Memo 38: From Nowhere
what do bushmen and a viral adult tweet have in common
You thought you were done with me - not today! That’s right, 2/2! Nothing quite like overcompensating for a lack of posting these past few months by creating a flash flood of ideas on here and giving you a mere floaty.
Winding back from the other post about finite endings, this memo is about quite the opposite - undefined beginnings. And this idea begins with a viral adult podcast clip on Twitter that came from a podcast that, well, doesn't exist.
A few weeks ago on Twitter, there was a bit of a fuss over a podcast clip of a woman from OnlyFans claiming she would satisfy her man 6-7 times a day. As it stands, the clip (at least this one that I found) has 50 million views. So it’s getting around. But where did it come from? How many OnlyFans models have podcasts, and what do they talk about for 40 minutes at a time in each episode?
I was not the only one to be intrigued by this. Ryan Broderick was as well, but took it to another level through careful research in his thorough post. He realized that the clip was staged; there is no real podcast it came from. This is unfortunately not surprising, as there is a much larger trend of people fabricating podcast-esque setups and posting them on Twitter for pseudo-ethos. Give a Gen Zer a podcast mic, and they will make like a mouse with a cookie.
I’m making a bit of a joke about it because the truth is much more dire and in line with how out of touch people can be regarding where they receive their information. I am no better; if I did not have a vested interest here or if Ryan did not do such thorough research, I would have been none the wiser.
It reminds of me the other piece of news that captivated me this week, which was about San Francisco’s bushmen from the 80s to the 2010s. The general gist is that a man would hide behind eucalyptus leaves and scare tourists in Fisherman’s Wharf as they strolled by. Simple enough, it engaged people for decades.
Unsurprisingly, there were people not too happy with them - Kamala Harris (when she was San Francisco’s DA) filed four criminal misdemeanor charges and the bushmen claimed they were assaulted many times. But the story gets crazier than that.
There were two bushmen - Bushman David Johnson, who said he came up with the idea after he saw a pile of tree limbs sticking out of a nearby dumpster; and Bushman Gregory Jacobs, who claimed the idea came to him after being scared by birds leaving bushes one late night after drinking. Johnson is credited as the “true” bushman and at one point the two worked together, but soon became enemies and said they each came up with the idea first.
Clearly one came up with the idea first; one is the true bushman. But how can the other bushman live their life, their career and their livelihood as a lie so convincingly? It takes a certain amount of conviction to make claim to something that isn’t yours, to make real something that doesn’t exist.
Bushmen playing pranks on tourists and misinformation are in two vastly different categories, of course, and these are relatively silly cases of both. However, underneath the Twitter links and leaves there is a scarier truth. When there is no true start to something we don’t fully understand, we cannot know how to stop it from happening again.
Something entertaining popping up from nothingness can appear to be just that: entertaining. But there is always a true start, whether or not it is hidden from us, and we must wonder why.
And because there is always more to consume, here are some LINKS from this past week:
Apparently, scientists use mirrors as a marker for animal self-recognition and consciousness but recently, they have hit a snafu with black-tailed wrasses who do little backflips when they see themselves in the mirror. It’s a wholly interesting piece, if not illuminating on how self-righteous we are in our ideas of what denotes self-awareness (only chimpanzees, orangutans and humans have passed the mirror mark test so far - which doesn't feel right).
Vice wrote an article on the case for making films horny again and how the anti-sex trend in the youth is concerning, which is relatively timely if not a little sporadic in its takedown here. The most concerning thing about the article is that it doesn’t touch on RS Benedict’s seminal classic, Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny.
I had no idea that Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou died recently, and this piece on her is a beautiful sweeping look at her life and ethos.