We Are the Monkeys of Rum
What horrible affliction are you?
“I remember coming out. I did it on R+M first. I remember that being this loudmouth in an online community gave me the confidence I needed to go on an insane bender of emotional and identity alchemy, where I slapped things on my digital body and drank colorful potions and saw what happened. My friends at school would later say that I didn’t so much “come out of the closet” as much as I burned it down and danced on the ashes. A lot of the rehearsal (and fuel for the burning) came, psychically, from playing on R+M with all of you.” ~ Mani
“You’re rickets!”
It was 2001. A few short years ago, the web had emerged as a place where anyone could publish — if they knew HTML. Now, thanks to startups like Blogger and Livejournal, anybody could sign up to add to the conversation. And it was a conversation: weblogs, the term for logs of content published to the web, were social from day one. One writer would respond to another’s, each from their own site. “We blog.”
Memes began to spread like wildfire. At MIT, Cameron Marlow and Elizabeth Wood created Blogdex, a tracker that listened to all the blogs in the world and ranked the websites they linked to. It felt like a new era, not just in publishing and media but in society, where everyone could be connected to everyone else and share their ideas without gatekeepers or censorship. It was an idea so powerful that people coined ham-fingered words like “blogosphere” and “folksonomy” and it still didn’t make a dent on our optimism.
But the memes were irredeemable.
“Which Care Bear are you?” “What kind of girlfriend are you?” The web was suddenly saturated with imagination-free, sub-Cosmo personality dreck. It was a simple model: you would take a lightweight personality test, and you’d get a snippet of HTML that would allow you to paste the result on your blog. “I’m Wish Bear!” “I’m independent!” Your friends were supposed to click on the badges and take the tests themselves, because they were so enthralled with curiosity over which Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle they were. The viral loops were embryonic compared to today’s carefully honed growth hacking machines, but they were powerful. And smoosh-your-head-against-the-desk annoying.
I wrote a parody: Which horrible affliction are you? My dark, college-age sense of humor took delight in the idea of a universe of writers merrily plastering I’m ebola! on their websites. It took me a couple of hours: the simplest possible PHP script and some brightly-colored badges with wildly inappropriate taglines. I posted it on my domain, squirming.net, and — juvenile catharsis achieved — left to spend the weekend with my girlfriend in Durham.
“I found it through a friend, who showed me the horrible affliction test. R&M was super important to me and played a huge role in shaping my personality in high school. I figured out that I had a lot of opinions, and that if you want to convince someone that your opinion was valid, you’d better be prepared to defend it. It gave me some great (terrible) role models who were confident and completely okay with being themselves, and I learned that people would love you for that, even if you were totally weird.” ~ Esther
My friend Sven phoned me on Saturday. I was surprised to see his name on the screen of my Nokia brick-phone: like a bunch of my friends, he hated calling people, so it had to be important. As it turned out, Coke, our web server (all our computers were named after caffeinated drinks), was blowing up. On its first day, my horrible affliction test had received 60,000 visits. On the early web, that was big; certainly far bigger than anything else I’d ever published online.
“I put a banner ad on it for you,” he said. I hadn’t really thought about money, but I also hadn’t considered that anyone would visit. Sure, why not. Money could be good. Thanks, Sven.
Over the weekend, my stupid test got around a quarter of a million visits. It quickly rose to the top of Blogdex, and my favorite bloggers started posting it to their sites. I’d written things on the web for years, but for the first time it felt like I was on to something. Weird that it was this.
At the same time, my friends and I were glued to an online magazine called Uber, run by Ben Brown and his friends. It seemed completely fresh and new: all the attitude of zines, combined with the distribution potential of the web. I wondered if I could build something that combined this kind of writing with the kind of off-kilter meme I’d stumbled upon. Maybe I could even be as cool as Ben.
The banner ad had made decent beer money, so I gathered up Sven, who was an obsessively good system administrator, and Owen and Iain, who were the funniest writers I knew. They were three of my favorite people in the world, and it would be fun to make something together. I’d build the website and contribute writing, and at the very least, we’d get free beer.
“R&M was one of the few places I felt like I was really able to connect with people when I was going through a major depression in college. I don’t remember how I found it but once I did I basically spent all my time there.” ~ Cat
We decided Iain would name the site. He was near-genius even at his worst, but his ideas typically became more out-there creative the more sleep deprived he was. He stayed awake for two days running, writing as many names down as he could on a legal pad. Eventually, we narrowed it down to two high-quality options: Weak as Water and Rum & Monkey.
