2022.07.28 魔术师如何赢得注意力经济

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How magicians won the attention economy
A group of illusionists got rich making addictive videos for social media. Did it cost them their souls?

Jul 28th 2022

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By Ashley Mears

If you were online at some point last spring, there’s a good chance you’ll have scrolled past a video in which a woman squirts whipped cream and chocolate syrup into a toilet bowl. In the video, which was posted on Facebook and TikTok and picked up by various news sites, the woman garlands the mixture with maraschino cherries and rainbow sprinkles, prompting a man behind the camera to gush: “Oh my goodness, that is so extra!” Then she picks up a straw.

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The woman later posted a photo of herself with a friend, both apparently sipping merrily from the bowl. “You’re going to get dysentery,” warned one disgusted comment. Of course, she isn’t really drinking a toilet milkshake: the unnerving enthusiasm with which she swirls the whipped cream beneath the rim stops you realising that, unless you suck it, putting a straw in your mouth doesn’t actually bring you into contact with what’s at the other end.

Anna Rothfuss, the woman starring in the film, is neither a fetishist nor a desperate attention-seeker: she’s one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world of online videos. The man behind the camera is an accomplished magician called Justin Flom (he is now her boyfriend). The other woman at the toilet bowl is me.


As a cultural sociologist, I’ve embedded myself in some strange situations. But hanging out in this content factory was, well, extra. It wasn’t just that people were doing ridiculous things with toilet bowls. It was that they were making so much money doing them. Each element of the video had been tested for its effectiveness in getting people to keep watching. On a good day, one of these short clips could earn Rothfuss enough to buy a Tesla.

Before I started looking into this corner of the content economy I assumed that the videos that went viral were made by Gen Z-ers playing around and occasionally surfing a serendipitous wave. But it turns out that there’s a formula to getting people to watch you on social media.

Though that formula isn’t perfect – you never quite know what the algorithms of the different platforms will favour or what will strike a chord with viewers – a group of people have come as close as anyone to creating a method for going viral. And that method is designed by magicians.

Rothfuss and Flom are among the 180 video-makers (or “creators” in the industry’s jargon) working with a Las Vegas magician called Rick Lax. They produce short videos timed to last the precise number of seconds that Facebook requires a clip to run to be eligible for an ad (this used to be three minutes but recently went down to one). Though the clips usually look like authentic user-generated material, all are scripted. Most fall into genres: diy, crafts, hazards, adultery and proposals.

Lax manages his network like a cross between a Hollywood agent and a schoolteacher. He takes a slice of the ad revenue that creators earn. In exchange, he gives them online tutorials about how to make viral content: everything from how to hold the camera to which metrics matter to Facebook. He releases new instructions every time the algorithm changes substantially, and offers feedback on people’s videos. He also posts his creators’ videos on his own Facebook page, which has 14m followers.


The network is best known for what you might call appalling cooking videos. One of these, posted last summer under the heading “Ultimate Spaghetti Trick!!”, featured a woman dumping pasta and tomato sauce onto a shiny white marble counter, mixing it up, then proudly proclaiming this to be the authentic Italian method. The clip was watched 33m times.

Rothfuss is tall and slim with dark hair and a pale, angular face (she was amused when one commenter described her as looking like “a pretty donkey”). She studied music and once dreamt of becoming a jazz singer. She downplays this ambition now, but for years she bounced between different gigs, including a stint on a cruise ship. At one point she worked as a nanny in Los Angeles to make ends meet between sporadic bookings.

A friend was making videos for Rick Lax, and invited Rothfuss to join in 2019. A year later she bought her first mansion. Entering the viral-content game involves a certain surrendering of artistic aspirations, but Rothfuss says she doesn’t care. “I do not want to be famous,” she says. “I love being low-key and flying under the radar, and just getting rich.”

It was Rick Lax himself who led me to become straw-deep in toilet milkshake. He contacted me in 2020 to congratulate me on the book I’d just published, a sociological study of elite nightclubs, and suggested that perhaps I should look at the “new creative elites” next. “Randomly, I’m the most-viewed influencer on Facebook. And I’ve turned my fiancée and all our friends into fb influencers too.” It was a characteristically bold introduction. He is not the only magician gaming the viral video economy (a British rival called Julius Dein operated his own empire in Mexico for 18 months), but he is arguably the most determined.



A few months later I drove to Henderson, a wealthy town outside Las Vegas, to meet Lax (he has since bought a larger property in the same area). Lax greeted me warmly, speaking with a faint Midwestern twang. His home was a mix of sleek minimalism and things a teenage boy might buy if he had the money. Decks of cards were stacked up between a ping-pong table and video-game consoles. The large white kitchen brimmed with snacks. In one cabinet the premium whisky was labelled: “The Owner’s Stash: please only drink if your previous month was $100,000.00+.”

For all his swagger and good looks, Lax seemed worried about how he’d come across on the page. If he was dissatisfied with his answer to one of my questions he’d stop and tell me it was off the record. Later on he asked if I’d been popular in high school, and looked disappointed when I said that I was. Lax was picked on as a child. He remembers a boy taunting him at summer camp: “I’m the fattest kid at camp and people still like me more than you.” When his middle-school classmates played tag they pretended to be passing on a disease: “the Ricky touch”.


For as long as he can remember he has been enthralled by magic, particularly the power it exerts over an audience. He used to watch old videos of David Copperfield shows over and over again at his grandparents’ house. He once told a podcast interviewer that he remembers his grandmother doubling up “in pain with delight” at Copperfield’s tricks, saying: “Oy vey Ricky, how does he do it?”

Lax practised tricks every day throughout his childhood. At Hanukkah he’d ask for magic props: linking rings, marked cards. His parents encouraged him to pursue a steadier career. Eventually he buckled down and went to law school, like his father.

He fried eggs in red bull and then appeared to stretch them like rubber bands

In 2008, after sitting his bar exams, Lax went to Las Vegas to let off steam. There he discovered Gary Darwin’s Magic Club, a weekly event held at the back of a dive bar. He was so enthralled by Las Vegas that he ended up moving there and working at a local paper. In a book he wrote about that time, he paints a portrait of the community that congregated around the club, enjoying the fraternity of tricksters as much as the art of magic. “Deception and deceivers” appeal to him, he explained in “Fool Me Once”. “I’ve always tried to learn their tricks and understand the psychology behind why they work. Not because I want to pull the tricks myself, but because I’m afraid of falling victim to them.”

Lax’s childhood dream seemed to be coming true. He recorded promotional videos for a website that sold magic tricks. In 2011, he began helping his childhood hero, David Copperfield, fine-tune the illusions he performed in Las Vegas. Two years later, Lax and Justin Flom, a friend from the Darwin club, successfully pitched a tv series to the Syfy channel. “Wizard Wars” was to be a reality show in which teams of visiting magicians would compete against a regular panel of conjurers to perform tricks with everyday objects.

Lax wanted to appear as a judge in “Wizard Wars”, as well as produce it. But when he arrived at the studio to audition, the production-company executives told him not to bother – he was too “cheesy”. Instead, they asked him to perform tricks for other potential judges to critique as part of their auditions. His friend Justin Flom – good-looking, with a more relaxed performance style – got a role on the regular panel of magicians. Lax stayed off camera.

The experience was “humiliating”, Lax told me. “Being told I just couldn’t be in the show because I wasn’t good enough. I said, ‘No, I think that’s wrong. I think you don’t like me, but actually I’m better than these other people. Here, let me prove it to you.’”

After the “Wizard Wars” debacle, Lax began uploading his own magic performances straight to Facebook. No one could stop him being cast in these. In the first ones, filmed on his phone in Starbucks, a stony-faced Lax looked into the camera and asked the viewer to pick a number between one and ten. This is a basic opener in mentalism, a branch of magic that creates the illusion of mind-reading through a mixture of showmanship, suggestion, trickery and, sometimes, basic maths (for example, there’s a certain formula for adding and dividing which, if done right, will always produce the number five).

