The Campaign of Terror: How We Spent 9 Months Scamming the Internet for a Good Cause

As a rule, it’s generally not advised to start an article begging for forgiveness. Rhetorically it reeks of cowardice. However, after spending the better part of 2025 creating an ad campaign for a fake company with fake employees selling fake doomsday bunkers that fooled hundreds of thousands (millions?) of real people, we’re lost on how else to start it.

Alright, fuck this, you’re saying to yourself. Wait! The “Why” here is important. We started Null+Void to help environmental and humanity-saving companies get their name out there. Problem is, we don’t know how to make anything that isn’t certifiably insane. It’s like asking Gordon Ramsay to make you lunch: he’s going to come back with a 22-minute episode of a restaurant owner/father constantly calling his son a fuck up. 

Hence the guerilla marketing campaign we came up with for a company called Aquipor, an environmental, permeable concrete company out of Spokane, Washington. We loved their product, loved their mission, and we found the CEO to be one of the more admirable people we’d ever met.

Which is why it’s confusing to us (and eventually you) why we decided to market his company with a farce doomsday bunker product that was part of a marketing strategy we dubbed “The Campaign of Terror.” 

What follows is our attempt to manufacture something frightening in order to shine a light on something good. Starting with the ill-fated idea.

THE PITCH

Greg Johnson is the CEO of Aquipor, and as we said before the guy’s admirable. He’s got an oh-golly-gee-shucks boyishness about him mixed with a wise every-man charm and optimism for the future usually reserved for people like Mormons and Dead & Company fans. 

As far as we know though, Greg isn’t into acid or dinnerware. He’s more about solving real world environmental problems. Aquipor makes a newly invented permeable concrete that mitigates flooding, restores groundwater, reduces ocean pollution, and is almost zero CO2. And it works with existing concrete processes.

Cool shit. Greg's also not a polarizing figure. Also cool. Unfortunately green tech and a nice CEO can be a death sentence for a company struggling to make a name for itself. So in an effort to bring some Punk into the green world, we decided to pitch him a plan so reckless that it required plausible deniability. 

Now, it’s important to note that we didn’t have a specific plan. We had a few nuggets, concepts of a plan if you like heady speak, all with the same anarchic (re: borderline illegal) naughty zest that would draw attention, sort of like a 70-year-old man wearing a g-string riding a bicycle through rush hour. 

Greg took it all in, didn’t speak for a moment, then said finally: “Wow, you guys… you’re out there. Well, I know you’re good at what you do, and you wouldn’t hurt us, so… I guess let’s do it! What’s the plan?” 

We didn’t tell him. Partly because we didn’t have one, but also because, as we established, it was better that he didn’t know. It wasn’t long though before the gases of creation bubbled up from the primordial brain ooze and we had something.

Aaron had been doing his yearly re-watch of his favorite Vietnam movies, and he realized his appreciation of the Vietcong’s booby traps. Simultaneously, Adam had been desperately combing the Null+Void archives for unused ideas and found a blurb about a “luxury doomsday bunker subscription service.” It was decided that the two things would be merged. 

We’d create a company that produced a truly aspirational subscription bunker product (sleek interiors, a useless streaming service, state-of-the-art security, a cancel-anytime clause that read like Finnegans Wake, and, ahem, low CO2 permeable concrete) and market it like the NVA with guerilla ads that would mess with people’s heads and make them question everything. We’d reel them in with a teddy bear on the ground, and then BAAM! give ‘em a face full of Aquipor.

The company would be called “Bunkers 4 Everyone,” and the strategy would be the aforementioned "Campaign of Terror." It felt good. Right, even. But decades of making stuff told us we couldn't just create this in a vacuum and that we needed a gut check. So, we contacted some people who once made George W. Bush so upset that he said at a press conference, "there ought to be limits to freedom."

THE FOREFATHERS OF LAUGHTIVISM

What we were proposing — funny guerilla activist marketing — wasn't new. In the '90s, two dudes named Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos became the masters of "hijinks" (as they called it) involving public stunts that drew attention to serious issues. They pretended to be ExxonMobil, highlighting how they were destroying the planet (but that was okay because they could turn people into oil), as well as the George W. Bush campaign, pointing at his hypocrisies (before it was cool).

