Speaker 1: Pushkin. This episode will discuss death by suicide. If you're
Speaker 1: suffering emotional distress or you're having suicidal thoughts, support is available,
Speaker 1: for example, from the nine to eight to eight Suicide
Speaker 1: and Crisis Lifeline in the US or from the Samaritans
Speaker 1: in the UK. New York City, nineteen fifty six, a
Speaker 1: young man goes into a bookstore and asks for a book,
Speaker 1: I Libertine by Frederick R. Ewing. The bookstore clerk checks
Speaker 1: their stock. It seems that they don't have a copyright now,
Speaker 1: but let's see if he can order one. He thumbs
Speaker 1: through the list of books available from the stores wholesalers. Strange,
Speaker 1: he can't see it anywhere. What's it called? I Libertine?
Speaker 1: The young man says, And who did you say was
Speaker 1: the author? Frederick R. Ewing. The clerk still can't find it.
Speaker 1: Do you happen to know the publisher? Sure, says the customer.
Speaker 1: Excels your Press. The clerk keeps looking through his lists.
Speaker 1: He can't see any mention of excels your Press. Are
Speaker 1: you sure that's the right name? The young man says
Speaker 1: he's sure. The bookstore clerk can only shrug in confusion.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, he says, the book doesn't seem to exist.
Speaker 1: The young man thanks him and walks away, looking disappointed
Speaker 1: but also strangely amused. Later, another young customer approaches the clerk.
Speaker 1: I'm looking for a book, he says. It's called I
Speaker 1: Libertine by Frederick R. Ewing. Oh, says the clerk. Someone
Speaker 1: else asked about this. I looked for it and it
Speaker 1: doesn't exist. Sure it does, the customer insists, Freddie Ewing,
Speaker 1: you know, the noted expert on eighteenth century erotica. Haven't
Speaker 1: you heard his radio series on the BBC. The clerk
Speaker 1: decides to call his wholesaler. It's very odd, says the wholesaler.
Speaker 1: We've been getting lots of calls asking for I Libertine,
Speaker 1: but we never heard of it, or Frederick are Ewing
Speaker 1: or Excelsior Press. What on earth is going on? I'm
Speaker 1: Tim Harfer, and you're listening to cautionary tales. In the
Speaker 1: middle of the night, in a building in Carteret, New Jersey,
Speaker 1: a man in his mid thirties is talking into a
Speaker 1: microphone wearing nothing but fruit of the loom jockey shorts.
Speaker 1: It's stiflingly hot because also in this building is a
Speaker 1: fifty thousand watt radio transmitter and there's no ventilation. This
Speaker 1: is not what Jeene Shepherd had in mind when he
Speaker 1: moved to New York with his young family in tow
Speaker 1: to try to crack the big time. He'd been jobbing
Speaker 1: around various provincial radio stations, starting in his Indiana hometown.
Speaker 2: Next HG. Grubbage and the news.
Speaker 1: There's no HG. Grubbage. It's Shepherd playing the character of
Speaker 1: a self important newsreader and reading out odd little snippets
Speaker 1: he's seen in the newspaper, like the zookeeper whose paycheck
Speaker 1: was eaten by an elephant, or the man in the
Speaker 1: Canary Islands who tried to cross the Atlantic in a barrel.
Speaker 2: He sailed two yards and turned over twice.
Speaker 3: Two bystanders rescued him, then two medical attendants took him
Speaker 3: to the local psychiatric hospital.
Speaker 1: Shepherd collects these stories, not quite garbage, he calls them,
Speaker 1: but grubbage mostly though he doesn't read stuff out. He
Speaker 1: just talks and talks, no script, no notes. At WKRC
Speaker 1: in Cincinnati, he's fired for too much talking. It just
Speaker 1: wants someone to read out the ads from sponsors and
Speaker 1: tee up the records. He promises to play more music
Speaker 1: on his show, so they give him his job back,
Speaker 1: but he just keeps talking and talking, so they fire
Speaker 1: him again. He moves to Philadelphia.