The clips were low on production values – you could see Lax’s white earbuds, and the brightly lit Starbucks counter in the background – but hard to look away from. At the end of each one, Lax commanded the viewer to share the video if he’d correctly guessed their number, birth date or favourite colour. Some racked up over 10m views within weeks.


Lax spent a year filming these videos in Starbucks. Within two minutes of posting one, he could tell if it was going to take off; if it wasn’t, he’d delete it and try something else. He’d do this for hours until his laptop ran out of battery, then go home, charge it and return. He started to develop a sense of what kind of things worked, tracking when people stopped watching and which sorts of set-up performed better with viewers. After a while his research showed he’d be better off getting out of Starbucks and recording at home. The move paid off: his kitchen-counter videos were wildly popular (“bangers”, as the creators say).

One particularly successful strand involved him applying energy drinks to everyday food items. These clips look like frat-house fare, but they’re part of a tradition going back to Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, a 19th-century illusionist. Houdin (whose name was borrowed by escape artist Erich Weisz for his stage persona, Harry Houdini) liked to exploit popular curiosity about ether, an anaesthetic that was just starting to be used in medicine, and pretended to give his son the substance before performing a levitation illusion on him. Lax pulled off something similar with Red Bull, frying eggs in it, pulling them out of the pan and then appearing to stretch them like rubber bands (in fact he had switched the real eggs for toy ones).

By 2017, Lax’s videos were regularly getting 100m views. This was great publicity for his day job selling tricks to other magicians. He also got a lucrative deal with Diply, a clickbait publisher, to post a link to its site on his Facebook page. But he still wasn’t making any money directly for the output he spent most of his time on.

She used to be a nanny. Now, on a good day, one short clip can earn her enough to buy a Tesla

Lax often talks about a dinner he had at that time with a group of friends who worked in Hollywood. The conversation turned to his social-media popularity. “They laughed at me,” he recalls. Whenever he tells the story, a hostile edge creeps into his voice. “They literally laughed at me for just spending so much time making these videos that were paying zero.”

He wasn’t the only one wondering how to make money in the battle for eyeballs. An hour’s flight away in Silicon Valley, executives at Facebook were also trying to work out a business strategy. In just ten years, Facebook (whose parent company is now known as Meta) had attracted 2bn users worldwide, simply by offering a space for people to interact online. It was beginning to make huge profits by offering companies the opportunity to focus advertising on particular types of consumers. But by 2018 those consumers were spending ever more of their time online watching videos, a sphere dominated by Facebook’s rival, YouTube (TikTok hadn’t yet taken off).

Though Facebook did host videos, it paid only a select group of people for them, typically celebrities and established publishers such as tv channels and newspapers. People who wanted to make money out of their films usually posted them on YouTube, which offered creators 55% of the ad revenue. In 2018, in a bid to improve the quality of its video content, Facebook introduced the idea of “paid creators”, people eligible for the same proportion of ad revenue as YouTube was offering.


To qualify for this status, you had to have at least 10,000 followers and regularly post videos on your feed. Once registered as a paid creator, you could access Facebook’s Creator Studio dashboard, which helps you track how many people are watching content and for how long, what emojis or comments they leave, likes, shares and the demographic breakdown of the audience.

Lax was one of the first to sign up to Facebook’s scheme, and that summer he got his first cheque. By this point, he’d dispelled any lingering regrets about devoting his talents to mindless video clips. His partner (now fiancée) Elly Brown, a former singer, had just undergone gruelling treatment for oral cancer and the episode had dragged him into depression. Dumb tv programmes had helped get him through the months-long ordeal. He decided there was no shame in making the social-media equivalent.

Soon, Facebook’s payments to him were hitting six figures most months. He noticed that videos did better if scenes were raw and looked as though they captured real people in a moment of awkwardness. To increase his output, he started buying existing videos from sites such as Jukin Media, which is a warehouse of videos generated by people online. He might pay $500 for a video of a marriage proposal gone awry and tinker with it until it fit the format of a viral clip.



Lax found it frustratingly hard to get other people’s videos quite right: something about the visuals or timing usually remained stubbornly outside the parameters of what he knew worked. So Lax and Brown started to stage scenes themselves. Their living room became a studio in which women dumped their boyfriends, ridiculous bar bets were waged and surreal diy projects enacted. The videos would regularly get 100m views across different platforms (Facebook counts anything watched for more than a few seconds as a view). Lax realised that appetite for these videos was insatiable: the only obstacle to earning more money was how many clips he could make in a day.


In 2020 the pandemic threw up a surprising opportunity: magicians and singers were stuck at home. Lax and Brown invited friends who worked in the entertainment industry to help them make videos. Traffic was soaring with the world under lockdown. Lax brought 20 more people into the network, then another 20 and another 20. By late 2021, Lax’s creators were generating a total of about $5m a month across Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube.

Lax wouldn’t go into details of his profit-sharing arrangement but his creators are clearly flourishing. Many told me they felt like they were taking part in a 21st-century gold rush. “This doesn’t happen to that many people,” says Amy Boiss, a one-time Uber driver whose magician boyfriend introduced her to Lax’s network. “To make more money than neurosurgeons.”

Lax and his crew weren’t the first people to make overnight fortunes through social-media videos. In 2009 a group of college friends posted a video to YouTube of them shooting hoops in their backyard; two years later Dude Perfect, as they called themselves, were guests on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” and they’re now estimated to be among the highest earners on the platform. A teenager from Connecticut, Charli D’Amelio, started filming TikTok clips of herself dancing in 2019: last year she made $17.5m, according to Forbes. But there’s a difference. These stars made their millions by establishing a recognisable brand which meant people consciously sought their output. Lax and his friends got rich without anyone knowing who they are.

It feels like a drug. when this video starts to go down, you’re chasing your hit again

That anonymity partly reflects how videos are consumed on Facebook. The platform is a less obvious destination for video entertainment than YouTube or TikTok – many of us are sucked into watching clips posted there after coming to it for updates on our friends or family (this may be changing: Meta has said that 1.25bn people visit its dedicated video section each month). Videos such as Lax’s represent the rawest form of the social-media campaign for our attention: they don’t need to inform, or inspire, they simply have to make it hard for us to look away.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that the two most-viewed Facebook creators in 2021, Lax and Julius Dein, both started out as magicians (as did many of their affiliates). Their videos aren’t magic performances as such, but they’re informed by the art of magic. “Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people’s perception,” wrote a former Google employee (and amateur magician) in an essay published on Medium in 2017, “How technology hijacks your mind”. Social-media companies, wrote the author, “influence what people do without them even realising it”, just as magicians do: “Once you know how to push people’s buttons you can play them like a piano.”

Last August, I spent a day filming bangers at Anna Rothfuss’s rented condo. Lax’s team often shoot in each other’s homes, to give videos the authentically amateurish feel that Facebook’s algorithms favour (the professional lighting rigs are just out of shot). Boundaries between personal and creative space are almost non-existent: Rothfuss has a costume wardrobe at home which contains, among other things, 12 wedding dresses. In the collab house, in which Lax lets his creators crash and film, it’s hard to move in some rooms for all the masks and fake feet.

Over the course of six hours I cranked out five videos with Elly Brown, Lax’s fiancée. The one that performed best online was a cheater drama, a tried and tested genre in the viral-video world (a “bucket”, as creators call it). Cheater dramas involve an unsuspecting spouse walking in on their partner with someone else. The suspense of waiting for a cuckolded spouse to find out keeps viewers gripped enough to sit through the ad.