Basically they were the model for what we wanted to be. Before we started, we sent a message to them outlining our plans, seeing if these legends of the game had any feedback. Their response... "Good idea!":

With the approval of our heroes* we had just found, we set to work on The Campaign of Terror, starting with the building of its foundations.

BUILDING THE LIE

If we wanted this thing to work, we had to go deep. We needed to make the Company, the employees, their families, their pets... everything needed history, a footprint. So we started with the CEO, whom we named Doug Kelsey.

Doug Kelsey is a mosaic of every bad startup persona you’ve painfully tolerated. His Linkedin posts are tone deaf and he views humanity as a “nice-to-have.” Behind the scenes, his wife is dutifully neglected, and his young daughters (whose resentment is just starting to blossom) know that daddy's work is very important (unlike their soccer games).

We set to work giving him an internet past. None of that lazy alt-account cosplay where someone forgets to log out before role-playing as a middle-aged black woman. The internet can often be sophisticated in its bullshit detection. What we needed were aged accounts.

Now, to get good, quality aged social accounts, you need to find a shady internet marketplace full of either Kathoeys in Thailand or 12-year-old Russians who sleep during the day. Preferably both. Don’t ask why. If you’ve dealt with others, you’ll know. The site we chose was Z2U. Their tagline: “Enjoying game! Safe and hassle-free.” Right. 

After spending $30 on fake accounts, we had the beginnings of something that would (hopefully) make any would-be journalists briefly pause and say, “Huh, that’s weird.” Now it was time to move onto the next step: our press release.

Press releases are like a grocery store manager giving herself employee of the month and then using that as evidence to Corporate that she deserves a raise. They’re bullshit, and years of working for Big Business and small parts of Poland helped us engineer a press release that was scandalously perfect: A $99/month subscription for a bunker, AI security, a Swedish trash-based perpetual energy system, low CO2, permeable concrete, and a $52 Million Series A, because nothing says real like an arbitrary seven-digit number. 

Normally the presser would cost $500 bucks, but because we were an up-and-coming company, they followed the drug dealer’s code and gave us the first one for free. Now it was time for the launch.

THE LAUNCH

The initial plan for the launch video was to put it on every platform, because why not? We had the fake accounts and profiles, might as well use them for more than just trolling our extended family. But as we looked closer at Twitter and Facebook, we realized the sites were more fucked than we thought. 

When you really look into a lot of these prolific profiles, we mean really look into them, you start to see how many lights are on with nobody home. We’ve seen the headlines and assumed it was bad — like a lot of you probably — but not this bad. 

Well said, whoever you are who couldn’t possibly be responsible. Anyway, posting on those graveyards would be a waste of energy. We then looked at TikTok, but remembered we still didn’t understand it. We looked into the up-and-comer Bluesky, but it seemed to be more focused on spouse swapping in its current form. Basically that left only Reddit for a last gasp of real engagement.

We put the video up with a headline that said more than the footage ever could: “The Disney+ of Doomsday Bunkers.” We primed comments with our hand-managed burner accounts, logged off and called it a day because we’re professionals. That, and we didn’t expect it to get picked up any time soon.

That very afternoon, Aaron emerged from his portable sauna to a message that read: “this you?” We were informed that the post had over one million views. 

Let’s sit on that for a moment. That number evokes a particular kind of chaos in one's mind. A small power trip, a lie that you are somehow in control of the beast you have set upon this doomed planet. Our minds flashed back to The Yes Men. They would have killed for these kinds of views on their work. But, best not to get ahead of ourselves.

We were also overwhelmed with the comments. Some were filled with disgust, anger, others with gallows humor. And a few people who took it at face value. Then the weird part. 

News outlets started to aggregate the noise because aggregation is a business model and outrage is the lifeblood suckled to stay relevant. Crunchbase even gave us a heat and growth score of 80+. We didn’t know what that was, but it sounded good.

They also said the Bunkers 4 Everyone company was now worth $52 million, without doing any additional research. They just… believed it. That number crystallized the problem neither one of us could articulate until putting this article together. Someone out there with more authority than you or I had decided that a digital voxel of make-believe money equated to real-life equity. 

It also wasn't lost on us that the fake company we'd just created was now worth more than Aquipor, the real company we were helping that we hadn't mentioned in this video.