Speaker 2: The purpose of my program is not to please, but
Speaker 2: to begin trains of thought. I realize that many things
Speaker 2: that I do might not be good listening.
Speaker 1: Shepherd's unusual approach piques the interest of a New York
Speaker 1: radio station, who try him out on a Saturday afternoon.
Speaker 1: In just a few months, he sheds so many listeners
Speaker 1: that they shunned him into the graveyard shift from one
Speaker 1: am to five thirty every weeknight, and because the New
Speaker 1: York studio closed overnight, he has to broadcast from the
Speaker 1: sweltering transmitter room in New Jersey wearing only his underpants.
Speaker 1: Shepherd doesn't mind. He's got four and a half hours
Speaker 1: to fill every night, a prospect that might be daunting
Speaker 1: for some broadcasters, but not for Shepherd. Finally, his thoughts
Speaker 1: have room to breathe for the.
Speaker 3: Guy hits a on the piano and I went Merigs, Schmedrigs,
Speaker 3: double Beat, Nicks, Papkins all agree a pin.
Speaker 1: In the words of his biographer Eugene Bergmann, these late
Speaker 1: night shows are a slow, casual free floating association of ideas, philosophy,
Speaker 1: and amused commentary. He tells long, meandering stories about his
Speaker 1: childhood and his time in the army. That is anyone
Speaker 1: actually listening. His bosses suspect not. They worry that Shepherd's
Speaker 1: not commercial. He hates playing music or reading out ads
Speaker 1: from sponsors. They threaten to fire him. Shepherd decides to
Speaker 1: fight back.
Speaker 2: All right, gang, let's show them that there are a
Speaker 2: few klutzes out there to listen to this drivel all night.
Speaker 2: All of you go to your grocery star tomorrow and
Speaker 2: ask for Sweetheart soap.
Speaker 1: The next day, stores in New York shift a surprising
Speaker 1: amount of Sweetheart soap. There's any one problem. Sweetheart Soap
Speaker 1: isn't actually a sponsor of the radio station. Shepherd chose
Speaker 1: it at random, just to make a point. He does
Speaker 1: have listeners, a lot of listeners, and they're devoted. In
Speaker 1: the dead of the New York night, Shepherd has found
Speaker 1: his audience. He starts to ruminate on who they are,
Speaker 1: these night people.
Speaker 4: I'm talking about people with that while tossing in the
Speaker 4: soul that somehow makes them stay up till three o'clock
Speaker 4: in the morning and brood. They might get up at
Speaker 4: seven the next morning and go to work, but that
Speaker 4: ain't That isn't what their life is about, not a
Speaker 4: bit of it.
Speaker 1: Shepherd also starts to philosophize about the day people. Their
Speaker 1: life is about work. They believe in the world of
Speaker 1: the office. He says, they believe in file cabinets. They're
Speaker 1: the people in sales meetings with the light of ecclesiastical
Speaker 1: fervor in their eyes. They believe in what they're selling.
Speaker 1: Shepherd diagnoses that the day people are suffering from a
Speaker 1: malaise he.
Speaker 2: Calls creeping meatballism.
Speaker 1: By which he means conformity.
Speaker 2: The average person the day thinks in certain prescribed patterns.
Speaker 2: People that they have a genuine fear of stepping out
Speaker 2: and thinking, and they're own.
Speaker 1: Take the latest model of refrigerator that has a clever
Speaker 1: design of door that enables it to open from either side.
Speaker 1: The day people think this kind of progress is great.
Speaker 2: By George, we really are getting ahead.
Speaker 1: The night people couldn't care less about which side their
Speaker 1: fridge door opens. All they want to know is.
Speaker 2: Does it keep the stuff cold?
Speaker 1: This is the nineteen fifties. Remember Shepherd was ahead of
Speaker 1: his time. What would he have thought of fridges that
Speaker 1: connect to the internet.
Speaker 5: He needs cheese.
