Reply All - #175 This Website Will Self Destruct

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

FemmeAndroid tries to do a good deed…but instead finds herself in a battle to save a place she loves.  Some helpful links:  FemmeAndroid’s Patreon for her webcomic Bodies. If you or someone you know is feeling depressed or just needing to talk to someone, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Find more resources for people outside the U.S. here . One specific resource for trans people is Trans Lifeline - a peer support and crisis hotline run and operated by trans people. To reach Trans Lifeline, call 877-565-8860. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey folks, just a warning before we get started. In part of today's story, we talk about depression and suicidal ideation. If you're feeling depressed or just want to talk to someone, know that if you're in the US, one resource you can call is the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Once again, that's 1-800-273-8255. We'll put that information as well as some other resources for people in other parts of the world in our show notes. Also, if these subjects are hard for you to listen to, you might want to skip this one. Okay, here's the show. From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm Emmanuel Jochi. There's this storyline in the TV show Lost that I've been thinking about a lot recently.

If for some reason you haven't seen Lost in, I don't know, the 11 years since it ended, I promise I am only going to spoil, no lie, just one part of one storyline from one episode for you. Anyways, Lost is the story of what happens after a bunch of plane crash survives. find themselves stranded on a tropical island. But this island turns out to be full of all kinds of supernatural, incredibly strange things. And one of the bizarre, like, hard to explain events that happens on the show, and there are many, is that one day the survivors of a plane crash discover this hatch buried deep underground in the middle of the island.

And it turns out that in that hatch, there is a man. Like, there's a man living down there, this lovable Scottish dude named Desmond. He's been down there for years, all alone, pushing a button every day in order to reset a clock that keeps counting down. Because he thinks that if he doesn't push the button and the countdown gets to zero, he'll cause this global catastrophe. He doesn't actually know this, but he won't take the risk, so he's just kind of stuck. He's a prisoner in this kind of weird private hell where he does the same thing every day to the tune of Cass Elliott's song, Make Your Own Kind of Music. He pushes the button on line faith alone, just kind of hoping, believing it has meaning, that the misery he's subjecting himself to is worth it.

I've always found the whole storyline pretty depressing. Desmond is constantly doubted, other characters on the show think he's the victim of a cruel joke, that he's been tricked, and in a way, he has. He's walked into a situation, experienced personal losses that nobody truly prepared him for, and he's completely alone with this responsibility. I've been thinking about this storyline and about lost because recently I came across somebody who, at the beginning of this pandemic, we created a low-stakes version of Desmond's horrible situation, like on purpose. They thought it might be fun, but instead it brought them face to face with the darkest parts of our society. So we're not going to be using your real name.

Yeah. Yeah. And I figured we would just end up using your, like, I guess your screen name, femme andrew. Yeah, that works. Okay, cool, cool. The person you're hearing is not Tham Android. It's an actor that we've hired on Tham Androids request to copy her voice as closely as possible. And the reason you're not hearing Femandroi's real voice or name is because she's a trans woman who transitioned during the pandemic.

And the timing is meant she just isn't out at work yet. Where I'm working, just because nobody sees my face, it's one of these things where like, especially in the past year and a half of working remotely, Transitioning can be both effective and very stealthy when you never see anybody. Fem Android does a lot of things on the internet, but one of the things she does is make video games, just for fun. For years, she's taken part in gamer competitions known as game jams, where you have to make a game from scratch in a limited amount of time. And last year, she entered a game jam called Ludumdare,

which is one of the biggest game jams in the world. Is this basically just like the big holiday like hangout for game developers and wannabe game developers around the world? Yeah, I guess in part, yes. Okay. It is a holiday for indie game devs where we all come and do a thing, but we do a thing in the antisocial way that we would,

which is making a game by ourselves. The way Ludom Dami works, right before the competition opens, you're given a theme, and then you have just 48 hours to make a game based on that theme. And in the super-panicked, frantic time that people have to make a game,

they tend to come up with some pretty creative stuff. Like, at one of the last Ludendaria game jams, the theme was two incompatible genres. And somebody created a game called Double O Boyfriend that I really love, where you run around kicking ass like James Bond, while keeping small talk going with someone you presumably just met on a dating app. Fem Android loves this kind of competition. So in April of 2020, on a Friday night, while a lot of us turned to Tiger King and Zoom happy hours,

