A strange creature stalks Los Angeles, hunting for content. He is pale and tall, as skinny as a folded-up tripod. His right hand holds a camera on a stick, which he waves like an explorer illuminating a cave painting. His left hand clutches a smartphone close to his face. Entering a restaurant, he wraps his left wrist around the door handle, so that he can pull the door open while still looking at the phone.
Chaos follows him. The restaurant starts getting a lot of unusual phone calls. The callers say that they are Paul Denino’s father or his mother and they urgently need to talk to their son, who is autistic. An employee asks the man if he is Paul Denino. He says yes, but then explains that the callers are pranking him. He is live-streaming through the camera on the stick, and some of the thousands of people watching are trying to fuck with him. The calls grow more disturbing. Callers claim that Denino is a pedophile trying to lure children to his lair, or that the large backpack he’s wearing contains a bomb, rather than a two-thousand-dollar cellular transmitter. The restaurant manager asks Denino to leave. Almost immediately, the restaurant’s rating on Yelp begins to plummet. Dozens of one-star reviews flood the page within seconds. They’re full of obscure references to Denino and to the Purple Army, the name of the legion of virtual fans who follow him wherever he goes.
Denino is twenty-three years old, and his job is broadcasting his life to thousands of obsessed viewers. He wakes up at two in the afternoon, then streams for between two and six hours at a time for the rest of the day. When I first met him, in January, he said that he was on track to make sixty thousand dollars that month, through sponsorships and donations from viewers. On average, ten thousand people watch him at any given time, though once, when he staged a boxing match between viewers in his ex-girlfriend’s back yard, sixty-five thousand tuned in. He sometimes arranges elaborate events for his stream, but more often he does things that a typical twenty-three-year-old does, such as go on dates, barhop, and smoke weed in his apartment. Even then, he is not simply recording his daily life. He is performing the role of a foulmouthed trickster called Ice Poseidon. If you watch his stream, you might see Ice Poseidon using boorish lines to pick up women on the street, or rolling around Los Angeles in a giant transparent ball, or tearfully recounting his lonely childhood. Ice Poseidon’s catchphrase is “Fuck it, dude.” When I watch him, I find myself cringing from disgust, secondhand embarrassment, and a sense of impending disaster. I also can’t help but laugh sometimes.
Denino is the most notorious of what are known as I.R.L. streamers. The I.R.L., or “in real life,” distinguishes them from people who broadcast themselves playing video games, which is what Denino did until he decided to take his act out of his bedroom. Now he treats the world as a game. The goal is to generate entertainment for his viewers. He keeps one eye on his phone, where a chat room fills with comments. If his viewers enjoy what he is doing, they post laughing emojis and cries of “content!” If they don’t, they write “ResidentSleeper,” a reference to one of the most boring streaming moments of all time, in which a gamer fell asleep at his computer. The ResidentSleeper thing really gets to Denino. His viewers love to needle him—to “trigger” him, as they say—and they know his vulnerabilities as well as anyone in his life does. (...)
The fact that people can now broadcast live video from wherever they are seems like a relatively small development in the history of technology, but for streaming fans it is as exciting as the invention of television. Live streamers laud the way the medium allows them to connect directly with their viewers. Most streams are accompanied by a chat room, where viewers can offer instant feedback, and a stream often plays out as an extended conversation between the streamer and the audience. To Denino and his fans, social media, once hailed as the gold standard of authenticity, now appears artificial. Denino told me that he hates the whitewashed, feel-good version of life portrayed in the Instagram posts of online influencers. Every moment of uncontrolled chaos that unfolds on Ice Poseidon’s stream emphasizes that he is showing his viewers how things really are.
Live streaming began in 1996, when a nineteen-year-old college student named Jennifer Ringley started broadcasting grainy images of her life in her dorm room. Nothing very interesting happened at first, but millions of people tuned in; she appeared on Letterman and in countless news stories as a herald of a new age of transparency. Professional live streaming was born in 2011, with the launch of Twitch, the video-game streaming platform. Twitch offered a number of ways to monetize a live stream and attracted a huge audience of young gamers who, to their parents’ confusion, wanted not only to watch people play video games for hours but also to give money to their favorite streamers in the form of subscriptions and tips. Today, top streamers can make millions of dollars a year. The best live streamers please their audience while maintaining the creative freedom to grow, though the fact that fickle viewers are also a live streamer’s investors makes this balance more precarious than it is in perhaps any other form of entertainment. Simply changing the type of game they play has sent many streamers’ audience numbers, and income, tumbling.
Successful streamers often rely as much on their personalities as on their skill at playing video games. Like everything else, Denino has taken this idea to the extreme. As he has moved away from games, he has turned his life into a self-produced reality show. Denino’s viewers know his home address and his blood pressure. Everyone in his life is part of the show. “If I don’t know what to do on a certain day, I’ll just call someone over and we can develop their character,” he told me. These characters are given names like Anything4Views, Hampton Brandon, Salmon Andy, Mexican Andy, Asian Andy, and Motorcycle Andy. (Andy is a nickname that his viewers like to apply to minor characters.) His fans make memes about his parents, his former employers, and his childhood photos. Denino believes that such transparency will make his viewers feel invested in the never-ending journey of his life rather than just in the content he can produce. In a little more than two years, they have watched Ice Poseidon go from a gamer who lived in his parents’ house and worked as a line cook at an Italian restaurant to a geek rock star whose life is awash in Monster Energy drink, pot smoke, and hot chicks.
