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I return to you today as a humbled Dout. I was briefly brought low by the failed predictions of my incompetent staff and I was embarrassed to be the target of a Team Takedown hack that claimed to “expose” my connections to government intelligence agencies. I won’t sugar coat it: I spent last night drowning the Undeniable Drama Codex’s sorrows in warm Zima. 

Predictive drama analysis is a new science. The work we do takes years of correlation with computational algorithms that are, in a way, like people themselves. Sometimes the algorithm doesn’t get it all right. Remember, generations of alchemists gave themselves mercury poisoning in order to turn base metals into gold. Some days analysts like myself are gold, other days we’re mercury poisoning. That’s the job. 

One way, the only way, we can protect ourselves is with data— cold, impersonal, agnostic data. The Undeniable Drama Codex proposes to free us from this crisis by turning humanity away from chaos to determinism, the iron block universe. Determinism is the idea that one could derive a model of everything that happens in the universe by studying the way those first few atoms collided after the big bang. Those first, crucial instances at the dawn of time are responsible for everything. Even the people trolling your mentions, calling you a bald, deluded grifter. 

The UDC is making a model of our social universe through complex systems analysis. I am proud to say that I have completed the case study for the drama before us.

The work is complete. What appears to be chaos is, in fact, the path to determinism. BEHOLD! THE UDC TEAM ZANDER/TEAM TAKEDOWN CASE STUDY MASTER CHART!

You’re going to want to hold on to this chart, because it is your roadmap for everything that’s about to take place. I’d stake my professional reputation on it. 

Make no mistake: chaotic charts like this one are how we will defeat the beast Chaos for eternity. This is how we determine our predetermined path through the universe and minimize risk to ourselves. Join us in this new age of social analytics, where all paths are foretold. 

Today’s predictions from the Undeniable Drama Codex: 

• Zander will recover his lost assets today when a friend who plays wide receiver for a minor league sports team (the Fightin’ Growlbacks) posts a GoFundMe to his personal Instagram account;
• Weed plays a major role in this story, and will appear when one of our actors is arrested for trying to buy a nickelbag (do they still make those?)
• Zander will produce an 8-track tape that proves his innocence
• No matter what Zander’s next moves are, David King will be as cool as a cucumber about them.

So speaks the Codex.

Friends, allies (clients? hit me up!), I come before you today a much wiser Dout than I was the day previous.

Yesterday’s rollout of the UDC was a dang mess, and my staff takes full responsibility for any errors you may have encountered in our analysis of the hacker collective Team Takedown. First, I want to apologize to the incredibly gifted actor Jesse Plemons when we suggested that he might be the target of yesterday’s hack.

Jesse, please understand me when I say that I am truly, deeply, apologetically certain that it was someone else’s fault. Not mine. I promise whichever person I suspect of making that mistake will never work at the UDC again. You can still sign up for UDC services free of charge, if you’d like to get on the ground floor of anti-cyberswarming security.

Secondly, Team Takedown (out of fear, perhaps?) has accessed one of my old email accounts and published what they suppose to be “incriminating” information about me and my activities with the UDC.

Rest assured, the Undeniable Drama Codex is NOT working with an alphabet soup of government intelligence agencies to sell your embarrassing information. We are certainly not undermining democracy in foreign countries via social media. I never joined a cult of rich perverts and don’t think they’d take me even if I wanted them to.

Those emails are the product of roleplaying sessions between me and my tabletop crew. That’s all they are. Now, I’ll thank you to respect my privacy.

Some people have asked me if I was humbled by yesterday’s events: absolutely not. Everything I do, I do for the good of the social experience. That includes sticking my nose in other people’s business and compromising the operational security of my own tech startup. It’s for all our own goods, and believe me: anyone who says differently will rue the day.

Speaking of rueing the day, I vow to not sleep until I personally see this Team Takedown drama through to the end. The elves in the UDC offices are hard at work crafting something that will be *the definitive and objective guide* to getting back at this group of teenagers who embarrassed me.

Keep your eyes locked here. Big things are on the way.

— Dout

In addition to the case study with Team Takedown, the Drama Codex is studying a number of other dramatic developments across social spaces. I’ve been over the numbers a few times with my team, and I think we can say with certainty these cases are going to be the drama to follow in the coming weeks. I’m popping open a bag of loaded BBQ baked potato popcorn for this devastating display of misfortune and you should, too.

I’m on my ninth cup of coffee this morning, so please excuse the titles I gave these cases. We have…

The Curse of the Secondhand Weight Bench! Trevor, a bodybuilder, was looking for a bargain. He found the perfect bench on Craigslist, but are the gains worth it?

Dramatic Index Rating: Silver. Trevor has a colloquial writing style and he overshares his feelings in spite of his oafish nature. This has a +6 chance to go viral, following the classic “cycling moonrabbit” pattern of social engagement.

