The Fake Steve Jobs is outed at last
I’ve been reading and commenting on the Fake Steve Jobs blog for almost two years now – my favorite posts were always the ones where he adopts a hard-boiled, two-fisted tough guy persona, writing about how Larry Ellison and friends would go out on “Rat Patrol” in the streets of San Francisco. Or how Brad Grey would casually kill an aggressive panhandler and then chillingly ask Jobs, “I’m asking. Do we have a problem here. Because I have to know.”
Great stuff. But now we find out that the guy behind FSJ was Daniel Lyons, an editor at Forbes magazine. Well, hell. It figured that it was a biz journalist doing this stuff – the writing was quite professional, albeit with the occasional Britishism (red herring? no relation to the failing Red Herring) thrown in.
Fake Steve responded to the unmasking by pointing out the virtues of
old media over new. “For six months Dr. Evil and Mr. Bigglesworth put
their big brains together and couldn’t come up with the answer,” writes
the Fake Steve today, referring to Nick Denton and his staff at the
gossip blog Valleywag, which had long been digging into the Fake Steve
mystery. Valleywag fingered Leander Kahney of Wired News, Andy Ihnatko of Macworld,
and several others as the real secret Steve. Gloats Fake Steve: “Guy
from the Times did it in a week. So much for the trope about
smarty-pants bloggers disrupting old media. Brilliant. My only regret
is that we didn’t get a chance to see Bigglesworth take a few more
swings and misses.”
There are probably going to be many faithful readers and commenters bemoaning the stripping of FSJ anonymity. Recent posts by FSJ had cryptically alluded to someone doing something he didn’t like … I wonder if it was the NY Times reporters that he was referring to. Or maybe just the terrifying robot zombie hordes of Mac-worshipers who would screech like hungry macaws at any real or implied criticism of any Mac or Mac-related product.
The larger issue that this made me think about was the whole notion of identity … like the headline says, are we who we say we are, or are we who we are? And who is to say who we are? Maybe I’ve been living in Los Angeles too long, a town dedicated to the notion of self-invention … recent history is rife with cases of scam artists and moguls (and the line between the two is not as thick as you might think) who moved to L.A. and created themselves from the ground up as wholly new beings, with shiny glam backgrounds and impressive skill sets and social networks.
Will and/or does social networking sites make it easier for people to become someone else? That is, can you join the right social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.), hang around the right subgroup, soak up the lingo/jargon, learn the issues, start parroting the right buzzwords, and then in the real world, move seamlessly into said subgroup by infiltrating a meatworld meetup? The present-day “Catch Me If You Can” types will perhaps find it easier than ever to pass for whatever person they wish & want to be … I wonder if you could, say, hang out in chat rooms of nuclear power plant workers/engineers, lurking and then chatting and then meeting and then just joining the team. There’s a movie in there somewhere.
Or does the web free us from the restrictions of the normative behaviors that we are expected to obey in analog world … where people feel constrained to conform to what their milieu orders as being “normal,” only to find that their true selves are free to be expressed in Second Life or whatever chat room/MMPORG they favor? So many wannabe-World of Warcraft knockoffs are promising to allow the frustrated, scared and confused teens an outlet to express their inner orc/troll/elf. CHeck out the grim, tough-guy monikers of all the juveniles (regardless of age) who populate the gamesphere … sociologists studying the coping mechanisms aberrated, frustrated somewhat educated middle-class males use, would find a rich trove of free source material there.
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