That’s the scam: perception drives perception until you can’t tell what has actual value. But enough of that. This thing hasn’t even begun to go downhill.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT 

The Bunkers 4 Everyone launch video, which was made to mostly bolster the phony press releases and provide a deeper back story for future videos, had worked almost too well. It had drawn more heat and attention than we’d initially expected or wanted. It also created some odd feelings for us that we couldn't quite pin down. 

On the one hand, it had achieved the exact subtlety and dry humor we’d wanted, but on the other it was depressing to see how people were engaging with it as if it was actually real. Maybe we’d played it too close to the bone. Maybe in our years of making straight ads, we’d lost our touch and created something too real. Maybe those were just bot accounts and we were the fools. In either case, the parody had become plausible.

We had a rethink and decided on the obvious: Our next video would have to push things back to normalcy, for our spirit’s sake. Keep in mind, this would be our version of normalcy.

We asked ourselves, “What’s dumb enough to sound insane yet plausible in today’s climate?” The answer, unfortunately, was that it could be anything. Eventually we settled on a story as old as time, crooked governments handing private companies the keys to pave over nature. We’d heard good things about Yellowstone and Wyoming from Kevin Costner, so… done.

We staged a parody Wyoming News Now newscast, inserted ourselves right into the footage, and parked it on a URL that looked close enough to the real thing. The entire project cost us only the price of a single domain. (Note: we are actively trying to give said domain to the news station that didn’t buy it in the first place)

We even considered emailing the video to whoever ran the Wyoming News Now Facebook page, hoping they’d upload it themselves. That felt like a line too far, even for us. Not that it mattered. The story went nowhere on Facebook. Maybe the idea of a private company paving over part of Yellowstone was oddly kinky to that demographic. Or maybe Meta’s detection systems actually work. We doubt it.

So once again, we went searching for validation in the same place all men go when they want to sound more important than they are: Reddit. Our first post was flagged in r/videos, so we tried our luck with r/interestingasfuck. And, uh, a couple people noticed it. 

In twenty minutes, it’d been viewed 300,000 times. In two hours, a million and a half.

There was even more outrage, more disillusionment. How could they build bunkers on an active volcano? The Republicans are selling off our public lands! And on, and on. But then a few people started to suggest it wasn’t a real company, and others even went against the grain and suggested it was satire. They were quickly attacked and gaslighted.

And a few recognized us, reaching the obvious conclusion that Adam had changed his name and became a field reporter in Wyoming. Huzzah.

Bunkers had struck again. Yeah, we still hadn't mentioned Aquipor anywhere, but that would come in time. You can't just slap people in the face with it. The frog must be boiled. Now it was time for a little more heat.

ESCALATION 

We started this project back in March 2025. At the time, FaceFusion was the go-to for deepfake trickery. Runway worked for a shot or two, but never enough to comfortably rely on. We’d been experimenting with these tools since Stable Diffusion 1.5, and like most people who felt its power early on, we got hooked. At the same time, it often feels creatively bankrupt, especially in the hands of people least deserving of its potential. We’re not auteurs. We grew up on Fark, YTMND, and Something Awful.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s context. We see today’s tools through the lens of that old internet. Back then, nobody was making money. You bought or pirated Photoshop just to make your friends laugh or to learn something new. Now corporate greed has stripped that spirit away. Creative is no longer about fun or curiosity. It’s fodder for a marketplace where talent is harvested more than empowered.

But us? We try to use AI the way good chefs use fire: with purpose and little regard for the kitchen staff. It hasn’t really been a shortcut, more of a spark. A way to breathe life into ideas. Our own ideas.

So, with that in mind, imagine our reaction when we saw this:

We didn’t rage about how lazy marketing had become, or how much worse it would get. We did the opposite. We leaned into the dead art of parody.

For our third act, we went all in on the latest video toy: Veo3. We learned quickly. The interface was horrific, the token consumption resembled a broken washing machine, and yet it was still fun. Over time it’s gotten better, cheaper, and slightly less cursed. Not perfect, but that’s the appeal. The joy in the jank.

This would serve as the crescendo in the Bunkers 4 Everyone finale, the closing curtain for Doug and his loyal cast of imaginary friends. Our final attempt to get people to notice a small concrete company from... Washington(?). At this point we couldn't remember.