The Apartmentshed that Breathed. Landlords want to house everyone in the world, but at significant profit to themselves. What happens when wealth-extraction crosses paths with landlords who are extremely particular about the air you breathe?

Dramatic Index Rating: Ochre. I predict this unassuming apartment will soon make a name for itself, following a “prisoner’s gambit”-style engagement structure. We caught this post before it was flagged and removed but something tells me we haven’t heard the last from these rent-seekers.

Wait… This is what we call a “sleeper hit” in the business of drama research. This is an item from the early Internet and it remained obscure until it was unearthed decades later. In this engagement, psychonauts from the psycho-aughts experiment with an obscure drug called “Wait.” It is a potent psychedelic with effects few people can qualify. One of the few mysteries left on the old web, hosted here in the interest of preservation.

Dramatic Index Rating: Whistling Yellow.

Ciao!

— Dout

Predictive dramatic analysis is the most powerful tool in 21st century social dynamics. Our firm, The Undeniable Drama Codex, attempts to study, understand and predict the ways drama plays out on the internet. Our tasks are twofold: Indexing and Analysis.

Today a dramatic opportunity dropped in our lap, a chance to show you what predictive analysis of Internet shaming looks like. We will follow this drama as it unfolds and, by cross-checking it against all of the data the UDC has collected previously, we will predict the strange and varied maneuvers this event will take. You will witness us. You will be amazed.

Earlier today a ne’er-do-well hacking collective called Team Takedown announced they would leak embarrassing and damming social interactions from a known individual.

They declined to say who, but thanks to Codex analytics of more than 15 years of social interactions I think I can safely determine who their target is. If I’m right, this unfortunate target can make use of Codex services for free, as a beneficent show of our power.

Our predictions are not magic. They’re the result of petabytes and petabytes of carefully-studied social interaction data. If one analyzes two-hundred billion posts, one gets a general idea of the Internet’s attitude toward certain figures. For our clients, these can be read as live risk analysis. This is the service the Undeniable Drama Codex provides.

So who is the target? Well, this person must be known to people within the social demographics of Team Takedown. This person must either be an object of ridicule prime facie (your Guy Fieris, for example), or they must be perceived as deserving it.

In the online drama ecosystem, schadenfreude is the sun, and the air, and the rain, and the soil. The person who is the target of such an attack must have it coming! This allows both the hacker and the rubber-necker to feel a sense of righteous judgment, a touch from the fingertips of an avenging and angry god.

The nature of the offense that provokes the mob can be fluid, everything from disrespecting valet to showing up in a cringe soda commercial where the celebrity in question makes out with a teargas-firing riot cop. The exact cause doesn’t matter, but the perception of wrongdoing does. TT’s target hasn’t done either of these things, according to our metrics, but he has done something to inspire fury.

For these reasons, the Undeniable Drama Codex predicts that Jesse Plemons will be the target of Team Takedown’s hack.

Now, Jesse, I know this may seem like an attack… It is, but not by me. You know what you did and you know it was wrong, but I don’t care about that. How you handle these next 24 hours could determine the arc of your career. Team Takedown is no joke. They’re definitely real.

The Undeniable Drama Codex is the only thing standing between you and a horde of Boschian Internet trolls. I, J. Dout, can mitigate their wrath by using predictive drama analysis. We will navigate this catastrophe together and get you out on the other side. Call me, Jessie! I’m standing by!

— Dout

The Undeniable Drama Codex has been collecting data since the early days of social media. Our case files cover petabytes and petabytes of data, all housed in a dedicated server farm in a New Mexico black site.

So, showing you the depth and breadth of our research is impossible, but we can still give you some small display of our power. About two months ago the predictive algorithm started making noise about two crews of Internet youths: Team Zander and Team Takedown.

Density acoustics suggests that the coming confrontation between these two groups will create the right kind of environment to use predictive drama analysis. The UDC will get out ahead of the action so that you may follow the drama before it even happens.

This dramaburst is going to be so big that it will have blowback into people who are not involved in any way with the major players. We’ve run the numbers five, six times now and they’re clear: the audience will flow from the TZ/TT beef and into four entirely unrelated lives. They are:

• A bodybuilder who buys a weight bench with a disturbing past
• A woman from 1998 who is experimenting with untested designer drugs
• Yuppie landlords
• A young man whose life is a series of self-validating epiphanies

We’re also getting data on interlocutors including a special effects mercenary, an outrageous new exercise craze and a beauty queen. We will comment on these threads as they become more clear.

Please stay tuned here, or follow our twitter account at @DramaCodex for advance news of all the news of shameful happenings around what will certainly be the most definitely real discomposure of 2020.