This week's Sunday Long Read is Nate Rogers's profile of legendary Twitter zeitgeist poster Paul "dril" Hochney in The Ringer, the man behind one of the most surreal and witty accounts of the last decade, making the trenchant observations of a digital world one shitpost at a time.
Dril is a real person, or so I had been told. Sitting in the House of Pies in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, I was waiting for him to join me in a booth—but I didn’t know who was actually going to show up.
It was the quiet midafternoon hours at the diner, which is a relic of when the area was less upscale, and it still partially attracts an off-key clientele of misfits and bozos, some of whom are alone and in no hurry to leave. (As I sat, an older man in oversized overalls walked by carrying a seat cushion; it was unclear whether he worked there.) This venue was the most readily available approximation of Dril’s world that I could think of.
While I waited, I pulled up Dril’s Twitter account and looked at a recent post: “The fact is,” he wrote, “people arent doing a good job wiping their ass these days. And its attracting all manner of stray dogs and coyotes to our towns.” The likes were ticking up and up in real time as they moved toward their eventual zenith of almost 17,000. By Dril standards, this wasn’t even a particularly popular—or deranged—post.
With 1.7 million highly engaged followers, Dril is one of the more powerful Twitter users and, by default, one of the more powerful figures on the internet. Active since 2008, the Dril account—simultaneously known by the profile name “Wint”—with its grainy Jack Nicholson avatar, has been responsible for countless viral posts, just as beloved for the vivid scenes they induce as for the baffling grammatical and spelling errors they contain. Many of his tweets have become part of the permanent online lexicon: “‘im not owned! im not owned!!’, i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob”; “issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to them’”; “i am selling six beautfiul, extremely ill, white horses. they no longer recognize me as their father, and are the Burden of my life.”
To most people, he is nothing; show the unaffiliated some of his posts, and they will likely just generate confusion and possibly anguish. (“Uh, so, I think I’ll stick with gardening. Where bull poop helps good things grow, and the tweets come from birds, not nitwits,” read one of many upset people in the comment section of a recent Washington Post feature about Dril, inadvertently adopting their own Dril-esque cadence in the process.) But to a large sect of the Very Online, he is king—the undisputed poet laureate of shitposting, the architect of a satire so effective that it has become impossible to tell when Dril stopped mocking the way people speak online and when we, instead, started speaking like Dril online.
For almost 10 years, he was entirely anonymous. Like a decent number of the people in the so-called “Weird Twitter” scene that Dril is still vaguely a part of, he doesn’t put his real name on the account—but as time has gone on and his popularity has grown, it’s become nothing short of miraculous that he’s kept up the mystery. He’s a pyramid-obsessed phantom. He’s banky. Still, over the years, some of his digital curtain has begun to part—largely spurred by his being doxxed in 2017, when his identity was revealed to supposedly be that of a man named Paul.
Around the same time, Dril started a Patreon, released a book, Dril Official “Mr. Ten Years” Anniversary Collection, and had an Adult Swim television show, TruthPoint—a surrealist Infowars parody in which he manifested behind a cheap old man mask and bantered with self-professed “manic pixie stream boy” cohost Derek Estevez-Olsen. Dril also began doing an interview here and there, but never anything substantial, and always in character. I reached out to him via email, and when he replied, the name attached to the account was “paul d.” But I still wasn’t totally sure that he wouldn’t walk into House of Pies with his mask on, throw a plate against a wall, and then walk out.
“I’m Paul,” he said, once he found me and after I began by asking whom, exactly, I could say I was speaking to.
Paul Dochney, who is 35, does not, in fact, look like a mutant Jack Nicholson. He has soft features and a gentle disposition and looks something like a young Eugene Mirman. It’s difficult to say what I expected to find sitting across from me, but it wasn’t this. Looking at him, you’d never presume that this was the person who made candle purchasing a matter of financial insecurity.
He opted to stick with water—not a terrible decision at the House of Pies, but also, I worried, a choice that theoretically allowed him a quick exit at any point. For a while, I got the sense that he might have been deciding how much to reveal to me in real time, based on how the conversation went. But one thing he was clear about from the beginning: It was all right to end this game of living in the digital shadows.
“I mean, my name is already out there,” he said, acknowledging the fact that, after the doxxing, he had at separate points confirmed his name on both Twitter and Reddit. “It’s in my Wikipedia article. Maybe people need to grow up. Just accept that I’m not like Santa Claus. I’m not a magic elf who posts.”
In some sense, anonymity has served a creative purpose. “Practically, it’s a good tool,” Estevez-Olsen told me later in a phone interview, “because when you make a post, you don’t want to be like, ‘From Paul Dochney, I fuck flags’ or whatever. You want to have some distance from it.” (He would know: “Estevez-Olsen” is itself a TruthPoint stage name that he asked me to use for reasons of privacy.)
But the secrecy has also lingered because of the types of personalities Dril naturally attracts to his orbit. “Most people are normal,” Dochney explained. “But there’s, like, three or four weirdos who just ruin it for everyone.” Jon Hendren, a fellow titan of Weird Twitter who is known by his subtle handle, @fart, told me that he had seen some disturbing messages people had sent Dochney in the past—that he wasn’t being paranoid or dramatic. “It’s gotta be kind of surreal,” Hendren said. “And it’s got to be kind of difficult to live with.”
Before Elon Musk brings Twitter to a grinding halt with pieces of it falling off like a cartoon Ford Pinto, it's nice to know that yeah, social media in the 2010's and early 2020's was pretty good with people like dril in it.
Right before, you know, it all went to shit.
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