Speaker 1: One day, Shepherd's in a New York bookstore trying to
Speaker 1: get a copy of a book he saw at a
Speaker 1: friend's house. The bookstore clerk looks through the lists of
Speaker 1: books he can get from wholesalers and inform Shepherd that
Speaker 1: the book doesn't exist. But Shepherd knows the book exists,
Speaker 1: He's seen it.
Speaker 4: I suddenly became aware that New York is almost entirely
Speaker 4: a city that really does run on lists.
Speaker 1: The day people believe in lists. If a book's on
Speaker 1: a bestseller list, it must be good. If it's not
Speaker 1: on any list at all, it not only can't be good,
Speaker 1: it can't exist. Shepherd wants to mess with the belief
Speaker 1: in lists.
Speaker 2: What do you say tomorrow morning, each one of us
Speaker 2: walk into a bookstore and ask for a book that
Speaker 2: we know does not exist.
Speaker 1: Shepherd asks his listeners to suggest a title. He chooses
Speaker 1: I Libertine and makes up the author's bio on the fly.
Speaker 1: Frederick R. Ewing, an expert in eighteenth century erotica who's
Speaker 1: retired from the Royal Navy and broadcasts on the BB
Speaker 1: see I Libertine is going to be an explicit account
Speaker 1: of the salacious sex lives of eighteenth century London aristocrats.
Speaker 2: And by the way, mister Ewing is quite surprised at
Speaker 2: the success his book is enjoying, since it was written
Speaker 2: primarily for scholars people who want misunderstand that Satain chapters
Speaker 2: are there for the purpose of scholarly research.
Speaker 1: Listeners write in to tell Shepherd what happened when they
Speaker 1: went into stores to ask for the book. One reports
Speaker 1: a deliciously satisfying encounter with the puffed up clerk at
Speaker 1: his local bookstore who always has an opinion on every book.
Speaker 1: When the listener mentions I Libertine, the clerk knowingly strokes
Speaker 1: his beard. Ah, yes, Freddie Ewing, It's about time the
Speaker 1: public discovered him. A student tells Shepherd that he turned
Speaker 1: in an essay on I Libertine augmented with quotes from
Speaker 1: Ewing's BBC broadcasts. He got a B plus superb research.
Speaker 1: Another listener says he flagged I Libertine to the Archdiocese
Speaker 1: of Boston and got them to ban it. It seems
Speaker 1: like a perfectly judged prank, funny and harmless, but there's
Speaker 1: another angle on the story of I Libertine, which shows
Speaker 1: it in a different light, will pick up Gene Shepherd's story,
Speaker 1: but first let's meet his modern heirs after the break.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and seven, a post on the anonymous
Speaker 1: online message board four chan suggested that users send an
Speaker 1: email to the principle of their local high school. Yesterday afternoon,
Speaker 1: I came home early to find my son and his
Speaker 1: friends getting high on something they called jencom. They urinate
Speaker 1: and defecate in plastic bottles and leave them to ferment
Speaker 1: in the sun, then inhale the resulting gas. Surely not,
Speaker 1: but the email continues. I looked it up on the
Speaker 1: Internet and apparently this was something invented by African children.
Speaker 1: That's actually true. Kind of years earlier, in the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: a press agency in Zambia had reported on how how
Speaker 1: tough life was for impoverished street children. Some were seeking
Speaker 1: a temporary escape by getting high on gases from human
Speaker 1: waste that had fermented in sewer ponds. The New York
Speaker 1: Times and BBC picked up the report and included the
Speaker 1: local term for that fermented sewer water, jencom. So if
Speaker 1: an unsuspecting high school principle went to Google and typed
Speaker 1: in jencom, they would find the top results did indeed
Speaker 1: mention African children, and they came from respected news organizations
Speaker 1: that made the emails seem superficially plausible, though what it
Speaker 1: said next about jencom wasn't true at all. Now kids
Speaker 1: all over the world are doing it. My son says
Speaker 1: most of his friends at school have tried it. You
Speaker 1: would hope that most high school principals who received this
Speaker 1: email will have engaged their brains, done a bit of digging,
Speaker 1: and concluded that it was clearly a hoax. Most of
Speaker 1: their students were not fermenting their own excrement in plastic bottles.
