The “elite” couple Malcolm and Simone Collins going viral again this week after being featured in another article on pronatalist beliefs aren’t just the face of a movement that critics say urges the wealthy to populate the earth with as many “genetically superior” children as possible. They’re also longtime Redditors with years of posting to show for it.
We already knew that this couple were terminally online: they first made headlines 10 years ago, when Malcolm proposed to Simone through Reddit “advice animal” memes and DeviantArt commissions.
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Malcolm’s identity as u/SirTechnocracy is no secret: he wrote an op-ed for Huffington Post, “How I Proposed to My Girlfriend On Reddit,” under his real name, and as the founder of the artist commissioning business ArtCorgi. “Yesterday I proposed to my girlfriend of a year and a half. I didn’t take her out to a nice restaurant, on a romantic walk along a beach, or pop the question during halftime at a major sporting event. I proposed to her online, as SirTechnocracy on Reddit,” he wrote. Technocracy is a form of government where elite technological experts run society.
The proposal went viral, but after the internet fame died down and they moved on into their marriage, they went on to become the faces of the pronatalist movement, and so far they’ve been given several long profiles for mainstream media outlets to share their pronatalist ideals. This week, it was the Telegraph. In January, it was the New York Post. Last year, it was Business Insider. As Business Insider put it, pronatalism—espoused by Elon Musk, for example—is about breeding supposedly “genetically superior” people. The Collinses have expressed in multiple profiles that certain traits like empathy and even political beliefs are genetically inherited, and so breeding among people who hold those beliefs will carry them forward. In an email to Motherboard, the Collinses disputed this characterization and described pronatalism as “a movement that urges individuals from low fertility cultures to have kids to preserve as much genetic and cultural diversity as possible.” Their carefully-crafted “elite” look in these profiles—thick black-rimmed glasses, turtlenecks, dress shirts and suits—has made them a meme, and is at odds with their trollish posting history.
Their very online past is still, well, online. It takes a poster to know one, and Katie Notopoulos resurfaces the Collins’ online lives this week after their pronatalist story went viral. Simone made a dakimakura—a style of body pillow usually printed with a sexy anime lady—for Malcolm, with an anime-style version of herself on it. But she didn’t just custom order that pillow. Based on her old Reddit posts, she sold custom pillows to other people through the ArtCorgi business, too.
Notopoulos also pointed out that Malcolm is a brony (a fan of My Little Pony), but he’s not just any run of the mill My Little Pony enjoyer—he’s specifically into Fallout Equestria, a fanfiction crossover book between the Fallout video game franchise and My Little Pony, and has written about his love of the fic on Medium.
They seem to take what happens on Reddit so seriously that they let it mess with their lives. After the happy engagement, advice animal memes started getting to their heads. “My fiancée and I have a recurring (though not constant) nagging feeling that our lives are too perfect and we are on the precipice of losing everything,” Malcolm wrote in 2014 in r/relationships. “The recent bout of adviceanimal memes about people who had their wives/husbands suddenly screw them over after long and apparently happy relationships has only served to intensify this fear.” Someone wisely replies, “stop reading Reddit?”
The pair seems to share an interest in kinks beyond breeding. They co-wrote a book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality: What Turns People On, Why, and What That Tells Us About Our Species, which Malcom pitches on r/freeEBOOKS: “Have you ever: Been aroused by something . . . unexpected? Stumbled upon bizarre porn and wondered how it could possibly turn people on? Wondered why something that turns on many of your friends is super gross to you?” (Definitely, I have!)
The pair, but especially Malcolm, consults Reddit on decisions both major and minor, from where to move, how to house-train his puppy, and how to build a PC. He’s also belabored the decision of naming his kids on Reddit, asking, “Who would you rather hire: A Torsten or a Trajan,” and “Who would you rather date: A Torsten or a Trajan” (they went with Torsten).
Simone is less prolific, mostly posting on engagement subreddits. But over the last decade, Malcolm’s posting has been all over the place and reveals a tendency toward trolling. He posed a question on r/AskTrumpSupporters in April 2017, “Have you changed who you plan to vote for this election (post-primaries)? If so when did you change and why?” but it was removed too quickly to be archived, and had another post removed in that subreddit for saying he doesn’t support Trump. He also shows up in r/fatlogic, a subreddit celebrating anti-fatness, to discuss fat people being sent to zoos for medical imaging, and r/KotakuInAction—a Gamergate subreddit so full of racism and sexism that its own creator quit—to defend Milia Jovovich.
The Collins’ Reddit habits, at least under those usernames, have died down in recent years; they’re busy seeding the earth, after all. But a true poster never retires. They’re still on Twitter, posting as a joint account, defending their ideas by praising the fascist Terran Federation from Starship Troopers.
Update 4/20/23: This article was corrected to reflect that ArtCorgi is still operational, and to add comment from Simone and Malcolm Collins.
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