Indy100 News and Insights: A Deep Dive into the World of @dril
@dril, a pseudonymous Twitter user, has carved out a unique niche in the social media landscape with his absurdist humor and non sequiturs. Known for his idiosyncratic style, the account and its associated character are often referred to as dril or wint. Since his first tweet in 2008, dril has amassed over 1.8 million followers, becoming a significant figure in the “Weird Twitter” subculture, which is characterized by a surreal, ironic sense of humor.
The character of dril is a bizarre reflection of a typical male American Internet user, often repurposed by others for humorous or satirical effect in various political and cultural contexts. Many of dril’s tweets, phrases, and tropes have become familiar parts of Internet slang. Despite the speculation about his identity, a large portion of his fanbase respects his choice to maintain privacy. In 2017, following a doxing incident, New York identified the author as Paul Dochney, who confirmed his identity on several occasions thereafter. In 2023, Dochney participated in his first interview under his own name at The Ringer.
Dochney funds his work through Patreon, has created animated short films, and contributed illustrations and writing to other artists’ collaborative projects. His first book, “Dril Official ‘Mr. Ten Years’ Anniversary Collection” (2018), is a compilation of the account’s “greatest hits” alongside new illustrations. In 2019, he announced the launch of a streaming web series called “Truthpoint: Darkweb Rising,” an InfoWars parody co-created with comedian Derek Estevez-Olsen for Adult Swim. Writers have praised dril for his originality and humor, with poet Patricia Lockwood calling him “a master of tone, a master of character.”
Dochney was born in June 1987 and grew up in New Jersey. Raised by working-class parents, he graduated from Haddonfield Memorial High School and later attained a BA in media design from Wilmington University in Delaware. He moved to Philadelphia in the late 2010s and by the early 2020s, resided in Greater Los Angeles.
An avid Internet user from early childhood, Dochney posted at the Something Awful forums under the name “gigantic drill” in the 2000s. He joined Twitter about two years after its launch, adopting the handle “@dril” because “@drill” was already taken. Dril’s first tweet, the single word “no,” was posted on September 15, 2008. Reflecting on the state of Twitter at the time, dril said, “everyone was just posting bullshit like, ‘Oh, this is what I had for lunch.’ I posted ‘no’ because I didn’t care for it at the time. I still really don’t care for it.”
Dochney initially maintained anonymity, with little known about the author behind the @dril account. When asked about the account’s longtime anonymity during a private Q&A in 2017, he responded, “i am an almost 30 year old man and i could not really care less about the Authenticity of the platform i use to convey dick jokes.” In 2017, a Tumblr post identifying dril’s author as Paul Dochney went viral, leading to a doxing incident. The post was met with backlash among Twitter users, many of whom voiced a preference for keeping dril’s personal identity a mystery.
Dril addressed the doxing on his Patreon page, writing, “everything’s normal. i guess im ‘doxxed’ now. sorry. it’s fine. i donr really give a shit.” In a Reddit “ask us anything” interview, dril confirmed that he had worked on Hiveswap and said the personal impact of the doxing had been minimal. In August 2018, the Twitter account announced that dril was transferring the publishing rights of his tweets to Paul Dochney for the purpose of publishing his first book. Some reporters subsequently identified dril as Dochney. In a 2020 Reddit AMA, dril commented, “i doxxed myself so amazon would give me permission to publish my other book last year. im some guy named paul dochney who cares big whoop.” Dochney gave his first fully “out-of-character” interview under his own name in April 2023, solidifying his intent to be publicly identified under his personal name.
Dochney writes dril tweets in character, using an avatar of a blurry image of Jack Nicholson smiling and wearing sunglasses. Although there is no consistent narrative, the “voice” or “character” is considered highly distinctive. Critics have described dril’s voice as an amalgamation of ordinary Internet users, most of all those who are arrogant, obsessive, ignorant, or hapless. Professor of English literature Roger Bellin describes the character of dril as “generally a recognizable type: a self-important buffoon who’s often raging out, or other times preening, over some bit of nonsense that we’re all meant to realize is absurdly unimportant.”
Dril’s tweets are deliberately peppered with odd typos like misspelled words, grammatical mistakes, punctuation errors, and eggcorns. In the preface to his first book, dril called his writing style “Prestige Short Prose.” Pick suggested that the phrase was likely “meant to make fun of the snobby lit theory types who want to make Dril out to be some highbrow art project,” but she concluded it was an apt term to describe dril’s style of “part art form, part jokes to read on the toilet.”
Dril has been identified as one of the “most revered” and “quintessential” accounts associated with the “Weird Twitter” scene. Dril was one of many Weird Twitter personalities who migrated to Twitter from Something Awful’s FYAD board and carried over the forum’s in-jokes and tone. Like others on Weird Twitter, dril’s tweets have been described as having a dadaist sensibility. Writing for Complex, Brenden Gallagher compared dril to a musician who refuses to sell out or an auteurist indie filmmaker, as Twitter’s version of “the enigmatic figure that even [an art form’s] best known practitioners look to with reverence.”
Most of dril’s writing is understood to be absurd, surreal, ironic, or nonsensical. An article about dril in The Oxford Student singled out this 2011 dril tweet as the account’s guiding “manifesto”: “fuck ‘jokes’. everything i tweet is real. raw insight without the horse shit. no, i will NOT follow trolls. twitter dot com. i live for this.”
Providing an ostensibly out-of-character statement to BuzzFeed for an oral history on “Weird Twitter” in 2013, dril commented on the nature of his work and motivation: “Twitter, as I understand it, is a sort of ‘Hell’ that I was banished to upon death in my previous life. In this abstract realm, the only thing I am certain of is that my cries are awarded ‘Favs’ or ‘RTs’ when they are particularly miserable or profane. These ethereal merits do nothing to ease my suffering, but I have deliriously convinced myself that gathering enough of them will impress my unseen superiors and grant me a promotion to a higher plane of existence. This is my sole motivation.”
In a 2017 Reddit AMA, he commented: “my friend told me to join twitter ten years ago and i thought it looked dumb as shit so i tried posting the worst things i could think of to destroy it and it didnt work.”
Although dril’s content is typically absurd or nonsensical, some have noted an undercurrent of satire or social commentary in dril’s tweets. Surveying Weird Twitter for Complex, Gallagher commented that dril’s “vicious satire of conservatives, gamers, conspiracy theorists, and other less savory aspects of the Internet is always on point, always hilarious, always in character.” Fellow Weird Twitter user @rare_basement said dril’s “trolling [of] Penn State fans during the molestation scandal was so brilliant, always on the right side of the issue, but super funny and subtle about it.”
Dril’s tweets have become part of the vernacular of Internet slang. Some of dril’s distinctive phrases have become so ubiquitous that they are used even by those who are unaware of the phrases’ origin. Although dril’s biggest influence is on Twitter, his tweets are also popular on other social media platforms. A common piece of conventional wisdom on Twitter holds that it is possible to find a dril Tweet that corresponds to virtually any situation or statement, leading to the saying “There’s always a dril Tweet.”
Dril’s influence on the tenor of the internet is significant, with his early preoccupations and sensibility having an outsized impact. By the end of 2017, the staff of Deadspin declared that “comparing everything to @dril” was a trend that “should die” in 2018, asserting that dril himself remained funny but dril comparisons had become an overused, lazy trope.
Source: New York, The Ringer, Complex, BuzzFeed, The Verge, Vice, The A.V. Club, Mashable, Kotaku, Gawker, The New York Times, First Things, The Oxford Student, Tablet
