A strange creature stalks Los Angeles, hunting for content. He is pale and tall, as skinny as a folded-up tripod. His right hand holds a camera on a stick, which he waves like an explorer illuminating a cave painting. His left hand clutches a smartphone close to his face. Entering a restaurant, he wraps his left wrist around the door handle, so that he can pull the door open while still looking at the phone.
Chaos follows him. The restaurant starts getting a lot of unusual phone calls. The callers say that they are Paul Denino’s father or his mother and they urgently need to talk to their son, who is autistic. An employee asks the man if he is Paul Denino. He says yes, but then explains that the callers are pranking him. He is live-streaming through the camera on the stick, and some of the thousands of people watching are trying to fuck with him. The calls grow more disturbing. Callers claim that Denino is a pedophile trying to lure children to his lair, or that the large backpack he’s wearing contains a bomb, rather than a two-thousand-dollar cellular transmitter. The restaurant manager asks Denino to leave. Almost immediately, the restaurant’s rating on Yelp begins to plummet. Dozens of one-star reviews flood the page within seconds. They’re full of obscure references to Denino and to the Purple Army, the name of the legion of virtual fans who follow him wherever he goes.
Denino is twenty-three years old, and his job is broadcasting his life to thousands of obsessed viewers. He wakes up at two in the afternoon, then streams for between two and six hours at a time for the rest of the day. When I first met him, in January, he said that he was on track to make sixty thousand dollars that month, through sponsorships and donations from viewers. On average, ten thousand people watch him at any given time, though once, when he staged a boxing match between viewers in his ex-girlfriend’s back yard, sixty-five thousand tuned in. He sometimes arranges elaborate events for his stream, but more often he does things that a typical twenty-three-year-old does, such as go on dates, barhop, and smoke weed in his apartment. Even then, he is not simply recording his daily life. He is performing the role of a foulmouthed trickster called Ice Poseidon. If you watch his stream, you might see Ice Poseidon using boorish lines to pick up women on the street, or rolling around Los Angeles in a giant transparent ball, or tearfully recounting his lonely childhood. Ice Poseidon’s catchphrase is “Fuck it, dude.” When I watch him, I find myself cringing from disgust, secondhand embarrassment, and a sense of impending disaster. I also can’t help but laugh sometimes.
Denino is the most notorious of what are known as I.R.L. streamers. The I.R.L., or “in real life,” distinguishes them from people who broadcast themselves playing video games, which is what Denino did until he decided to take his act out of his bedroom. Now he treats the world as a game. The goal is to generate entertainment for his viewers. He keeps one eye on his phone, where a chat room fills with comments. If his viewers enjoy what he is doing, they post laughing emojis and cries of “CONTENT!” If they don’t, they write “ResidentSleeper,” a reference to one of the most boring streaming moments of all time, in which a gamer fell asleep at his computer. The ResidentSleeper thing really gets to Denino. His viewers love to needle him—to “trigger” him, as they say—and they know his vulnerabilities as well as anyone in his life does.
Denino is fanatical about making his live stream the best it can be. For a while, he was into bodybuilding—his mother is a competitive power lifter—and he shared updates about his muscle gains on a bodybuilding forum, under the handle Leanice44. His automatic signature was “You are an artist, sculpt your masterpiece.”
The fact that people can now broadcast live video from wherever they are seems like a relatively small development in the history of technology, but for streaming fans it is as exciting as the invention of television. Live streamers laud the way the medium allows them to connect directly with their viewers. Most streams are accompanied by a chat room, where viewers can offer instant feedback, and a stream often plays out as an extended conversation between the streamer and the audience. To Denino and his fans, social media, once hailed as the gold standard of authenticity, now appears artificial. Denino told me that he hates the whitewashed, feel-good version of life portrayed in the Instagram posts of online influencers. Every moment of uncontrolled chaos that unfolds on Ice Poseidon’s stream emphasizes that he is showing his viewers how things really are.