Fem Android was looking forward to a weekend of Lusen Android. Ludumdare. So she got ready and settled in to find out what the theme would be. I sat down at my computer. I watched as the timer clock on the Ludumdari website ticked down to zero seconds. And so I just, I waited and I refreshed and I saw Keep It Alive. Keep it alive. That was the theme. Given what was happening in the world, the pandemic, now raging, keep it alive was a bit of a loaded choice for a theme, but them Android decided to give it a go. She had 48 hours to make a game, and it seemed like a good challenge. I mean, keeping yourself alive, that is the main theme of most

video games to begin with. I guess so. Like, you can recontextualize it just to mean like keeping something else alive. Hmm. And so I started thinking about like, well, what's going on right now? Like, we're all locked inside. She figured it would be cool to have people work together to keep something alive, maybe in a kind of multiplayer game or something. But that would take too much time to build. And this is when Femm Android came up with a kernel of an idea that would grow way beyond the confines of Lundemdhari. In fact, it wouldn't actually be a game at all.

I was like, I know how to make a website. And then I thought to myself, you know, I know how to make a website that breaks. I do that a lot. I can make a website die, Femmonde. Android thought. Maybe a website can be the thing that people are trying to keep alive. So she got to work and after six hours she was done. She'd made a website. A website with a beige background and a message that's tilted to the left just a few degrees just enough to make it feel like a handwritten note that's laying on a table or something. And the message read,

Hi, I'm a website. I'll be gone soon and that's okay. You can send me messages using the form below. If I go 24 hours without receiving a message, I'll permanently self-destruct, and everything will be wiped from my database. That's okay, though. Until then, let me know how you're doing. Other people will be able to read what you write, but your name or identity won't be attached to anything. So feel free to say what's on your mind. It's been a rough few months. With love, this website will self-destruct.com. Under the welcome letter, there was a message box with the words Dear Website to get you started. You could write your message in there, click send, and then it would just disappear into the void.

When somebody sent a message to the site, a giant timer at the top of the page, counting down the number of seconds in a day, would reset. If nobody wrote to the site in 24 hours, it would delete itself. The entire database of messages would be destroyed. There was also a button on the page that you could press in order to read other people's messages, and the website would let you click through as many of them as you wanted, one at a time, in a completely random order. Everything about the website is fleeting.

Like, them Android thinks the website might self-destruct before the judging for the Ludumdare Game Jam even ends. But the next morning, when she wakes up and checks the site, what she sees surprises her. From the start, there were, like, people writing personal messages for the most part. Do you remember what some of those messages were?

Or, like, the tone, like the gist of them? There was one about like an upcoming test where somebody was anxious about the results. There was one that was pretty revealing about somebody's like sexual desires in a way that felt like not provocative but like uncomfortably honest. And so at that point I was just like, well, people are using this. And that was really just where it was like, well, I think this might last a little bit. Femandro is excited to be getting messages. She keeps checking her phone, watching them rolling. At this point, there's maybe 100, but the number's growing.

Then, two days in, she gets a notification from her website server. I think I was probably downstairs in my house, just probably watching television or something. Yeah. And I think I actually got like a message to my phone that said it was taking more than 30 seconds to respond to requests. Oh, like the website was having trouble like functioning. Exactly. And I was just like, oh, this is interesting. ran upstairs to see what was going on, and I just pulled up the, kind of like my diagnostics

metrics pages, and saw like, oh, there's a lot of traffic coming through here. Turns out the website, which Fem Android built using, you know, a basic free server, is blowing up on the subreddit internet is beautiful, and it's being absolutely besieged by messages. I was getting like hundreds to thousands of posts per second of like... Wait, thousands of posts per second? Thousands of posts of, like, spam messages. Whoa. So, like, people had realized that, like, this is a forum on the internet that doesn't have any authentication

and doesn't require you to log in or anything, so we can just post whatever we want. Femandra's website is basically a troll's paradise, right? Like, you don't need an account to use it. There's no button someone can press to report you. You're completely anonymous and untraceable. And there's a website full of earnest people posting heartfelt, sincere messages you can ruin an experience for. It's like them android just threw a juicy stake into a tank full of piranhas. The trolls can't help themselves.

It's a feeding frenzy. They start with some tried and true trolling moves, Rick-rolling people, posting the scripts of the animated film The B-movie in the message box over and over again. But then the spam becomes pretty sinister. There was a mix of, like, it was like racist neo-Nazi stuff for the most part. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, there were some people who had like gone and started researching who I was a bit and got into like transphobic stuff and stuff particularly targeting me.

