Trolls, Hoaxes, Culture Jamming, Poetic Terrorism, Media Hacks,
Frauds, Impostors, Spoofs, Counterfeits, Fakes, Pranks, Scams,
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
Dedicated to Joshua
A. Norton, Emperor of These United States.
"Every sham shows there is a reality."
-- P.T. Barnum
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A $20,000 (U.S.) prize has been announced "for the best act of creative
subversion of any highly visible commercial product" in 1997. Click
here for details.
Media Hacks:
- Lambda Sigma Delta helps out: A mythical
fraternity engages in public service and the newspapers are happy
to report.
- Pol Pot
hoax called experiment -- A Swedish internet marketing agency
claims responsibility for a news hoax claiming that Pol Pot was in
Sweeden seeking political asylum. "It was an artistic experiment...
aimed at learning something about [how] the net and... the media work
together," said the managing director.
- The National Pochismo
Institute: Hispanics For Governor Wilson parody California's racial
politics.
- Ladies Against
Women: A parody of conservative women's groups.
- Pranking
Talk Radio: A step-by-step guide to getting on the air, staying on
the air, and making listeners confused.
- The 'Devilish'
Barney Media Hoax -- Barney the Dinosaur is implanting the godless
theory of evilution in our childrens' heads.
- Guerjia Culturale -- A site
(in German) for the Kommunikationsguerilla in all of us.
- Salvation Central -- A caller
to right-wing talk shows takes things to their illogical
conclusions.
- Poem With Hidden Protest Gladdens Chinese
Dissidents -- "Li Peng Step Down!" hidden inside a patriotic poem
in the official Chinese Communist Party newspaper.
- Abrupt Culture Jamming
-- cereal boxes, newspaper articles, tracts, manifestos.
- Ever heard of
Ern Malley,
Helen Demidenko,
Wanda Koolmatie,
or Araki Yasusada?
More than noms-de-plume, these were invented persona, complete with
biography.
- A fake Memoir of
Dmitri Shostakovich by Solomon Volkov.
- AOL made its subscribers April Fools says one subscriber who didn't find their fake news story funny. Why, you'd think the net would be a more reliable source of information, and especially AOL, wouldn't you?
- Journalism class' experiment aims to teach a lesson by sending out 35 fake press releases to see how many newspapers fall for it.
- Fake Klansmen, Cat Hunting: TV 'News' Producer Caught in Hoax: German news stories planted by someone with an eye for fiction...
- Hoax has Springer show defending its 'integrity' -- tabloid TV gets fooled.
- Peter van der Linden trolls newspapers: S.M.E.G.M.A. keeps the pages safe, and a forged pro-drug editorial from the attorney general.
- Floss, dance, don't be fooled -- the MIT commencement address that wasn't delivered by Kurt Vonnegut.
- I was a media
dupe: There is no Church of Kurt Cobain, but it made such a good
story that this reporter couldn't help falling for it.
- Princess Di
caught on film: Say, isn't that the princess cavorting in her bra?
The Sun thought so, but nope, they got fooled...
- A
Journalist's Favorite Hoax: Petrifications: Three petrified people
invented by the press.
- Poe's
Balloon hoax: Edgar Allen needed some money, so he got the
newspaper a great scoop about two folks who crossed the Atlantic by
balloon. Poe always was better at fiction, though...
- Alan Sokal's
Social Text hoax: Sokal managed to get Social Text
to print a paper that Sokal packed with as much baloney as could
fit.
- Joey Skaggs'
"Sexonix" technodildonics company: Reported as fact here and
there.
- Joey Skaggs'
"Solomon Project" and
more: Use
artificial intelligence, not judges and juries, to decide fate of
defendants.
- www.joeyskaggs.com -- Well,
well... This otta be good.
- Grunge Lexicon Hoax: The New York Times printed this phony guide to grunge slang.
- Discordianism: the Hidden Threat -- often overlooked among dangerous fanatic cults.
- Esquire's
sexy starlet is the hoax with the most and
more --
Esquire Magazine's insta-superactress covergirl Allegra Coleman
an alluring fabrication.
- Adam Rich is
Dead! (and
more).
Well, okay, maybe he isn't, but it's good for a laugh.
- Alan Abel,
World's Greatest Hoaxer: Founder of the Society for Indecency to
Naked Animals and a school for professional panhandlers.
- Jenny's
P--d Off Over Pint Pitch -- Jenny McCarthy selling her urine as a
gag gift? Nope, just an Alan Abel prank.
- You Can't Believe Everything You Read: This is news, according to the Washington Post.
"We want people to think critically, and
there's not a lot of critical thinking going on. We also made the other
side look like buffoons, like Sergeant Schultz in Hogan's Heroes. You
make your enemy appear cartoonish, and it gives you a sense of
empowerment." -- Esteban Zul.
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Pranks:
- Evil Genius List of
Hi-Tech Practical Joke Ideas -- such as: "Carve computer-generated
ripples in the surface of a main highway, and when vehicles pass over
the surface, mysterious voices whisper, and distant music
plays."
- Free the kids!: Fliers advertising a
meeting of the North-American Man-Boy Love Association cause
alarm in a central California neighborhood.
- The Whistle Prank: A
wonderful prank using the natural kingdom, Pavlovian principles, and
patience to work wonders. Hope it really happened...
- Paul
Krassner: Who remembers LBJ skull-fucking JFK's warm head
wound?