Speaker 1: But there are always people who are ready to panic
Speaker 1: about what the kids are up to. A sheriff's office
Speaker 1: in Florida sent out a warning, complete with photos they'd
Speaker 1: found on the Internet of a teen inhaling from a
Speaker 1: plastic bottle. Someone had made jencom as a joke from
Speaker 1: flower Water and Natella. Local news stations picked up the story.
Speaker 6: Cops are calling it jenkam or the human waste drug,
Speaker 6: but parents need to be aware that kids are calling
Speaker 6: it by the more popular slang term butt hash.
Speaker 1: How could concerned parents tell if their teenager is inhaling
Speaker 1: butt hash. One news reporter earnestly advised parents to smell
Speaker 1: their children's breath at bedtime. Another asked for action from
Speaker 1: the US Drugs Enforcement Agency. An amused agent explained that
Speaker 1: it was hard for the government to regulate people's urine
Speaker 1: and feces. This all caused much hilarity for the anonymous
Speaker 1: users of four chan. As Around this time, the academic
Speaker 1: Whitney Phillips found out about four chan from her eighteen
Speaker 1: year old brother. Check it out. He told her, you'll
Speaker 1: like it. Phillips checked it out and was horrified.
Speaker 5: She recalls there was so much porn and gore, so
Speaker 5: much offensive, antagonistic humor, and general foulness.
Speaker 1: It was also confusing with its own lang language and
Speaker 1: evident in jokes. Why were people saying a hero, for example,
Speaker 1: I'll come back to that. Phillips sense that whatever was
Speaker 1: happening on four chan was interesting enough to study. She
Speaker 1: did a PhD on trolling subculture. The anonymous posters on
Speaker 1: four chan self identified as trolls, but what did the
Speaker 1: word even mean? Phillips soon discovered that there were two etymologies.
Speaker 1: For some The troll comes from Norse mythology, trolls are ugly,
Speaker 1: malevolent and stupid. They live under bridges and threatened to
Speaker 1: eat the billy goat's gruff that others insisted that trolling
Speaker 1: is a fishing term. It means dangling bait behind a
Speaker 1: fishing boat. In this sense, trolling is a skilled suit.
Speaker 1: The metaphor of dangling bait certainly seems like a better
Speaker 1: fit for the jencum email, which got several satisfying bites
Speaker 1: from school principles and local news reports. When Phillips asked
Speaker 1: the four Chan trolls what makes a troll, they told
Speaker 1: her trolls believe that nothing should be taken seriously. When
Speaker 1: she asked them what they got out of trolling, they
Speaker 1: said lolls. Lolls, says Phillips, is an extremely slippery term.
Speaker 1: Trolls themselves struggle to explain it.
Speaker 5: You know it when you see it was the most
Speaker 5: common definition I heard when conducting interviews.
Speaker 1: But Phillips has a go at defining lolls.
Speaker 5: A kind of ambiguous, unsympathetic laughter.
Speaker 1: Pant. More and more time getting to know the kind
Speaker 1: of people who post on four chan. What she found
Speaker 1: reflected the split between these two etymologies.
Speaker 5: Some trolls are remarkably reflective and intelligent, and some are
Speaker 5: remarkably not.
Speaker 1: Phillips began to understand the language and the iconography. She realized, I.
Speaker 5: Found certain forms of trolling funny, interesting, and in some
Speaker 5: cases justifiable.
Speaker 1: Rick rolling, for example, came from four chan, the practice
Speaker 1: of disguising links so you end up unexpectedly. At the
Speaker 1: YouTube video of Rick Astley singing never going to give
Speaker 1: you up, Never going to let you down, a well
Speaker 1: executed rick roll makes a point. We're tempted to click
Speaker 1: on a link against our better judgment, and Astley is
Speaker 1: our chain reward. Why Rick Astley, It's just one of
Speaker 1: those random things that caught on Like over nine thousand,
Speaker 1: originally from a melodramatically delivered and mistranslated English dub of
Speaker 1: the Japanese anime Dragon Ball.