Live streaming began in 1996, when a nineteen-year-old college student named Jennifer Ringley started broadcasting grainy images of her life in her dorm room. Nothing very interesting happened at first, but millions of people tuned in; she appeared on Letterman and in countless news stories as a herald of a new age of transparency. Professional live streaming was born in 2011, with the launch of Twitch, the video-game streaming platform. Twitch offered a number of ways to monetize a live stream and attracted a huge audience of young gamers who, to their parents’ confusion, wanted not only to watch people play video games for hours but also to give money to their favorite streamers in the form of subscriptions and tips. Today, top streamers can make millions of dollars a year. The best live streamers please their audience while maintaining the creative freedom to grow, though the fact that fickle viewers are also a live streamer’s investors makes this balance more precarious than it is in perhaps any other form of entertainment. Simply changing the type of game they play has sent many streamers’ audience numbers, and income, tumbling.
Successful streamers often rely as much on their personalities as on their skill at playing video games. Like everything else, Denino has taken this idea to the extreme. As he has moved away from games, he has turned his life into a self-produced reality show. Denino’s viewers know his home address and his blood pressure. Everyone in his life is part of the show. “If I don’t know what to do on a certain day, I’ll just call someone over and we can develop their character,” he told me. These characters are given names like Anything4Views, Hampton Brandon, Salmon Andy, Mexican Andy, Asian Andy, and Motorcycle Andy. (Andy is a nickname that his viewers like to apply to minor characters.) His fans make memes about his parents, his former employers, and his childhood photos. Denino believes that such transparency will make his viewers feel invested in the never-ending journey of his life rather than just in the content he can produce. In a little more than two years, they have watched Ice Poseidon go from a gamer who lived in his parents’ house and worked as a line cook at an Italian restaurant to a geek rock star whose life is awash in Monster Energy drink, pot smoke, and hot chicks.
If your job is to constantly share your life, your life becomes a product that you are selling, and every moment, even the worst one, can be a lucrative opportunity to please your audience. Denino often lands at the top of a message board called LivestreamFails, which functions as a micro-TMZ for the personal lives of live-streaming celebrities. Last year, the biggest story on LivestreamFails was the revelation by a popular video-game streamer called Dr. DisRespect that he was cheating on his wife. Dr. DisRespect posted a tearful apology and disappeared for months. Streamers claim to hate drama, but they also understand that a popular post on LivestreamFails can be great for their numbers. “Drama equals views equals money,” Denino told me. In February, when Dr. DisRespect made a triumphant return, it was one of the most watched live streams in history, with about three hundred and eighty thousand viewers.
Denino’s friends all told me that he is kind, and he always was to me. But, if you watch his live stream, the word that most readily comes to mind is “asshole.” Denino is keen to point out where he draws the line. He will not film a homeless person if that person seems unwell or intoxicated, though he is fine with milking schizophrenics for laughs. He will never call anyone the N-word with a “hard R,” though he often adopts a caricature of a rapper and addresses people, of whatever race, as “my nigga.” He sees himself as an envoy to the real world on behalf of the culture of online trolling, in which anonymous malcontents provoke people with extreme speech and behavior. Hiding behind a screen name, Internet trolls can make a game out of offending people. When Denino trolls in the real world, the consequences are unavoidable.