The first thing creators have to get right is “stopping the scroll”, so the viewer doesn’t reflexively move down to the next post in their feed. That means the opening has to titillate or intrigue, ideally both, in the first three seconds (I saw one begin with a hotdog being lowered into a woman’s mouth). If a viewer stays for those initial moments there’s a good chance they’ll commit until the ad plays.

The ad is the holy grail on Facebook: making money on the platform is all about getting someone to watch it. Even if you achieve that, however, the compensation structure is opaque. Creators don’t know what the ad rate will be on any given video. It could be as high as $40 per thousand views if the audience is deemed “high value” (ie, North American). That fee drops sharply the further a video travels from wealthy countries: advertisers pay as little as $1 per thousand views in Pakistan. Rates, and the calculations underlying them, change all the time. A viral hit doesn’t necessarily translate into a big payout, and it’s not always easy to work out why.


Despite this uncertainty, Facebook remains the preferred platform for video-makers such as Lax. For a long time, TikTok paid creators only nominal sums and didn’t share ad revenue – people who’ve made money from TikTok videos have usually done so by becoming famous enough to get sponsorship deals. (That could change: TikTok recently started offering top creators a 50% split.) YouTube, like Facebook, gives creators 55% of the ad revenue, but its user base is not as large (around 2.2bn to Facebook’s 2.9bn), and it isn’t engineered for virality as Facebook is.

On Facebook, stopping the scroll informs the aesthetic of the entire video. Just as a good casino never lets a gambler’s cocktail glass sit empty, viral creators don’t give you any reason to leave: no bad lighting, no stagnant action. Viewers from Manhattan to Mumbai should be able to understand every second, when watching on a phone screen without sound.

As the video continues, the action (known as the “beats”) must build tension while also creating the feeling that the pay-off – the cheater getting busted, the prank revealed – could happen at any moment. Even if someone doesn’t watch all the way to the ad, Facebook’s algorithms will promote a video more aggressively if it has a high “watch time” from users.

The cheater banger I filmed started with Brown, who was playing the mistress, dressed in a bright orange tank top and rolling off the bed as the wife (played by me) walked through the door. It was a dramatic opener.

At some point, Lax’s creators typically treat the viewer to a surreal twist, which they call “triggering”. Triggers exploit the psychology of curiosity: people pay closer attention when they are trying to fill in missing information or making sense of a weird detail (did I just see tampons in that woman’s freezer?). Sometimes the trigger is an object that’s out of place. In one cooking video, the camera catches a glimpse of a dirty hairbrush on the countertop. In another a woman scoops relish out of the jar with long manicured nails instead of a spoon, all the while playing it straight. Triggers don’t just keep you watching, they also often elicit comments, which can be a factor in helping videos get promoted on Facebook.

In our cheater video, I marched around the flat after coming home from work while Brown surreptitiously changed into a disguise under the bed. The trigger was the outfit itself: an astronaut costume. Brown’s team had already tried out different versions of this disguise. A pool cleaner gleaned 99m views, a soldier got 234m. None of the choices of what to wear made sense – that was the point. Your confusion makes you linger and then, as one magician in Lax’s network put it: “Boom! Gotcha.” You stay through the ad.

“So cringe,” said one performer about a video in which she eats a condom out of a cupcake

The work of creators doesn’t finish when the camera stops rolling. After filming the cheater scene, we went back and recorded slightly different versions of the same video. Using Facebook’s data on how videos perform, you can run tests to help predict which version of a video, thumbnail picture or title has the greatest appeal. Some creators I met had made their own spreadsheets to better analyse the resulting data.

There are no prizes for originality. Lax and his rivals shamelessly rip off and refine each other’s “buckets”. A media company in Cyprus that produces videos for Facebook and YouTube recently put out a recruitment ad that openly called for video producers who could mimic the output of Lax and his fellow magician Julius Dein.


Though copyright is rarely an issue, Lax’s creators have to keep an eye out for Facebook’s filters, which may remove videos that don’t clearly disclose that they’re staged. Most creators now put disclaimers at the top of captions accompanying their videos saying that the clips are “scripted dramas, satires (and parodies)”. Some continue to play with the idea that the content might be real, however, through videos with titles such as “When She Pulled off the Covers!”

Our astronaut-cheater video took us about 20 minutes to set up and film. Glancing at the thumbnail a few weeks after we posted it, I felt proud and a little unnerved to see that it had 50m views (to date, 164m people have seen it). Brown was unfazed by its success. “You’re seeing a compelling video, and we’re seeing a formula that we practise,” one magician-turned-creator told me. “It’s like a magic trick.”

Breaking into the arts became almost impossible after the pandemic. Theatres and venues closed, some permanently: the entertainment industry was one of the worst-hit sectors of the American economy in 2020. Job losses were particularly heavy in Las Vegas, where Lax is based.

There are no signs of such trouble in Lax’s milieu. I went to a party at his home recently, to which Rothfuss turned up with an $8,000 Chanel handbag. Kate Heintzelman, a former schoolteacher who out of habit still collects discount points from Target, used to earn about $28,000 a year after tax. Now she makes that in a single week. The other day she treated herself to a handbag without even looking at the price. “I didn’t need a Gucci bag”, she told me, “but it was a pretty purse and I was like, ‘yeah, I want that. And I can afford it because I know that today I’ve made 20 grand.’”



Success on this scale is intoxicating, particularly for creators like Brown and Rothfuss who spent years trying to get a break in the conventional entertainment industry. “You don’t have to go through an agent or booker or casting director telling you that you’re good enough or not to do their roles,” said Brown, over dinner one night. “We make our own roles,” Rothfuss chimed in. “If I feel like it, ‘ok, I’m a teen model today!’” (Rothfuss, who was 34, had in fact played a teen model earlier that day and her hair was still in two plaits at dinner.)

I spent several weeks with Lax’s crew. At times, being part of his network seemed like being a college student with a massive bank balance. They’re in and out of each other’s houses all the time, filming pranks in Walmart and Target, trawling junk shops for surreal props. On occasion, though, it was as if a capricious boss or casting agent had simply been swapped for a capricious algorithm.

Rothfuss spends most of her days replying to comments and live streaming, as well as shooting, editing, posting and studying the data about her videos. Producing relentless iterations of the same videos doesn’t always feel like a very creative process. The internet, says Lax, “rewards influencers who recognise the disposability and fluidity of content”.

Most of Lax’s creators used to work in the performing arts. Not all are as comfortable as he is about giving themselves over to the production of clickbait. “So cringe,” said one performer, about a hit video in which she eats a condom out of a cupcake. Another creator called his videos “shittainment”, because they were the kinds of things people would watch in the bathroom. “Wait, there are 100m people that watched this stupid video I made. Why?”

Many comments under such videos are hostile, threatening and pointedly personal. “Wasted three minutes of my life I’ll never get back,” is a common one. Lax reckons he’s received more than 10,000 death threats over the years. When I looked through his Facebook messages the toxicity and menace were palpable.

As I spent more time with Lax’s creators I realised it wasn’t just the monetary rewards that were driving them on, but the same dopamine rush they were exploiting in us. If you’re looking at the data, you can actually see your earnings go up as people watch your work: making viral videos can be just as addictive as watching them.

“It feels like a drug,” said Tommy Wind, one of the magicians in Lax’s network. “When this video starts to go down, now you’re chasing that hit again. And that’s the next post and you’ll do whatever you gotta do to get to that next post. You’ll hire as many actors, you’ll go wherever you have to film. You’ll get kicked out of places.” (“Half the network is banned from Target,” his wife adds.)

“Wait, there are 100m people that watched this stupid video I made. Why?”