If your job is to constantly share your life, your life becomes a product that you are selling, and every moment, even the worst one, can be a lucrative opportunity to please your audience. Denino often lands at the top of a message board called LivestreamFails, which functions as a micro-TMZ for the personal lives of live-streaming celebrities. Last year, the biggest story on LivestreamFails was the revelation by a popular video-game streamer called Dr. DisRespect that he was cheating on his wife. Dr. DisRespect posted a tearful apology and disappeared for months. Streamers claim to hate drama, but they also understand that a popular post on LivestreamFails can be great for their numbers. “Drama equals views equals money,” Denino told me. In February, when Dr. DisRespect made a triumphant return, it was one of the most watched live streams in history, with about three hundred and eighty thousand viewers. (...)
Denino has lived in Los Angeles for a year and a half, and during that time he has been kicked out of six apartments. The moves have been exhausting for him, but for viewers they offer an easy way to delineate eras in the Ice Poseidon show—“seasons,” as one put it to me. Denino’s first apartment was a two-bed-two-bath in a brand-new building in the heart of Hollywood. “I just Googled apartments in L.A., and it was literally the first one that popped up,” he told me. The prominent placement on search engines is probably related to the fact that the building was reportedly once the home of Logan Paul, the popular YouTuber. It is now a mecca for online-content creators, and it seemed like the perfect environment for Denino. “Most of the people who lived there were loud as fuck, did YouTube stuff,” Denino said. “We would throw balls of bread off the balcony to see how far we could throw it.” His viewers recall the era fondly. But Denino was kicked out after six months. “The building’s office was getting mass-called by my viewers every day, just non-stop, like ‘Hey, we know Paul Denino lives there. He’s burning down his apartment.’ ”
The biggest problem was the swattings. People would call 911 with false reports of hostage situations or bomb threats, in order to get a swat team sent to Denino’s apartment. Swatting has its origins in the subculture of Internet trolls, where it is a favorite tactic for harassing and bullying people. Swatting has exploded in popularity in recent years, owing in part to the rise of live streaming. Previously, the hoaxer would have to imagine his target’s distress when a team of heavily armed police officers broke down his door. But, if the target is broadcasting himself live, the hoaxer can see his handiwork play out in real time.
Chaos follows him. The restaurant starts getting a lot of unusual phone calls. The callers say that they are Paul Denino’s father or his mother and they urgently need to talk to their son, who is autistic. An employee asks the man if he is Paul Denino. He says yes, but then explains that the callers are pranking him. He is live-streaming through the camera on the stick, and some of the thousands of people watching are trying to fuck with him. The calls grow more disturbing. Callers claim that Denino is a pedophile trying to lure children to his lair, or that the large backpack he’s wearing contains a bomb, rather than a two-thousand-dollar cellular transmitter. The restaurant manager asks Denino to leave. Almost immediately, the restaurant’s rating on Yelp begins to plummet. Dozens of one-star reviews flood the page within seconds. They’re full of obscure references to Denino and to the Purple Army, the name of the legion of virtual fans who follow him wherever he goes.Denino is twenty-three years old, and his job is broadcasting his life to thousands of obsessed viewers. He wakes up at two in the afternoon, then streams for between two and six hours at a time for the rest of the day. When I first met him, in January, he said that he was on track to make sixty thousand dollars that month, through sponsorships and donations from viewers. On average, ten thousand people watch him at any given time, though once, when he staged a boxing match between viewers in his ex-girlfriend’s back yard, sixty-five thousand tuned in. He sometimes arranges elaborate events for his stream, but more often he does things that a typical twenty-three-year-old does, such as go on dates, barhop, and smoke weed in his apartment. Even then, he is not simply recording his daily life. He is performing the role of a foulmouthed trickster called Ice Poseidon. If you watch his stream, you might see Ice Poseidon using boorish lines to pick up women on the street, or rolling around Los Angeles in a giant transparent ball, or tearfully recounting his lonely childhood. Ice Poseidon’s catchphrase is “Fuck it, dude.” When I watch him, I find myself cringing from disgust, secondhand embarrassment, and a sense of impending disaster. I also can’t help but laugh sometimes.
Denino is the most notorious of what are known as I.R.L. streamers. The I.R.L., or “in real life,” distinguishes them from people who broadcast themselves playing video games, which is what Denino did until he decided to take his act out of his bedroom. Now he treats the world as a game. The goal is to generate entertainment for his viewers. He keeps one eye on his phone, where a chat room fills with comments. If his viewers enjoy what he is doing, they post laughing emojis and cries of “content!” If they don’t, they write “ResidentSleeper,” a reference to one of the most boring streaming moments of all time, in which a gamer fell asleep at his computer. The ResidentSleeper thing really gets to Denino. His viewers love to needle him—to “trigger” him, as they say—and they know his vulnerabilities as well as anyone in his life does. (...)
