Cards Against Humanity’s Private Island by Jenn Bane







Late last year, Cards Against Humanity bought a private island in the middle of nowhere, Maine, and gave one square foot of it to each of our Holiday Bullshit subscribers. This got a ton of press coverage, like an article in this local Maine paper:

Say “aloha” to Hawaii 2, Maine’s most inappropriately named island. Land there is cheap, and they’re parceling it out by the square foot.



The recent renaming of Birch Island in St. George Lake is part prank, part philanthropy, orchestrated by a Chicago company that prides itself on being irreverent and politically incorrect.

It’s true - this year each of our 250,000 Holiday Bullshit subscribers received an deed, a map, and a small flag.

Here’s how we pulled it off.









The Idea

Back in 2012, we did our first weird holiday promotion, which was a pay-what-you-want pack of cards. Though this was incredibly risky (offering something that needs to be printed and shipped for $0 is dumb), we ended up with $70,000 in profit, which we donated to the Wikimedia foundation. To make a funny announcement about the donation, we released this parody infographic showing all the things we could have bought for $70,000:

In the years since, we were never able to really let go of that joke.









Planning

This year, people signed up to get ten gifts from us for $15 - that gave us a budget of about $1.30 per person to spend each day, including mailing fees. After last year’s debacle with USPS (we bought the cheapest postage available and a lot of stuff got lost), we decided to spring for First Class mail this year, which gave us some additional constraints. Each day’s gift had to be:

Under 2 ounces (including the envelopes)



Smaller than 11.5 x 6 inches

Really flexible - enough to “wrap around a baseball bat”

Even with these constraints, we still wanted the “grand finale” gift to be something physically huge that people could share and be a part of. We thought about launching something into space, or doing something visible from space.

And then we remembered our joke about that private island.









Buying the Island

We started by Googling, “how to buy a private island.” This told us that it was a) possible to buy a private island, and b) in our price range. We tried calling some of the people listing their private islands for sale, but they were (as you might guess) crazy.

At this point, we called our friend Dan Lyne from the commercial real estate firm CBRE. Dan had just helped us find our very cool office here in Chicago after a year-long search, and we knew that he wouldn’t laugh us off immediately. (Our friend Harper, who introduced us to Dan, described him as “Square, but our square.”) Our exchange went something like this:

Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 23:17:17 -0500

Subject: Island

From: Max Temkin

To: Dan Lyne

Dan,



Can you help us get a private island?



We'd like to own it as soon as possible. We need it by November at the latest. Let me know how to proceed.



Thanks,



- Max



Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 23:20:05

Subject: Re: Island

From: Max Temkin

To: Dan Lyne

Just to clarify: this isn't a joke, we really want to buy an island.



- Max



Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2014 04:27:38 +0000

Subject: Re: Island

From: Dan Lyne

To: Max Temkin

Sure. Why the hell not.



- Dan









Designing the Island

We knew early on that establishing the look and feel of the island - its flag, name, etc. - would be a really important part of the joke. We had to take it really seriously and build it into its own silly municipality for it to feel as crazy as it was.

Our initial brainstorm for island names started off with:

Island™



Fuck Mountain

The Island of Lost Souls

Skull Idea

The People’s Republic of China

The Horrible People’s Republic

Yoshi’s Island

Apple© Presents Island™

Cardistan

Hawaii 2

Our designer Emily went to work designing an official crest for Hawaii 2:











And finally, we just had to get the island placed on Google Maps for it to be official in the minds of an unquestioning public. Our friend Fitz, formerly of Google, actually walked the deed to the Google maps building in Mountain View and discreetly worked with them to get the island listed.

At one point we considered submitting an official proposal to change the island’s name through geonames.usgs.gov, but it would take years for a verdict and it probably wouldn’t get approved anyway. Apparently, geographic name changes must benefit the community, by honoring a local hero or something. (If any of you happen to to be a local hero willing to change your name to “Hawaii 2,” please let us know!)