Speaker 2: Z, It's over nine thousand.
Speaker 1: Over nine thousand took on a life of its own
Speaker 1: on four Chan as the default joke answer to any
Speaker 1: numeric question. Anyone familiar with troll subculture would immediately recognize
Speaker 1: over nine thousand. Oprah Winfrey was not familiar with troll subculture.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and eight, she was discussing peterophilia on
Speaker 1: her show, some people still weren't understanding the threat to children.
Speaker 7: She said, let me do something that was posted on
Speaker 7: our message boards from someone who claims to be a
Speaker 7: member of a known pedophile network.
Speaker 1: Are you sure about this, Oprah?
Speaker 7: His group has over nine thousand penises and they're all
Speaker 7: raping children. So I want you to know they're organized
Speaker 7: and they have systematic ways of hurting children.
Speaker 1: Over nine thousand penises became a four Chan classic, an
Speaker 1: absurdist in joke, offensive subject matter, but it also made
Speaker 1: a worthwhile point. It showed that Oprah could take some random,
Speaker 1: anonymous post on her message board and imbue it with
Speaker 1: authority as long as it fit her sensationless narrative. The
Speaker 1: researcher Whitney Phillips concludes that this kind of trolling performs
Speaker 1: a useful social function. As she writes in her book,
Speaker 1: this is why we can't have nice things.
Speaker 5: Trolls on earth the biases, hypocrisies, and deep inconsistencies that
Speaker 5: compose mainstream culture.
Speaker 1: Or put another way, trolls reveal it all sounds very
Speaker 1: much like Gene Shepherd's Night. People asking bookstores for a
Speaker 1: book they know doesn't exist. The prank revealed that some
Speaker 1: archdioceses might ban a non existent book if the title
Speaker 1: sounds a bit risque that some teachers will call research
Speaker 1: superb if it reads plausibly like it might have been
Speaker 1: superb if only the subject were real. The student who
Speaker 1: got a B plus for his essay on Frederick R.
Speaker 1: Ewing wrote to Shepherd, my whole education is probably phony.
Speaker 1: Shepherd kept up the joke for weeksjournalist who was in
Speaker 1: on it casually mentioned in his column had lunch with
Speaker 1: Freddie Ewing. Today, a listener reported that three players at
Speaker 1: a bridge party had earnestly discussed I Libertine and concluded
Speaker 1: they didn't like it. The prank revealed when people were
Speaker 1: willing to bluff an opinion about a book that was
Speaker 1: getting bars, rather than admit that they didn't know a thing.
Speaker 1: Then a publisher who was in on the joke wrote
Speaker 1: to Shepherd with a proposal, how about writing I Libertine
Speaker 1: for real? Cautionary tales will be back in a moment.
Speaker 1: When Whitney Phillips began to study four chan in two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven, the commonly used phrase a hero was
Speaker 1: one that confused her, as she discovered it traced back
Speaker 1: to a teenager who'd killed himself in two thousand and six.
Speaker 1: One of the boy's friends had posted on an online
Speaker 1: memorial page a poem mourning his loss. The poem was
Speaker 1: heartfelt but terribly written. He was such an hero to
Speaker 1: take it all away. We miss him so that you
Speaker 1: should know. It goes on with three more mentions of
Speaker 1: an hero and loving him like an brother. Someone posted
Speaker 1: the poem to four chan, where it became one of
Speaker 1: those random things that caught on. That's comprehensible. It is,
Speaker 1: after all, an terrible poem, But what happened next was
Speaker 1: truly awful. Trolls on four Chan tracked down the address
Speaker 1: of the boy who had killed himself and published his parents'
Speaker 1: phone number. The parents got prank calls, kids turned up
Speaker 1: at the boy's grave to take photos to post on
Speaker 1: four Chan. There's no worthwhile point to redeem any of this,
Speaker 1: As Whitney Phillips puts it.