Denino has lived in Los Angeles for a year and a half, and during that time he has been kicked out of six apartments. The moves have been exhausting for him, but for viewers they offer an easy way to delineate eras in the Ice Poseidon show—“seasons,” as one put it to me. Denino’s first apartment was a two-bed-two-bath in a brand-new building in the heart of Hollywood. “I just Googled apartments in L.A., and it was literally the first one that popped up,” he told me. The prominent placement on search engines is probably related to the fact that the building was reportedly once the home of Logan Paul, the popular YouTuber. It is now a mecca for online-content creators, and it seemed like the perfect environment for Denino. “Most of the people who lived there were loud as fuck, did YouTube stuff,” Denino said. “We would throw balls of bread off the balcony to see how far we could throw it.” His viewers recall the era fondly. But Denino was kicked out after six months. “The building’s office was getting mass-called by my viewers every day, just non-stop, like ‘Hey, we know Paul Denino lives there. He’s burning down his apartment.’ ”
The biggest problem was the swattings. People would call 911 with false reports of hostage situations or bomb threats, in order to get a SWAT team sent to Denino’s apartment. Swatting has its origins in the subculture of Internet trolls, where it is a favorite tactic for harassing and bullying people. Swatting has exploded in popularity in recent years, owing in part to the rise of live streaming. Previously, the hoaxer would have to imagine his target’s distress when a team of heavily armed police officers broke down his door. But, if the target is broadcasting himself live, the hoaxer can see his handiwork play out in real time. On YouTube, you can watch compilations of famous streamers being swatted. Last December, a Kansas man was killed by police in a swatting episode prompted by a feud in an online game of Call of Duty.
Denino has been the target of so many swatting attempts that he seems to have a sixth sense for them. I recently watched as he live-streamed a session with a British hypnotherapist. Sirens sound in the distance. Denino winces but continues to talk about his childhood. The sirens draw nearer. He glances around nervously, his voice becoming thin as he struggles to keep up the conversation. The sirens stop directly outside the therapist’s apartment. The amused therapist gets up to look out the window, and tells him that there is nothing to worry about. The chat room knows better. Viewers write “SWATTED” and “omg RUN!!!,” and post emojis of sirens. Loud voices echo down the hallway. When there is a knock on the door, and the therapist opens it to find a squadron of cops, Denino seems almost relieved.
There was a time when he was swatted every day for a month. Things reached a crisis point when someone called in a bomb threat on a plane he had just boarded in Phoenix, on his way to a video-game convention, and several of the airport’s runways had to be closed. The episode led to Denino’s permanent banishment from Twitch, which is why he now streams on YouTube. Most of the swattings turned out to be the work of an anonymous hacker. At the peak of the epidemic, Denino posted a video titled “A Terrorist Is Trying to Ruin My Life,” in which he tearfully asked for help tracking down the swatter. Eventually, a group of sympathetic hackers gave Denino the swatter’s supposed name and address, which belonged to a teen-ager in Poland, and Denino gave the information to the F.B.I. (The F.B.I. declined to confirm this.) He does not know what happened to the teen-ager, but the swattings have slowed to a trickle. Today, Denino says that he has a liaison in the Los Angeles Police Department who contacts him any time the cops get a 911 call to his address. Yet, whenever a siren sounds on his stream, you can see the fear flash across his face.
Denino likes to frame himself as a rebel, up against a world filled with people trying to tell you what to say or how to act. The origin story he has shared with viewers draws heavily on his difficult childhood, which he recounts as a never-ending struggle against authority. He grew up in a gated community in Martin County, Florida, a rural area near Palm Beach. His mother, Enza, was a mental-health administrator at a nearby clinical facility. His father, Paul, was a plasma technician. Enza told me that Denino was very shy, though he was also desperate to make friends. To gain attention, he acted out—he once asked a teacher if she was good at giving blow jobs—but that only increased his isolation. He bounced among schools and spent time at a forestry camp for troubled boys. When he was twelve, a psychiatrist diagnosed that he was suffering from behavioral issues and prescribed Zoloft and A.D.H.D. medication, plus sleeping pills to counteract the side effects of the other drugs. When he turned sixteen, he quit them all cold turkey. These days, he often talks about the drugs as a mental prison, and urges his young viewers to resist medication. “You have these fucking doctors who are telling your parents all this shit—the doctors were telling my parents how to parent,” he once said on his stream.
When Denino was twelve, a neighbor introduced him to RuneScape, an online fantasy role-playing game. After consulting a random-name generator, Denino called his character Ice Poseidon. He started playing at all hours—at 5 A.M., before school, and late into the night. During some summers, he didn’t leave the house for weeks. He enjoyed the game’s social aspect. People from all around the world held parties in virtual houses, and if you had good enough armor and a big enough house you could make a lot of friends. Through the game, he met his first real friend, Gray Shaw, who lived in California. They began talking on Skype every day. When Denino moved to L.A., Shaw became his roommate.
