in reference to the previous post
this is not my first experience with obvious jokes being taken very seriously on the internet. a lot of you are familiar with this:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/alvin-greenes-on-the-scene/
and if you’re not, it’s something that twitter stalwart virgiltexas and i engineered last year during the run-up to the 2010 election. alvin greene was a pretty entertaining character from the get-go, and virgiltexas had a bogus alvingreene4senate twitter, so we made this song and video as a big joke.
within two days news outlets like CNN and the New York Times were reporting on it like it was legit, and it took most of them two or three days to track down either of us, get statements, and issue corrections (although neither of us took any great pains to disguise our identities.)
so, i dunno. what’s the point of this? who knows. obviously this was a much larger scale operation than a few people believing whole-heartedly that fake xkcd comics are real, even when they’re designed to insult their audience, but it’s yet another example of how i’ve come face to face with the depressing realization that a lot of people just turn off their bullshit filter when they read stuff on a computer.
it’s cool when something you do achieves that sort of reach but it also reminds me of when Negativland and the Church of the Subgenius would engage in culture-jamming activities, the difference being that you don’t really even have to set out to deceive people to end up fooling them these days.
use your minds please.
