How to Extort a Publicly Traded Company

All of us know daily life is too flat, and everyone inevitably wants to do something earth-shaking, maybe even the kind of thing that flips the entire internet over. Based on some recent events, I’ve realized there’s now one more way to solve that flatness. What follows is a breakdown of the full operating procedure.

It begins with choosing a suitable extortion target. Take-Two, say — market cap north of forty billion, parent company of Rockstar Games. A target like this helps you find a reasonable ground to stand on and make full use of their customers’ weak points. If you aim at them being too slow at making games — “it’s been thirteen years since GTA V, why am I still not playing GTA VI?” — that’s just being unreasonable, because deep down you know that even with a billion dollars you couldn’t make that game. That angle is like the chair falling apart before you’ve even sat down at the negotiating table, with a broken wooden leg lodged in your ass crack. So you think hard (which really just means a few more days of scrolling social media) and discover that a lot of players are furious about the cancellation of the physical disc edition. These are also people who, in real life, find everything objectionable — call them “conservatives” if you’re being polite, or, less politely, a group with hearts more fragile than a fourteen-year-old girl’s. Then you find some people, not even players, questioning the legitimacy of preordering a digital game. Their seemingly self-consistent logic finally hands you the moral high ground.

Next is how to capture everyone’s attention, which is the discipline everyone in the world is studying right now. You know, of course, that tens of millions of people are waiting for GTA VI, and you can see these people’s weak points without waiting for them to drop their pants. Because they’ve spent years earning money they can’t spend and killing people who don’t exist, their dopamine mechanisms work a little differently, and nothing is more thrilling to them than seeing early what the game they’ve waited years for actually looks like. What you need to do is very simple: through a series of operations so illegal that no AI would tell us how to perform them, obtain video recordings of the game in development, or even a build that barely qualifies as playable.

Like everyone who lives on social media, you need an identity distinct from the real one, a persona that wins people over. You’re not an English major, after all — you’ve soaked in the internet for years and there’s nothing in your head but memes and some online slang. You think about it for a long time and can only come up with a homophone joke, and it happens to be a vegetable commonly found at market. You do some basic graphic work and turn the vegetable into something inedible, which looks pretty cool, though it would go soft and mushy the moment you put it in a pot.

Persona secured, next comes release cadence — a separate discipline within the creator industry, maybe. You have never been this restrained before, and we understand: this must be harder to hold in than Michael holding back from pushing Tracy off that yacht. You have to post only a few things a day, giving every commentary channel, every edit-video uploader, every Reddit archaeologist on the internet enough time to carry out secondary, tertiary, even quaternary distribution, until everyone who sees it just swipes past. You don’t even have to write any copy — game media editors haven’t turned off their writing software or their oxygen machines in days.

Soon everything falls into your plan. You know that for the first few posts people are still hesitating over whether it’s real. People today are easy to fool, but they’ve gotten dumb enough to reach the absurd point of calling real things fake. You’re not worried, though, because you know that the moment Rockstar starts firing off DMCA takedowns in a frenzy, that alone will prove everything is real.

Still, you need to do something that sets you apart from your predecessors, something to make yourself a true god of the cyber world. You take control of a character in the unreleased game and sign your own species into a wall with bullet holes — completely unnecessary, but that’s the kind of signature con artists like. You have to tell the world that everything is under your control, so hurry up and buy your meme coin. Even though doing this still turns you into that covfefe building the enormous ballroom. But there’s always someone willing to get in for the thrill, even knowing full well it’s most likely vapor. The illusion of being inside some kind of movement beats the gambling itself.

Meanwhile, you obviously have to draft yourself a manifesto, ideally written like a declaration of war, ideally deploying a skill like “no-ai-slop.” It must be logically tidy, must read like legal text with a note of righteous grief — feel free to consult OpenAI’s first response to Apple suing them. The key, in short, is to keep your ass firmly glued to the seat of the exploited, and to forget one fact with your whole being: nobody is riding an Oppressor MK II with you in their sights, forcing you to preorder a game you were going to buy anyway.

You must repeatedly emphasize that this is not extortion, and then open a “contact us” page on your website reading “advertising partnerships, custom content, including adult,” priced at around a hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars, payable in Monero. It has to look like a startup’s business development terms. It has to look like Paul Graham might call you at any moment.

At this point you’re already halfway to winning. Injunctions, subpoenas, cease-and-desists — you won’t shed a single tear when they arrive. Even if Take-Two eventually puts you in prison for the rest of your life, you’ll surely find a way to break out. You’re the Robin Hood of the digital age, and if some people question you as a cyber vagrant shilling a coin, that’s their blindness. Either way you’ve done it. You’ve finally made your life something other than flat as water, which is the highest honor available in contemporary society. The only problem now is that you’ve accidentally pissed off the faithful of Hatsune Miku.