After high school, Denino took a job as a line cook, but his social life was still centered on RuneScape. In the game, Ice Poseidon could do things for attention without suffering real-world consequences. In 2013, Denino came up with a prank called “closing doors,” in which he would repeatedly click on a door so that it couldn’t be opened, trapping another player in a room. Denino uploaded videos of the prank to YouTube, and they racked up views. He decided to start broadcasting live on Twitch. The first night, ten people watched him. The next, twenty. Soon, he was making seven hundred dollars a month in viewer donations. At the end of the summer, he was laid off from the restaurant, and decided to try to make live streaming a career.
People liked his channel because he created a community around his stream. He played songs requested by viewers. He called fans on the phone. He let people tag along on his in-game adventures, and was often followed around by a crowd of dozens of other avatars. He called this posse the Purple Army, and it became known for harassing other streamers and for fighting the Reign of Terror, the most powerful clan in the game. The Purple Army quickly developed a reputation as a toxic hive. But some of the memes it generated are still influential.
As Denino developed an online following, he became more isolated in the real world. With no job and no classes, he hardly spoke to anyone. When he had a bad stream, his disappointment was sharpened by harsh criticism from viewers, the people who seemed to care the most about him. In a clip from that era, he breaks down on stream. He is alone outside in the dark, with his face lit from below. “I don’t even talk to my parents. I live with my parents, but we maybe talk two words a day,” he says. “It’s really hard to not have any sort of, like, human interaction with anybody except for the people who watch your stream over the Internet.”
In July, 2016, Nintendo released Pokémon Go, in which people used their smartphones to capture virtual creatures in real-world locations. Denino used the game as an excuse to get out of the house. He would strap a Webcam to his head, put his laptop in his backpack, and walk to a local mall. This was when he pioneered one of his viewers’ favorite forms of content—ineptly hitting on women on the street. The streams were a sensation; he said that he regularly pulled in twenty thousand viewers. His fame began to bleed into the real world. That Halloween, children who came to his parents’ house to trick-or-treat recognized him. “It just completely blew us away,” Enza said. “They all knew what Ice Poseidon was, and they stopped dead in their tracks.”
Then Denino experienced the first of what would be many major setbacks. In December, 2016, he was banned from Twitch for forty-five days, after revealing a girl’s phone number to his followers, who started calling her. Denino decided to try something new. In a video that he posted during this involuntary break, he announced that he was moving to L.A. “That’s when the videos will start to flow out,” he said. You can watch the rest on YouTube.
When I first met Denino, he was living in a three-story town house in East Hollywood. (I was not surprised to learn that, a few weeks later, he was kicked out.) His bedroom, on the third floor, was a tiny white cube, decorated with a poster, made by a fan, of the various characters on his stream. Denino’s fans joke that he streams “from the streets of Hollywood to the dirtiest bedroom in L.A.” Someone appeared to have emptied a full trash can in the attached bathroom: fast-food wrappers, orange peels, and cans of Monster Energy drink spilled off the white counter and onto the floor. Denino does not own much besides a five-thousand-dollar, dual-screen gaming computer, his live-streaming equipment, and a large brown sectional couch with electric recliners, which he bought during a stream. (“I feel like a fucking adult!” he exclaimed, throwing himself onto the couch, before closing the deal.) His current outfit of choice is a pair of skintight black leggings patterned with bright-green marijuana leaves and a matching shirt. His only concession to conventional fashion is a six-hundred-dollar pair of Louis Vuitton sneakers. Viewers use the term “scuffed” to describe the aggressively careless way in which Ice Poseidon presents himself on stream. Denino’s real life is highly scuffed as well.
