ManBeef.com

» see manbeef.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 2001 i was seventeen, on a dial-up line in Ankara, and the panic about this site never reached me. ManBeef.com moved by English-language chain email, forwarded between people who already had each other's addresses, and that route did not run through Turkey. What i know about it comes from the archive and from the American local news that covered it as though it were a real business.

The site went up on 4 January 2001 claiming to sell human flesh, delivered. Its own meta description opened with fresh cut human flesh, delivered to your door, and went on to promise every standard cut. The archive still holds the page names, which is what shows how much work went into it: a page for bones and organs, and a page of aprons and wine racks. There was a Flash intro with a fallback for browsers without the plugin, which in early 2001 was most of them.

None of it was real and nothing was ever shipped. The only things you could actually buy were t-shirts and mousepads, and the site refused direct meat orders, which is what kept the joke running. At its peak it was taking around half a million hits a day, almost all of it people arriving from a forwarded email that told them to sign a petition.

The Food and Drug Administration sent investigators. They found no evidence that human meat had been sold and closed the matter, because a storefront that never fills an order is not selling anything. In July 2001 a Los Angeles graphic designer using the name Joseph Christopherson took responsibility and told The Columbian that the subject had been chosen for its ability to churn the viewer's stomach.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was actually for ~

The two people behind it were Chris Ellerby and Joseph Mallett, working under one invented name between them. The design is the giveaway in hindsight. A real specialty butcher in 2001 had a contact page and a fax number, not a Flash intro and a merchandise line, and ManBeef had the production values of a portfolio piece because that is what it was.

It belongs to a small family of sites built to be believed and then disbelieved, which is a different job from a shock site. Bonsai Kitten worked the same way in the same window. The measure of success was not traffic. It was how many people forwarded the address to someone else with a note saying this has to be stopped.

~ how it came off ~

Every writeup says the site went offline at the end of 2001, and the archive says otherwise. The Wayback Machine holds 579 captures of manbeef.com across 2002, and the last working one is 5 June 2002, still serving the storefront with the Flash intro on it. So it outlived its own confession by a year and nobody bothered to record that.

After that the record goes empty. There is not one capture of the front page in 2003 or in 2004. The next thing in the index is 6 February 2005, when the address answered with a redirect to a registrar's expired-domain renewal page carrying MANBEEF.COM in the query string. By March it was serving a parked ad template, and by the end of that year it belonged to a pornography squatter.

~ the long tail ~

Today manbeef.com answers with a domain broker offering strategic-grade names to funded startups, which is a stranger ending than anything the original site put on the internet. The FDA file is the piece worth keeping. A federal food agency opened an investigation because enough people believed a website, and the finding was that there had never been anything there to investigate.

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