In March, Meta announced a change that had wide-reaching implications for Lax and his creators. The company was going to stop promoting what it called “watchbait” – videos that “create an arbitrary curiosity gap” or promise sensational revelations. Both Lax and Dein saw their audience and earnings fall abruptly.

This didn’t deter Lax. He and his creators have been posting videos of different lengths on their pages to “clean” them up for the watchbait filters and making it clearer that their work is scripted. Facebook seems keen to promote feel-good videos these days, so they’ve been doing fewer pranks and more crafts and cooking (with a surreal twist, naturally: pianos painted with garden rakes; dyeing children’s shoes with Skittles). The network is now climbing back to the same viewing levels it was achieving before.

Lax’s rival, Julius Dein, closed down his production hub and moved back to London; his small community of creators, who described themselves to me as a family, disbanded overnight. He now regards his participation in the viral gold rush as damaging to his reputation, he said, though it’s clearly a hard habit to kick. He recently posted a video – similar to one from the Lax network – in which he and his ex-girlfriend ate pasta together in silence. “It’s so easy to be delusional when you’re living in a content house, with all your friends, like, ‘Oh this is amazing! We’re making so much money, we’re getting millions of likes’,” he said.

He plans to start producing magic videos again soon. “Let me give you my two cents as someone that went to number one in the world. I made a lot of money out of it. I would give every penny back, to reverse everything I did and to not have a single one of these views.”

It’s great to have money”, Lax told me once, as we drove through the gleaming strip malls of Henderson in his new Mercedes, “because that’s how society keeps score.” Lax remains unrepentant about producing time-sucking videos. The notion of what he refers to as “quote unquote good art” is merely a creation of “elites”, he says. “If people are upset that we’re getting so many views, I think it’s because we’re the only ones in this game of actually entertaining people and giving people what they want.” He has even learned to be blasé about death threats, he claims.


One community of critics still has the power to wound him: fellow magicians. There’s a long thread in the magic community’s forum on Reddit called “What happened to Rick Lax”. One typical post lays into Lax and Justin Flom: “[They] started doing fake prank videos and ended up being the laughing stock of the magic community and losing all respect. They’re probably hiding under a rock somewhere in embarrassment.” Similar rants persist in a Facebook group, “Magicians Only”, and on another forum, themagiccafe.com.

When Lax first told me how much he’d been hurt by “the cool kids in magic”, I stifled a laugh. But any aspect of your social life can end up feeling like high school, with hierarchies of status and the anguish of not fitting in. Several magicians referred to the film “Mean Girls” when describing their fellow magicians.

In some ways magic is inimical to social media. Magicians are not natural sharers. They can’t copyright tricks, so they rely on a code of honour. The greatest sin is to reveal on social media how someone else’s trick works.

Lax himself has never crossed this Rubicon, but his friend and colleague Justin Flom did. In December 2020, Flom posted a three-minute video on his Facebook page titled “whoa”. This exposes the secret behind the Crystal Casket, a stage illusion invented in the early 1900s, in which a woman magically appears inside a glass box that was previously empty. The video quickly racked up 95m views on Facebook, and Flom earned $60,000 in advertising revenue.

This was a big departure for Flom, who comes from a family of magicians. Magicians heaped scorn on him, both privately and publicly. The Fellowship of Christian Magicians, of which Flom and his father have been members since his childhood, threatened to expel him. A famous magician, one of his childhood heroes, left him a string of angry late-night text messages on his birthday (“who do you think you are?”). Creators in Lax’s network were trolled just for being associated with Flom.

In the months that followed, Flom attracted further opprobrium by exposing several more magic tricks in videos that went viral. He insists that making information public can only improve the art of magic, and that secretive communities shouldn’t stand in the way of market forces. Last year he bought himself a new mansion. “I took my ego out back”, he told me calmly of his decision to dive into viral video-making, “and shot him.”

In 2020 Lax and his friends were uninvited to a local magician’s party in Las Vegas, an annual event that marks the start of the MAGIC Live! convention, when nearly 2,000 magicians from around the world gather to see new tricks and network.

Lax decided to host his own pre-convention party. The invitation he posted on Facebook included a picture of his multi-million dollar home overlooking the Las Vegas Strip. “Beautiful hotel,” one magician joked in the comments.

It was a glitzy affair. Rothfuss and Brown wore matching satin gowns in green and pink, and milled about with performers between the tapas and the open bar. Lax had also invited some models to move around and liven up the scene. The event, Flom told me, was a signal to the magic community that, “We are here, we’re successful, we’re not going away.” He added, “And that we’re nice.” Lax kept asking me if I had talked to any of the “magicians’ magicians” in the room, to find out what they thought of the evening.

Shortly afterwards, Lax returned to his data. From his office you can see his swimming pool, terrace and, far below, the Strip. At night the lights of the hotels are mere tiny twinkles from his balcony.


As the pandemic has waned, performers have gone back on stage. Lax is still analysing data, steering content, dealing with accountants and devising how to make more money. “I wonder whether what we’re doing is ‘really’ significant,” he wrote to me once, in a rare moment of doubt. Lax has changed the lives of his friends for ever, and is watched by billions of people. But nobody sees him.■

Ashley Mears is author of “Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit”. Read Mears’s previous piece for 1843 magazine here




魔术师如何赢得注意力经济
一群魔术师为社交媒体制作令人上瘾的视频而致富。这是否让他们失去了自己的灵魂？

2022年7月28日


作者：阿什利-米尔斯

如果你在去年春天的某个时候上网，你很有可能浏览过一段视频，其中一名女子将鲜奶油和巧克力糖浆喷入马桶。这段视频被发布在Facebook和TikTok上，并被多家新闻网站转载，在视频中，该女子用马拉西诺樱桃和彩虹洒在混合物上，促使镜头后的一名男子惊呼："哦，我的天哪，这真是太过分了！" 然后她拿起一根吸管。

这名妇女后来发布了一张她和一个朋友的照片，两人显然都在欢快地喝着碗里的饮料。"你会得痢疾的。"一个厌恶的评论警告说。当然，她并不是真的在喝厕所奶昔：她用令人不安的热情在边缘下搅拌生奶油，让你意识到，除非你吸吮它，否则把吸管放进嘴里实际上并不会让你接触到另一端的东西。

影片中的女主角安娜-罗斯福斯（Anna Rothfuss）既不是一个恋物癖者，也不是一个绝望的寻求关注者：她是网络视频世界中最成功的企业家之一。镜头后面的男人是一个叫贾斯汀-弗洛姆的有成就的魔术师（他现在是她的男朋友）。在马桶旁的另一个女人是我。


作为一个文化社会学家，我曾将自己置身于一些奇怪的环境中。但是，在这个内容工厂里闲逛是，嗯，额外的。这不只是因为人们在用马桶做可笑的事情。而是他们在做这些事情时赚了很多钱。视频的每个元素都经过了测试，以确定其在吸引人们继续观看方面的有效性。在一个好的日子里，这些短片可以让罗斯福斯赚到足够买一辆特斯拉的钱。

在我开始研究内容经济的这个角落之前，我以为那些走红的视频是Z世代的人在玩耍，偶尔在偶然的浪潮中冲浪。但事实证明，让人们在社交媒体上关注你是有公式的。

虽然这个公式并不完美--你永远不知道不同平台的算法会倾向于什么，或者什么会引起观众的共鸣--但有一群人已经和其他人一样接近创造出一种病毒式传播的方法。而这种方法是由魔术师设计的。

罗斯福斯和弗洛姆是180名视频制作者（或行业术语中的 "创作者"）中的一员，他们与拉斯维加斯一位名叫里克-拉克斯的魔术师合作。他们制作的短视频的时间是Facebook要求剪辑的精确秒数，以符合广告的要求（过去是三分钟，最近降到了一分钟）。虽然这些短片通常看起来像真实的用户生成的材料，但都是有脚本的。大多数属于不同的类型：DIY、工艺品、危害、通奸和求婚。