Denino is hardly ever alone, even when off camera. He encourages his viewers to stop by his apartment if they happen to be in Los Angeles. He sees his open-door policy as the best demonstration of his commitment to total transparency. They come to offer gifts or praise, to ask for favors, to appear on his stream, or simply to confirm that he exists. One day, a nervous kid of about seventeen showed up, carrying a bucket full of cleaning supplies. He stammered out that he had travelled by public transportation from Redondo Beach, three hours away, to clean Denino’s house. Denino declined, and the kid went home. Young men milled about in the living room at all times of the day. They came from China, Denmark, Sweden, and throughout the United States. Denino’s viewers have spent so much time with him on stream that they see him as a friend, and they often fall into easy conversation.
One night, I stopped by, hoping to catch him alone after a stream. When I arrived, he was in the middle of what is known in the community as a “PC stream,” broadcasting from his desktop computer. Outdoor streams are more interesting for viewers but more taxing for Denino, so he occasionally does a PC stream, to prevent burnout. He sat at his desk, wearing a large plastic headset and swinging a big boom mike to talk to people in the room. At one point, a Domino’s deliveryman walked into the room. It was one of four prank deliveries that Denino received that night. The delivery guy looked at Denino. “Ice?” he said. He was a viewer. Although nobody had paid for the food, he left a cheese pizza and a chicken-parm sub as an offering.
Denino begins many streams with what he calls a Reddit Recap, where he reads the top posts from a message board, or subreddit, dedicated to his stream. The subreddit has more than a hundred thousand subscribers and produces a steady flow of memes, gossip, and criticism. Its prominence in Denino’s live stream can give the whole thing a dizzying ouroboros feel. The main drama in Denino’s life is his turbulent relationship with his viewers. Sometimes they act like worried parents. Once, he had a panic attack on stream that ended with him in the hospital, and afterward viewers urged him to see a doctor. A few days later, he live-streamed the visit. At other times, they are like left-out friends or jealous lovers. When Denino went to Disneyland with a couple of Playboy models and failed to stream the outing, the subreddit filled with posts from disappointed viewers.
During the PC stream, viewers could pay between two and twenty dollars to leave featured comments that appeared on the desktop screen in bright boxes and were read out in the automated voice of a little boy. This is how Denino makes much of his income, and he responded to each one. Many of the comments demanded information about a woman named Courtney. She had appeared on a couple of recent streams, and viewers were convinced that Denino had slept with her. “Just admit you banged Courtney,” one comment read. “Say admit it ice in the chat.” The chat room filled with “Admit it Ice!” Denino leaned back in his chair and grinned.
Just being in the room was exhausting. I went downstairs, to the living room, where Jacob, Denino’s assistant, watched the live stream on a large flat-screen TV. Jacob was a viewer whom Denino had hired to take care of his increasingly complicated affairs. “I probably respond to a hundred individual people per day asking questions about Paul’s life,” Jacob said. Although Denino characterizes his radical transparency as a branding decision, he also admits that his viewers are so obsessive that it is nearly impossible to hide anything from them. A while ago, Denino went to San Diego for a conference and didn’t tell his viewers where he was staying. They called every hotel in the city until they found him. “Have you ever seen the movie ‘World War Z’?” Jacob asked me. In the movie, there is a terrifying scene in which thousands of zombies surge toward a wall and pile on top of one another until they are able to clamber over it. “That’s like how his community is. They smash into the wall and hopefully they get to the top.”
The disruptive power of the community was on everyone’s mind. For the past six months, Denino had been struggling with fans over his girlfriend, a platinum-blond streamer named Caroline. Viewers thought that she was taking him away from the stream and using him to boost her own career; they called her “the leech.” They bombarded the subreddit with hateful posts about Caroline and Denino, approached the couple in real life to harass them, and staged a boycott that cut Denino’s viewership and revenue by a third, demanding that he break up with her. Denino resisted for months—Caroline made him happy—but eventually he relented. “It just got too much, dude,” he told me. “It was just easier to break up with her than to deal with it.” He showed me a chart of his earnings, which had doubled the week after he and Caroline broke up.
