Fakebook (2 page)

“Well, I could always cheat,” I said. “I mean, I've got Photoshop—I can post just about anything on Facebook. A hotter wife, a better car…It's like plugging into
The
Matrix
!”

We all laughed and exchanged glances, suddenly excited by a shared epiphany—this joke on Facebook could possibly work! There was no reason my Facebook friends wouldn't believe it. After all, what exactly were Facebook friends? I might know lots of minutiae about their day—but what did I really know about them as people? I mean, I knew from Facebook that Debbie from fifth grade had just sold her fake cows on FarmVille. If I then found out that FarmVille Debbie had murdered someone, I'd be shocked…but I'd believe it. For all of Facebook's transparency, it's still fairly opaque. We know only what people care to share. So what was to stop me from sharing complete nonsense?

Without skipping a beat, Ted, Steve, and I began the gleeful work of creating as many premises for my “Fakebook” life as possible.

I could join Cirque du Soleil. I could become a Tony Robbins–style self-help guru, offering terrible, unsolicited advice to the fringes of my Facebook friend base. I could win the lottery and pull increasingly eccentric stunts with my newfound cash, culminating in a Somali pirate hostage situation. I could be a royal food tester, a professional wrestler, the first male Rockette—I had lived a hundred faux lives by the end of the conversation.

But as the long weekend ended and real life resumed, not only did the idea stay with me, but it blossomed. Watching a baseball game made me want to fake a life as the guy in the Mr. Met costume. A full moon made me want to pretend to be bitten by a werewolf. And on and on it went as I found myself filling my sketchbook with every funny premise that crossed my mind. I was completely inspired—and ensnared. I was viewing the world through the lens of the countless lives I could pretend to live.

If only I were still sixteen, I thought, I might actually do this.

I finished my water and put the glass in the sink of Handler PR's kitchen. Maybe this notion of creating a Fakebook on Facebook would join the pile of ideas I'd never followed through on. Or maybe I'd do it. I wasn't sure. But right now, there was a real job to do.

The tasting event invitation awaited, so I walked back to my desk and spent the next hour digging around stock photography until I found a picture I liked. It was of a woman raising her glass in front of a brick wall, smiling at nothing in particular in that plastic stock-photography way. I added the copy from my previous draft, and with some minor adjustments, it created the appearance of the woman toasting the words. It wasn't a bad start, but the tone was off.

The wine we were promoting had an old-fashioned charm, appealing for its ties to a bygone era of Sunday dinners. So I evened out the levels of light and dark and added a sepia wash to give the scene a vintage feel. I added a texture to the entire image to make it look as if age had chipped away at the finish—as if it had spent decades hanging on Grandma's wall.

Now it was time for the little details. I masked out the woman's jewelry, her painted nails, and her lipstick. I adjusted the colors into the burgundy red of our client's logo. It was subtle, but it made a random photograph into a cohesive, branded image.

I could have stopped there, but I decided it needed one final touch—the glass of wine.

Everything I had done to the photo, I now undid with the glass of wine—masking out the dust and scratches, the color adjustments, the yellow sepia tone. I took it further and pushed the colors in the opposite direction, with the blacks running deep and the red a vivid, lush hue.

The wine now commanded your attention. It was a timeless, immortal glass that deserved a place on your table—just as it had fifty years ago, just as it would fifty years from now. This was a wine to share with friends and family. This was a wine that would never go out of style.

This was a wine that, above all else, was not being enjoyed by anyone in the photo.

I was restless that night, lying in my secondhand bed. I clicked on my light—a photographer's studio lamp clamped to my window grate—and sat up, resting my back against the bare wall that served as my headboard.

To anyone but New Yorkers, I lived in a criminally expensive 250-square-foot space under a bridge—but finding a one-bedroom in the Lower East Side that I could (just barely) afford was the fruit of a four-month crusade and the accomplishment of my life.