Speaker 5: The trolls were either disinterested in or outright blind to
Speaker 5: the ways in which their mockery exacerbated an already traumatizing experience.
Speaker 1: The trolls of four Chan had told Whitney Phillips that
Speaker 1: they didn't take anything seriously. They were in it for
Speaker 1: the lulls. Sometimes it's true they happened to make a
Speaker 1: point while annoying or confusing or offending people, like showing
Speaker 1: up the gullibility of media when it comes to raising
Speaker 1: fears about drugs and pedophiles. But making a point wasn't
Speaker 1: the point. The lulls was the point. Whatever they revealed
Speaker 1: was just by accident. When a publisher approached Gene Shephard
Speaker 1: to write I Libertine for real, he agreed that have
Speaker 1: to rush it out while the buzz was still buzzing.
Speaker 1: So Shepherd quickly sketched an outline, and they drafted in
Speaker 1: the prolific sci fi writer Theodore Sturgeon to bash out
Speaker 1: the prose against a tight deadline. When Sturgeon fell asleep
Speaker 1: at his typewriter with only one chapter to go, the
Speaker 1: publisher's wife stepped in to finish it off. None of
Speaker 1: this sounds very promising, nor does the blurb turbulent, turgid, tempestuous.
Speaker 1: I Libertine is long out of print. But I was curious,
Speaker 1: and Oxford University's Bodily and Library has almost every book
Speaker 1: ever published in English? Did it have I Libertine, but
Speaker 1: of course in hardback and paperback editions. I requested it
Speaker 1: for the purpose of scholarly research. On the paperback cover,
Speaker 1: a dungeon, a swashbuckling hero in a tricorn hat, a
Speaker 1: woman in chains dress, ripped eyes, closed lips, sensually parted.
Speaker 1: Let's check out the pros, shall we? What happened? What happened?
Speaker 1: It was a tease, a small thing and nothing, a passatiempe,
Speaker 1: and she closing her eyes and her lips to show
Speaker 1: him some childish something in this blaze, this confiscation, arms
Speaker 1: full of mouthful of break, burst, spill, crash, silence. It's
Speaker 1: no mystery why I Libertine is out of print. What
Speaker 1: is a mystery is why Gene Shepherd thought this was
Speaker 1: a good idea. Getting people to talk about a non
Speaker 1: existent book was very funny and revealing. Actually, then to
Speaker 1: publish a book that's just shlock doesn't seem that funny
Speaker 1: or clever or revealing of anything, except perhaps that Gene
Speaker 1: Shepherd hadn't really understood why his own joke worked. So
Speaker 1: was I Libertine really as perfectly judged a prank as
Speaker 1: it seemed. Let's look again from another angle.
Speaker 3: Double Beatnicks, Pompkins, all agreed a pinch, and all these
Speaker 3: guys were sitting and they're looking at me and Jean.
Speaker 1: Shepherd's free floating late night shows won him some lifelong fans.
Speaker 1: One likens him to a jazz musician with words. Another
Speaker 1: recalls he made literature fresh, right in front of your eyes,
Speaker 1: like a guy making pizza in the window of a restaurant.
Speaker 1: While Shepherd wove his spell by night, he spent his
Speaker 1: days with a mistress. He'd come home to his wife
Speaker 1: now and then. His son recalls he'd talk his way
Speaker 1: back in with a line how it was going to
Speaker 1: be different from now on. It never was. All he
Speaker 1: seemed to want was the wife to do his ironing.
Speaker 1: Nearly half a century after Shepherd went off the airwaves,
Speaker 1: some recordings of his shows remain. To be honest, it's
Speaker 1: not always easy to reconstruct his appeal Like an hero
Speaker 1: or over nine thousand. Shepherd's catchphrases seem to have taken
Speaker 1: on such a life of their own that you probably
Speaker 1: had to be there to get them, like this excelsior, Yes,
Speaker 1: bad head. He was so fond of that one that
Speaker 1: it became the title of his biography and Excelsior Press.