After the stream, Denino came downstairs. He seemed shaken. He said that he had abruptly shut down the stream when viewers refused to stop asking about Courtney. Although he had rakishly batted away the questions onscreen, he now admitted to another motive. He thought that Caroline would be watching. He still cared for her, and he didn’t want to boast publicly about another woman. Yet he felt that he had to act as if he didn’t care, or his viewers might suspect that he and Caroline hadn’t actually broken up. I later learned of a previous incident, in which his fans saw a pair of shoes in his bedroom that belonged to a woman who was not his girlfriend at the time. The fallout occupied Denino’s life for weeks. “You have to be inconsiderate and a little bit of a sociopath to stream,” he said. “I have to turn on the stream tomorrow, and not give a fuck about any of this, but I actually do give a fuck, and I’m actually annoyed and hurt and awkward by all of this shit.”
He sat on the couch, absorbed in his phone. The subreddit filled with new posts about the stream that had just ended. A friend of Denino’s, a soft-spoken twenty-three-year-old named Kyle Falador, sat down next to him. Falador had been a viewer since the RuneScape days. “I was going through a tough time, and watching his streams gave me an outlet outside of reality where I could just smile and not think about my problems,” he told me. Falador has had his own turbulent relationship with the community. During the campaign against Caroline, viewers criticized him for not trying to break up the couple, and nicknamed him Yes Man.
“Stop reading this poison!” Falador said.
“I have to see what’s going on—I have to see what the vibe is,” Denino said.
“Fuck the vibe,” Falador said.
“This shit gives me content ideas,” Denino said.
“It also gives you cancer,” Falador said.
I left with a sense of the Purple Army as controlling and toxic. Not long after, though, Falador contacted me to clarify his “cancer” comment. He said that the community was, over all, a good force in Denino’s life, and that it often gave him ideas and constructive criticism, pushing him to do better. But, when I was in L.A., Denino and the Purple Army were locked in a cycle of conflict. When the subreddit filled with hate about Caroline, Denino responded by taking days off, and cutting off streams abruptly, in a way that seemed meant to punish his viewers—a tactic that only increased their ire. “The community’s never been like that, and since then it’s never got like that again,” Falador later said. The situation reminded me of how a small slight between two stubborn friends can spiral into a feud, although even the most pissed-off person would probably not try to destroy his friend’s career.
Denino gets emotional on stream often enough that his viewers have branded these moments Real Talks. In many Real Talks, he speaks candidly about his struggles with depression and stress. In others, he relates the emotional fulfillment he has found from success. In early 2017, after his first months in L.A., he took a trip home to Palm Beach. One night, he streamed himself from the top of a tall building. He began to cry as he related how his dad had told him about a kid he knew at the gym who was a fan of his streams, and about former classmates who said that they were proud of him. “I haven’t been happy for a long time, so I come, and I hear these things,” he said. “That’s all I wanted, dude. That’s all I ever fucking wanted in life—just people to be proud.”
Yet, in conversation with me, Denino most often talked about his viewers in cold, transactional terms. He said, “Every so often, you’ll open up to them—you just let them in on your feelings, emotions, personal life—and then that’s basic human relationship building. It works the same way on the Internet like it does in real life. It’s like I’m like their friend, you know.”
One day, I asked Denino’s manager, Brent Kaskel, about this seeming contradiction. Kaskel got his start managing video-game streamers, but, when he joined the company representing Denino, he became convinced that Denino was the future of I.R.L. streaming. Kaskel is known among the Purple Army as Scuffed Steve Jobs, because he resembles the Apple founder; he is at times reviled as a moneygrubbing manipulator, largely because he secured Denino a forty-thousand-dollar-a-month sponsorship that required him to stream every few days using a Chinese live-streaming app that the viewers hated. Kaskel said that, despite Denino’s evasions, he has an intense emotional connection to his viewers. “He had no friends, and now he has a group of people that fucking adore him,” he said. “And, dude, when they hate him, he shuts down. He’s just, like, ‘This sucks. My friends are attacking me.’ ” I observed to Kaskel that, even though Denino was playing a character on stream, he could also be deceptively authentic. “I think he’s more real on stream, actually,” Kaskel said.