In January, 2002, we launched Rum & Monkey with Pulp Ibsen, a reimagining of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House as written by Quentin Tarantino.
NORA: But I wasn’t happy, Torvald. I’ve just had fun. You’ve always been very kind to me. Giving me all the fucking drugs and booze I wanted. But our home, our marriage, has never been anything but a playroom. I’ve been your fucking doll-wife, just as I used to be Papa’s doll-child. And the children have been my dolls. I used to think it was fun when you came in and played with me, just as they think it’s fun when I go in and play with them. That’s all our marriage has been. Fucking and playing. Playing and fucking and shooting up.
(I figured you could Tarantino any classic work of literature by adding the word “fuck” all over it.)
There was Señor Peeg, a crudely drawn and roughly scanned cartoon about a pig that I tried to update daily. There were more personality tests: Which Evil Criminal Are You? was intended as a conversation starter, and deliberately trolled the blogosphere by including some heads of state (President Truman earned a place as a possible answer for having used the atomic bomb). Three times a week, give or take, there were new articles.
It even began to attract outside writers: Gregor Stronach, who was involved in a satirical Australian newspaper called The Chaser, asked to contribute. “It really was an amazing outlet to write for,” he told me recently. “To this day I still think that a lot of my best work was published there.”
It was a fun experiment, and the site paid for itself, even if it never managed to make us enough beer money.
And then we gave our visitors a voice.
“R&M probably actually changed my life. When I was a really little kid we moved to Tennessee and I grew up in a small town. Some old lady in our city council had witnessed two guys kissing on the sidewalk and tried to put forth an ordinance to ban homosexuals from living there. We made national news for a couple days and a few celebrities commented on it and eventually someone put together Gay Day, our version of a pride parade that consisted of some bands playing in a park. Our youth pastor went down there to witness to them and came back to report on it.
‘They were all really nice and inviting,’ he told us. ‘Almost like real people.’ I immediately thought of my friends on the internet and how much they meant to me, how they listened and joked and accepted everyone. I knew I couldn’t be part of something that would treat people, my friends, as subhuman. I never went to church again.” ~ Craig
My friends and I were part of, or at least adjacent to, the alternative scene in Edinburgh: goths, hippies and poets rolled into one circle of friends, in the city that plays home to the largest arts festival in the world. This anarchic way of thinking about the world, combined with the punk aesthetic we’d borrowed from Uber.nu, found its way onto the site.
To our complete surprise, it resonated. Imagine being a teenager in small town America: you need to drive (or be driven) to get anywhere, and you’re probably surrounded by values that don’t quite feel like your own. You’re becoming your own person, but you have nowhere to experiment with your own identity. Except online.
The political backdrop to 2002 was stifling and intense. The aftermath of September 11th had created a conservative, gung-ho political atmosphere in the US, and the UK was following suit. 2% of the entire British population took to the streets to protest the war in Iraq, but we invaded anyway, based on fake evidence and weak justifications. This was the age of the PATRIOT Act and George W Bush, and xenophobic policies were arguably even more popular than they are today. Marriage equality felt like it was a long way off. To a generation of people just coming of age, it felt like the world was baked wrong — and there was our corner of the web, sticking its middle fingers up to all of it.
I installed the forum on a whim — just a vanilla phpBB installation — but a handful of people joined on its first day. One of the first members was Scott, a teenager in Seattle who became one of the community’s most beloved members.
“Scott used to snail mail me random stuff. Once it was 30 Baskin Robbins coupons. Another time, it was a hand-bound story called ‘The Circus Elephant Who Lost His Way.’” ~ Nicole
More people followed, and after the introductions and sharing of personality test results had died down, conversation inevitably became more serious. It turned out that the kids who had been attracted to our site were opinionated, sharp, and smart. They had a lot to say about politics, their communities, and the state of the world.
Unfortunately, alongside these smart, disaffected kids who would become the backbone of our community, we attracted conservative trolls who objected to just about everything. Our memes were wrong; our articles were inflammatory; the discussions needed to be shut down. In particular, adult libertarians started joining in droves, often from government IP addresses, apparently intent on personally insulting teenagers.
