Distinct from Forgeries and Invented Persona, which I deal with elsewhere, is this category of hoaxers whose bent is to pretend cleverly to advocate things they don't actually believe in an extreme case of devil's advocacy or reducto ad absurdum.
I'm thinking here of things like the Report From Iron Mountain. In the form of a government think-tank report, this fabulous satire analyzed the "possibility and desirability of peace" and found that a state of peace would be undesirable to the American state for many reasons. The satire was aimed at the U.S. military-industrial complex from the American left-wing during the cold-war, but it has been taken seriously by anti-government groups on the American right-wing in more recent years, some of whom take it to be actual evidence of an on-going conspiracy.
Alan Sokal's Social Text hoax caused a few chuckles. Social Text, one of those ohsopomo academic journals, accepted and printed a paper of Sokal's that the physicist had filled with a bunch of things he thought to be utterly ridiculous, surrounded with enough deconstructive camoflage to pass as wisdom.
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Daniel Defoe |
Time to honor the pioneers. Jonathan Swift's 1729 work "A Modest Proposal For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public" (by serving them as food to the starving masses) was a wicked satire whose title has become a descriptive code-phrase for this sort of effort.
Daniel Defoe had tried a similar stunt several years previously, with his The Shortest Way with Dissenters, which got him jailed and pilloried (legend has it that the crowd pelted him with flowers as a show of respect).
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Arm the Homeless in the news |
Marc Perkel and Cat Yronwode wrote a satire of the hunger of the American press for any presidential scandal, no matter how poorly supported, with their rant "Was the Press Involved in the Death of the President's Mother?"
Here's a cute one: The "state" of Idaho: The case for open debate in which the author mimics the rhetorical techniques of holocaust revisionists to argue that there is insufficient evidence for the existence of Idaho.
An Italian group called the "Metropolitan Indians" parodied the sloganeering of the left-wing establishment by slapping up posters in 1972 with slogans like "LONG LIVE SACRIFICE" or "ALL POWER TO THE DROMEDARIAT." I've got a page full of information on politically-motivated Guerilla Hacks you might want to look into.
Want to try this sort of thing out at home? Form a chapter of the activist group Arm the Homeless in your community. The press can't seem to resist biting when you throw them bait as good as this tasty blend of left-wing homeless activism and right-wing firearm advocacy. For more News Hoaxes, check out the page devoted to 'em.
Or urge your neighbors to join the campaign to ban that insidious solvent and acid-rain component known as Dihydrogen Monoxide. Or join the Christians for the Cloning of Jesus and assist in the second coming.
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Orson Welles |
With motives of a less-specifiable nature, Californian Luther Blissett created the Mollusca Information Center to share resources and useful information about an entirely mythical sexually transmitted disease allegedly known to your average joe as "the clam." And web pages have also been created for "Americans for the Destruction of War Memorials" and an organization selling "Black Market Babies" (no questions asked).