That was three years ago, though, and by now my IKEA furniture was beginning to fall apart—which, I believe, signals the official end of early adulthood.

I looked at the stack of books next to my bed. There were four different titles on four different topics, all half read. I shuffled through them and put them down one by one. Then I looked straight ahead at the large, unfinished, and flawed charcoal figure drawing on the wall, and my drawing supplies scattered on the surface of the particleboard dresser with the drawer that didn't quite close.

I stumbled out of bed and logged on to Facebook, looking for that subdued thrill of seeing a notification—of being virtually acknowledged.

I'd been tagged in a photo from a party I'd gone to. I saw a version of myself. A guy who was doing it, making the most of being young and living in New York. He was dressed well, holding out a full drink, arms around the shoulders of a bunch of other New Yorkers who were also living exciting lives. We were partying like we were extras in a rap video.

It was a good photo. It told a good story.

But that's all it was doing, telling a story. And by just showing those posed moments where everyone was smiling—omitting the dresser drawer that didn't quite close or the frustrating notes from Legal—Facebook struck me as just another form of marketing, essentially selling a shiny version of our lives to ourselves and to others. We courted people's attention and then tried to control how we're seen. Voyeurism and narcissism—in that moment, that's all Facebook was to me.

Suddenly, my Fakebook idea felt urgent. Everybody's profile was already a little bit fiction. I could make mine completely false. Facebook seemed ripe for something like this. It felt inevitable. But I had to do it now, before this moment passed.

I grabbed my sketchbook, thumbed through it, and found a premise I'd written down a week earlier. It was perfect—believable enough to be accepted, sensational enough to be noticed, and open ended enough to accommodate whatever whims I might come up with. It was the perfect template for a social media soap opera—a premise that could court people's voyeurism.

And when they looked at the new me, who would they see? If I made myself a hero, I'd just be another person using Facebook to flatter himself. No…this had to be the opposite of all other pages. This had to be a parody of Facebook. I couldn't be heroic. Instead, I'd play the fool—the butt of the joke. Someone spiteful, arrogant, and deserving of his own unraveling.

The idea made even more sense to me as I scrolled down my news feed, looking at each new party pic, each new self-aggrandizing statement, each new humblebrag…it added to the sense that this was something I needed to do.

This scheme couldn't wait, or else I'd start thinking of all the reasons why I shouldn't do it. And there were plenty. It was lying, for one. It would be incredibly time consuming, for another. It would be also a pretty fucking weird thing to do. If I had a legal department, they'd certainly forbid it.

But for once, I didn't need anyone's approval. It was just me, sitting alone in my apartment, staring at the status box's open-ended question:

Update Status

“What's on your mind?”

So I opened the Note feature in Facebook and began to write.

But I didn't go…not yet. I sat there with my cursor hovering over the Submit button and my index finger over the Enter key.

It was a feeling I'd soon be familiar with, but would never get used to. The event I'd just scripted was floating in limbo—it both had already happened and was still to come. There was something unsettling about that.

I had no idea what would happen if I hit Enter, if I gave those words life and allowed Fakebook to broadcast to the news feeds of an unsuspecting audience. I had no notion of the consequences. I didn't think about the people I'd have to avoid or the feelings I'd hurt. I didn't consider the places I could no longer go to, the events I couldn't take part in. I didn't consider the many hours a week I might have to devote to my second life, or how I'd have to be ever vigilant of exposure.

I was completely ignorant about how intertwined my real life and my online persona could become—how much of what was on that screen was actually a part of me. I didn't realize how doing this might complicate old relationships or prevent new ones.

And I certainly never imagined it could change anyone's life.

Instead, I felt excitement swelling. A sort of wry anticipation. It's true that I wanted to explore an interesting, complicated idea, to take a step out of my routine. But there was also a part of me that still liked to push boundaries. That liked mischief. That liked pretending. A part of me that liked crafting something unusual and seeing how far I could take it.