拉克斯管理他的网络，就像好莱坞经纪人和学校教师之间的交叉。他从创作者赚取的广告收入中抽成。作为交换，他向他们提供关于如何制作病毒性内容的在线教程：从如何拿相机到哪些指标对Facebook很重要，应有尽有。每次算法发生重大变化时，他都会发布新的说明，并对人们的视频提供反馈。他还在自己的Facebook页面上发布创作者的视频，该页面拥有1400万粉丝。


该网络最出名的是你可能称之为骇人听闻的烹饪视频。其中一个视频是去年夏天发布的，标题是 "终极意大利面技巧！"，内容是一个女人将意大利面和番茄酱倒在一个闪亮的白色大理石柜台上，搅拌起来，然后自豪地宣称这是正宗的意大利方法。该片段被观看了3300次。

罗斯福斯身材高大苗条，黑发，脸色苍白，棱角分明（当一位评论者形容她看起来像 "一头漂亮的驴子 "时，她感到很好笑）。她学过音乐，曾经梦想成为一名爵士乐歌手。她现在淡化了这一雄心壮志，但多年来她在不同的演出之间跳来跳去，包括在一艘游轮上的工作经历。有一次，她在洛杉矶做保姆，在零星的演出之间维持生计。

一个朋友在为里克-拉克斯制作视频，并邀请罗斯福斯在2019年加入。一年后，她买了自己的第一座豪宅。进入病毒式内容的游戏涉及到对艺术追求的某种交出，但罗斯福斯说她不在乎。"我不想成名，"她说。"我喜欢低调，喜欢在雷达下飞行，喜欢发财。"

是里克-拉克斯本人带领我成为厕所奶茶的草根。他在2020年联系我，祝贺我刚刚出版的书，这是一本关于精英夜总会的社会学研究，并建议我接下来也许应该研究一下 "新的创意精英"。"随机的，我是Facebook上浏览量最大的影响者。而且我把我的未婚妻和我们所有的朋友也变成了fb的影响者。" 这是一个具有特色的大胆介绍。他不是唯一一个在病毒视频经济中博弈的魔术师（一个叫朱利叶斯-迪恩的英国对手在墨西哥经营了自己的帝国18个月），但他可以说是最坚定的。



几个月后，我驱车前往拉斯维加斯郊外的富裕小镇亨德森(Henderson)，与拉克斯见面（此后他在同一地区购买了一处更大的房产）。拉克斯热情地迎接了我，说话时带着淡淡的中西部口音。他的家是时尚的极简主义和一个十几岁的男孩如果有钱可能买的东西的混合体。在一张乒乓球桌和电子游戏机之间堆放着一副扑克牌。大型白色厨房里摆满了零食。在一个柜子里，高级威士忌被贴上了标签。"主人的藏品：只有当你上个月的收入超过100,000.00美元时才能喝。"

对于他所有的豪迈和帅气，拉克斯似乎担心他在页面上的表现。如果他对我的某个问题的回答不满意，他会停下来，告诉我这是不公开的。后来，他问我在高中时是否受欢迎，当我说我受欢迎时，他显得很失望。拉克斯从小就被人欺负。他记得一个男孩在夏令营中嘲弄他。"我是营地里最胖的孩子，人们还是喜欢我，比你更喜欢我。" 当他的初中同学玩捉人游戏时，他们假装在传授一种疾病。"Ricky触摸"。


从他有记忆起，他就被魔术迷住了，特别是它对观众施加的力量。他曾经在祖父母家一遍又一遍地观看大卫-科波菲尔表演的老视频。他曾告诉播客采访者，他记得他的祖母在看到科波菲尔的魔术时 "痛苦地 "翻了个身，说。"Oy vey Ricky，他是怎么做到的？

拉克斯在整个童年时期每天都在练习技巧。在光明节的时候，他要求得到魔术道具：连接的戒指、有标记的卡片。他的父母鼓励他追求一个更稳定的职业。最终，他像他的父亲一样毅然决然地去了法律学校。

他在红牛中煎鸡蛋，然后像橡皮筋一样拉伸它们。

2008年，在参加完律师资格考试后，拉克斯去拉斯维加斯发泄情绪。在那里他发现了加里-达尔文的魔术俱乐部，这是一个在潜水酒吧后面举行的每周活动。他被拉斯维加斯迷住了，最后他搬到了那里，并在当地一家报纸工作。在他写的一本关于那段时间的书中，他描绘了一个聚集在俱乐部周围的社区，享受魔术师的兄弟情谊，就像享受魔术艺术一样。"欺骗和欺骗者 "对他有吸引力，他在《愚弄我一次》中解释说。"我一直试图学习他们的把戏，了解他们成功背后的心理学。不是因为我想自己玩这些把戏，而是因为我害怕成为他们的受害者。"

拉克斯的童年梦想似乎要实现了。他为一个销售魔术技巧的网站录制了宣传视频。2011年，他开始帮助他儿时的英雄大卫-科波菲尔，对他在拉斯维加斯表演的幻术进行微调。两年后，拉克斯和达尔文俱乐部的朋友贾斯汀-弗洛姆成功地向Syfy频道推荐了一个电视系列。"巫师大战 "是一个真人秀节目，由来访的魔术师组成的团队将与一个常规的魔术师小组竞争，用日常物品表演魔术。

拉克斯想作为评委出现在 "魔法师大战 "中，并制作该节目。但是，当他来到工作室试镜时，制作公司的主管告诉他不用麻烦了--他太 "俗 "了。相反，他们要求他为其他潜在的评委表演一些技巧，作为他们试镜的一部分进行点评。他的朋友贾斯汀-弗洛姆（Justin Flom）--长相不错，表演风格更轻松--在常规魔术师小组中得到了一个角色。拉克斯没有出镜。

拉克斯告诉我，这次经历是 "羞辱性的"。"被告知我不能参加这个节目，因为我不够好。我说，'不，我认为那是错误的。我认为你不喜欢我，但实际上我比其他这些人更好。来，让我证明给你看'"。

在 "巫师大战 "失败后，拉克斯开始将自己的魔术表演直接上传到Facebook。没有人能够阻止他出演这些节目。在第一批表演中，他在星巴克用手机拍摄，面色凝重的拉克斯看着镜头，让观众在1到10之间选一个数字。这是心灵感应的一个基本开场白，心灵感应是魔术的一个分支，通过混合表演技巧、暗示、诡计，有时还有基本的数学知识（例如，有一个特定的加法和除法公式，如果做对了，总是会产生数字5）来创造读心术的错觉。

这些片段的制作价值不高--你可以看到拉克斯的白色耳机，以及背景中灯光明亮的星巴克柜台--但很难看出什么。在每个片段的结尾，拉克斯要求观众分享视频，如果他猜对了他们的号码、出生日期或最喜欢的颜色。有些视频在几周内就获得了超过1000万的浏览量。


拉克斯花了一年时间在星巴克拍摄这些视频。在发布一个视频的两分钟内，他就能知道它是否会起飞；如果不会，他就会删除它，然后尝试其他东西。他这样做了几个小时，直到他的笔记本电脑没电，然后回家充电，再回来。他开始培养一种感觉，即什么样的东西是有效的，跟踪人们何时停止观看，以及哪种设置在观众中表现更好。一段时间后，他的研究表明，他最好离开星巴克，在家里录音。此举得到了回报：他在厨房的视频大受欢迎（正如创作者所说的 "大热门"）。