Oh, oh, I'm sorry. That wasn't great. Yeah. Yeah. That's really awful. And so I really was working on like getting all that off as soon as possible. Most people using the site at this moment are seeing these hateful messages in a random occasional way as they click through. But Fem Android, she has a behind-the-scenes view and can see the last hundred posts on the site at any given time,

and she's watching them all pile up one by one. The source of websites getting tons of vile content like this, say Facebook, has teams of moderators flagging content and removing it. But Fem Android doesn't have any of it. It's just her. She tries to block the hate messages by creating filters for certain vile words, banning all the awful, terrible search you can think of. But no sooner does Fem Android block a slur, then the drolls post the same band slur with slightly different spelling, doing things like swapping out S's for fives and E's for threes. It just feels like you're trying to chop off a million headsdars firing everywhere. Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

I would say to myself at like 10 o'clock, okay, I can go to sleep like once I do this one thing, and then a new thing would come up. And a new thing would come up. And the morning of the second day, I remember just looking at my wife and saying, like, I need to go to sleep because I have not slept in a very long time. These hateful, very personal, transphobic messages flowing in are really getting to Fem Android. As she's transitioned, her friends and family have been really supportive and wonderful. But these messages are making her feel suddenly insecure about some of the interactions and conversations she has to have with people in her life.

I think by reading all of that, I then, I imagine that coming from people I care about. To me, that is the weight of those messages. It isn't into seeing them in the moment. It is when on reflection I say I need to talk to my friends who I have a board game night with about this change in my life. Right. And then I think to myself, what will their response be? And then those messages that I read or like those ideas, I imagine them coming out of friends who are not like that

and have not been like that's mouth just because I'm trying to imagine the worst case scenario and if I can handle it. Fem Android starts to get some of the spam under control. But within a few days, she finds herself facing what seems to be a full-blown emergency. The sort of scenario she never could have anticipated. Somebody DM'd me with a link to this screenshot

of this website was self-destruct, and the message was 8 a.m. April 30th, Charlottesville Fashion Square, watch the news, I have a surprise. Wait, wait, so someone worked on your website, 8am, April 30th, Charlottesville Fashion Square, as in, like, Charlottesville, like, Virginia? Yes, Charlottesville Fashion Square, I have learned since, is a mall or, like, a mall complex. Watch the news, I have a surprise. So it sounds like a threat. Someone seems to be using this website will self-destruct to threaten a mall in Charlottesville, Virginia. Them Android meets a post in horror.

I was just like, well, like, I have enabled this. And the fact that it's called this website will self-destruct, like if you're seeing just a screenshot of the site that says this website will self-destruct and a threat, like the optics of that, like the people coming that are seeing this do not know what this website will self-destruct is. Oh.

So there are all these people out there who are probably potentially seeing, like, this website and thinking... Yeah, like, this is where people post threats. So I decided, you know, I'm going to call the police. I mean, back up even a second. Like, what do you say? So I first said just like there was a potential threat made on a website, and they were like, yeah, we've heard about it.

Oh, so they're just thinking, oh, another person calling to, like, give me like a tip. Yeah, and I was just like, I created the website. Following this new detail, Fem Android's phone number then gets passed over to somebody in the Cybercrimes unit. And so then he called me up and then he had the reaction of like, wait, you made the website? Oh, wait, what? Who are you? Can I? Yeah. And then he wants my information. So I gave him all the information I had. I kind of walked him through the, it was a screenshot of my website that was posted to Reddit. For a while, he thought that I ran Reddit. Oh my God.

I felt like I need to explain to you what Reddit is, what this is, and how I can't do anything about it, and how I came to be here in less than five minutes. And so I explained that I do not run Reddit, but I do run a website that doesn't store any personal information. Fortunately, Femandroids says the officer from cybercrimes eventually understands what's going on. He tells her not to worry.

He kind of just said, listen, we see a lot of things like this online. Not like a lot, a lot, but he was just like, This could mean anything. It doesn't look like what I would describe as a real actionable threat. And the mall is closed at the moment. And so he was just like, we'll see what happens, but we appreciate you calling. Thanks. Turns out the threat might not have been so threatening after all.