PLAN B, C and D

Our goal was to launch an AMA on Reddit where Doug himself would take the hard questions and be forced to look at ASCII dick art all day. This was the first time in the campaign where we spent more than a happy meal, coughing up a few hundred bucks on targeted Reddit ads. Ads look legitimate, especially when they leave the comments open. That meant opening Doug up to public scrutiny which we welcomed.

The twist would be Greg. After being turned on to the fact that Aquipor was featured in this Bunker company’s creative, he’d have no choice but to step in and call Doug out, accusing Bunkers 4 Everyone of illegally using Aquipor’s IP, which they did. Greg or an Internet Lawyer would have to issue a cease-and-desist, force the Bunkers 4 Everyone site offline, and in the process reveal the whole thing as a stunt. The website would then redirect to Aquipor giving everyone a clean ending.

We gave Greg an out. Told him we’d understand if this was a bridge too far. To his credit, he agreed. He was impressed by the sheer madness of the campaign and open to trying something different, something attention-grabbing.

But then the internet reminded us it still had gatekeepers. A couple hours after the AMA launched, Aaron was answering questions as Doug, when one of the Reddit mods reached out to him with an article from two journalists. They’d investigated our Yellowstone story and exposed it as a hoax. The AMA was flagged as a scam and shutdown right as it was taking off.

Strangely, we felt relief. Real journalists were still doing real work. They didn’t catch the obvious tells in the comments mentioning us by name. Instead they did actual work, they spoke to sources (anchors / the president of the news station, government officials, Yellowstone park rangers), even tried to contact Doug. We actually missed those because by then we just weren’t checking his inbox. That one’s on us.

We’ve since tried reaching out to those journalists for their perspective. They never responded. Which is fair.

But that pretty much ended it. The AMA was dead, the plan derailed, and here we are a couple months later, writing this article.

THE AFTERMATH 

Now we’re here, judging whether we failed or succeeded. A quick surface-level scan shows that we made ourselves laugh, made Greg nervous, stirred the pot a bit, got a few million views, and drove a couple people to Aquipor. But if we put the microscope on this thing, the truth about the campaign is a little uncomfortable.

Ultimately, we made the content (and it is merely “content”) that we both loathe and feast on. We added to the very noise that drains our dopamine and drowns out the Aquipors of the world. This issue was exacerbated by the fact that we barely even mentioned the goddamn name of the company we were supposedly helping. We were focused on all the wrong things.

Take for instance our fake CEO, Doug Kelsey. We knew him inside and out, even the names of his daughters (Kehmberleigh and Johne) who hate his very existence. Counter that to Greg — we still don’t know the names of his kids, which kind of shows you where our head was at. We lost the plot at some point, which is probably also why we felt that strange tickle of relief when it all came to an end.

You don’t feel that sort of thing when you stop volunteering at the food bank or donating to the Red Cross. We doubt that The Yes Men ever felt glad a campaign was over.

At the end of the day, we can’t help but wonder what nine months of straight, hand-over-our-heart work for Aquipor would have done to help move the needle for them. What could’ve been if we’d used our skills to work a little more within the lines while still keeping an attention-grabbing edge. We’ll never know. 

What we do know is that nobody wrote Aquipor that big check to build their company and produce a product that could change the planet. Greg’s still hustling, still nice as hell, still doing a great job of firing up grassroots investors for a dream that’s 10 years in the making. It’ll just take more time. 

If you're furious, we understand. We used the same tools as scammers and told ourselves the mission made it okay. It didn't. If you're laughing, we also understand. We had more than a few chuckles, too, and that was part of the problem. If you're wondering whether any of this mattered, so are we.

All we can say is that the next time an outrage pellet whizzes past your melon, maybe, for 30 seconds, look for the source. Follow the trail. Not because we're qualified to tell you that (we're the ones who put the garbage on your feed), but because we've seen it from the inside, and the inside is empty. Not everyone who screams “fake” or “gay” is a hero and blind trust doesn’t make a villain. It’s just that, in a world where the line between satire and scam is thin and weathered, a little curiosity is good to have.

And speaking of curiosity, check out https://aquipor.com