Tribewanted was a project that intended to build an online community -- a tribe -- of people who would become a real-life community by pooling their money to lease a private Fijian island for three years. Each member of the tribe could reserve a certain amount of weeks on the island, similar to a timeshare. This was the co-idea of two young British men: Mark James and Ben Keene. They'd engaged with the aboriginal Fijian who owned the island in question, and together they set out to make Tribewanted into a model of eco-tourism.
Sounds great, right? Well, there was a catch: if the "tribe" did not achieve 5000 pre-paid members before a certain cutoff date (about 6 months from when I discovered the project), then the project would shut down. At first it was strictly "all or nothing" -- you didn't get your money back if the tribe didn't form. Then they changed their minds and said you could get a refund if -- and only if -- the tribe failed to reach 5000 members. But where were the project's founders getting the money to run the Tribewanted project in the meantime? Whoops.
It seemed suspicious, so I started looking into it. Tribewanted's PR flak was a five-star clown -- nothing like what I was used to dealing with in the IT world -- and tried to stonewall me after I asked some obvious questions about finances and logistics. The two British men leading the project would not talk to me, either, and that made me even more suspicious. What were they hiding? Ostensibly they'd agreed to an "exclusive interview" with National Geographic, but that doesn't mean they can't answer some fundamental questions to other members of the press. I knew something was wrong with this, so I dug deeper. I discovered that Mark James was actually Mark James Bowness, and he'd started at least one similar project in the past that ended up failing. He also had written a book for a Christian publisher in the UK, and that book had been unpublished. I'd worked on enough books to know that publishers don't take a book off the market unless there are serious problems with it -- usually big legal issues like libel or copyright infringement.
Eventually I hit a wall and decided to publish what I'd discovered thus far: Is Tribewanted a Scam?
I hoped that the article would either crush the scam (if it was one) or encourage Mark and Ben to explain to the public why this project looked like a scam, but actually wasn't. Instead I received two classes of email from readers: Tribewanted followers who chided me for "not believing" in what increasingly looked to me like a cult, and some anonymous Mark James Bowness detractors who insisted that he was a horrible person who'd committed unspeakable crimes against their loved-ones.
I know what you're thinking because I was thinking it too, but you can't just go printing what you think -- you have to prove it. So I pressed those "anonymous" emailers to tell me more about why Mark Bowness was such a villain. Eventually I called long-distance to England to speak with Mark's former Publisher, and got in email contact with Mark's ex-wife and her friends, and at last I discovered the truth: Mark was gay. When he came out privately to his friends and family, they almost universally rejected him as immoral, and they made it very clear to me that they hated Mark because of his sexuality. His marriage ended, his conservative Christian publisher took his somewhat-popular YA self-help book off the market, and I got the impression that Mark Bowness lost a large portion of his real-life community as a result. That's a devastating set of circumstances, no matter who you are. When I discovered all of this, I was horrified.
Mark Bowness wasn't trying to cover up a scam, he was just trying to start a new career as a public figure while avoiding tainting the Tribewanted project with the anti-homosexual hate that he hoped he'd escaped. He and and Ben Keene were just two fame-seeking entrepreneurs who got drunk on Tony Robbins-style "set impossible goals for yourself" hype, and developed a really shitty plan for what eventually proved -- after public pressure from me and other skeptics -- to be a pretty good idea for an eco-tourism project.
At last I knew the truth, and it was not what I expected, hoped, or wanted it to be. I felt terrible for putting the spotlight on Mark when he was trying to rebuild his public persona after so many people in his community unjustly rejected him without question or exception; on the other hand he and Ben brought this on themselves by stonewalling me when I only wanted to get some plain-English answers to what I considered to be reasonable questions that a prospective Tribewanted participant or investor would ask. It's a major red-flag when something looks scammy and the people collecting non-refundable money for it refuse to answer questions.
Mark's detractors were hungry to see him vilified on a public stage -- limited though mine may have been. This often happens in investigative journalism; if you have a long-enough conversation with someone, eventually he or she will expect you to champion their cause. But, like I said: the line between tabloid hacks and real journalists is the willingness to print the unprofitable narrative. So I wrote this follow-up piece: An Update on Tribewanted.
As of this writing, Mark Bowness is publicly out as gay, therefore I'm comfortable revealing his formerly-secret sexuality. However I did not reveal what I learned about him in that follow-up article, not just out of respect for the privacy and dignity of an innocent man, but because it wasn't important to the story. I am not a tabloid hack. In the end, Tribewanted was not a scam no matter how much it looked like one at the start.
Presumably as a result of my articles and the public pressure they generated, Tribewanted changed substantially from its original plans, most notably the tribe would no longer be a total wash if it didn't reach its glaringly unrealistic goal of 5000 members by September of 2006. Mark Bowness ceased to be one of the public faces of the project, but he did personally invite me to visit the Tribewanted island of Vorovoro some months later. I turned the offer down because I would not be able to accept a gift from someone I'm writing about. Personally I was curious, though, and I developed a lesser fantasy of visiting the island under an assumed name to ask what the participants thought of that "evil blogger" who questioned their faith. That would have been fun.
Some two years after that follow-up article, Mark Bowness and I had an extended email conversation about the whole situation. Ultimately his goal was to get me to take down my articles because they were in some way interfering with his current and future projects. I refused because I thought of journalism as "the rough draft of history," which should be preserved for posterity. Tribewanted massively fucked up in the beginning, and no one should ever deny that. While I sympathized with Mark's Google rankings situation -- and offered him a "friend price" on an ad for the pages he wanted to derank -- ultimately I had a problem with his reasoning. When I wrote those articles, everything in them was true, but in response Mark and Ben had silently changed policies and rules without notice so as to make it seem like what I wrote had never been accurate. In the beginning, Tribewanted looked and felt like a scam, and that's why it didn't get the traction the founders were hoping for. As a result of my reporting, they learned how to alter the project to be successful under more realistic circumstances. To pretend that they never said that it was originally "5000 tribesmen or bust" is not just dishonest, it's also an attack on my journalistic integrity, and I don't deserve that. Neither can they pretend that my reporting did not help them find a path to the success that they eventually earned. Mark and Ben are now (separately, it seems) professional coaches, speakers, and consultants.
Apparently the National Geographic Channel produced a documentary on Tribewanted. I have not seen it. Since I was not interviewed for it, I hope I can assume that I was not featured in it -- I would be shocked if an NGS writer did something like that -- though I have heard that I was at least mentioned as an anonymous villain.