The presumed mall attack never came to pass. My producer, Hannah, reached out to the police about this incident, and they told her they'd taken it really seriously, actually sent officers to patrol the area and make sure everything was okay. I will say, when Hannah asked whether the cybercrimes officer thought Thamandroid ran Reddit, the police couldn't confirm. Femandroid felt relieved, but also the whole experience after wondering whether she should just, like, end the sight. It had been a really harrowing couple of weeks for her.

And a lot of people in her position would have given up and focused on other stuff, especially since for her, barring these events and the pandemic, 2020 was going pretty well. She and her wife were expecting a child, she was transitioning, and because of that, was feeling more comfortable as herself than ever before. But on this website was self-destruct.com, something was happening that would make Femandroid unable to walk back the site she'd created. We'll get into that after the break.

Welcome back to the show. Following Femandroid's scare in Charlottesville, the trolls that had haunted this website was self-destruct.com seem to get bored, and they just move on to their next meal. And as time passes in 2020, what the mandroid sees, instead of trolls swinging awful insults, are, you know, the people she made the site for coming to the site, seeing its directive, let me know how you're doing and responding. And maybe some of them are skeptical.

I know I often am with these kinds of post-secret-type websites. my reaction is usually, like, what a bunch of corny rubbish. But I have to say, as someone who is normally pretty skeptical to all these sorts of things, it does feel like something different has developed on Fem Androids now much safer website. The messages that come up are completely random, random in when they were originally posted, and random in terms of emotion. Winning through them, you're constantly being jerked from one perspective to another.

One minute, you'll plunge back into the world of high-south, school stress and anxiety. Dear website, I have a crush on someone, a really big crush on someone. Dear website, I got accepted into a big prestigious college. I should be excited, but I'm terrified and don't think I will do well. I think they made a mistake. Another minute, you're reading posts from people who've read those messages from the high schoolers, copy and pacing those posts into their own messages and responding.

They did not make a mistake, and you are going to do amazing. keep up the good work. Another click, and you feel like you've been transported into the quiet moments to someone's house after their kids have gone the bed. My kids are little, and even though I get tired and frustrated, I will never have a chance like this again to spend this kind of time with them. You're reading in Portuguese. In French, in a lot of different languages, from people all over the world,

who keep coming every day to this site, giving a little bit of themselves. and receiving a little bit of something. A little bit of hope, a little bit of sadness. Actually, a lot. Like, I mean, a lot of sadness. Some of those sadder messages are hard to read and to process. The anonymity of the website means that you'll never really know much about the people writing the sadness messages on the site.

I've often found myself wanting to respond to stuff, but I don't, because what I really want to do is reach through my computer and give that person a hug, which obviously I can't do, and I'm upset. me. But the other day, via Twitter, I did manage to find someone who's used a website to process some of their own struggles. He was really eager to talk to me about the site. Gosh, dang it. I just love this website, dude. I'm so glad you guys asked me about this. That's Seamus. He's in his 20s, lives in Tennessee, works in a warehouse. And early last year, he was looking forward to

moving out of his parents' home and kick-starting his life. Things felt like they were starting to take shape like I might have some good direction going. Then the pandemic hit. Then I was worried about losing my job. And my girlfriend broke up with me right at the start of the pandemic in March. Oh, man. I'm sorry. And completely felt unsure and not confident anymore.

Around this time, Seamus made the website an integral part of his daily ritual, made it his homepage. Seamus said he's written quite a few entries about his depression, where he was talked about how awful his day was. He actually started using it like a makeshift therapist. saying the sorts of things people often only say in therapy. I think something about anonymity. Like, it makes you want to open up a little bit more when you know there's no repercussions. Is there stuff that you've, like, thought about running on the site but haven't?

Yeah, definitely on, like, particularly bad days. Right. I've thought about getting a little too honest. about where I was at. Like in what kind of way? Suicide. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But, you know, because like I seek things out to help me.

And, you know, I've been to like, you know, subredits and chat rooms of people venting about that. And I know that, like, to an extent that can, there can be a nice helpful, like, okay, other people are going through this. But beyond a point, I think it can be a little, a little cyclical where, like, seeking it out reinforces those feelings. And so I kind of felt obligated to not send that out. and that there's enough of that. Yeah. And I should try to tip the scale positive a little bit.

And even if I wasn't feeling good, I would tell somebody what I wanted to hear in that moment is the best way I can put it. Yeah. Like what I'd like to hear someone tell me, I'll throw that out there so someone else can have it. Seamus eventually realized that what he was experiencing was serious, and he since started seeing a professional therapist.

