And even when the spoilers get it right, there is a thin, thin line here between investigating those who have chosen to insert themselves into the public spotlight and stalking them at their home or workplace. For example, one ambitious fan found out where CBS was running the initial interviews for Survivor: Pearl Island, booked time at the hotel before CBS did, and refused to move when they wanted to buy out the hotel for the weekend. She was able to take photographs of everyone interviewed, using a long-range telephoto lens, and her photographs were used to check any names that surfaced. The community spends a great deal of time debating exactly where you draw the line.
Sometimes, spoilers really hit the jackpot during this phase. Quartz-eye showed up at the used car lot where Brian (Survivor: Thailand) worked, pretending to want to buy a car, and took pictures of him standing next to the vehicle. Once the group compared her pictures with the official publicity shots, they could see that he had lost an enormous amount of weight, and it was then clear that he had been out there in the wilds for longer than most. Someone looked on the corporate Web site for Mike Skupin (Survivor: The Australian Outback) and found a picture of him standing with a business associate, his arm in a cast, and that led the group to detect early on that there was going to be an accident. Some local Photoshop experts remained unconvinced, diagramming various ways the image could have been doctored. As it turned out, Mike fell into a fire and had to be evacuated for medical attention.
With each season, Mark Burnett, CBS, and the production team have tightened security, further closed off leaks, anticipated hackers, and made it that much harder to play the game. For Season Six, the community had been working hard trying to get names and coming up largely empty handed. They had a few confirmed names—Heidi, the gym teacher, most prominently—and some of the ones being currently proposed later turned out to be wrong. (The community places a high standard on confirming names. Only once has the community confirmed someone who did not appear in the show, and only rarely does the group discard the name of someone who turns out to be a real contestant. During this early stage, however, many names are proposed and investigated.) So, when ChillOne implied that he knew at least partial names or might be able to confirm some of the names that were already in circulation, the group went wild. Here was the breakthrough they had been waiting for, and it came only one day before the official announcement.
But ChillOne played with them, saying that he didn’t want to post inaccurate information, that they would have to wait till later in the day when he could get home and double-check his notes. Later, some would find this timing suspicious, wondering if he had access to early copies of TV Guide or USA Today accounts that would be released in a matter of hours, or if he had a source at The Early Show, where the official announcement was going to be made. Maybe he was stalling for time.
“Gated [Knowledge] Communities”
“If you are eager to share information but are hesitant to spill it all out here, I suggest contacting someone privately,” a poster suggests early in the process, nominating themselves for the task. The most sensitive personal information about the contestants doesn’t get aired on Survivor Sucks, where it could be read by anyone with Internet access. Over the first five seasons, “brain trusts,” which may be as small as twenty people or as large as a few hundred participants, had emerged as offshoots of the Survivor Sucks site. These “brain trusts” do much of their most hard-core investigation through password-protected sites. Think of these “brain trusts” as secret societies or private clubs, whose members are handpicked based on their skills and track records. Those who are left behind complain about the “brain drain,” which locks the smartest and most articulate posters behind closed doors. The brain trusts, on the other hand, argue that this closed-door vetting process protects privacy and ensures a high degree of accuracy once they do post their findings.
One question Lévy never fully addresses is the scale on which these knowledge communities may operate. At his most utopian, he imagines the whole world operating as a single knowledge culture and imagines new modes of communication that would facilitate exchange and deliberation of knowledge on this scale. At other times, he seems to recognize the need for scalable communities, especially in the first phases of an emerging knowledge culture. He has a deep-seated distrust of hierarchy of all kinds, seeing democracy as the ideology that will best enable knowledge cultures to emerge. Lévy writes, “How will we be able to process enormous masses of data on interrelated problems within a changing environment? Most likely by making use of organizational structures that favor the genuine socialization of problemsolving rather than its resolution by separate entities that are in danger of becoming competitive, swollen, outdated and isolated from real life.”10 The brain trusts represent the return of hierarchy to the knowledge culture, the attempt to create an elite that has access to information not available to the group as a whole and that demands to be trusted as arbitrators of what it is appropriate to share with the collective.
The Paradox of Reality Fiction
Spoiling is only one activity that engages Survivor fans. Like fans of many other series, Survivor fans also write and post original fiction about their favorite characters. One fan with the unlikely real name of Mario Lanza was inspired by talk about an all-star reunion series of Survivor to write three whole seasons’ worth of imaginary episodes (All Star: Greece, All Star: Alaska, and All Star: Hawaii), featuring the fictional exploits of these real-world participants. Each installment may be between forty and seventy pages long. He unfolds these episodes week by week during the off-season. The stories follow the series’s dramatic structure, yet they are even more focused on the character motivations and interactions. Lanza compares this process of getting to know the characters with police profiling: “I tried very hard to get into these people’s heads, and I thought if I am going to play this game again, what am I going to change, how would I do this, what do I know about this person, how do I know them, how do they talk, how do they think.”1 While spoiling tries to anticipate how contestants will react to the incidents depicted in the series, the fan fiction takes this one step further, trying to imagine how they would respond confronting challenges and dilemmas that they never faced in real life.
So far, this may sound like the way any other fan fiction writers approach their task—get to know your characters, remain consistent with the aired material, and speculate based on what you know about people in the real world, except in this case, the characters are people who exist in the real world. Lanza’s stories have, in fact, become very popular with the Survivor contestants themselves, who often write him letters telling him what he got right or where he misread some participant’s personality. For example, he said that Gabriel Cade (a contestant on Survivor: Marquesas) was so flattered about being included in one of the allstar stories that he wanted to get more involved in the writing process: “He’s really interested in how his character is going to come off, so he’s told me all kinds of gossip about what these people are like, what they do, who likes who, and how they get along.” As a writer of reality fiction, Lanza has been getting fan letters from his characters.
With Survivor: Greece, Lanza sought to tell the stories of those contestants who had been bumped early in the runs of their series. Because so little aired material dealt with these characters, he drew much more heavily on what he could learn by interviewing them and their teammates. After arbitrarily choosing Diane Ogden (Africa) and Gabriel Cade (Marquesas) as team leaders, he contacted them to see which players they would have selected to be on their teams. In some cases, he asked actual contestants to write their own “final words” as their fictionalized characters are voted out of the game. Chris Wright interviewed some of these players and found that they often felt Lanza’s fiction more accurately