Fakebook (6 page)

With this, I was ready to figure out exactly what it was I'd started. I began to see Fakebook as a real-time, virtual
On
the
Road
in the form of a twenty-first-century “War of the Worlds” broadcast. It was an entirely new medium of storytelling—a medium meant to capture your passing thoughts as they happened—to an audience that didn't know it was an audience.

But this new medium needed different rules and different goals than a movie or a novel. I wanted to push my story into strange, impossible-to-believe places. To do that required a longer, more disciplined approach, and I needed to respect the timeline of actual events.

Six months, I decided. Fakebook would go on for six months, giving me the chance to end it on April Fools' Day. It was enough time for my online persona to start living a different life. We needed to be different people.

And to write a different person, I needed to get inside my protagonist's head and acknowledge the realities of his life. I needed to start treating the situations, as absurd as I was going to make them, as real events happening to a real person.

It had been fourteen years since I'd created my first online persona—back when AOL CD-ROMs were growing the Internet a hundred free trial hours at a time, and “GarbageM0n” navigated a dozen open Instant Messenger chats like a twelve-year-old day trader. I thought it was appropriate to write Fakebook that way—like an insecure, emotional teenager in search of meaning and afraid of screwing up.

After all, this Fake Dave walked down the road every day, getting closer and closer to Amish country, less and less sure about what he'd do once he got there, straying from a plan that no longer mattered. He was cut off from his friends and family—misunderstood by some, supported by others, but still terribly alone—and stubbornly clinging to an ideal of independence while unable to cut Facebook's tether to his old life.

I listened to the storm outside my window in New York City. It was a heavy rain, and it was almost certainly raining in Philadelphia as well. My online persona and I had parted ways, but he hadn't traveled far. I was under a warm blanket on my couch. Where was he?

There, I gave my online persona a dose of sensitivity, but that's not to say I made him any smarter.

True enough, Fake Dave. True enough.

2
My rules were simple: you can have whatever opinion you'd like about the events, but you cannot create the events themselves. You only can react to things on the Facebook page. I needed to be the only author of the actual plot. Otherwise it would have been far too easy to contradict myself.

New York loves Halloween, and I love Halloween in New York.

I love how New Yorkers—no matter what they're wearing—still walk like New Yorkers. Seeing a wolf-man booking it down Fifth Avenue with a “Time is money” stride is surreal, just like the October 31 subway platform, with Ninja Turtles, ironic news parodies, and sexy nurses all elbowing for position. It's a citywide performance art project, an absurd spectacle, and an extremely good time.

For kids or adults, the whole of October moves to the beat of anticipation for the night when millions of people are freed from being themselves. For the twenty-something single New Yorkers like me, it's a chance to throw caution to the wind. Talking to strangers—hell, even accepting candy from strangers—is encouraged. Why not? It's Halloween, and you are not you.

But I was already not me. And maybe that's why I was feeling slightly out of step. For me, it was Mischief Night hanging in the crisp fall air, but my alter ego—the unassuming hero of Fakebook, designed to be the perfect practical joke—was living an entirely unmischievous life.

I was twenty days into the sham and just getting over the initial learning curve. Like all storytelling media, Facebook had its own strengths and limitations. The most jarring was that it made for completely decompressed storytelling. A moment was a moment, now was now—there'd be no skipping over the boring parts. My audience was living their lives in parallel with my protagonist, so not only was Fakebook going to take six months to write, it would take six months to read, too. This was a long con, and as practical jokes go, it would be a
slow
burn.

Still, I'd made the right decision to abandon the early sensationalism and stick to more plausible mini-adventures and funny banter about life on the road. Patience and restraint, especially in the beginning, were crucial. I needed people to invest in the authenticity of the story before I started stretching it.

But while I figured out how to not screw Fakebook up, I was stumbling in my ability to push it forward. Ultimately, I knew that every post was a gamble, so before long, I caught myself relying on the safe bets—living two cautious lives. I even considered a plot in which I became a midlevel manager at an Olive Garden in Pittsburgh. It'd be an easy scenario to create: my flawless pronunciation of “gnocchi” would have put me on the fast track there. But it's one thing to settle in real life—I refused to settle in my fictional life, too.

