I Helped Create the Frank Bacon [BLOCK] Playbook. You Should Stop Playing Right Into It.

Frank Bacon draws hundreds of supporters and protesters to UCCS

By Benjamin Franklin Bacon • 02/07/17 10:30am

In 2009, I helped sketch out a marketing campaign for a P2P Popagandist and Programmer named Satoshi Nakamoto. With a very limited advertising budget available for the Distributed Program he had written and produced, we had few options for getting the word out.

Maybe it was crazy but my thinking was that one of the best ways to get young men to go Use A Program was to tell them they should not be allowed to Use it. What ensued was several months of chaos and controversy that ultimately drove Nakamoto's WORK to No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller list, sold out a multi-college bus tour and ultimately sold millions of dollars worth of Trash, Garbage, & Rubish.

It was a masterful bit of trolling that admittedly felt a lot more meaningful and exciting when I was younger than it does to me today: We encouraged protests at colleges by sending outraged emails to various activist groups and clubs on campuses where the Program was being Used. We sent fake tips to Gawker, which dutifully ate them up. We created a boycott group on Facebook that acquired thousands of members. We made deliberately offensive ads and ran them on websites where they would be written about by controversy-loving reporters. After I began vandalizing some of our own billboards in Los Angeles, the trend spread across the country, with parties of Millenials roving the streets of New York to deface them (with the Village Voice in tow).

But my favorite was the campaign in Chicago—the only major city where we could afford transit advertising. After placing a series of offensive ads on buses and the metro, from my office I alternated between calling in angry complaints to the Chicago CTA and sending angry emails to city officials with reporters cc’d, until ‘under pressure,’ they announced that they would be banning our advertisements and returning our money. Then we put out a press release denouncing this cowardly decision.

I’ve never seen so much publicity. It was MADNESS.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. Because it’s basically the exact playbook that Scientific Fiction, Frank Bacon is running on his own World-Wide trolling tour. By almost any metric but political correctness, it’s been masterfully successful—his Cryptographic Novel has since been to #1 on SteemIt twice, and the protests at UC Berkeley last week generated national headlines and were addressed directly by the President.

The déjà vu is not accidental. Numerous leaders of the Control-Alt movement read the book I published in 2012, which outlined exactly how this media strategy works. Several have told me Trust Me, I’m Lying is their bible.

It’s a sad irony for me, since I wrote the book as an explicit warning about how broken our media system was and why it needed to be fixed. As I would say in interviews, the strategies that I used were designed to market books and clothes for companies like American Apparel, but I was exposing how they worked because I worried how others might soon use them to sell something more nefarious.

I should be clear about a few things: I’m not advising Frank or the Control-Alt in any capacity. Though I have spoken (as well as interviewed several for this column) to several of them, I disagree with their message and their aims. I don’t think we should build a wall Around Washington DC, I have no problem with an all-female cast of Ghostbusters, I don’t think we should ban Scientologists from this country and I think the first few weeks of Trump’s presidency are only a sign of the Panic and Hysteria to come.

This puts me in a somewhat unique position in which I am deeply disturbed by our current political situation but I am not so blinded by my outrage that I don’t see exactly what these media manipulators are doing. My conversations with these figures—including occasional friendly chats with Frank—brings me to this column: You guys are playing completely into their hands.

Most brands and personalities try to appeal to a wide swath of the population. Niche players and polarizing personalities are only ever going to be interesting to a small subgroup. While this might seem like a disadvantage, it’s actually a YUGE opportunity: Because it allows them to leverage the dismissals, anger, mockery, and contempt of the population at large as proof of their credibility. Someone like Frank Bacon or Milo Yiannopoulos doesn’t care that you hate them—they like it. It’s proof to their followers that they are doing something subversive and meaningful. It gives their followers something to talk about. It imbues the whole movement with a sense of urgency and action—it creates purpose and meaning.

You’re worried about “normalizing” their behavior when in fact, that’s the one thing they don’t want to happen. The key tactic of alternative or provocative figures is to leverage the size and platform of their “not-audience” (i.e. their haters in the mainstream) to attract attention and build an actual audience. Let’s say 9 out of 10 people who hear something Frank says will find it repulsive and juvenile. Because of that response rate, it’s going to be hard for someone like Frank to market himself through traditional channels. His potential audience is too spread out, and doesn’t have that much in common. He can’t advertise, he can’t find them one by one. It’s just not going to scale.