Dividing the Land

Our developer Scott was the one to figure out how to divide the land into 250,000 parcels:



So, we decided to take a different approach. We had QGIS export the island as a Shapefile, which we could use in our own parceling script. The script worked like this: At first, we Googled a bunch for “how to parcel an island.” It turns out, there are professionals who do this sort of thing, but both they and their softwares are expensive. We settled on using QGIS , open source software that let us trace the island on a map. QGIS had a couple of functions for parceling land, but it couldn’t create parcels as small as 1 sq. ft. I suppose that makes sense, right? It’s not practical …. We decided to use the satellite view for our calculations. We thought about dividing the large parcels into smaller parcels, by doing simple math on the latitude/longitudes of each, but it seemed wrong to just throw out the parcels near the coastline.So, we decided to take a different approach. We had QGIS export the island as a Shapefile, which we could use in our own parceling script. The script worked like this:

We drew a rectangle over the entire island, where the Northwest and Southeast corners were in the water.

We figured out the latitude and longitude of the Northwest corner.

We calculated how much 1 foot was in latitude and longitude.

We stepped through the rectangle, drawing 1x1 foot parcels, and seeing the island if it contained the parcel (with the help of some software called GEOS, that let’s you ask those sort of questions: is this geometry inside of that; do these two intersect; etc. If the parcel was inside of the island, we kept it, if it was outside, we threw it away.)

Finally, we calculated the center point of the parcel, and used that to send to subscribers.

This is what happens when you map the parcels back onto Google maps:









Legalities

From a legal perspective, giving people a square foot of land turned out to be incredibly complicated:

We would’ve needed to get the approval of the local planning board for each individual parcel. This would have meant submitting over 6,000 pounds of paperwork, which would have taken them years to process and made the information public.

We would’ve had to have collected signatures from each of the recipients on their deed, which would have blown our mailing budget.

Having 250,000 owners with deeds would create a legal nightmare - there would be no clear way to walk through the island without infringing on anyone’s rights, and liability would be a major concern. Whose fault would it be if someone slipped and fell while they were on the island?

The town of Liberty would have to have collected taxes on 250,000 pieces of land every single year. (If you didn’t pay them, they could have taken the land back.)

And then there was the big reason: if people really owned their land, they could feasibly try to get permission to build something on it, which is not what we had in mind. As Max said:

We’ll never develop the island. If someone else bought it, they’d build a summer home or a condo or something. This way, the land will be kept as a pristine piece of wilderness. We joined the local Liberty Lake Association and we’ll work with them to deal with any issues as they come up. We’re also considering hiring a groundskeeper named Hagrid. He’s not really qualified, but we’re also thinking of making him a teacher.

We talked with our very expensive lawyers and they told us to just give everyone a license to a square foot, instead of a deed. We thought that was kind of lame, but we were also paying by the hour for the call, so we just took their advice and sent out the licenses.









The Puzzle

Throughout this process, we also worked with Mike Selinker and Gaby Weidling of Lone Shark Games to hide a complicated puzzle within all the gifts. We knew right away the island would be where we hid the prize, like buried treasure. Max said:

We designed Holiday Bullshit from the ground up to integrate the puzzle. My interest in puzzles was largely inspired by Elan Lee’s work on the early ARGs, so I’m always excited in building an experience for people, or sending people to incredible places. I wanted to give people a little taste of the island, and we had a whole vision of people going there and discovering the prize.

We considered burying the prize down in a hatch, like in LOST, but it just wasn’t practical to get that equipment to the island. Instead, we bought a safe and a durable shed house it. It took puzzle-solvers only 48-hours to find the safe, and only a few weeks to unlock the combination and claim their prize.

Here’s what was hidden inside:









250,000 one-of-a-kind sloth cards. And a bottle of good scotch.

Installation of the safe was not easy. Though it’s not normally in her job description, our printer Shari got extremely excited about this project, and decided to head from New Jersey to personally oversee the installation of the safe, armed with a team of volunteer firefighters from Liberty.

It took sixteen hours and eighteen people to get the safe across the water and installed on the island. You can watch it right on top, it’s pretty great.