Dril, the man behind what is arguably the most iconic Twitter account in the history of social media, is practically internet royalty. An ever-cranky old man who is frequently confused by internet culture and yet simultaneously embodies it perfectly, Dril is the sort of brilliant internet content that would be utterly incomprehensible to someone who traveled to 2017 from a pre-Twitter age. If the internet were an H.P. Lovecraft story, Dril would be the tentacle-faced beast who is older than the universe and exists just out of our human levels of perception. He is also, unfortunately, a real guy with a real name, and the internet seems to have finally revealed the person behind Dril.
If you’d rather not ruin the magic, turn back now and remain in blissful ignorance. For everyone else, a New York Magazine piece has laid out the evidence, which weirdly begins in a subreddit for Hiveswap, a game based on cult classic webcomic Homestuck. Way back in September, somebody apparently put the pieces together and realized that Dril’s real name was in the credits for Hiveswap, though the post has since been deleted and locked. Recently, though, people in the Homestuck Tumblr community also managed to solve the mystery, cross-referencing some details people have shared in interviews with the list of Twitter accounts Dril follows, the credits to Hiveswap, and—just in case this wasn’t entrenched in internet lore enough—some details from Linkedin pages.
In the end, they discovered that Dril is run by some guy named Paul. He’s not an alien, he’s not from the future, and he’s not even a real-life old man. He’s just a dude who has been making funny internet stuff for a very long time.