I should be working on a paper that’s due a week from today, but instead I’m figuring out how to get tens (or hundreds?) of thousands of real followers on Twitter for a few fake people I’ve created. One of them is a hot girl who likes puppies and kittens and funny pics, another is a female of unspecified age (as of yet) but she is politically conservative and can’t stop watching Fox News, and yet another is a manly man who likes all things manly, especially football. Hot girl also likes football. Weird coincidence.
I’m doing this because of my long-held belief that I know the internet well enough to exploit it for long-term, sustainable financial gain which, if I begin to see some success, will someday involve hiring a contractor in the Philippines to manage these fake personalities. Teachers don’t get paid shit so I gotta get creative. So far my only real online success has been iphoneappreviews.net but that was too much work and I feel like the only people who are interested in reading about iPhone apps anymore are iPhone app developers.
I have a loosely-formed strategy which starts with Twitter and ends with a large canvas bag full of money, and there is a big dollar sign printed on that bag. Yes, thank you, my plan is brilliant. Nearly three years ago I experimented with fake Twitter followers but did nothing with them. I was just curious about the fakes. I got 20,000 fake followers which, three years later, is now down to 261*. I guess those fake Twitter followers don’t last forever. But I’ve done some more digging and I believe there is a way to use third party services and statistical probability to turn fake followers into real followers, and then those real followers slowly morph into the money bag. As with many entrepreneurial pursuits the internet is a numbers game, and it takes big numbers to fill the bag.
As of this moment, hot girl has precisely eight followers on Twitter (mostly friends but all are real), unspecified Republican female has one (manly man), and manly man has two followers (one of them is real, the other is a Twitter alias that I invented for academic purposes, tesolrobot). Let’s see, three twitter accounts and a grand total of nine real followers. That’s not gonna cut it. I’ll post an update after I start to see the results of the new Twitter follower-getting strategy that I learned from YouTube. Cost-wise I’ll have to spend the equivalent of about three foot-long Subway sandwiches to test each of my three Twitter accounts (a foot-long in Korea is about $9… no $5 foot-longs here), but I have confidence. I think this will be fun. Plan Z is most definitely in effect, but that doesn’t mean I have to abandon all other plans. You know what? Let’s call this Twitter shit Plan X. Yeah. Plan X, because who the fuck knows when it will succeed or if I’ll ever give up on it. Spoiler alert: I probably won’t give up on it.
I actually like teaching and in a strange way I also enjoy academia, but the dream of spending the rest of my life on the couch, in my underwear, and not giving a fuck, is still alive. Some dreams never die.
Now it’s time to get back to grad school bizness.
* 5/4/15 Update: I’m hijacking @kickedintheball for my NCAA Amazon project, so my new USC Twitter handle will inherit the fakes.