Crimes of the information Age

[_MeDotOrg]

Try to imagine explaining this story to someone who just woke from a coma after 30 years:

Rossi Lorathio Adams II built an empire on college debauchery. On social media accounts he started as a senior at Iowa State University, he posted photos and videos of students performing what one local TV station dubbed “all kinds of crazy shenanigans.”

The posts, which showed people doing things such as lighting their nipples on fire, guzzling beer from women’s backsides, and chugging milk they then retched back up, were accompanied with a catchphrase: #DoItForState. The hashtag caught on successfully enough that students sometimes shouted it during their exploits.

But to Adams’s growing frustration, someone else had snagged the domain name for the phrase. After a years-long effort to persuade owner Ethan Deyo to sell, Adams decided to take it by force instead. A federal jury convicted the now-27-year-old in April of hatching a madcap scheme in which his cousin broke into Deyo’s house to make him transfer the ownership at gunpoint.

On Monday, a judge sentenced Adams to 14 years in prison — the end to a bizarre tale of a wildly successful social media company, its young owner’s obsession with expanding his viral brand and a domain-name standoff that escalated into a bloody break-in.