Fakebook
by Kane X. Faucher
Fakebook Revolutionizes the Online Social Networking Industry
Upon the heels of Facebook’s success, intrepid creator Mikhail Ziggurat has pioneered an alternative site for those who have become fatigued with the original platform. Fakebook boasts itself as an antisocial networking site that unites all its members on the basis of insults, silence, and complete indifference.
Instead of the traditional “poke” button, registered users may make their emotional ego crises public with such variations as “sulk,” “passive-aggressive tantrum,” “inappropriate comment,” or “unprovoked stabbing.”
Fakebook promises many new features that improve upon the original Facebook format. Rather than forming groups, users can form island monads and “solos.” In addition, the pesky invitations to add limited shelf-life novelty applications do not factor into Fakebook; instead, random gibberish spewed by net-crawling bots is dumped right into users’ inboxes, at times using a Burroughs cut-up machine method to render legitimate emails from other users entirely unintelligible.
The goal of Fakebook is pleasantly paradoxical: it is a social network that prides itself on being as antisocial as possible. “There are far too many of these silly networking sites as it is,” says Ziggurat. “It only promotes the illusion of friendship when the truth of the matter is that most of us are generally horrible human beings no one would want to befriend.”
Fakebook users are encouraged to make themselves as unpublic as possible in a public forum. Profile pages are constructed to provide the least amount of personal information (if anything at all), or to be so broadly general as to not be able to identify who anyone actually is.
One such profile for the user “Citizen of Some Place” reads: “About me: I contribute rather regularly to the carbon cycle, am between 1 and a million years old, and live in a place where there is stuff.”
One of the joys of Fakebook, aver its users, is the ability to verbally attack people at random for no other reason than as an expression of personal meanness. But perhaps the biggest draw for this site is the desire to be left entirely alone. Fakebook’s search engine refuses to return any results on inquiries. In fact, states Ziggurat, “you can’t fault the search engine because there isn’t really a search engine at all. You can’t find anyone, and no one can find you.”
If users do violate the spirit of Fakebook’s antisocial mandate and actually are able to connect as friends, the Fakebook Scrambler randomly makes the friend list expire, and then shuffles the friend within its vast matrix of computer gibberish.
“I think this will start a revolution in line with how we honestly feel about each other,” says Ziggurat. “Antisocial is the new social for the 21st century.”
Copyright © 2008 by Kane X. Faucher