Often, it raged over the line into abuse. As the Guardian wrote recently:
Online harassment might feel like a recent issue, but it’s an enduring problem with 45 years of history. In 1984, 13 years after the invention of email, the social psychologist Sara Kiesler found computer manuals lamenting people’s terrible behaviour online. In the 1980s subscribers on The WELL, an early internet forum, developed block lists to ignore abusive messages.
These idiots were terrible, and they threatened to destroy our proto-community. We quickly realized we had to take firm hold, and lead by example. We created two equal and opposite forum areas: Random Spleen, where just about any topic was more or less acceptable, and Serious Debate, which contained our version of a code of conduct that eventually colored discussion across the whole site:
Owen wrote on July 23, 2002 at 3pm:Having had a number of complaints about idiotic posts, personal attacks and the like, from now on this forum is going to be moderated much more strictly. Offenders will be warned, or banned, depending how seriously they breach the rules. Send a private message or use the contact page to tell me, Ben or Iain if you think you’ve been treated unfairly. To recap from the Terms and Conditions (if you haven’t read them, go and do so now):Use the English language to the best of your ability. That includes at least trying to use the correct spelling for your region, and using easily understandable punctuation. If we see you speaking in 1337, or writing “hey peeps how r u”, we will cry.No personal attacks. This includes insults, calling people “sick”, “immature”, “adolescent”, or making any derogatory comment about another poster.Don’t post IN ALL CAPS. It makes you look like an idiot.Don’t make “me too” postings — i.e., if you’re posting, make it legible, and try to further the conversation. The occasional humorous comment is OK, as long as it’s witty, but try to make a valid point as well.This isn’t the place for internet tests, adverts or silly posts. We have forums for those; please use them.Post intelligently. Please. (This was the major complaint people had with the forum.)Let people have their say. It doesn’t matter how wrong they are; either out-argue them or live with it.And now... enjoy! Let the debates (re)commence!
We made sure that we spent lots of time in the forums ourselves, having the kinds of conversations we wanted to see. We talked to people privately, when they needed to bring something to our attention. We gave a lot of power to members of the community to moderate, giving them ownership to influence its direction.
Strikingly, some of the trolls started to play along, and for the first time in my life I found myself having in-depth, logical conversations with libertarians, conservatives, and other people who I disagreed with. Through Serious Debate, I was introduced to Ayn Rand and objectivism; bewildered by the prospect that anyone would adopt this as their ideology, I sometimes found myself struggling to obey our own rules. Still, the conversations were long, deep, and more or less reasonable. Even if people disagreed with each other, they could be friends, and even if they couldn’t be friends, they could treat each other respectfully. (And if they couldn’t treat each other respectfully, out they went.)
“I was about to graduate high school and was still incredibly timid about expressing myself, and the forums opened up a vast intellectual (and/or splenetic) field in which to frolic with like-minded weirdos. R+M had a huge influence not only on my sense of humor and ability to debate, but on my expectations of community and connection online, or anywhere. We generally treated each other well and policed our own when we crossed lines, and we formed close and caring friendships even with people we never physically met.” ~ Susan
Of course, there’s reasonable and then there’s reasonable. One morning after a heavy night of vodkaing, we woke up to discover that our friend Fred (who drew a cartoon about a walrus pirate captain) had changed every single word in every single discussion thread to “gunrock”. These aren’t the sorts of challenges every website owner faces, but they were ours.
We played with the system, to amuse ourselves and the community more than anything else: you could earn ranks as you posted, and we’d sometimes add new ones or give a custom rank to a specific person who we thought deserved one. We censored certain bad language, but only to make it more creative. One day we started playing with the emoji, years before reacji, and just like that, we had our own language:
It was a safe space. People came out on the forums, because they knew they’d be accepted. They talked about their depression and their lives; their ideas and their dreams. Sure, we kept writing articles and tests, but the discussion forum was the beating heart of the site, with a life all of its own. There was no love for tradition or entrenched values, but it was a community that cared a lot about people.