其中一个特别成功的环节是他将能量饮料应用到日常食品中。这些片段看起来像兄弟会的票价，但它们是一个传统的一部分，可以追溯到19世纪的幻术师让-尤金-罗伯特-胡丹。胡丁（他的名字被逃脱艺术家埃里希-韦斯借用到他的舞台角色哈里-胡迪尼身上）喜欢利用大众对乙醚的好奇心，一种刚刚开始用于医学的麻醉剂，并在对他的儿子进行浮空幻术之前假装给他的儿子注射这种物质。拉克斯用红牛做了类似的事情，在里面煎鸡蛋，把它们从锅里拉出来，然后看起来像橡皮筋一样拉伸它们（事实上他把真鸡蛋换成了玩具鸡蛋）。

到2017年，拉克斯的视频经常获得1亿次观看。这对他向其他魔术师出售魔术的日常工作来说是很好的宣传。他还与Diply（一家点击率高的出版商）达成了一项有利可图的协议，在他的Facebook页面上发布其网站链接。但他仍然没有为他大部分时间的产出直接挣钱。

她曾经是一个保姆。现在，在一个好的日子里，一个简短的片段可以让她赚到足够的钱买一辆特斯拉

拉克斯经常谈起他当时与一群在好莱坞工作的朋友的晚餐。谈话转向了他在社交媒体上的知名度。"他们嘲笑我，"他回忆说。每当他讲述这个故事时，他的声音里就会出现一种敌意。"他们真的嘲笑我花了这么多时间制作这些零报酬的视频"。

他并不是唯一一个想知道如何在眼球之战中赚钱的人。在一小时航程之外的硅谷，Facebook的高管们也在努力制定商业战略。在短短十年间，Facebook（其母公司现在被称为Meta）已经在全球吸引了20亿用户，仅仅是为人们提供了一个在线互动的空间。它开始通过为公司提供机会，将广告集中在特定类型的消费者身上，从而获得巨大的利润。但到了2018年，这些消费者在网上观看视频的时间越来越多，这一领域由Facebook的竞争对手YouTube主导（当时TikTok还没有起飞）。

尽管Facebook确实主办了视频，但它只向特定的人群支付费用，通常是名人和成熟的出版商，如电视频道和报纸。想从自己的影片中赚钱的人通常会把它们发布在YouTube上，YouTube为创作者提供55%的广告收入。2018年，为了提高其视频内容的质量，Facebook引入了 "付费创作者 "的概念，人们有资格获得与YouTube提供的相同比例的广告收入。


要获得这种地位，你必须至少有1万名粉丝，并定期在你的feed上发布视频。一旦注册成为付费创作者，你就可以访问Facebook的Creator Studio仪表板，它可以帮助你跟踪有多少人在看内容，看了多长时间，他们留下了什么表情符号或评论，喜欢、分享和观众的人口统计细分。

拉克斯是第一批报名参加Facebook计划的人之一，那年夏天他收到了第一张支票。此时，他已经打消了将自己的才华投入到无谓的视频剪辑中的任何挥之不去的遗憾。他的伙伴（现在的未婚妻）艾莉-布朗（Elly Brown）是一名前歌手，刚刚经历了口腔癌的艰苦治疗，这段经历将他拖入抑郁症。愚蠢的电视节目帮助他度过了长达数月的折磨。他决定在社交媒体上发表类似的文章，这并不丢人。

很快，Facebook给他的付款在大多数月份达到了六位数。他注意到，如果视频的场景是原始的，看起来就像捕捉到了真实的人的尴尬时刻，那么它的效果会更好。为了增加产量，他开始从Jukin Media等网站购买现有的视频，Jukin Media是一个由人们在网上产生的视频仓库。他可能会花500美元购买一个求婚失败的视频，并对其进行修改，直到它符合病毒剪辑的格式。



拉克斯发现，要想把别人的视频做得很好，是一件令人沮丧的事：视觉效果或时机的某些方面通常顽固地停留在他知道的有效参数之外。所以拉克丝和布朗开始自己制作场景。他们的客厅成了一个工作室，里面有女人甩掉她们的男朋友，有可笑的酒吧打赌，有超现实的DIY项目。这些视频在不同的平台上经常获得1亿次观看（Facebook将任何超过几秒钟的观看都算作一次观看）。拉克斯意识到，人们对这些视频的需求是无法满足的：赚取更多钱的唯一障碍是他在一天内能制作多少个片段。


2020年，大流行病带来了一个令人惊讶的机会：魔术师和歌手都被困在家里。拉克斯和布朗邀请在娱乐业工作的朋友帮助他们制作视频。在世界被封锁的情况下，交通量急剧上升。拉克斯又带了20个人进入网络，然后又带了20个人，又带了20个人。到2021年底，Lax的创作者在Facebook、Snapchat和YouTube上每月共创造了约500万美元的收入。

拉克斯不愿谈及他的利润分享安排的细节，但他的创作者显然正在蓬勃发展。许多人告诉我，他们觉得自己是在参加一场21世纪的淘金热。艾米-博伊斯（Amy Boiss）说，她曾是一名Uber司机，她的魔术师男友把她介绍给了拉克斯的网络，"这种情况不会发生在很多人身上"。"要比神经外科医生赚更多的钱。"

拉克斯和他的团队并不是第一个通过社交媒体视频一夜暴富的人。2009年，一群大学朋友在YouTube上发布了一段他们在后院投篮的视频；两年后，他们自称的 "完美小子"(Dude Perfect)成为 "吉米-金梅尔现场 "的嘉宾，据估计他们现在是该平台上收入最高的人之一。一名来自康涅狄格州的青少年Charli D'Amelio在2019年开始拍摄自己跳舞的TikTok片段：据福布斯报道，去年她赚了1750万美元。但有一点不同。这些明星通过建立一个可识别的品牌，意味着人们有意识地寻求他们的产出，从而赚取了数百万美元。拉克斯和他的朋友们在没有人知道他们是谁的情况下发了财。

这感觉就像一种毒品。当这个视频开始下降时，你又在追寻你的热门。

这种匿名性部分反映了Facebook上视频的消费方式。与YouTube或TikTok相比，该平台是一个不太明显的视频娱乐目的地--我们中的许多人都是在看了朋友或家人的最新情况后，才被吸引到这里来观看发布的片段（这可能正在改变。Meta公司表示，每月有12.5亿人访问其专门的视频版块）。像拉克斯这样的视频代表了社交媒体争夺我们注意力的最原始形式：它们不需要提供信息，也不需要激发灵感，它们只需要让我们难以移开视线。

2021年脸书上浏览量最大的两位创作者，拉克斯和朱利叶斯-迪恩，都是以魔术师起家的，这也许不是巧合（他们的许多附属公司也是如此）。他们的视频并不是魔术表演本身，但他们从魔术的艺术中得到了启发。"魔术师从寻找人们认知的盲点、边缘、弱点和极限开始，"一位前谷歌员工（也是业余魔术师）在2017年发表在Medium上的一篇文章《技术如何劫持你的思想》中写道。作者写道，社交媒体公司 "在人们没有意识到的情况下影响他们的行为"，就像魔术师一样："一旦你知道如何推动人们的按钮，你就可以像钢琴一样演奏他们。"

去年8月，我在安娜-罗斯福斯租住的公寓里花了一天时间拍摄流浪者。拉克斯的团队经常在对方家里拍摄，以使视频具有Facebook的算法所青睐的真实的业余感觉（专业照明设备就在镜头之外）。个人和创作空间之间的界限几乎不存在。罗斯福斯在家里有一个服装衣柜，其中包括12件婚纱。在拉克斯让他的创作者们撞车和拍摄的合作屋里，由于所有的面具和假脚，在一些房间里很难移动。

