Lanza also wanted to preserve the show’s fundamental element of chance: “I have talked to a lot of the survivors in real life over the phone or on e-mail, and this is one of the things they consistently bring up over and over. It doesn’t matter what your plans are or how smart you are or how strong you are. So much of the game is based on luck. … I wanted that to work out the story somehow. As a writer, I didn’t want to be able to cheat.” So, as he started to write the challenges, he rolled dice to determine which team or player wins and then wrote the scene accordingly. A single roll of the dice could wipe out weeks of plotting, much as it did for the producers of the television series, and as a consequence, the stories are full of surprise twists and turns that capture something of the spirit of the series. One of his series ended with an allfemale final four, something that never happened on the air. As he explains, “That’s just the way the story happened to go.”
Perhaps because of this close interaction with the contestants, Lanza has become a sharp critic of spoiling, which he says becomes too intrusive. As he explains, “People take it way too seriously. It’s just a TV show.” Only a few minutes later, however, he adds, “Get me talking about Survivor and I will talk forever.” As they say, Survivor sucks.
Most spoilers argue that these brain trusts serve a useful purpose, but they can be paternalistic as hell. As one Suckster explained, “Everything we have is also theirs because we’re open, everything they have most definitely is not ours because members of the gated communities may or may not feel like dropping in and sharing it. They have sources we do not, and they like to hoard information, which is what the private groups are all about.” The trusts tend to dump data with no explanation about how they got it, essentially cutting the plebeians out of the process and constructing themselves as experts who are to be trusted at face value. Many of the brain trusts are rumored to have secret sources, often within the production company.
ChillOne posted everything he knew in the most broadly accessible discussion list and let the vetting take place in public view. The brain trusts were working behind closed doors to see how far they could push his intel, but ChillOne himself wanted everything to remain out in the open. Some of the brain trusts sought to discredit ChillOne, urging Sucksters not to put their full faith in what he was saying, but they wouldn’t say why. Some believed such warnings because the brain trusts had access to so much inside information; others suspected they were trying to discredit a rival.
But as of day 2, ChillOne wasn’t revealing the contestants, and the group was watching the clock tick down before the names would be publicly announced. If that wasn’t annoying enough, ChillOne closed his post with a bombshell: “Here is a little ‘teaser’ … the deaf girl is 22. I don’t know her name but, she does make it to the Final 4.” For the first time, ChillOne implied that he might even know who won the game.
By the end of day 2, ChillOne started to deliver the core of his intel and offer some hints about how he accessed it. ChillOne wanted to protect his sources, he said, so he wasn’t going to disclose much. He spent time buying people drinks at the hotel bar and asking them questions, but not too many questions since he didn’t want them to clamp down. At least some of the people he talked with spoke only Portuguese, so he had to rely on translators. In the following weeks, he was asked about the gestures they used and the tone of their voice, whether they had thick accents, and how comfortable the translator was with colloquial English. He did spell out a theory about how knowledge might have circulated back to the hotel, given that it wasn’t the “loser lodge” as some had suspected, and that none of the contestants themselves ever went there: he implied that the information had come from the “boat guides” who ferried away the contestants once they were voted off the tribe. “Since there are only a small handful of ‘boat guides’ most of them working long hours driving the S6 crews in/out of the jungle, thus, enabling them to witness the filming. I’m sure that over the 3 months, they rapped among themselves and with the help of the English-speaking staff, figured out what was going on.” ChillOne never actually said a boatman was his source. He let the spoilers draw their own conclusions, and in the weeks ahead, an enormous amount of speculation and mythology grew up around the boatman. ChillOne refused to confirm or deny any of the theories. He said he didn’t want to cloud the water by engaging in speculation. Some think he was messing with their minds.
“Here’s what I know … it’s not much,” he said with classic understatement. He knew parts of everything—the first four boots, the final four, the location, the details of contestants and their behavior, some of the highlights of the series. He knew that for the first time the tribes would be organized by gender but that they would “merge much earlier … possibly after the first 3 or 4 contestants are gone.” He knew the women would dominate the early challenges and that several of the first boots would be athletic young men who had fumbled in the competition. He knew that one of the contestants would strip down to gain an advantage. (It turns out that both Heidi and Jenna went skinny-dipping in return for chocolate and peanut butter during one of the immunity challenges.) He knew that a certain kind of local insect would be the gross food challenge. Some of what he knew, even some of what he was certain about—like the claim that the “deaf girl,” Christy, was part of the final four—turned out to be dead wrong. Some of it turned out to be so vague that it could be massaged to seem right no matter what the outcome. But the general pattern of his knowledge held true. He got the order of the first four boots wrong, but in the end, his four were among the first five folks kicked out of their tribes. He misidentified one of the final four, but Christy did make the final five. The odds of getting all of that right without inside information are astronomical.
As for the outcome, he knew, or claimed to know, that it came down to a contest between a woman who was called “Jana” or something close to it and a man who was in his twenties, had a “strong build,” and had a “tight haircut” that was combed to the side. The Oracle at Delphi spoke with greater clarity. First of all, the name “Jana” didn’t perfectly match any of the contestants, and on a season where the women’s names included Janet, Jenna, Jeanne, and Joanna, there was certainly room for confusion here. Matthew the globe-trotting restaurant designer might meet his description of the man, more or less: he certainly had a strong build and he did part his hair to the side, but he had longish hair going in and was apt to have even longer hair by the end, and he was a good deal older than twenty-six, so perhaps they were thinking about Alex the triathlon coach or Dave the rocket scientist. Before long, even the gawky nerd-boy Rob was starting to be put forward as someone who could have refined his muscle tone over a two-month stay in the rain forest. There was more than enough here to keep the community busy for the coming months, and for the most part there was enough that could support multiple theories and arguments.
Several people wanted to delegate tasks, rally the troops, and see what they all could put together before the season started. That is, they wanted to exploit the full resources of a knowledge community rather than put all of their trust in one previously unknown individual. One of the would-be leaders explained, “There is LOTS we need to know about them and could be compiling. Basically build a dossier on each of them. Pics from outside of Survivor, vidcaps, bios, descriptions (how friggin’ TALL are these guys, exactly?). What hints have Jiffy [Jeff Probst], MB [Mark Burnett], and others made about them, what allusions to them exist? … Eventually, more clues are going to pop out at us. Pieces will fit together. The puzzle will start to make sense. A tremendous amount can be done in this way BEFORE the show airs.” But ChillOne had refocused the spoiling community’s efforts; everything was directed toward proving or disproving his theories—and nobody was searching in other directions. Over time, ChillOne’s intel would spread outward to all of the other boards and discussion lists, until you couldn’t turn around without running into an opinion about his veracity, whether you wanted to have contact with spoilers or not. You couldn’t put forth an alternative theory without having someone dismiss you for going against what the group “already knew” from ChillOne.
Contested Information
Almost immediately, the skeptics on the listboard began to circle, because something