptic references to old characters and offbeat-yet-unnamed occultism have circulated throughout many of the lonelygirl15 episodes, leading to what may be a much more sinister subplot. After another YouTube user, cassieiswatching, published a rather freaky video on 12 September 2006, things began to fall in line: something is seriously weird about lonelygirl15. This subplot has developed further since 12 September, with references to the perennial-favourite of occultists Aleister Crowley, a character known as Cassie, referenced rarely, as well as the main characters, tying them all together in a dark, ominous universe where the drama with Bree’s parents and her relationship with Daniel are laughable.

The spooky videos by cassieiswatching lead into a large alternate reality game known as Operation Aphid (OpAphid for short), where yet another YouTube user, OpAphid, posts cryptic videos riddled with codes and numbers. OpAphid’s videos directly overlay the lonelygirl15 saga, abstracting the surreality even further by meeting with OpAphid followers in Second Life. Even now, ARG players on both the official LG15 forums as well as ARG hub Unfiction are deep into Bree’s rabbit hole. While the rose picture on Bree’s wall was referenced by a Wired reporter as an analogy to the real name of Bree, others have paralleled it to Aleister Crowley’s wife Rose Edith Kelly, yet an additional reference to Crowley’s magickal Thelema religion. It’s the kind of weirdness you’d only expect during Halloween, and the entertainment presented by the lonelygirl15 crew rivals anything released recently by Hollywood.

While the lonelygirl15 saga is certainly interesting in itself, the really interesting part of the whole deal is that the ARG started the day lonelygirl15 was being publicised as a hoax. Oddly enough, user cassieiswatching started the lonelygirl15 alternate reality game without the support of lonelygirl15’s creators; the creators confessed last Friday to the original OpAphid plotline being fan-created and assimilated into the storyline later. OpAphid’s origins were constructed entirely by a fan, injecting a fictional reality into an open-ended, yet possibly still considered realistic at the time of the cassieiswatching posting (NYT reporter Virginia Heffernan didn’t publish her popular article until the day after the cassieiswatching video was posted.) The alternate reality game shaped by cassieiswatching simply exploited the parts of lonelygirl15 that were unexplained.

This social media exploit was something I theorised about way back in August under an entry titled The Chris Saviano effect. Now, exactly what I had outlined as a social media possibility has proven true in a mainstream case. The lonelygirl15 creators loved the ARG so much that OpAphid was made official, tying user-created, immersive content into the canon. While an actual reality wasn’t exploited in this case (as I had outlined in The Chris Saviano effect,) the concept of building questionably deceptive media around a seemingly authentic event has proved alarmingly real. It’s almost ironic that lonelygirl15, a lie in itself, got tangled into yet another created by a different user/creator. Now, in the canonical saga of Bree and Daniel, the subplots reach deep at little cost to the original filmmakers. Lonelygirl15 is now absolutely huge.

While the mainstream media is still focusing on the brilliant deception executed by Rose, Flanders, Beckett, et al., lonelygirl15 should be a social media star on a much, much greater level. It has done exactly what Hollywood and traditional video entertainment should be doing. It has set a bar for how we will perceive YouTube-based entertainment in the future. Hundreds of thousands are watching lonelygirl15 for entertainment, but anyone developing content for the social Web should be watching and learning.

The meme of a meme itself

What was originally a phenomenon stuck firmly within the realm of fan-fiction and existing alternate realities, we’ve seen social media fall susceptible to recursive deception. In a smart move, the creators of the original plot quickly reincorporated the spinoff into its own saga, showing a model of social creation and anonymous collaboration that we usually see in the software development world.

While developers have always been receptive to user suggestions, for some reason those on the creative end of media have traditionally been much more restrictive of their rights. The necessity to match every detail of the original universe’s vision is seen as inherent in the filmmaking genre: the director is responsible for an overall creative vision, visualising the production and executing it to the last detail. Regardless of what YouTube calls “directors,” the barrier between user and creator fails to exist in much of any concrete form on the Web in any medium, be it video, audio, or interactive applications.

This type of user-created content assimilation is something we should be wanting to do at any possible moment (given that the content created is of decent quality.) Be it YouTube, our own blogs, our software, or published fiction, assimilation of the branches off the developmental trunk can be extremely useful when compiled into the official “vanilla” build. This is something proven true daily in open-source software development, and now we can easily extrapolate such a model to all social content. One can copyright whatever he or she wants, but it is impossible to copyright the spread of the meme. The meme itself, plus the replies, mashups, and remixing of all sorts of data is inherently democratic and, for better or for worse, open-source to a degree. If a meme of a meme is to be created, there’s nothing a marketer, production company, or even a simple user can do about it.

Such a concept is something that has not been seen on such a massive scale within the Internet sphere, although plenty of much more minor examples have surely existed. We have witnessed numerous mashups of all sorts, from The Grey Album to thousands of API permutations outlined on blogs like Mashable!, but cassieiswatching has moved a meme into a new type of mashup, in which it is not data or algorithms that are central to the mashup, but rather is a mashup — and subsequent hijacking, not sharing — of the creative concepts outlined in the social media itself. To Hollywood or other models requiring a healthy revenue stream from viewers glued to the main plot, renegade, unofficial subplots can seem very dangerous, especially when they use concepts from a canonical plotline. In the case of cassieiswatching, attention was in some degree diverted to a darker plot that had little to do with the original lonelygirl15 saga, and with that diversion arose a lot of buzz about whether or not cassieiswatching was really part of the original vision of “The Creators.”

At this point, it could have taken a turn for the RIAA: the creators of lonelygirl15 registered the name as a trademark in August, thus giving them some rights to the name. Considering they also have a copyright by default on the plot, lonelygirl15’s creators could have DMCA’ed user cassieiswatching, removing the plotline from YouTube entirely. As memes go, however, any action would have most likely been too late: the buzz was there, and if a copyright notice was displayed in its place, many would have simply continued speculation; those that had gotten enough clues from the cassieiswatching would have been able to continue on the ARG as planned. Of course, there is no guarantee that yet another conceptual mashup like cassieiswatching would have occurred again.

Instead, the cycle came full circle: the lonelygirl15 creators simply re-mashed the cassieiswatching plotline, maturing it into OpAphid and changing their own plotlines accordingly. Instead of rejecting the influence of cassieiswatching, they embraced it publicly with much passion, stating that they “can’t wait to see what other characters and storylines you guys come up with,” and that their viewers’ “creativity and passion is truly amazing.” The cassieiswatching identity had already been established as a key player in the lonelygirl15 universe: what lonelygirl15’s creators did was a direct, social content analogy to what Google recently did with the social application YouTube. In the social media world, the distinction between platform and content is seemingly nonexistent when the ways of dealing with the intellectual property are equivalent.

While my original theory of greater social-sphere hijacking is now a reality in the wild, not limited to similar content types or architectures, the way the social mashup itself translates to this higher level leaves a ton of new information on its own. We are witnessing creative content enter a world where mashups are no longer limited to applications or social data but extrapolate to the very ideas themselves, with all user-generated content existing in a universe where the creator’s greatest competitor is their own consumer. While the details change, the concepts that define this mashup culture do not, and all information, brand identity, and resources are vulnerable ingredients for a remix. Hollywood may not get it, but Web 2.0 certainly does: try to adapt before enforcement. Try to acquire before attempting to silence. Adaptation and acquisiton are possible under meme-like conditions; the latter, more harsh tools of keeping the canon in line are excessively costly.