在六个小时的时间里，我和拉克斯的未婚妻埃利-布朗（Elly Brown）拍摄了五段视频。在网上表现最好的是一部出轨剧，这是病毒视频世界中一种久经考验的类型（创作者称之为 "桶"）。出轨剧涉及一个毫无戒心的配偶撞见他们的伴侣与其他人在一起。等待被戴绿帽子的配偶发现的悬念使观众被牢牢抓住，足以坐到广告里。

创作者要做的第一件事是 "停止滚动"，这样观众就不会反射性地向下移动到他们饲料中的下一篇文章。这意味着开篇必须在前三秒内刺激或吸引人，最好是两者兼而有之（我看到一个广告以一个热狗被放进一个女人的嘴里开始）。如果观众停留在最初的时刻，他们就很有可能在广告播放前继续观看。

广告是Facebook的圣杯：在这个平台上赚钱的关键是让人看广告。然而，即使你实现了这一点，补偿结构也是不透明的。创作者不知道任何特定视频的广告费会是多少。如果观众被认为是 "高价值"（即北美地区），每千次观看可能高达40美元。视频离富裕国家越远，广告费就会急剧下降：在巴基斯坦，广告商每千次浏览只需支付1美元。费率和计算方法一直在变化。病毒式的点击率不一定会转化为大笔的报酬，而且要弄清楚原因也不容易。


尽管存在这种不确定性，Facebook仍然是拉克斯等视频制作者的首选平台。长期以来，TikTok只向创作者支付名义上的金额，而且不分享广告收入--通过TikTok视频赚钱的人通常是通过变得足够出名来获得赞助协议。(这可能会改变。TikTok最近开始为顶级创作者提供50%的分成）。YouTube和Facebook一样，给创作者55%的广告收入，但它的用户群没有那么大（约22亿人，而Facebook为29亿人），而且它没有像Facebook那样为病毒式传播而设计。

在Facebook，停止滚动会影响整个视频的美感。就像一个好的赌场不会让赌徒的鸡尾酒杯空着一样，病毒式创作者不会给你任何离开的理由：没有糟糕的灯光，没有停滞的动作。从曼哈顿到孟买的观众，在没有声音的手机屏幕上观看时，应该能够理解每一秒。

随着视频的继续，动作（被称为 "节拍"）必须建立起紧张感，同时也要让人感觉到回报--作弊者被抓，恶作剧被揭露--随时都可能发生。即使有人没有一直看完广告，如果用户的 "观看时间 "很高，Facebook的算法也会更积极地推广一个视频。

我拍摄的出轨视频开始时，扮演小三的布朗穿着一件鲜艳的橙色背心，在妻子（由我扮演）进门时从床上滚下来。这是一个戏剧性的开场。

在某些时候，拉克斯的创作者通常会用一个超现实的转折来对待观众，他们称之为 "触发"。触发器利用了好奇心的心理：当人们试图填补缺失的信息或理解一个奇怪的细节（我刚刚在那个女人的冰箱里看到卫生棉条了吗）时，他们会更加关注。有时，触发因素是一个不合适的物体。在一个烹饪视频中，摄像机瞥见了台面上的一把脏毛刷。在另一个视频中，一个女人用修剪过的长指甲而不是勺子从罐子里舀出津津有味的东西，而她却一直在装模作样。触发器不仅能让你继续看下去，它们还经常引起评论，这可能是帮助视频在Facebook上得到推广的一个因素。

在我们的作弊视频中，我在下班回家后在公寓里走来走去，而布朗则在床下偷偷地换上了一套伪装。触发点是服装本身：一套宇航员服装。布朗的团队已经尝试了这种伪装的不同版本。一个泳池清洁工获得了99米的浏览量，一个士兵获得了234米。关于穿什么的选择都没有意义--这就是问题所在。你的困惑让你流连忘返，然后，正如拉克斯网络中的一位魔术师所说的那样。"轰！"。找到你了。" 你在广告中停留下来。

一位表演者说："太令人讨厌了，"她在一段视频中把避孕套从纸杯蛋糕里吃出来。

当摄像机停止拍摄时，创作者的工作并没有结束。在拍摄完出轨的场景后，我们又回去录制了同一视频的略有不同的版本。利用Facebook关于视频表现的数据，你可以进行测试，帮助预测哪个版本的视频、缩略图或标题具有最大的吸引力。我遇到的一些创作者制作了自己的电子表格，以更好地分析所得数据。

原创性是没有奖的。拉克斯和他的对手们无耻地抄袭和完善彼此的 "桶"。塞浦路斯一家为Facebook和YouTube制作视频的媒体公司最近发布了一则招聘广告，公开征集能够模仿拉克斯和他的同僚魔术师朱利叶斯-迪恩的产出的视频制作人。


虽然版权很少是个问题，但拉克斯的创作者必须注意Facebook的过滤器，它可能会删除那些没有明确披露其为舞台剧的视频。现在，大多数创作者都在他们的视频附带的标题上写下了免责声明，称这些片段是 "编剧的戏剧、讽刺（和模仿）"。然而，一些人继续玩弄这些内容可能是真实的想法，他们的视频标题是 "当她拉开盖子的时候！"。

我们的宇航员作弊视频花了大约20分钟来设置和拍摄。在我们发布视频的几周后，我瞥了一眼缩略图，看到它有5000万的浏览量（到目前为止，有1.64亿人看过它），我感到很自豪，也有点不放心。布朗对它的成功不以为然。"你看到的是一个引人注目的视频，而我们看到的是一个我们练习的公式，"一位由魔术师变成的创造者告诉我。"这就像一个魔术。"

大流行之后，进入艺术领域几乎变得不可能。剧院和场所关闭了，有些是永久性的：娱乐业是2020年美国经济中受打击最严重的部门之一。拉斯维加斯的工作岗位损失尤其严重，而拉克斯就在那里。

在拉克斯的圈子里没有这种麻烦的迹象。我最近去参加了他家的一个聚会，罗斯福斯带着一个8000美元的香奈儿手提包出现在聚会上。凯特-海因茨曼（Kate Heintzelman）曾是一名教师，出于习惯，她仍在收集塔吉特（Target）的折扣积分，过去她每年的税后收入约为28,000美元。现在，她在一个星期内就能赚到这些钱。有一天，她甚至没有看价格就请自己买了一个手提包。她告诉我，"我不需要古奇的包"，"但这是一个漂亮的钱包，我想，'是的，我想要这个。而且我买得起，因为我知道今天我已经赚了两万块钱"。



这种规模的成功是令人陶醉的，特别是对于像布朗和罗斯福斯这样花了多年时间试图在传统娱乐业获得突破的创作者来说。"你不必通过经纪人或预订者或选角导演来告诉你，你是否足够好，是否可以做他们的角色，"布朗在一天晚上的晚餐中说。"我们创造我们自己的角色，"罗斯福斯插话说。"如果我觉得喜欢，'好吧，我今天是个青少年模特！'" (34岁的罗斯福斯实际上在那天早些时候扮演了一个青少年模特，她的头发在晚餐时还扎着两个辫子)。

我在拉克斯的团队中度过了几个星期。有时，成为他网络中的一员，似乎就像一个拥有大量银行余额的大学生。他们经常出入对方的房子，在沃尔玛和塔吉特拍摄恶作剧，在废品店里翻找超现实的道具。不过，偶尔，就好像一个任性的老板或选秀经纪人只是被换成了一个任性的算法。

罗斯福斯每天大部分时间都在回复评论和直播，以及拍摄、编辑、发布和研究有关她的视频数据。无休止地迭代相同的视频并不总是感觉是一个非常有创意的过程。拉克斯说，互联网 "奖励那些认识到内容的一次性和流动性的影响者"。

拉克斯的大多数创作者曾经在表演艺术领域工作。并非所有的人都像他一样对把自己交给点击广告的制作感到舒服。一位表演者说："太恶心了。"在一个热门视频中，她把避孕套从纸杯蛋糕里吃了出来。另一位创作者称他的视频为 "狗屎娱乐"，因为它们是人们在厕所里看的那种东西。"等等，有1亿人看了我做的这个愚蠢的视频。为什么？"