One day, I arranged to interview Denino on stream. When I arrived at his house, he was streaming from U.C.L.A., trying to persuade girls to come to a party at his house later that week. I watched from my phone as he talked his way into a sorority by pretending to be making a documentary for the BBC, about Greek life on campus. A little later, he came up the path and, after a brief pause at the door—“Does anyone have my house keys?”—invited me up to his room. As he prepared to start a PC stream, he complained about a neighbor who was trying to thwart his plans for the party. The neighbor had stopped by while Denino was streaming earlier in the day to complain about noise, and had given enough information that viewers had tracked down his social-media accounts. Denino said, “His Instagram blew up, saying, ‘Who the fuck are you? Fuck off!,’ so now, obviously, he has a vendetta against me.”
Once he had started broadcasting again, he turned to me. “So let’s get at it, then,” he said. I asked Denino how he had changed during his time streaming. He said that, since the airport swatting, he had become more conscious of the havoc that his live stream wreaks. He had started to ban the most disruptive members of the community from the subreddit. “A year ago, I will agree, I was a very immature person,” he said. He described how overwhelmed he felt at the height of the furor over Caroline. “My Reddit was telling me everything I was doing was wrong,” he said. “What was the point of streaming? What was the point of anything? I was just losing it.” He took a weeklong break from streaming, and took some Ecstasy. While he was high, a phrase came into his head: “Don’t let the stream project onto myself. Project myself to the stream.” Caroline gave him a card with the phrase printed on it, which he keeps in his wallet.
Throughout our conversation, we were interrupted by the computer’s little-boy voice reading out viewers’ messages. They asked questions, and criticized Denino for apparent inconsistencies. At one point, Denino recalled how bad he had felt about the incident that got him suspended from Twitch, when he shared the girl’s number. “I remember how he didn’t give a fuck about leaking the girl’s number,” one Redditor wrote. “hahahaha ICE is such a good fucking liar lol.” Another asked, “Mr. Reporter, what does Ice’s room smell like?” (Not bad, surprisingly.) Before the interview, a moderator on the subreddit had asked for submissions of questions for Denino. One viewer asked about an apparently notorious event: in December, a viewer had posted an aggrieved message to the subreddit that detailed how Denino had stood him up for dinner in Las Vegas, where the viewer lived. He had Crohn’s disease and colon cancer and had posted that, in order to make it through the rendezvous without having to empty his ostomy bag, he had not eaten for two days. The “Cancer Andy” saga, as it came to be known, became a symbol for all the viewers who complained about the inauthenticity of Denino’s friendship with his community. (Denino had failed to show because he had been swatted that evening.)
Denino looked amused. “So, this person in question is actually downstairs in my living room,” he said. He asked me to go get him. Cancer Andy’s real name is Michael. He was twenty-five and frail, and wore an orange hoodie. Michael was in Los Angeles for a doctor’s appointment and had decided to stop by. He told me that he had started watching Denino after his cancer got so bad that it prevented him from leaving his room for days on end. At times, Ice Poseidon was the only thing that kept him from killing himself. “I was so suicidal, I could have done it right there,” he said. He kept watching Denino even after a stomach surgery made it hurt to laugh.
I was initially interested in Ice Poseidon as a phenomenon, a sign that the terrifying digital mobs that are a constant fact of online life have begun to appear in the real world. Denino voted for Donald Trump—he says he found him “funny”—and has a “Trump for America” banner on his wall. His community overlaps with a movement of Internet-savvy reactionaries who cloak bigotry in ironic memes and pop-culture references. One viewer, who claimed to be a thirty-five-year-old retired Army sergeant with “2 kids and 2 ex wives,” wrote on the subreddit, “Thank god for Paul cause all cable tv not some but all Chanel’s for the most part are the same left Wing pro gay anti American ANTIWHITE garbage!” In the Ice Poseidon community, “KFC and Watermelon” is a popular phrase to apply to black people; viewers have devised about a million different ways of getting around YouTube’s ban on the N-word. Denino writes this off as an unavoidable facet of edgy online culture—or as the work of a handful of malcontents trying to give him and his community a bad reputation—but he does little to actively discourage racist speech, and sometimes he seems to tacitly endorse it.