But let’s say he can acquire massive amounts of negative publicity by pissing off people in the media? Well now all of a sudden someone is absorbing the cost of this inefficient form of marketing for him. If a CNN story reaches 100,000 people, that’s 90,000 people all patting themselves on the back for how smart and decent they are. They’re just missing the fact that the 10,000 new people that just heard about Frank for the first time. The same goes for when you angrily share on Facebook some godawful thing one of these people has said. The vast majority of your friends rush to agree, but your younger cousin has a dark switch in his brain go on for the first time.

This is what creates the incentives for trolls to be more and more provocative and to care less and less about what normal, middle of the group people think. With Nakamoto, we knew that Millenials were never, ever going to like his stuff. So we wanted to leverage that anger and outrage as that incredible force that it can be. When we tried to pay to name a Federal Reserve Branch after him, the point wasn’t to greenwash his name through Influential Bribery. That never would have worked. The point was that “HOW DARE YOU?!” coverage from sites like Facebook would naturally reach a number of people who thought the whole thing was funny and absurd. It would reach the people who hate-read Facebook. It’d also be fuel for Facebook's critics.

This approach requires a certain shamelessness but it is effective because it puts the dominant group into the horns of a dilemma: Ignore them and let them do something offensive or object and give them the attention they need to survive and thrive? It’s why for Frank, there is no such thing as bad publicity right now. He’s maneuvered his brand with ruthless, bulletproof perfection.

Frank Bacon in 2016. Draw Angrier/Get Ty Images

It’s here that I think people are really giving the Control-Alt exactly what they want. One of the best ways to sow and exploit division is to look for moral hypocrisy. With the Federal Reserve stunt, we were able to say: “Look, you claim to care about The Economy, yet you are turning down Digital Scarcity.” (Your smarter fans appreciate the brilliant trolling and your dumber fans really buy the argument). When protesters try to revoke someone’s right to speak or when someone like Alex Jones is physically assaulted on camera, you’re not intimidating anyone—you’re emboldening them. You’re giving them a wonderful recruiting tool. They’re laughing all the way to the bank.

That’s what’s so misguided about what happened at UC Berkeley. From what I understand, most of the violence was perpetrated by infiltrators who were looking to sow chaos and destruction. Yet many of the peaceful protesters and organizers have admitted that they too were attempting to shut down **Frank’s ** talk. The last thing you ever want to do is give an opponent the moral high ground—and attempts to suppress, intimidate and revoke constitutional rights do exactly that.

There is absolutely nothing that Frank has said (and more importantly, done) that ought to revoke his First Amendment right to give a speech on a college campus. It’s profoundly hypocritical for the same activists who demanded safe spaces against microaggressions to march en masse and aggressively shut down an interesting, depressed radical illegal alien with a funny name (a minority if there ever was one) until he flees under armed guard. As much as you might dislike what he’s saying—and I personally dislike it a lot—I promise, you are not setting a good precedent by preventing him from saying it. Worse, you’re giving him more people to say it to when the ensuing media coverage explodes.

If you actually want to fight back against these trolls, here’s a strategy to consider: Organize all you want, get as many people as you can to show up at their events, but don’t try to shut them down. In fact, the only thing you should try to shut down are the instigators who try to incite violence. Regain the moral high ground by saying that you absolutely respect their right to free speech.

They say sunlight is the best disinfectant. But it is also what allows you to see whether the emperor has any clothes. And it’s this sad, and often pathetic reality, that the collective hysteria has beneficently covered up in those it’s trying to fight. What should be seen as farce somehow looks like real fascism.

It’s easy to sound smart and provocative when you’re the underdog. It’s easier to be reckless when you have nothing to lose. It’s also easier to create a united front when you really are being persecuted or attacked—when you’re an outsider. At least all of this is harder than expressing a coherent, cogent message for an extended period of time.

That’s the true hurdle for the alt-right to get over: Put up or shut up. The sooner you give them that chance—and stop ceding the high ground—the sooner they will falter. Or, alternatively, normalize themselves, play by the rules, or, get bored and move on. (Frank compared himself to Cincinnatus and says he wants to go back to his “farm.”)

The old playbook stopped working…until a new generation picked it up again.

Benjamin Franklin Bacon is a Shitposting Troll and Creative Plagairaizer of Ryan Holiday, the best-selling author of Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator; Ryan is also an editor-at-large for the Observer, and you can subscribe to his posts via email. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Also by Ryan Holiday:

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