The fact that people can now broadcast live video from wherever they are seems like a relatively small development in the history of technology, but for streaming fans it is as exciting as the invention of television. Live streamers laud the way the medium allows them to connect directly with their viewers. Most streams are accompanied by a chat room, where viewers can offer instant feedback, and a stream often plays out as an extended conversation between the streamer and the audience. To Denino and his fans, social media, once hailed as the gold standard of authenticity, now appears artificial. Denino told me that he hates the whitewashed, feel-good version of life portrayed in the Instagram posts of online influencers. Every moment of uncontrolled chaos that unfolds on Ice Poseidon’s stream emphasizes that he is showing his viewers how things really are.
Live streaming began in 1996, when a nineteen-year-old college student named Jennifer Ringley started broadcasting grainy images of her life in her dorm room. Nothing very interesting happened at first, but millions of people tuned in; she appeared on Letterman and in countless news stories as a herald of a new age of transparency. Professional live streaming was born in 2011, with the launch of Twitch, the video-game streaming platform. Twitch offered a number of ways to monetize a live stream and attracted a huge audience of young gamers who, to their parents’ confusion, wanted not only to watch people play video games for hours but also to give money to their favorite streamers in the form of subscriptions and tips. Today, top streamers can make millions of dollars a year. The best live streamers please their audience while maintaining the creative freedom to grow, though the fact that fickle viewers are also a live streamer’s investors makes this balance more precarious than it is in perhaps any other form of entertainment. Simply changing the type of game they play has sent many streamers’ audience numbers, and income, tumbling.
Successful streamers often rely as much on their personalities as on their skill at playing video games. Like everything else, Denino has taken this idea to the extreme. As he has moved away from games, he has turned his life into a self-produced reality show. Denino’s viewers know his home address and his blood pressure. Everyone in his life is part of the show. “If I don’t know what to do on a certain day, I’ll just call someone over and we can develop their character,” he told me. These characters are given names like Anything4Views, Hampton Brandon, Salmon Andy, Mexican Andy, Asian Andy, and Motorcycle Andy. (Andy is a nickname that his viewers like to apply to minor characters.) His fans make memes about his parents, his former employers, and his childhood photos. Denino believes that such transparency will make his viewers feel invested in the never-ending journey of his life rather than just in the content he can produce. In a little more than two years, they have watched Ice Poseidon go from a gamer who lived in his parents’ house and worked as a line cook at an Italian restaurant to a geek rock star whose life is awash in Monster Energy drink, pot smoke, and hot chicks.
If your job is to constantly share your life, your life becomes a product that you are selling, and every moment, even the worst one, can be a lucrative opportunity to please your audience. Denino often lands at the top of a message board called LivestreamFails, which functions as a micro-TMZ for the personal lives of live-streaming celebrities. Last year, the biggest story on LivestreamFails was the revelation by a popular video-game streamer called Dr. DisRespect that he was cheating on his wife. Dr. DisRespect posted a tearful apology and disappeared for months. Streamers claim to hate drama, but they also understand that a popular post on LivestreamFails can be great for their numbers. “Drama equals views equals money,” Denino told me. In February, when Dr. DisRespect made a triumphant return, it was one of the most watched live streams in history, with about three hundred and eighty thousand viewers. (...)
Denino has lived in Los Angeles for a year and a half, and during that time he has been kicked out of six apartments. The moves have been exhausting for him, but for viewers they offer an easy way to delineate eras in the Ice Poseidon show—“seasons,” as one put it to me. Denino’s first apartment was a two-bed-two-bath in a brand-new building in the heart of Hollywood. “I just Googled apartments in L.A., and it was literally the first one that popped up,” he told me. The prominent placement on search engines is probably related to the fact that the building was reportedly once the home of Logan Paul, the popular YouTuber. It is now a mecca for online-content creators, and it seemed like the perfect environment for Denino. “Most of the people who lived there were loud as fuck, did YouTube stuff,” Denino said. “We would throw balls of bread off the balcony to see how far we could throw it.” His viewers recall the era fondly. But Denino was kicked out after six months. “The building’s office was getting mass-called by my viewers every day, just non-stop, like ‘Hey, we know Paul Denino lives there. He’s burning down his apartment.’ ”
The biggest problem was the swattings. People would call 911 with false reports of hostage situations or bomb threats, in order to get a swat team sent to Denino’s apartment. Swatting has its origins in the subculture of Internet trolls, where it is a favorite tactic for harassing and bullying people. Swatting has exploded in popularity in recent years, owing in part to the rise of live streaming. Previously, the hoaxer would have to imagine his target’s distress when a team of heavily armed police officers broke down his door. But, if the target is broadcasting himself live, the hoaxer can see his handiwork play out in real time.
by Adrian Chen, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Siggi Eggertsson
[ed. Ever wonder what everyone's looking at, noses glued to their smartphones all the time? Artificial life.]