He says he's doing much better. At a certain point, Them Android, in response to these kinds of posts, added a feeling down button, just to point people towards helplines and resources if they'd need support. But those messages are still a pretty big fixture of the site. And the timelessness of them, the fact that what you're reading may have been posted a year ago or five minutes ago, makes it so you've no idea, right, if people are getting sad or as the

pandemic's gone on, or if people are always just kind of sad. And that this is a place those people can finally express some of that. It's a sort of thing I think we've all been wondering lately, which is, has it always been this bad? Are my kids actually really unengaged in school always? Am I sick of my job? Or do I just hate the idea of work? There's a way in which the pandemic has just made everything feel more present and more real. And one person who's seen a lot of that real is from Android. When I asked her what she's made of all of these messages, the answer she gave really surprised me.

She told me that the day-to-day experience of running the site has actually made her more hopeful about things. Frankly, like, the amount of kindness kind of overwhelmed me. Oh, really? Yeah, and it's very infrequent that you get to see just like. Like, I had a page up that just had the last hundred posts and just like a recent one from the past 20 minutes or something. I don't know. I just wanted to write you.

I hope you'll never be forgotten. We all deserve a chance. And like, somebody took their time to write that and think that. And just like, I think that's a good thing. Just like, we all deserve a chance. Like, I believe that. But, like, there aren't a lot of opportunities where I can articulate that to anybody, right? Like, maybe I'll get that when my son is older where like these just human beliefs and like things that are foundational and maybe like I think to myself or tell myself, it's not something that I write down or articulate.

Back in 2020, some people across the UK actually started tweeting about Desmond from Lost, sharing a scene of him going about his daily routine. They felt connected to a situation. They were isolated, quarantining, and they'd been told that by doing so, they were saving the world. Back then, we were all making decisions that felt like referendums on what sort of person we were and who we cared about, what we were willing to do for others. And yet, here we are. Over a year later, and millions of people have died around the world. I'm a sort of person who likes to think that things happen for a reason. I'm inclined to think this year was a year in which, you know, me and a lot of the people I know went through some terrible things and grew from them. But it's pretty impossible to find any meaning in all of that death. The only real thing to say is that we failed all those people and the people that love them,

and we're still failing. I think about that a lot, but I haven't really been able to feel it or process it, which makes me feel angry at myself. I don't know. In a year that feels so hard to make meaning out of things, maybe the only thing you're left with is just a simple list of stuff you've done. It might not mean anything, but at least you know you existed. And what Them Android and the many people who use this site have done is commit to a website and each other every day.

That's not nothing. Fem Android is the creator of this website will self-destruct.com and the sci-fi webcomic bodies. Given the content of today's show, I just wanted to again mention some resources for folks that are struggling. If you're in the US, one resource you can call is the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. That's 1-800-273-8255. We'll have more resources for those of you who are outside the US in our show notes. I also wanted to mention the Trans-Lifeline, which you can access via Translifeline.org. It's a peer support and crisis hotline run and operated by trans people.

Once again, that's translifeline.org. This episode of Reply All was produced by Fia Benin, Anna Folley, and me, Hannah Chin. It was edited by Tim Howard. Additional help from the rest of the reply-all crew, Damiano Marquetti, Lisa Wang, Jessica Young, and Nora Gill. We're hosted by Emmanuel Jouchi and Alex Goldman. This episode was mixed by Rick Kwan, with fact-checking by Isabel Cristo. Music in this episode is from Breakmaster Cylinder and Mariana Romano. The actor who voiced femme android in this episode is Joni Drago.

She is a writer and a comedian based in Brooklyn, and you can find her on Twitter or on Instagram at Joni Drago. Special thanks to Connie Walker, Julie Olive, and Persevney Rose, also thanks to Caitlin Hummel, Patrick Agenito, Catherine Brewer, Cabe Bulgarelli, Nabil Chalompot, Ali Docherty, Sarah Joyce, Jorge Juste, Matt Kelly, Bobby Lord, Dalton Maine, Shaila Murdoch, Jack Murphy, Navani Otero, Ayodaleoti, Sarah Platt, Matilda Fellino, and Sammy Weathersby. Finally, we're hiring.

We're looking for a reporter and an editor to join our show. So if you'd like to apply or just read more about those jobs, go to reply all show.com slash jobs. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in two weeks.