“I remember at one point realizing that a friend of mine from school had been sent to a forced corrective labor camp for children called Tranquility Bay. I remember flailing and trying to figure out what to do. In-person, I had gotten a hold of a social worker, and spent days non-stop collecting evidence. Online, I mentioned this on R+M, and Ben got involved, helping to guide me, and offering to help me set up a site to get Tranquility Bay taken down once he’d learned what it was. I was a kid. I wasn’t capable of figuring out how to martial all that generosity and drive that Ben showed me into something productive, and so nothing came of it (other than, ultimately, my friend getting out) — a fact which I think about regularly. But I remember Ben’s genuineness and involvement. He and the other Rum Monkeys weren’t just cool people — they were powerfully, genuinely, quantifiably GOOD people — dedicated to leaving at least some small part of the world better in their wake.” ~ Mani
The only possible next step was to meet up in person. I mean, at some point you have to, right?
Maybe it was a simpler time. Maybe teenagers who meet in online communities still travel across country unaccompanied to meet each other. Maybe the worries that come to mind are idiot scaremongering. Either way, bad things could definitely have happened — but they didn’t. Instead, online friendships became real ones.
Back in Edinburgh, we didn’t get to go to any meets. They were all in places like Seattle, which were too far and too expensive for us to travel to, and the site wasn’t paying us enough money to cover fares. But we watched the pictures, and read the stories, and were proud that our community was growing.
In the meantime, we rebuilt our system to let anyone publish a personality test. We would still create our own “official” ones (Which Colossal Death Robot Are You?), but our community had been such a success that we figured interesting things might happen. We had created a series of name generators — enter your real name and learn your British name, for example — and we made that open to user-generated content, too.
It wasn’t long before we were getting over a million pageviews a day, but weirdly, it didn’t translate into more forum traffic. I moved us from server-side log analysis to Google Analytics, which told us more about the demographics of our visitors. It turned out that while our discussion forum was still dominated by kids from English-speaking countries, most of our visitors were Indonesian. The user-generated content had created a new community, completely separate to the one we already had.
That same summer, I got an email from someone at a then-popular social network asking if we were for sale. I didn’t even respond, figuring it was a practical joke. I’m not sure if I would have wanted to sell it, but sometimes I think the conversation would have been fun.
Either way, that was the beginning of the end.
“Eventually I became a less socially awkward adult with a job and stuff and stopped hanging out on the forum. Then the forum was overrun by bots and died tragically. The end.” ~ Sarah
Eventually, everyone has to grow up.
Owen, Iain, Sven and I had long since graduated. I had joined and left my first real job, and started to work on a web startup called Elgg. As time went on, I had less and less time to devote to chatting in the discussion forum and writing new content. Owen, Iain and Sven found respectable, high-profile positions in respectable, high-profile organizations. The same month I finally went to my first Rum & Monkey meet in London, I flew to attend my first Elgg-themed event in Austria. (It would still take four years before Elgg was anywhere near as popular as Rum & Monkey.)
As the internet grew and Google’s algorithm became more influential, businesses realized they could become more popular by getting other sites to link to them. Sometimes that happened by asking them and establishing business relationships; more often, it happened by writing dirty spambots and spewing links into dark corners where they hoped no-one would notice them. phpBB, our forum software, became particularly susceptible — and because we were a relatively high-traffic site, we had a target painted on our back.
The forum died at the hands of spammers, and quickly.
Facebook started growing rapidly at around the same time; I have to think we were only one of thousands of communities that were driven away from discussing on their own sites by the onslaught of spam. Our safe space and community-driven platform was gone, replaced with Facebook’s content standards and homogenous timeline.
The website is now owned by a group in Florida. It’s very different now.
“My favorite memories are traveling to meetups. I traveled to London twice! I’ve eaten conveyor belt sushi on two different continents! Likewise puking in gutters!” ~ Rachel
Communities aren’t bound to place. In the modern age, you don’t lose your friends because you move away. The most amazing thing is that right now, as I’m writing this, those very same people are chatting in another window — on Facebook, of course, but now also on Slack.
We outgrew our website. My stupid pig drawings make a lot less sense to me as a 37 year old than they did fifteen years ago. There’s no need to add the word “fuck” to Ibsen. We can debate like adults in all kinds of places.
But what we do have is the shared experience of growing up and building a community together, from all over the world, and the continuing shared experience of friendship. We still meet up and share stories. We have each other’s backs. And we know what it means to grow something special that transcends time and space; something that I feel incredibly lucky to have been a part of.
“Millions of people came to visit, but a number of really special individuals found themselves a home, found themselves some great friends — and many of us also simply found ourselves. It doesn’t get any better than that.” ~ Gregor
And it all started with a stupid personality test.
