In June 2018 Facebook admitted that a “software bug” existed causing millions of Facebook users to have their default sharing settings for new posts set to public. Naturally this “flaw” in the system helped those on the outside, those builders of the online houses homes with their virtual walls, expand their powerbase, but at the same time it massively compromised the safety and security of its users.
In the past Facebook has been compared to its predecessor – MySpace – but Facebook is different in that it requires users to give their true identity. Targeted advertisements are then the order of the day, and until recently, privacy promises have deceived a large number of Facebook’s users.
In Thrive’s networking marketing, there’s a parallel in the social network site, and vice versa. Just as Facebook requires users to volunteer their true identity, network marketing requires its promoters to provide honest testimonials for their products, and their experiences with them. As most of us know, who people are on Facebook, just as who network marketers really are, aren’t necessarily the same, and more often than not aren’t the same. One might call this schism between how things appear and how they really are manipulation if we’re being kind, deceit if we’re not.
In March 2018 some of the implications of these deceits were made manifest. It turned out that the data of almost 90 million Facebook user profiles had been sold to a political data analysis firm. What this data included were detailed profiles of users, with a plethora of identifiers based on their patterns of likes and responding to specific content and terms. Thus it was easy to determine their primacies, preferences and thus their triggers. There is strong evidence to show that this data mining and the targeted campaigns that followed actually changed the outcome of the 2018 U.S. elections.
In other words, some people being genuine on Facebook were taken advantage of by other less genuine people, people with an agenda. Humans manipulated by machines programmed by humans elsewhere on the food chain, or in short: humans becoming programmed and played by other humans.
It’s tough to get more obvious than that.
But there were signs of trouble before 2016 and 2017. In 2010 around half Facebook’s users were on the platform for an average of 34 minutes every day. By March 2011, Facebook was culling 20 000 profiles daily because of flagrant violations – from spamming to the posting of more severe content and other abuses. In the same year Facebook became the second-most accessed website in America, after Google.
By 2014 some in the news media were still describing Facebook as the world’s biggest waste of time.
Is that all?
In early 2015, Facebook had to implement an algorithm to filter out false advertising, fake news and hoaxes, such was the dearth of artifice, fraud and rip-offs bedevilling the network. Reuters described the trend of “fake news” at the time as spreading like wildfire through its 1.35 billion user-base. The result was [and still is] that ordinary folks in their online houses could no longer tell the difference between the fake world, and the fake profiles recycling this stuff, and the real world, and real people.
At the same time, as Facebook use increased as a staple “fix” in people’s day, as more people used the platform for work, for dating, for information, for amusement, psychological effects began to manifest. Feelings of jealousy and inattentiveness. Social media addiction. Lack of discernment. Lack of genuine attachments. For some, especially those tying their sense of self to it, the platform was an addiction.
The more one personally invested into the site, the more one could be validated by it – or invalidated.
Is that all!
No, goddammit that’s not all.
As early as 2012 Mashable reported on as many as 20 high profile crimes committed on and solved on Facebook. These statistics were predictably the tip of the iceberg. Since its inception, the United Kingdom had linked more than 100 000 crimes in that country to Facebook, averaging 20 000 per year or 54 crimes committed daily on the social network, or more than 2 each hour, every hour day and night. Between 2015 and 2018 the British police reported a 540% surge in Facebook crimes.*
By 2017 a new trend had emerged internationally – filming crimes, torture of children and occasionally suicides on Facebook Live. The average time people were spending on the Facebook app in 2018 had doubled since 2010, as had its user-base. By the end of 2017 Facebook had quietly rolled out facial recognition software which was also enabled by default. This allowed the network to automatically track and trace its 2.23 billion clients, almost like an eye in the sky.
Suddenly Big Brother had become a reality not merely close to home, but inside our homes, and the worst part of it was we’d invited them in. One company looking right inside the lives of one out of every three human beings on the planet. And every uploaded photo with someone else’s face in it was feeding into a machine stream of collective consciousness beyond our control.
And one of those people uploading her life to the machine cosmos was Shan’ann Watts. Over the last two years of her life, Shan’ann uploaded 357 videos, roughly one every second day. What she was trying to do was monetise every moment – eating, waking up, going on holiday, cleaning her home…all part of daily diary, but all sacrificed at the altar of Thrive. What Shan’ann was really selling was aspiration if we’re being kind, envy if we’re not. Envy is the currency that makes the Facebook world go round. We’re not there because we like our friends, we’re there because we’re silently comparing ourselves to everyone else and being conceited. It’s about narcissism. When we’re on Facebook what we’re pretending to do is thriving on the outside while dying on the inside.
So was Shan’ann, except she was doing this on the scale of a job, a family, a lifestyle and a life. Shan’ann was faking it to make it, but she needed a troupe of actors with herself as the leading actor. Shan’ann was using her marriage as a promotional tool.
When we’re so caught up in a culture of consumerism [and that’s precisely what network is, a consumption as a cult] images of people smiling in cars, happy homes and holidays triggers deep feelings of insecurity.
