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Kaycee Nicole died twice last week, first of an aneurysm, then of exposure.
Well known in the weblog community for her
journal chronicling life with leukemia, Kaycee was a
nineteen-year-old
beautiful spirit —
enthusiastic, hopeful, loving and, um, not actually real.
Invented by a woman
claiming to be her mother, Kaycee, her site and every communication she had
with dozens of people — including phone calls, e-mail, instant messages, and
care packages — were faked, in a hoax years-long and fathoms deep. On the
Internet, nobody knows you're healthy.
In the already emotionally unstable world of weblogging, this revelation —
which
leaked out,
by degrees, over the course of a few days — hit
like a bomb,
leaving legions of sympathetic visitors in varying states of
shock,
consternation, ennui and, hell, hunger, for all we know. There has
been much gnashing of teeth and
rending of cloth.
The
episode raises a
host of thorny issues involving community, anonymity, self, identity theft
and trust — the typical post-brouhaha philosophizing — but actually
addressing them sounds like a lot of work. So instead, we'll just note that
there's a small ray of hope for the Internet if someone is willing to put
hundreds or thousands of hours into a lie without ever making a dime off it.
With the collapse of the bubble, we were afraid that kind of
creativity/outright fraud had been chased off the Web.
Of course, where there are suckers, there's a business plan, and just
because Kaycee's "mom" didn't see fit to exploit that fact doesn't mean
others won't. Rather than being indignant, the Kaycee beta testers should
consider themselves lucky — they got to experience the very latest in
immersive marketing ahead of the rush. Forget
Evan Chan and A.I. and their
little tail-chasing game: Kaycee had more emotional resonance, a better
mystery and the ultimate in reality-based drama — people who didn't even
know
they were involved.
For all the lamentations that have followed the collapse of
Kaycee's story, we can't help but think it, or something very close to it,
is the future of marketing. A middle-aged woman with an Internet connection
pulled off the sort of intimate attachment with a brand that major
corporations would — you'll excuse the expression — die for. Kaycee may be
dead, but her legacy is just beginning.
"The challenge, for them, goes beyond merely coping with the Silicon Valley swoon,"
writes the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, in his
parable of the disappointed tech writers. "It is watching paper fortunes disappear, neighborhoods change, employers go belly-up, friends get tossed out of work — and wondering whether they, in ways large and small, became part of one of history's great hype machines." We considered ourselves duly fingered and justly
chastened; but our sources assure us Howard Kurtz is part of
the biggest hype machine since Pravda. He operates a
big bellows down in the kitchen, or so they say.
Even if we never mastered the art of making money, Suck can go safely
out of business knowing we never lost our knack for making enemies.
Here's one recent report from everybody's favorite Suck reader,
Humberto:
Maybe it's just that, as we find more and more often these days, we couldn't
have said it better than Humberto anyway. Maybe we're just tired. But
Gilliard's assault is so pathetic, his Rumpelstilstkin tantrum
so obviously more a symptom than a cause, that we wouldn't feel right
responding. Desperate times may or may not bring about desperate measures,
but it's for damn sure they bring about desperate theories, and Gilliard's
combination of bogus populist pique and old-fashioned
stab in the back theory is a perfect indicator of our own panic-ridden times. First a
conspiracy of office furniture salesmen, venture capitalists and the Trilateral
Commission moves $4 trillion into numbered bank accounts in the Cayman
Islands. Then an elite group of scoundrels apparently headed by Suck lives
it up by ripping off the marrow of the laboring classes. And now it appears
that Suck has the power to give people cancer. This may not explain much
about the state of the market, but it's the kind of talk that gets more shrill
and frequent when you see the end approaching, when
everybody you know is getting laid off or going out of business,
and you're just sure somebody must be responsible for this mess.
Indeed, Gilliard's intemperate talk of Nazis and Nuremberg may be
appropriate in a sense, but he's applying it to the wrong people. Here we
all are in the last days, cowering in the bunker as the Russians close in,
waiting for our numbers to
come up, and listening to the ever more fanciful ravings of madmen. Which
is why we're not angry, or even surprised, by Gilliard's attack. It's a sign
our chaotic times. At any
minute, any one of us could be promoted to Field Marshal or executed on the spot.
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