14 
There was a delightful story floating around this week about a humongous poop tattoo rendered on some drunken cheating girlfriend’s back. It’s fake, of course. It’s always fake. The internet is Lucy holding a football, and even in the weird online world of immediate and crippling skepticism, we want to believe that this time we’re really going to kick that urban myth right through the uprights.
The thing is, it’s our own fault. We want to believe.
Gigantic poop tattoo, great. Metta World Peace, right. Fastest super computer ever, world’s smallest elephant, homemade guillotine amputation. Okay, cool, lovely. If you’re not thigh-deep in the internet all day, though, it can be totally impossible to tell fact from fiction when things get weird—especially 140 characters or one RSS headline at a time.
But more than digging for blaring headlines and sensationalist happenings, the internet lies can happen because, by internet standards, they’re like lying about how much you weigh or when you lost your virginity. Totally insane stuff happens every day—just look at our WTF page. And with the pace that we consume media, something never-seen-anything-like-this crazy happening, made-up or otherwise, is more blip on the radar than fire alarm.
That’s compounded by the way that the internet gives a worldwide megaphone to all the “Would you rather” and “Wouldn’t it be funny if” conversations you’ve been having with your buddies for years. Am I the only one wh—No. You’re not. Someone else has done or thought of everything you have. Lots of someones, actually, and we know it. That’s why when some out-there story crops up that’s just like that thing you were talking about the other day, it’s easy to make the jump that the Collective is just making good on its seen-and-done-it-all reputation.
It says something about the egalitarian nature of internet news, I guess, that things like giant fake poop tattoos or city councilmen who think cloud computing depends on the weather keep juking everyone out of their socks. Scoops bubble up from the dingier corners of the internet, and one goober on a message board can look a lot like another. And hey, who doesn’t want to get out in front of the Nazi stripper poop scandal from hell?
It’s strange, though, when every syllable that pops out of the Prime Minister’s mouth is tossed out as slanty unrealistic junk, but everyone’s totally on board with the steaming doodie revenge scheme. But it probably does a good job of crystallising why, too. After that sad WE DUN’ BEEN HAD moment that makes you feel for your poor parents biting hard on those awful chain letters they keep sending you, there’s really no effect on your life from the poop story—or the million other lies like it—not being real.
And so it’s an easy negotiation between our sense of wonder and plain old common sense. In the end, with the stuff we really wish were true, we’re all Charlie Brown, every time. Good grief.
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To be honest although a lot of things are fake on the internet, the old saying “Truth is stranger than fiction” to reign true. The amount of things you find on the internet that are true are much more disconcerting than the fiction.
Does it matter if something is fake? If something real is felt or found within that – a TV show is fake, a film is fake, 50 cent isn’t a gangster, Bowie isn’t from space, your computer is faking a GUI display from 0′s and 1′s, the iPhone 4S is faking voice interaction with siri, that table is chipboard with a veneer and not oak, all tables are a faked invention to put fake stuff on, that all-inclusive holiday is a totally blouse so you can go to a hot climate and have a fake old time, all holidays are fake, brought experiences, that hip your gran has is plastic, the words from a politicians mouth is just a lie they want you to buy, even that hybrid pot plant is a man made, the majority of peoples jobs are unreal and redundant to our needs, money is a lie, the placebo that cures you, etc, etc, etc.
Fact is few things in our modern world are real, or true. It is like when people proclaim how nature is so good while living a false modern life with nothing natural in it – look around you do you see nature – even the British landscape is a man made invention – a rolling green hill formed from 1000 years of faked farming planted with imported trees – nothing real is see here.
Someone once said that the only honest profession is a magician, they are the only people that said I am now going to fool you and do so, everyone else just tries to fool you without stating that is what they are doing – yet even within that look how modern magic shuns the ‘camera trick’, which is just as fake as everything else they do to trick you, just using a more modern form of trickery – since the beginning of civilisation these people looked for ways to fake magic, so why draw the line with television? Because television is altogether too fake, both in an abstracted and real context.
So don’t be upset when you find out it is fake, embrace it and add it to the collection of everything else about our small unimportant lives that is already fake. Like if a comedian says, a funny thing happened to me on the way here tonight when going on to tell you a really funny joke, is it less funny when you find out it is just a ploy to draw you in, and is a joke that is 10 years old told by someone else? No, it is still a funny joke.
The next real thing you will probably do as a human is die, and that all depends on how you die.
We knew after the first 3 lines what this was going to say lol.
Sorry, but this kinda bull is a pet hate of mine – this person is fake, this isn’t real, this is unreal, natural is real. The human is a fucking abomination of nature and everything they do and say is fake. Like the fake story about the tattoo, yet probably founded in a truth of sorts, and even as a lie is more real than what most people do as a 9-to-5 job every fucking day.
That was either the most profound thing I’ve read in a while, or complete bollocks. Either way, whatever you were smoking when you wrote it, you need to stop
You may have thought it was profound, but seeing as you read it on the internet it’s probably fake
…Or send some over to us.
That’s what i thought, but was too cowardly to say anything. Someone really got out the wrong side of them internets.
The irony of course being that if everything we do is fake, it means that rant about fakeness would be fake, and as human is a part of nature it means all man-made things are inherently made by nature thereby inverting the entire premise of the argument; if everything is fake, then reality is fakeness and therefore fake is real and nature has made it thus.
That sounded like to epiphany of a stoner.
seems you beat me to it!
And the award for most postmodern comment on Giz UK goes to markcgrant (if I say it’s a fake award does that make it better?)
Also just to throw the proverbial cat in among the pigeons your post doesn’t make logical sense, it fails it’s own test: If nothing is knowable that includes the thing that’s telling you nothing is knowable – recursive infinite loop – not something that logic will get into bed with in a hurry
Everyone loves a philosophical debate on a Thursday afternoon
I think he wins the internet for that one. The fake internet, anyway.