That night, the thought of whether I should do it lost out to the realization that I could. Facebook, a community of nearly a billion users, is run entirely on the honor system. To a guy like me, an insight like that is just a giant red button marked “Do Not Push.”

So I pushed it.

1
The original quote is: “If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.” I recognize the irony that I did, in fact, change his copy.

That morning, I woke up with a stranger in my bed, and it was me.

Maybe that's a bit dramatic, but I did feel peculiar. It was almost like that disorienting feeling of momentarily forgetting where you are as you wake up in a hotel—only more personal. But I didn't have time to dwell on philosophical questions of self. My practical considerations were far more pressing. All the details I hadn't considered the night before, when Fakebook was still hypothetical, suddenly came rushing back in a rapid series of “oh shit” moments.

Oh shit. I needed to tell my parents.

Oh shit. I didn't have any photos planned.

Oh shit. I didn't know how long it takes to get to Lancaster County on foot.

Oh shit. I had way too much work to do before work.

It was only 6:00 a.m., but I jumped out of bed in a mild panic. My laptop was still on, the note I'd written last night still front and center. It was just as I had left it. Except that by now, people had seen it.

Oh shit! I went straight onto Google Maps and plotted a course to Lancaster County. A pace of about twenty miles a day would put me in Amish country in ten days. I could stop off in Philly first in just under a week. I hit Print and began running around my apartment, filling my hiking pack full of whatever crap I haphazardly decided my other self would theoretically need. I strapped it on, complete with my sleeping bag and tent tied on top, set my camera on a timer, and posed.

I paused for a moment to plot out my new self's next steps. Crossing the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey felt like a moment worth documenting.

I uploaded my camera and dug up pictures online. I frantically found images of the bridge. Over the next couple of hours, I stitched together an image with none of the finesse and care I'd used on the “Wine & Cheese Fries” invitation the night before.

It was almost nine. I couldn't work on this photo anymore, so I uploaded it onto my iPhone, tossed my hiking gear into my closet, threw my laptop in my work bag, and headed out the door.

If part of the joke was how ill-prepared I was for a cross-country trek, then I was off to a great start.

On the walk to the F train, I found myself refreshing Facebook at every street corner, constantly reloading to see new comments. Each new “like” was a burst of excitement—confirmation that this was really happening.

On the train, my Internet mercifully cut out and I began to settle down—but I still had enough nervous energy to tear the edges of my Google Map printout to shreds.

I started staring at the routes, plotting out again and again where I should go, when I should get there, what could happen along the way. Should I stick to highways, or would that encourage someone to try to find me? How long before I hitchhiked? Should I find ways to reach out to truck drivers so I could tag us together in photos?

I just kept staring at the map, feeling nervous. Over and over I looked at the same path and the same city names, as if the next time they'd reveal something new.

I felt like a tourist. Or like my teenage self from the suburbs of New Jersey.

As a high schooler growing up in commuter town, casual familiarity with “The City” was a point of pride—it distinguished you from your more comfortably suburban classmates. It was important to neither be intimidated nor impressed by the ins and outs of New York, and lunch-table stories about the weekend were incomplete without casually including how you “took the 6 train down to Bleecker.” You'd never admit to triple-checking your foldout subway map after every stop, or the sense or relief you got when you did, in fact, successfully get off at Bleecker.

It was, of course, all bluster. Every trip was laced with the quiet but unshakable suspicion that we were about to take the wrong turn and fall off the island of Manhattan. We didn't belong. We were suburban posers—glorified tourists.

Throughout my teenage years, even as I got more comfortable with mass transit, New York remained an intimidating place. I was still aware that I was never more than just a suburban poser. Every place I'd been to was public—a shop with an open door, a stadium where anyone with a ticket could walk right in.

So much of New York was roped off. I mean, I'd never even been in a skyscraper. Office buildings aren't for suburban tourists. They only let you in if you have a legitimate reason to be there. Or in my case, an illegitimate reason.