Through Facebook she’d effectively turned her home into a blue framed glass house to welcome in prospective Thrive customers. She was selling patches and powders, but in reality [the reality of the consumer culture] she was selling the realty of feeling better about one’s shitty life. People could see right inside, and if they liked what they saw, they could get some too! All of it was too good to be true, of course, but one of those people exposed by this transparency was Chris.
Did he want to be a player in the Thrive cult? Would you?
After opening the windows and doors to the world, we know Shan’ann often left home, making many business trips without her kids. She’d go and leave them in her glass house, and who was there to look after them? Did he have any choice in that?
And we know on one of those business trips, while she was away he did what he’d been itching to do. He murdered both children, and then prepared to murder their mother when she returned. Did he like being stuck at home – her home – while she was out? Did he like being a mommy while she was out bringing home the bacon? Or was it an oppressive shame that he carried with him, sticking to him like a shadow, a shadow cast by a blistering hot sun in a broiling desert?
When we look at those hundreds of videos, did he really want to be photographed or recorded as a performer in Shan’ann’s family spiel? It takes a cursory glance to see that Chris is almost never featured in the videos; he’s always skulking in the background. Even in the pregnancy video Chris seems to not want to appear on camera, and so his reaction is unsurprisingly mostly off camera.
When Chris films Shan’ann announcing the pregnancy to the children, the mother and daughters have a moment, but it’s almost like he’s not even there. Did he really want to be there when she wasn’t there, when he wasn’t being photographed or recorded? Clearly he didn’t.
When we look at all the reflections bouncing off those glassy walls of Shan
’ann’s social media, we’re left with a mosaic of smiles, noise and chatter. It’s all designed to make money, and perhaps it does, but there’s very little meaning behind it.
If we’re wondering how accurate those images and impression are, what we’re seeing is a real house and real people recast into something else, not just glass and players but something besides the material. How much of what we’re seeing when we look at the Watts house is real? How much is our own reflection, our own attachments to fairy tales, and our own pursuit of ideas of how we and our families could [or should] be? How much of what we see is simply transference?
The main reason this case fascinates us, is the same reason we’re drawn to fairy tales and celebrities. It’s the same reason we’re drawn to Facebook in the first place. We’re attracted to an idea: of ourselves, a partner, a family, a home, our country and the world that’s a certain kind of pretty picture. The prettier the picture the more we’re hypnotised by it.
Pretty pictures of houses and peoples and cars are symbolic of an idea that enhances how we feel about all these things. What is our place in the world? Where do we fit in in the hierarchy of things, and other people?
When real life catastrophe overtakes the pretty pictures as it did here, it challenges our notion of what a perfect life actually is. It cautions us about our dangerous fixations with appearance, and our deleterious capacity to endlessly compare ourselves to others.
The Watts case asks us to question or at least re-examine our own dreams for ourselves. What is the American dream beyond the house, car and beautiful family? In the Watts case it was very little; it was Facebook. The American Dream beyond the nails and timber, the people beyond their online showmanship – all of it is but a dream within a dream. A fiction. A fairy tale. And so is Facebook.
*In April 2018 26-year-old Devyn Holmes from Houston was shot in the head as his friends messed around with a gun in a car during a Facebook Live video. Despite the video showing Cassandra Damper shooting Holmes, she attempted to wipe gun residue from her hands. Damper was booked on charges of aggravated assault, and tampering and fabricating evidence. Although Holmes survived the shooting, three months after the incident he was able to eat and swallow for the first time.
His Backstory
“I always wondered why he was so quiet. But now looking at what has happened. I’m wondering if there was anything way back in his head back then that he may have kept from everybody.” ― Joe Duty, Christopher's former teacher
The current history we have of Chris Watts is incomplete. What we know thus far is that he is originally from Spring Lake, North Carolina, and that he grew up there on Vass Road. Watts graduated from Pine Forest High School in Fayetteville in 2003. According to his year book Watts even then was interested in engines, mechanical things and auto repairs.
A neighbor who claimed to know Watts’ mother “quite well” and felt bad for her, told WRAL that she couldn’t “see” someone like Chris committing a crime like this. Well, neither could Shan’ann or apparently anyone else.
On August 16th, the day after Chris confessed, Shan’ann’s friend Stacey Fowler told the media that Chris, Shan’ann and their children had visited a hair salon where her mother Sandi Onorati worked in Aberdeen, North Carolina, a week before her death.
Despite “boasting” online – as WRAL put it – of her love for her husband, in the hair salon prior to August 7th Shan’ann revealed a different story. Danell Search, an employee at the salon said Shan’ann mentioned that they were having problems. Danell Search also described Chris as “very standoffish”. He hardly spoke and when she greeted him, “he kept his head down” and didn’t reply.
This corresponds to an impression from another friend at a park in Myrtle Beach, also in the first week of August, on or close to August 5th in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Fayetteville is 38.2 miles due East of Aberdeen, less than an hour by car.
