Our First Time

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

~ the obit ~

July 1998 sits inside my window by a few months and outside it by everything else. That was the summer I was learning what a modem handshake sounded like on a Turkish phone line. Our First Time broke and collapsed inside about three weeks on a server that was already falling over under domestic American traffic, so this is reconstructed from the record like it would be for anybody who was not standing in the middle of it.

The site presented itself as a free public service with an educational purpose. Two people billed as eighteen year olds, using the names Mike and Diane, announced they would lose their virginity together and that it would be broadcast live at 9pm on 4 August 1998. Between 18 and 21 July the site posted daily updates following the pair through HIV tests and a conversation with their parents, all of it framed as responsible preparation.

The Internet Entertainment Group agreed to host it. IEG was the largest adult company on the web at that point and the arrangement was hosting in exchange for links back to its own paid material, which tells you what everyone involved privately understood the traffic to be worth regardless of what the front page claimed about education.

The servers went down under the load well before the announced date. In 1998 that was itself the story, because a page collapsing under global attention was still novel enough to be reported as news rather than assumed as a consequence.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it unraveled ~

People looking at the photographs noticed that Mike and Diane looked like working models rather than two teenagers from anywhere. They were right. Mike was Ty Taylor, an actor from Alabama. Diane was Michelle Parma, a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.

In late July IEG pulled out and went public, naming Ken Tipton as the man behind it. Tipton had been appearing on the site as Oscar Wells, a friend of the couple helping them out. According to IEG the plan was to run the free educational version until the attention peaked and then attach a five dollar age verification fee shortly before the broadcast window. The couple would announce at the last moment that they had reconsidered and would be abstaining. An eighteen day script for the whole sequence had existed from the beginning.

That is the detail that makes this worth a grave. The broadcast was never the product. The waiting was the product, and the abstinence ending was designed so that nobody could demand a refund for something that had been reframed at the last moment as a moral victory. On 4 August nothing was transmitted. A lawsuit between Tipton and IEG followed the collapse and TIME covered it, which is roughly the last anyone heard.

~ what came after ~

Jennicam had been running since 1996 and was the real version of this: a person who actually pointed a camera at her own life and kept it pointed there for seven years. Our First Time is the counterfeit that arrived two years behind it, having worked out that the audience Jennicam had built could be assembled much faster if you skipped the part where something genuinely happens.

It is usually filed as the first widely recognized hoax website, and the label undersells it. Before this, an internet hoax was an email chain or a Usenet post with no infrastructure behind it. This one had a domain name and a production schedule. It proved that a web page could announce a date and get newspapers on several continents to advertise it for nothing. Then it could charge for the anticipation without ever delivering anything at the end. Every countdown page since has been running some version of that arithmetic, usually with better lawyers.

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