I was nineteen years old when I first walked into the lobby of the Viacom Building, on a mission to falsely convince MTV that I was a Limp Bizkit super-fan.

I had no desire to be an MTV personality—hell, I didn't even have cable. And as far as I could tell, I wasn't pregnant or sixteen enough to qualify for most of their shows. But because I'd sign anything for a free T-shirt, I was on the “MTV casting” mailing list.

I usually just let their emails pile up in my inbox, but the opportunity to star in a fan-hosted Limp Bizkit special jumped out at me. I didn't really know Limp Bizkit, but I knew plenty of their fans. The thought of depriving one of those mouth-breathers a slot on the show really appealed to me.

So I fired up Photoshop and turned a picture of my bedroom into a shrine to Limp Bizkit's poorly played Partycore, then sent it to casting. It caught their eye.

“I'm here for my audition,” I told the guard at the security desk. I pensively waited as he looked up my name. He checked my ID and took my picture. It all seemed so serious—so official.

“Fortieth floor,” he said as he handed me my guest pass, barely looking up. This was routine to him, but it was epic for me. As with Fakebook years later, I'd made a bit of nonsense and thrown it out into the world—compelled to see where it would take me. It took me all the way to the fortieth floor. I was behind the velvet rope—a suburban intruder who had broken into New York's skyline.

I'll never forget the feeling of stepping into that elevator. I was excited, nervous, amused, and a little outside of myself but also totally engaged. It was a feeling I can't quite name.

Seven years later, I was once again riding an elevator up a Manhattan high-rise. By then, however, I wasn't an intruder. I was a New Yorker, and going up skyscrapers was routine. I had a security card. The doormen knew my name. I was supposed to be there.

Except I wasn't supposed to be there.

The night before, I'd told the world that I was on the move—going anywhere but here. Once again, I didn't belong. And that feeling I'd felt all those years ago when I invaded MTV…boy, I sure did feel it again.

“Dude!” I heard as I exited the elevator. “I thought you quit!”

Joe Moscone, one of the account leads and a drinking buddy, was walking toward me, sporting an ear-to-ear grin and wide eyes. He's a big guy with a linebacker build—the type of guy that wouldn't look right without a beard.

“Oh shit…” I instantly snapped out of my prankster euphoria as the reality of Fakebook started to sink in. “People here saw that, huh?”

When I'd faked Limp Bizkit super-fandom, I'd had a less complicated life. My “profession” was cleaning the municipal pool. Expectations were decidedly lower.

I looked at the clock and saw that it was well past nine. “Oh shit.”

As I hurried down the hallway, I explained to Joe what I was up to. He was a receptive audience and no stranger to making up elaborate and funny lies. In fact, a bar in Hoboken stopped serving test tube shots on the grounds that “Test Tube Joe,” the first test tube baby, found them demeaning.

“That's tremendous! What do you have planned for this?”

“It'll be a parody—the hike isn't going to go well. I didn't pack a winter coat, shit like that. If you want to play along, leave some comments. Feel free to criticize. I want it to be a farce—the plan is to make my online self kind of an idiot.”

Joe's eyes lit up. “Yeah, I definitely think I can pretend you didn't think this through. By the way, good luck telling the office you still work here.” He laughed with his full body.

“Now seems as good a time as any to post my next update.” I shrugged and smiled.

“To a lot of people,” I told Joe, “that just happened.”

He just walked away, shaking his head.

“That just happened,” I said again, this time to myself. It sort of gave me a chill to realize I was now in two places at once. I felt like I was at the center of one of those philosophy questions about perception. How do I know China exists if I've never been there? People have told me it exists, and I've seen pictures—but I've simply taken it on faith. In my own world, China isn't a place; it's simply a composite of secondhand knowledge. My Facebook friends had no idea that the version of me they saw wasn't me anymore.

I was greeted at my desk by a blinking light on my office phone. As my computer powered up, I took a deep breath and checked Facebook on my phone.