The purposes Xoxohth.com serves are legion. Its members provide the 411 on skirting TTTs. They commiserate with those gripped in the ennui of fulfilling "billable hours" quotas. Xoxoers are generous with advice, on matters great and sundry and tawdry.
But Xo's most conspicuous export is pwnage.
To be sure, the adjective "pwn3d," like the amorphous "right to privacy," has the structural integrity of an amoeba. For that reason, some clarification of the concept, as it applies to Xo, is well in order.
Who gets pwn3d? In no particular order, Xo pwns: pretenders to prestige, plagiarists, skanks, CGWBTs, CAGWBTs, idiots, and Xo Enemies. These items, clearly, are not mutually exclusive. Neither is the list exhaustive; as with the Ninth Amendment, our brief enumeration doesn't entail that there might not be other "reasonable grounds" bases for pwnage.
How does Xoxo facilitate pwnage? Sometimes a pwning is original to Xo. Sometimes Xo's role is parasitic on a pwnage already in progress. In either case, Xoers seek to add value.
Talk of "adding value" presupposes a calculus for pwnage extent. Quantification of pwnage is notoriously difficult; the class of all pwnings is probably not, mathematically, a well-ordered set: some pairs pwnings might be incommensurable. Nonetheless, here is a nest of three classes, which explain two main ways in which Xo creates, or ramps up, pwnings:
1) private pwnage: Any embarrassing event whose occurrence is only known to the pwn33 and/or the pwn33's acquaintances.
2) public pwnage: Any embarrassing event whose occurrence is known to (a suitably large number of) non-acquaintances.
These first two categories are easy to illustrate. If Janet Jackson had had her "wardrobe malfunction" while lip-syncing at a gathering of her closest friends, it would have been private. But its occurrence in a stadium of thousands of viewers (and millions at home) made it public.For reasons which will become clear in the Gallery, below, a third category deserves consideration:
3) personal pwnage: An embarrassing event wherein a person's past public pwning is thrown in the pwn33's face (either IRL or online).
Example: Suppose Britney Spears were to walk into a Victoria's Secret, and peruse nether-region garments. A private citizen walks up to her and remarks, "Funny, I didn't know you wore underwear." The citizen in question has enacted a personal pwnage: s/he has made use of a well-known public pwning to embarrass Spears F2F.
A recent Xoxo clusterdust seems to cry out for yet another category of pwnag3, to wit:
4) outag3 pwnage: An embarrassing event wherein an unseemly public event is connected to a person by name.
Suppose, to take a hypothetical example, a person gave an interview to a prominent newspaper, but "spoke on the condition of anonymity" because of the embarrassing nature of the matter. Suppose--again, hypothetically--that this person (or persons) were then promptly revealed as the "anonymous source(s)." That's an outag3 pwn.
Outag3 pwning seems like a hybrid between a public pwning (where a previously private matter becomes public) and a personal pwning (where a pwn33 is personally confronted with their pwn3d status). On the one hand, an outtag3 pwning involves an event which was previously public (yet unattached to anyone in particular). On the other hand, while outtage is not per se personal--the pwn33 may not know of the forum in which they were outed --it nonetheless makes personal pwnag3 possible.
In general, we will employ the following gradation of pwnage:
personals best publics best privates: Inter alia, Xoxo adds value to a pwning by: a) taking a private pwning public; b) making a public pwning more public (e.g., via outing or googlepwning); c) making a public pwning personal (e.g., by making available otherwise unknown contact information of a publically pwned invididual).
