The KillKrazy Affair
Well well well. Had this thing occurred but one month earlier, Kill might’ve taken a near clean sweep of the awards. Ah well, such is life.
This community has always been one that’s been interesting to me – especially from a sociological point of view. The controversies, the politics, the behind the scene wheelings and dealings, alliances between sites – it’s all there.
Kill is a rather intriguing online persona. From viewing just his website, it’s hard to gauge when he means something or not. One day he’s saying he suffers for his art. The next, it appears he’s grown sick and tired of it. The question now is, what’s gonna happen? Why would he lie – an action which would clearly cause a negative response from an evidently loyal band of followers? Yes, no doubts about it – while one party believes the “story” spun was ingenious etc., the fact remains that he did lie, and cruelly so. It wasn’t a joke. He took us for a ride. Could this be another self-inflicted experiment? Could it be he is finally closing shop and wanting to go down in flames of glory (or something to that effect)? He knew the consequences of his actions (as he said numerous times on his site, so it wasn’t something reckless or impulsive.
However one thing this did show, was how loyal Kill’s band of regulars are. Even though it’s clear that Kill is doing the site “for the love of it” and not for popularity, (more than I can say for F) the fact is that he is popular, and a great deal of the community has “embraced” his writings. Although he repeatedly refused to be classified into this site genre, he has been entwined in it by virtue of the fact that most of his audience is from this very community. He may be a relative unknown, but to those that know him, he’s far from that, and that is one thing what this episode has shown. The stuff written to and about him conveys some rather heavy, melodramatic words – faith, respect, betrayal, deceit and trust.
My feelings? Momentarily angry – not because of the lie, but because I got caught out and as a result feel gullible and strangely enough, embarrassed (I bet most of you did – even advanced warning didn’t make a difference in impact, but did show a measure of consideration on behalf of Kill). And this feeling didn’t last very long. There’s no personal offense taken. There shouldn’t be. That’s the main thing. It’ll definitely cause me to be more cautious and cynical about the truth to his future writings, which has both good and bad points, but feeling betrayed? No. Loss of trust? Yes, but not the sort of trust you would place in a real life friend – more a wariness about what he puts on his site.
One question remains – if Kill was offered $35K – would he sell out or not? From his convictions and writing, I’d say he would not. But over the Net – with only written words to go on – we’ll never know unless it actually happened. That’s the Net… mostly words.
2:40pm (GMT +10.00) tomorrow 