Speaker 1: Any bookstore clerk who knew Shepherd would surely pick up
Speaker 1: on the clue all this Flick Lives. Flick was a
Speaker 1: character in Shepherd's meandering childhood stories. One night, Shepherd told
Speaker 1: his fans, I'll.
Speaker 2: Tell you what you want to do.
Speaker 4: Just put wherever you can and the score John at
Speaker 4: the bulletin board, and just one single line, just say
Speaker 4: Flick lives.
Speaker 8: That's all on those claire our heads on the subway,
Speaker 8: you know, or it says holy her headdress, and those
Speaker 8: you just right under there, Flick lives.
Speaker 1: The point was simply to mess with the day people.
Speaker 1: Shepherd's listeners would know why Flick Lives was suddenly everywhere.
Speaker 1: The day people would be confused, and that would be
Speaker 1: funny lulls. In his dead of night shows, Shepherd'd like
Speaker 1: to do something he called hurling invective. He'd ask his
Speaker 1: listeners to put their radio up against an open window
Speaker 1: and whisper to them to turn the volume up up,
Speaker 1: up all the way to maximum. Then he'd yell some
Speaker 1: non sensical insult.
Speaker 2: You balthy pregnantist, I'm gonna get you.
Speaker 1: The point was simply to annoy the day people by
Speaker 1: startling them awake lulls. Sometimes Shepherd would invite his listeners
Speaker 1: to hold a mill, which meant turning up at a
Speaker 1: certain place at a certain time and just milling around
Speaker 1: for a while doing nothing. Hundreds turned up to these mills.
Speaker 1: One venue Shepherd frequently chose for a mill was a
Speaker 1: gallery cafe. The owner later said, I dreaded it. The
Speaker 1: waitresses dreaded it. All these young people would come, they
Speaker 1: never ordered, they never left a tip, The regular customers
Speaker 1: would stay away. The evening was just ruined. It's not
Speaker 1: in the same league of awfulness as harassing the parents
Speaker 1: of a kid who took his own life, but still
Speaker 1: it's inconsiderate. Not that Shepherd cared. He liked the lulls.
Speaker 1: When you look at I Libertine in the light of
Speaker 1: Gene Shepherd's other work, it seems hard to imagine he
Speaker 1: thought far beyond the lulls. The point was simply to
Speaker 1: annoy and confuse the day people, to waste the time
Speaker 1: of the bookshop clerks. What it ended up revealing was
Speaker 1: just by accident. There's a lot to be said for
Speaker 1: pranks that reveal. Like jenkom Over nine thousand penises or
Speaker 1: I Libertine. But maybe it's harder than we might hope
Speaker 1: to create the conditions for those pranks to emerge. With
Speaker 1: both Gene Shepherd and four Chan, they seem to have
Speaker 1: popped up by happy accident from a wider culture that's
Speaker 1: mean and self absorbed. Soon after Whitney Phillips began to
Speaker 1: study trolling subculture, that culture began to splinter. The anonymous
Speaker 1: posters on four Chan were also collectively Anonymous capital A.
Speaker 1: As four Chan became more and more popular, new posters
Speaker 1: wanted anonymous not just to chase the lulls, but to
Speaker 1: make a point. They began a campaign against scientology, prank
Speaker 1: phone calls, denial of service attacks, gathering in person outside
Speaker 1: branches of the church, and playing Rick Astley very loudly
Speaker 1: on a loop. They embraced activism, supporting WikiLeaks, the Occupy movement,
Speaker 1: and the Arab Spring. The old Hands were appalled. One
Speaker 1: complained to Whitney Phillips, Anonymous isn't supposed to represent anything.
Speaker 1: We did stuff for lulls, not because we care what
Speaker 1: happens in the world, but that Anon was disappearing, Phillips explained.