这类视频下的许多评论是敌对的、威胁性的和尖锐的个人评论。"浪费了我生命中的三分钟，我再也回不来了。"这是一个常见的评论。拉克斯估计，这些年来他已经收到了超过1万个死亡威胁。当我翻看他的Facebook信息时，毒性和威胁是显而易见的。

当我花更多时间与拉克斯的创造者相处时，我意识到推动他们前进的不仅仅是金钱上的回报，还有他们在我们身上利用的同样的多巴胺刺激。如果你在看数据，你实际上可以看到你的收入随着人们观看你的作品而上升：制作病毒视频和观看它们一样令人上瘾。

"感觉就像毒品一样，"拉克斯网络中的一名魔术师汤米-温德说。"当这个视频开始走下坡路时，现在你又在追逐那个热门。那是下一个岗位，你会做任何你必须做的事情来达到下一个岗位。你会雇佣尽可能多的演员，你会去任何你必须拍摄的地方。你会被踢出一些地方"。("一半的网络被禁止进入Target，"他的妻子补充道。)

"等等，有1亿人看了我做的这个愚蠢的视频。为什么？"

3月，美达公司宣布了一项对拉克斯和他的创作者有广泛影响的变化。该公司将停止推广其所谓的 "看点"--那些 "制造任意的好奇心缺口 "或承诺提供耸人听闻的启示的视频。拉克斯和迪恩都看到他们的观众和收入突然下降。

这并没有吓倒拉克斯。他和他的创作者们一直在他们的页面上发布不同长度的视频，以 "清理 "它们，使其符合 "诱饵 "过滤器的要求，并更清楚地表明他们的作品是有脚本的。脸书最近似乎热衷于推广感觉良好的视频，所以他们的恶作剧越来越少，工艺品和烹饪越来越多（自然也有超现实的变化：用花园耙子画钢琴；用Skittles染色儿童鞋）。该网络现在正在攀升，回到了之前的收视水平。

拉克斯的竞争对手朱利叶斯-迪恩（Julius Dein）关闭了他的制作中心，搬回了伦敦；他的小型创作者社区（他们向我描述自己是一个家庭）一夜之间就解散了。他说，他现在认为参与病毒式淘金热对他的声誉有损害，尽管这显然是一个难以戒除的习惯。他最近发布了一个视频--与拉克斯网络的一个视频相似--他和他的前女友一起默默地吃面条。"当你住在一个内容丰富的房子里，和你所有的朋友在一起时，很容易产生妄想，就像，'哦，这太神奇了！'。我们赚了这么多钱，我们得到了数百万的喜欢'，"他说。

他计划很快再次开始制作魔术视频。"让我以一个走向世界第一的人的身份给你两分钱。我从中赚了很多钱。我愿意把每一分钱都还给你，把我所做的一切倒过来，不要有一个这样的观点"。

有钱真好"，拉克斯有一次告诉我，当我们开着他的新奔驰车穿过亨德森金碧辉煌的带状商场时，"因为社会就是这样记账的"。拉克斯对制作吸人眼球的视频仍然毫无悔意。他说，他所说的 "引用不引用的好艺术 "的概念只是 "精英们 "的创造。"如果人们对我们获得如此多的浏览量感到不安，我认为这是因为我们是这个游戏中唯一真正娱乐人们并给人们提供他们想要的东西的人。" 他甚至已经学会了对死亡威胁无动于衷，他声称。


有一个批评者群体仍然有能力让他受伤：魔术师同行。在Reddit的魔术社区论坛上有一个很长的主题，叫做 "里克-拉克斯怎么了"。一个典型的帖子对拉克斯和贾斯汀-弗洛姆进行了抨击："[他们]开始做假的恶作剧视频，最后成为了魔术界的笑柄，失去了所有的尊重。他们可能正躲在某处的岩石下感到尴尬"。类似的咆哮声在一个名为 "只有魔术师 "的Facebook群组和另一个论坛themagiccafe.com上持续存在。

当拉克斯第一次告诉我他被 "魔术界的酷孩子 "伤害得有多深时，我忍不住笑了。但是，你的社交生活的任何方面都可能最终感觉像高中，有地位的等级制度和不适应的苦恼。几位魔术师在描述他们的魔术师同伴时提到了电影《贱女孩》。

在某些方面，魔术与社交媒体是相悖的。魔术师不是天生的分享者。他们不能对魔术进行版权保护，所以他们依靠荣誉准则。最大的罪过是在社交媒体上透露别人的魔术是如何运作的。

拉克斯本人从未越过这个卢比孔，但他的朋友和同事贾斯汀-弗洛姆做到了。2020年12月，弗洛姆在他的Facebook页面上发布了一个三分钟的视频，题为 "哇"。这暴露了水晶匣子背后的秘密，这是20世纪初发明的一种舞台幻觉，一个女人神奇地出现在一个以前是空的玻璃盒子里。该视频在Facebook上迅速积累了9500万次浏览量，弗洛姆获得了6万美元的广告收入。

这对出身于魔术师家庭的弗洛姆来说是一个很大的转变。魔术师们在私下和公开场合都对他大加嘲讽。弗洛姆和他的父亲从小就是基督教魔术师团契的成员，该团契威胁要开除他。一位著名的魔术师，也是他儿时的英雄之一，在他生日那天给他留下了一串愤怒的短信（"你以为你是谁？"）。拉克斯网络中的创作者们仅仅因为与弗洛姆有联系而被嘲弄。

在随后的几个月里，弗洛姆又在视频中曝光了几个魔术，引起了进一步的反对。他坚持认为，公开信息只能改善魔术艺术，神秘的社区不应该阻碍市场力量的发展。去年他给自己买了一栋新的豪宅。"我把我的自我带到了后面"，他平静地告诉我他决定潜入病毒性视频制作，"并向他开枪。"

2020年，拉克斯和他的朋友们没有被邀请参加拉斯维加斯当地的一个魔术师聚会，这是一个标志着MAGIC Live！大会开始的年度活动，来自世界各地的近2000名魔术师聚集在一起，观看新魔术并建立联系。

拉克斯决定举办自己的会前派对。他在Facebook上发布的邀请函包括一张俯瞰拉斯维加斯大道的数百万美元的房子的照片。一位魔术师在评论中开玩笑说："美丽的酒店"。

这是一个华丽的事件。罗斯福斯和布朗穿着绿色和粉红色的配套缎面礼服，在小吃和开放式酒吧之间与表演者磨蹭。拉克斯还邀请了一些模特在现场走动，使现场气氛更加活跃。弗洛姆告诉我，这次活动是向魔术界发出的一个信号："我们在这里，我们很成功，我们不会离开。他补充说，"而且我们很好。" 拉克斯一直问我是否与房间里的任何 "魔术师的魔术师 "谈过，以了解他们对这个夜晚的看法。

不久之后，拉克斯回到了他的数据。从他的办公室，你可以看到他的游泳池、露台，以及远处的大道。晚上，从他的阳台上看，酒店的灯光只是微小的闪烁。


随着大流行病的减弱，表演者已经回到了舞台上。拉克斯仍然在分析数据，指导内容，与会计师打交道，并设计如何赚更多的钱。"我想知道我们所做的事情是否'真正'有意义。"有一次，他写信给我，在一个罕见的怀疑时刻。拉克斯永远改变了他朋友的生活，被数十亿人关注。但没有人看到他。■。

阿什利-米尔斯是《非常重要的人》的作者。全球聚会场所中的地位和美貌》。点击这里阅读米尔斯之前为1843杂志撰写的文章