At 2:45 p.m. last Tuesday, someone going by the name of Brody Ruckus started a group on Facebook named "If this group reaches 100,000 my girlfriend will have a threesome." Eight days later, Brody and his group were removed for violating Facebook policy. It had, before it was killed, more than 400,000 members.
Brody, that fateful Tuesday, wrote that one day he and his girlfriend were discussing the largest Facebook group ("The Largest Facebook Group Ever," 840,000 members strong), and his girlfriend said it must have been rather difficult to create such a big group. Brody exclaimed that anyone could make a large group with the right idea, and bet her that if a group he would start got 100,000 members, they would have a threesome. She agreed.
But when the group reached 100,000 members, a mere three days after its inception, there was no threesome. Brody announced a new goal--that when the group was 300,000 members strong, his girlfriend would agree to have pictures taken of the "dirty deed." This goal was reached in another three days.
But again, when the goal was met, there was no threesome. This time, Brody announced that if his group's membership surpassed "The Largest Group's," his girlfriend would agree to have the event broadcast on the Internet.
As Brody continued to push back the date of the threesome, doubts arose as to whether Brody was real, and whether the group was really a marketing scam for some kind of product. No one ever came forward to say that they knew a Brody Ruckus.
He had no friends listed, the school that he originally claimed to attend, Georgia Tech, had no record of him--and most tellingly, after winning his bet, he set new goals for the group's membership rather than collect. Yesterday, Facebook removed Brody's group, reportedly saying they found out Brody was not a real person. As of now, one Charlie Stell, an Atlantan model and alleged spam scam artist, is the leading suspect among Brody Ruckus scholars.
It is, then, almost certain that Brody Ruckus was a pseudonym and the group was a scam, though to what end exactly it is too soon to tell. But, though Brody Ruckus was as fictitious a character as Rip Van Winkle or Jack Bauer, his story is a meaningful one.
Brody was born into the world, for all intents and purposes, on Sept. 5--the same date as the rollout of the much-maligned News Feed. And without News Feed, much fewer people would have heard of him. I, like most of the group's members, joined upon seeing a message on my home page to the effect that three of my friends had just joined the threesome group.
What Brody's rapidly ascendant popularity showed is that with the advent of the News Feed, groups that support a popular cause can grow at astronomical rates. As unlikely as it may sound, Facebook may become a powerful forum for our generation to organize political movements. The best example so far is, ironically, the "Students Against The News Feed" group, which ballooned to 750,000 members in just three days before Facebook gave in and agreed to allow users to hide their information from the Feed. With its planned expansion to include non-student users, Facebook may well become as important a site in shaping the way we see the world as Google.
But the much more profound lesson that can be gleaned from Brody's brief career is that God is truly dead. 400,000 students joined a group solely to enable a guy whom they never met to have a threesome--and then to broadcast it over the Internet. Of them, many attended religious schools and universities.
To be fair, people did start a number of anti-Brody groups. But almost all of them only denounce Brody's misogyny, and are lightly populated. One group, "monogamous people offended by Brody Ruckus," vaguely alludes to moral concerns. It has 80 members. Meanwhile, over on Brody's page, there was, until this afternoon, a 12,000-post thread dedicated to that eternal question: spit or swallow.
Asher Steinberg is a Trinity junior. His column runs every other Thursday.
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