![]() 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. Every moment of uncontrolled chaos that unfolds on Ice Poseidon’s stream emphasizes that he is showing his viewers how things really are. Denino told me that he hates the whitewashed, feel-good version of life portrayed in the Instagram posts of online influencers. To Denino and his fans, social media, once hailed as the gold standard of authenticity, now appears artificial. 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. Live streamers laud the way the medium allows them to connect directly with their viewers. 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. His automatic signature was “You are an artist, sculpt your masterpiece.” 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 viewers love to needle him-to “trigger” him, as they say-and they know his vulnerabilities as well as anyone in his life does.ĭenino is fanatical about making his live stream the best it can be. ![]() The ResidentSleeper thing really gets to Denino. 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. He keeps one eye on his phone, where a chat room fills with comments. The goal is to generate entertainment for his viewers. 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. I also can’t help but laugh sometimes.ĭenino is the most notorious of what are known as I.R.L. 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. 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. He is performing the role of a foulmouthed trickster called Ice Poseidon. ![]() Even then, he is not simply recording his daily life. 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. 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. ![]() 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. 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. 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.ĭenino is twenty-three years old, and his job is broadcasting his life to thousands of obsessed viewers. Dozens of one-star reviews flood the page within seconds. Almost immediately, the restaurant’s rating on Yelp begins to plummet. The restaurant manager asks Denino to leave. 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. He is live-streaming through the camera on the stick, and some of the thousands of people watching are trying to fuck with him. He says yes, but then explains that the callers are pranking him. An employee asks the man if he is Paul Denino. 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. The restaurant starts getting a lot of unusual phone calls. 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.Ĭhaos follows him. His left hand clutches a smartphone close to his face. His right hand holds a camera on a stick, which he waves like an explorer illuminating a cave painting. He is pale and tall, as skinny as a folded-up tripod. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.Ī strange creature stalks Los Angeles, hunting for content.
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