Speaker 5: As actavist Anon grew lolls. Anon receded, suggesting that the
Speaker 5: cultural landscape has room for only one anonymous at a time.
Speaker 1: Whitney Phillips had found two types of troll, reflecting two
Speaker 1: takes on etymology, the witless ogre and the bait dangling
Speaker 1: technique that took subtlety and guile. As Anon ditched the
Speaker 1: lulls for earnest political activism, the fishing variety understanding of
Speaker 1: trolling began to fade away. One troll reflected wistfully, the
Speaker 1: real trolls from way back when are done now. Trolling
Speaker 1: is just an all encompassing term for being an ars
Speaker 1: on the Internet. Jean Shepherd was onto something with his
Speaker 1: Credo of the Night People. His critique of creeping meat ballism,
Speaker 1: thoughtless conformity is just as relevant today, and irreverent humor
Speaker 1: is still the only antidote.
Speaker 2: Once a guy starts thinking, once a guy starts laughing
Speaker 2: at the things he once thought were very real, once
Speaker 2: he starts laughing at TV commercials. Once a guy starts
Speaker 2: doing that, he's making the transition from day people to
Speaker 2: night people. And once this happens, he can never go back.
Speaker 1: But if you take nothing seriously, you throw out some
Speaker 1: things that are worth caring about, compassion, relationships. Shepherd himself
Speaker 1: never took much interest in his children. His son recalls,
Speaker 1: he was more interested in talking about himself. His daughter adds, my.
Speaker 5: Father was an ahole as a father.
Speaker 1: Shepherd left his wife and married an actress. That didn't
Speaker 1: last because his new wife's career took off and Shepherd
Speaker 1: couldn't cope.
Speaker 4: Don't ever get yourself into a situation where a woman's
Speaker 4: making more money than you are.
Speaker 1: Shepherd was a tremendously insecure guy, says someone who worked
Speaker 1: with him, very narcissistic. Even off Mike, he couldn't shut
Speaker 1: up about himself. He was a monomaniac, says another colleague.
Speaker 1: He was always on. Maybe Shepherd's problem was a lack
Speaker 1: of self awareness when he mocked the day people and
Speaker 1: the conventional way they viewed the world. An old boss
Speaker 1: recalls he would rail against the establishment, and yet he
Speaker 1: desperately wanted the acceptance of that establishment. Shepherd thought he
Speaker 1: never got the credit his genius deserved. The boss says
Speaker 1: many guys would have achieved his success and been really
Speaker 1: happy with it. Shepherd, like modern trolls, was all about
Speaker 1: the lulls, but his boss decided in the end that
Speaker 1: Shepherd was a deeply unhappy guy. Perhaps the same is
Speaker 1: true of people who choose to be an ass on
Speaker 1: the Internet. Key sources for this episode were Excelsior, You
Speaker 1: Fat Head by Eugene Berkman and This is Why We
Speaker 1: Can't Have Nice Things by Whitney Phillips. Cautionary Tales is
Speaker 1: written by me Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines,
Speaker 1: and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.
Speaker 1: The sound design and original music are the work of
Speaker 1: Pascal Wise. Benderdaff Haffrey edited the scripts. Cautionary Tales features
Speaker 1: the voice talents of Genevieve Gaunt, Melanie Guttridge, Ed Gohm,
Speaker 1: Stella Harford, Jamal Westman, and Rufus Wright. The show also
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
Speaker 1: Greta Cohne, Corin Gilliard, Fisher, benderdaff Haffrey, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan,
Speaker 1: Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production
Speaker 1: of Push Industries. If you like the show, please remember
Speaker 1: to share, rate, and review it. Really does make a
Speaker 1: difference to us, and if you want to hear it,
Speaker 1: add free and receive a bonus audio episode, video episode,
Speaker 1: and members only newsletter every month, why not join the
Speaker 1: Cautionary Club. To sign up, head to patreon dot com
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Speaker 1: o N dot com slash Cautionary Club