I needed to remind myself why I was doing this in the first place: games like FarmVille and its mind-numbingly boring posts from Facebook friends.

For the uninitiated, FarmVille is a social media game. Essentially, all that means is that via wall posts, players get to waste your time in addition to wasting their own. In the game, people raise ducks and cows or something. I don't really know how it's played. I just knew, judging by my news feed, that I was the only one not playing it.

It's a feeling I'm familiar with. Growing up, other than watching my friends help me “get past that one tricky part,” I was on the outside of my generation's shared experience with Sega and Nintendo. The only video-game system allowed in the Cicirelli household was an Atari 2600—a product of my eldest brother's masterfully leveraged late '70s bout with appendicitis.

Any upgrade was a closed issue. In my mother's eyes, which were blind to the wonders of the sixteen-bit processor, a video-game system was a singular and static thing that we already had one of, so we didn't need another. Besides, she wasn't thrilled about the hospital bed compromise that had ushered the games into her house in the first place. Her motto? Don't do drugs, and don't be a vidiot.

Naturally, I experimented in college. Coming from such a sheltered environment—frozen in an era where game titles were just a general description of the activity—the leap up from
Adventure
and
Combat
to
Grand
Theft
Auto
III
was monumental. I was hooked…until I faced
The
Sims
.

In
The
Sims
, you create a character, put him in a house…and then clean the house. It's oddly compelling. Soon I found myself consumed and blowing off real obligations just to make sure Sim Dave had a well-balanced life. (In light of Fakebook, I realize there may be a pattern emerging.) I compulsively made sure that my little Sim guy cleaned his Sim apartment, cooked some Sim dinner, went to the Sim toilet, and scored a date with his sexy Sim neighbor.

It was a striking moment of clarity when I realized all this was happening while I sat in a dirty dorm room, hungry, holding it in, and completely alone. At that moment, the walls came crashing down, and suddenly, video games—every one of them—became fool's gold, filling me with a false sense of accomplishment. Mom was right, and I've been off them ever since.

That said, I'm no snob. If people want to spend their time raising a fake pig on FarmVille or cooking a fake ham in
The
Sims
, by all means, go ahead. Far be it from me to judge their fantasy lives—I just want them to leave me out of it. And that's what is so infuriating about FarmVille. While it is surprisingly touching to see sonograms from Johnny-from-third-grade-soccer-camp's wife on my news feed, it's maddening to have to watch him try to unload a crop of virtual corn there that he spent a week not growing.

As I developed and experimented with Fakebook in the first few weeks, I wanted it to be a counterpoint to the mundane updates of FarmVille. I didn't want to play games on Facebook; I wanted to play games
with
Facebook. To inject a healthy bit of misinformation into the Information Age.

Every day, more and more people were paying attention to Fakebook and believing the lie. But to what end? Every mischief-maker knows that the power of your thrill is directly related to your daring. The more brazen you are, the bigger the kick. Besides, roadside witticisms and comment-section banter had reached their peak the moment I arrived in Intercourse, Pennsylvania.

It was time to push Fakebook to its limits, and that meant taking stock of my advantages.

The biggest was the complete lack of precedent. As far as I knew, no one had flipped the switch as I had and become a work of fiction. The Fakebook idea wasn't in the ether yet, and I was dealing with innocent, uncritical eyes.

Next up was the nebulous space in which Facebook friendships exist. To many of our Facebook friends, we're nothing more than pixels on a screen, public figures projected onto one another's news feeds. Facebook is the
TMZ
and
Us
Weekly
for our own little worlds—and it's just as unreliable.

So I was hoping that if something out of left field struck on Fakebook…well…I guessed that people would react to it the same way they do to celebrity scandals. As with any sensational news, it would simply be evidence of the unreliable nature of public personas (Tiger Woods, anyone?). In the end, people would shake their heads, but they wouldn't scrutinize the credibility of the report.

Besides, my chips were already on the table. I'd set things in motion the night before by posting a recap of an incident from my past, a true story that would serve as the perfect foundation for fiction…my feud with the Amish.