But the abrasive ugliness of the Purple Army’s behavior can mask the underlying sense of isolation propelling many who join its ranks. “As someone who suffers with depression, I’ve isolated myself, and watching Ice distracts me and makes me feel less lonely,” a fan told me. Another said, “Seeing him go out and interact with people without caring one single bit about what they think about him is really refreshing and honestly inspirational to a guy like me.” The Purple Army’s members like to describe themselves as “autistic,” constitutionally incapable of following society’s rules. Some of this is myth building—I met plenty of well-adjusted fans—but the Purple Army’s core members are young, socially awkward men who have never found much of a place for themselves in the world outside the computer screen. They are immersed in an online culture that believes that “social-justice warriors” and political correctness are the main obstacles to self-actualization. They see the world as a game rigged against them. Ice Poseidon shows them the possibility of a different game, one in which they get to set the rules.
When we came back into Denino’s bedroom, Michael spoke in a voice so soft that Denino had to move the mike in front of him. Michael apologized for his critical post. “I didn’t think people were going to use that against you,” he said. “I watch you every day almost, so I would not want you to fall.” Denino invited Michael to get something to eat with him after the stream. “I haven’t eaten in three days,” Michael said. “Really?” Denino said. It was a joke, and they both laughed. They went downstairs and Michael showed everyone his ostomy bag. Later, Denino posted the interview to YouTube, under the title “No More Secrets,” where it currently has 340,069 views.
In April, Denino reached five hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube. In May, he loaded an R.V. with fellow-streamers and took a trip up the West Coast. Even diehard viewers had trouble keeping up with all the content. But some fans refused to let go of the Caroline episode. A leaked clip suggested that Denino and Caroline were secretly still together. Last month, after viewers discovered that she had flown to meet him in Austin, Texas, he admitted that it was true. The betrayal sent the Purple Army into a frenzy. Since then, its members have become fixated on the idea that the entire stream is fake; now, at the end of each broadcast, the subreddit fills with posts calling the action “scripted.” Whether Denino can win back his viewers, as he has so often in the past, is the overarching question of the latest season of the Ice Poseidon show.
It is hard not to develop a connection to a person after seeing so much of his experience, even if both of you are just doing your jobs. The unbroken flow of reality that somehow turns into a narrative makes you think of your own life in terms of a journey. My favorite moment of Denino’s live stream is a small one. It took place during a period when fans complained that Denino was turning into “Errand Andy”: many streams featured him doing mundane tasks. Denino has just eaten lunch at a run-down Chinese restaurant and is walking along one of the desolate boulevards that characterize out-of-the-way parts of Los Angeles. He passes a stray dog, and a girl in a white hoodie stops to talk to him. For whatever reason, Denino does not immediately accost her with an aggressive pickup line. They get to talking. She introduces herself as Olive. A friend of hers, an older, scruffy-looking man with a beard, pulls into a parking lot. When Denino says that he is walking to a nearby furniture store, they offer him a ride. They clear a bunch of junk out of the back seat of the car and drive him to the furniture store. Olive gives him her number and tells him to stop by an artist’s studio where she and her friend will be hanging out that evening.
I was reminded of a trip I took years ago, to visit my cousin in Chile. We were hitchhiking through the wine country, and a sunbaked old farmer picked us up and drove us all around his vineyard while we sat in the back of his truck. I got a little jealous of Denino as I sat at my dining-room table watching the video, remembering a time when I was free to take a ride from a stranger. ♦