The Watts family were likely visiting Chris’s family that day, and spending time at a trampoline park. Michelle Greer, who spent ten minutes talking to Shan’ann while queueing for the bungee trampolines, said Chris seemed disengaged.
Greer said “there wasn’t any affection” between the couple, and that he was “just kind of standing there”. Photos taken at the park confirm Chris sitting at the rear of the benches by himself, studiously focused on his phone. In the same image Shan’ann is also on her phone with her back to Chris, taking photos of her children.
Joe Duty, a former high school teacher at Pine Forest, where Watts was one of his former students, called the 33-year-old “one of the best and smartest students I ever had”. A possible classmate posted on Facebook that Watts was “just a guy” that “every girl” had a crush on. But even then, according to the same source, Watts was “shy and awkward” whenever the anonymous classmate encountered him.
Brandi Smith, an outcast in high school who was befriended by Chris, told The Daily Beast:
“Chris found himself as a father. Those girls brought him to life and out of his shell,” Smith said. “He’s not a crazy person. He’s not a violent, abusive or mean person.”
Duty confirms this impression of Chris Watts as withdrawn, describing him as “extremely introverted” and often silent. Watts as a student often sat in class saying absolutely nothing. Duty also said most of his top students kept in touch, but not Watts, which he found strange.
In 2003, Watts tied for third place in a North Caroline Automobile Dealers Association contest, winning a $1000 scholarship.
In those days, according to Duty, Watts had big dreams of working his way up to be a crew chief on a NASCAR team. Apparently Watts knew all there was to know about NASCAR. Watts’ interest and perhaps early promise in this area mimics Scott Peterson’s in golf. Both men basically got nowhere in their respective dreams, but clearly both men dreamed big, and as family men could hardly see themselves as roaring successes, in fact quite the opposite.
Like Scott Peterson, Watts’ teachers were under the impression he’d gone on to better things with his scholarship, but it’s not clear he had. According to voter records, Watts lived in Mooresville around 2008, which suggests he may have attended the Mooresville Institute.
After meeting on Facebook and dating for two years, Shan’ann and Chris married in Charlotte, Mecklenburg County in 2012. The same year the couple moved to Frederick Colorado, where Chris Watts got a job as an auto mechanic at a dealership. He was described as a good mechanic, and likable. In the same way Scott Peterson was described as the first guy who’d stop and help with a car tyre, Chris Watts has been sketched so far in similar terms, including by family friend Jerry Lindstrom. Lindstrom, unable to fathom “why”, told reporters:
“If you needed help with furniture, he'd be over there in a heartbeat to help you out.”
But this likable side seems to have had a flip side to it. It comes up repeatedly, including from Greg Alore, who employed Shan’ann at a Ford dealership when the Watts’ first moved to Frederick. Alore told The Daily Beast on August 31st:
“He was very passive. She was very aggressive with him. Bossy. Do this. Do that. Telling him what to do. Dominating the relationship. That I do know. [Even so] Shan’ann said Chris was sweet as can be.”
At around February 2018, Chris started a new job at Anadarko, earning $61 000 per year, just over $5 000 per month. Anadarko fired Watts on Wednesday August 15, the day of his arrest.
One aspect that sticks out between 2012 and 2018 is Chris Watts’ appearance. He’s lost weight[N1] and gained muscle. In home videos he uses his children as weights while doing squats and push-ups. He appears to have become very conscious of his appearance in the last days of Shan’ann’s life.
Her Backstory
“Jealousy is a dog’s bark which attracts thieves.” ― Karl Kraus
Shan’ann Onorati was born and initially raised in Clifton, New Jersey.* Her mother is Sandi Onorati, a hairdresser and her father Frank Rzucek, a carpenter and cabinet maker. Both Sandi and Frank w
ere active promoters of Thrive products and patches on their own social media pages at the time of Shan’ann’s murder.
It appears Shan’ann is related to the actor Peter Onorati. Since Peter Onorati was born, raised and went to school in Boonton, and Boonton is less than 20 miles west of Clifton, a family connection seems likely. However on Twitter Peter Onorati makes no mention of the Watts case between August 13 onwards, despite being active over this period.**
Shan’ann grew up in Aberdeen, and still has family members there in North Carolina. She attended Pinecrest High School in Southern Pines, not to be confused with Chris’s school – Pine Forest High School in Fayetteville. Their respective schools are 38.5 miles apart.
If Chris Watts was popular in high school, it’s less clear whether Shan’ann was. It’s also unclear whether she graduated, or indeed, how she performed at school. There is an impression of her being shy and insecure as a youngster, perhaps seeing herself as an ugly duckling.
Little is currently known about Shan’ann’s first marriage, except that she took on the name King, and that Arie King is her brother-in-law. Some forum members have suggested her first husband was a lawyer. No children were conceived during this first marriage. During this initial period when she lived in New Jersey, Shan’ann became a lifelong Steeler’s fan. It’s worth noting that her being a Steeler’s fan, meant her whole family had to be, including Chris. All of them had a uniform to wear and a role to play.
Two Face- the Man Underneath Christopher Watts Page 5
