Fourth, Walsh’s experts are credentialized; they have gone through some kind of ritual that designates them as having mastered a particular domain, often having to do with formal education. While participants in a collective intelligence often feel the need to demonstrate or document how they know what they know, this is not based on a hierarchical system, and knowledge that comes from real-life experience rather than formal education may be, if anything, more highly valued here. ChillOne and the other “sources” were reinserting themselves into the process as “experts” (albeit experts by virtue of their experiences rather than any formal certification), and this threatened the more open-ended and democratic principles upon which a collective intelligence operates.
What holds a collective intelligence together is not the possession of knowledge, which is relatively static, but the social process of acquiring knowledge, which is dynamic and participatory, continually testing and reaffirming the group’s social ties. Some said that having Chill-One tell them the final four before the season had really begun, before they had a chance to get to know these contestants and make their own predictions, was like having someone sneak into their house and unwrap all of their Christmas presents before they had a chance to shake and rattle them to try to guess what might be inside.
For many others, getting the information was all that mattered. As one explained, “I thought the name of the game was spoiling. … The fun is trying to find out how the boots go down by whatever means we can, isn’t it?” Many claimed that it intensified their pleasure—being in the know about the secret—and watching the really silly guesses the uninformed were making on the official CBS Web site, where Jenna and Matthew were way down in the pack of likely winners. Others argued that this advanced information shifted the way they watched the series: “If C1 has successfully spoiled this installment of Survivor, the fun part is trying to figure out how the hell it will happen! It is the detective in us that not only wants to know what will happen, when it will happen, and how and why it happens.” ChillOne, they argued, had given them a new game to play just as they had started to tire of the old one, and, as such, they predicted he would be a “shot of adrenaline” for the whole spoiler community, keeping the franchise fresh and new for another season or two.
The question was whether, within a knowledge community, one has the right to not know—or more precisely, whether each community member should be able to set the terms of how much they want to know and when they want to know it. Lévy speaks about knowledge communities in terms of their democratic operations; yet the ability for any member to dump information out there without regard to anyone else’s preferences holds a deeply totalitarian dimension. Historically, spoiler warnings had been a device to allow people to determine whether or not they wanted to know every bit of available information. ChillOne and his allies argued that such warnings were not needed here, since the whole purpose of the group was spoiling, and yet, telling the answers cut off the game that many other group members wanted to play. In any case, this argument assumes that the information ChillOne unearthed would stay within the spoiling community.
Increasingly, spoiled information is finding its way into more and more public discussion forums, where it is picked up by mainstream news outlets. New York Times’s reporter Emily Nussbaum wrote about this phenomenon as “the End of the Surprise Ending,” suggesting that this scurry to track down all available information and the accelerated circulation of that data across many different discussion lists was making it impossible for networks to keep secrets or for consumers to watch cult shows without knowing what is going to happen next. As she explains, “Shows are becoming more like books: If you want to know what happens later on, just peek at the last page. … It’s an odd wish—for control of the story, for the chance to minimize your risk of disappointment. With spoilers in hand, a viewer can watch the show with distance, analyzing like a critic instead of being immersed like a newbie. … But the price for that privilege is that you never really get to watch a show for the first time.”18 ChillOne’s critics would suggest that the problem extends beyond this: if you want to participate in the ongoing life of this community, you have to accept this knowledge whether you want it or not. Spoiling—at least within Survivor fandom—has now moved decisively from a game of puzzle-solving to one based on revelation of sourced information.
ChillOne stumbled onto his intel by accident; now the community was sending its own reporters. Since the Survivor: Amazon season, either ChillOne or someone else from the fan community had flown to the location while shooting was occurring and brought back a good deal of information about what took place. Two seasons later, a detailed list of all of the upcoming plot twists was dumped on Ain’t It Cool News, a Web site with a traffic many, many times larger than Survivor Sucks. From there, it got picked up by Entertainment Weekly and a range of other mainstream publications. (This list turned out to be largely false, but who can say what will happen next time?) Suddenly, it was not just members of the spoiling community who had to decide whether they wanted to log on and read what someone like ChillOne had found by visiting the series location. Suddenly, every viewer and every reader of every publication ran the risk of learning more than they wanted to know.
As spoiling has moved more and more into the public eye, it has moved from a fun game that Mark Burnett occasionally liked to play with a small segment of his audience to a serious threat to the relationship he wanted to construct with the mass audience of his series. As Burnett told an interviewer, “It [spoiling] is what it is as long as it doesn’t affect ratings. There may be 5000 people on the Internet but there are some 20 million viewers and they don’t spend their time reading the Internet.”19 In and of itself, spoiling represents an extension of the pleasures built into the series. The producers want us to guess what is going to happen next, even if they never imagined teams of several thousand people working together to solve this puzzle. In the next chapter, we will see how the desire to build a community around such programs is part of a corporate strategy to ensure viewer engagement with brands and franchises. Yet, pushed to its logical extreme, spoiling becomes dangerous to those same interests, and they have begun using legal threats to try to shut it down. At the start of the eighth season, Jeff Probst told a reporter for the Edmonton Sun, “The Internet and the accessibility to information have made it very difficult to do shows like Survivor. And it wouldn’t surprise me if ultimately it led to the demise of our show at some point. Sooner or later, you cannot combat people who betray you. We have a crew of 400 people, and everybody tells somebody something. I definitely believe that. Once you spread information like that and there’s money to be made or fame to be had—‘Hey, I know something you don’t know, listen to this’—all we can do, honestly, is counter it with our own misinformation.”20 And the producers are not the only ones angered by such efforts to track down information at the source. Wezzie, who has herself participated in on-location scouting, wrote to me,
Soon (On Sept 16), the next Survivor: Vanuatu premieres. But, the boards feel different this time around. … They’re D-E-A-D. I’ve kept a location-information thread going for the past few months with discussions about the environment and cultural traditions of Vanuatu and Dan put up some great maps, but that’s about all that has been happening on the boards. The Internet fans are bored, angry and disinterested. As a result of Chill-One’s (and Snewser of SurvivorNews) boot lists, Survivor’s most avid fans, the internet community, no longer seems interested in discussing the show. ‘Spoiler free’ boards and forums have sprung up but they are lightly visited. … Hopefully, interest will pick up once the show premieres. I wonder if CBS and SEG are happy that lethargy has set into the Internet community … or worried.”21
Earlier, I described these emerging knowledge cultures as defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations. Because they are voluntary, people do not remain in communities that no longer meet their emotional or intellectual needs. Because they