- Fake
Assassinations: "My guess is that nobody can withstand the
psychological warfare tactic of repeated, simulated death."
- The Meaning of 'Hack' along with several illustrative examples.
- The Pieman: "I throw
pies at people."
- School's Closed: The prank you wish you'd
played in high school.
- Students sign off with a wave of muck-up madness --
It's the end of the school year and time for the traditional theft,
vandalism, and indecent exposure.
- The Macworld
Prank and
Kill Gates:
What are computer conventions for, anyway?
- Windows Pranks --
make your buddy's computer act peculiar-like.
- Coyle
and Sharpe's idea of fun, including "Edges", "Musical Animals" and "Transporting Captured People"
- Prank email
to corporations: Fun at your keyboard.
- Samsung is the Target of Tangled Spam -- fake spam infuriates folks.
- Pundits release plethora of pranks: Yale pranksters on the loose.
- Experimental Free Travel: The democratization
of power thanks to Xerox. Today the bus is free of charge, folks.
- Spy
Magazine's "Bunny Burger" hoax: How will P.R. firms compete to
represent a mythical fast food rabbit meat chain?
"Any number can play. Millions of people
could nullify the control system which those who are behind Watergate and
Nixon are attempting to impose. Like all control systems it depends on
maintaining a monopoly position. If anybody can be tape recorder 3 then
tape recorder 3 loses power." -- W.S. Burroughs
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Culture Jamming:
- Do not resist your beating!: Official-looking
police notices popped up in California after the Rodney King
verdict, announcing martial law in bureaucratese.
- The Barbie
Liberation Organization and
more: Switch
the voice chips at the toy store and Barbie says "Vengeance is Mine"
while G.I. Joe says "Let's Go Shopping!"
- Boy 'Bimbos' Too Much for Game-Maker Maxis: A video game programmer replaced some kissing bimbos with kissing hunks and got fired for his troubles.
- Victor Lewis-Smith -- Culture
jammer from the U.K.
- The Gallery of
Advertising Parody: Haven't you always wanted to?
- Spend Some
Quality Time With Your Telemarketer -- because scum are people,
too. For more ideas, click
here,
here,
or here.
- Poetic
Terrorism on the citizens' band, good buddy.
- Karen
Eliot's MNK Investigation Website -- you make the call.
- AOHell: A
program designed to drive AOL batty.
- Propaganda for the
Paranoid -- just what we need.
- Dirty Tricks: A
fake home page for the 1996 Bob Dole campaign at
http://www.dole96.org/.
- The Free Radio
Network -- That's pirate radio, matey!
- Adbusters Culture
Jammers' Headquarters and
Adbusters Culture
Jammers' Toolbox
- The
Coalition to Raise Aesthetic Consciousness: Direct action against
uglification.
- Communiques of the
Association for Ontological Anarchy, with poetic-terrorist
brainstorming included.
- The Universal Life Church: Your
doctorate of divinity is only a mouse-click away.
- The Faceless Birthday Bash at Chuck-E-Cheese: Mayhem in America's food & fun center.
- Cheap Suit Santas
terrorize christmas shoppers in marauding packs.
- Antics of the San Francisco Cacophony Society: Hoaxing is our profession.
- Cacophony Flyers: Read Los Angeles telephone poles and learn about psychic car repair, public book burnings, and private scalp massage, courtesy of the L.A. Cacophony Society.
- High Mass: And then the priest said, "Brothers,
God is dead." Gotta have cojones to pull this one off.
- Crass!: Punk rockers make the press think
they've been duped by the KGB. They got the 'duped' part right.
- Unselfish Service: How the Texas House of Representatives officially praised the Boston Strangler.
- Negativland: Sonic, judicial outlaws & NegativWorldWideWebland -- Pranks of these "artists of appropriation."
- The (Unofficial) TV
Nation WWW Page -- Michael Moore made a career out of this
stuff...
- BBC's
avant-garde music hoax: Banging pots and pans, essentially, but
at least one music reviewer took it seriously.
- Arm the Homeless -- Food Not Bombs is only half-right.
- Jerry Rubin: Media prankster first class.
- Police
say man robbed bank, gave away money: And the poor fellow will
probably do time for it, too...
- 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: This classic spoof was written by Jonathan Swift and
published anonymously in 1729.
- The Shortest
Way with Dissenters by Daniel Defoe (1702). It was taken seriously
and got Defoe in hot water.
- Sometimes the best hoaxers don't know they're hoaxers: they're just
kooks,
crackpots,
cranks,
quacks, and
wackos.
- Bank Error
in Your Favor -- How Patrick Combs cashed a huge junk-mail
pseudo-check, how his bank fell for it, and how he's gotten away with
it.
- Eric's History of
Perpetual Motion and Free Energy Machines -- I like people who spell
it all out in the titles of their pages.
"Get someone from an out-of-state
newspaper to run a story on something sight unseen, and then you Xerox
that story and include it in a second mailing. Journalists see that it
has appeared in print and think, therefore, that there's no need to do any
further research. That's how a snowflake becomes a snowball and finally
an avalanche." -- Joey Skaggs
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Hoaxes:
- P.T. Barnum: "The public appears to be amused even while they are conscious of being deceived."
- The Brick
Trick: Clever manipulation of the public by P.T. Barnum.
- Joice Heth
made a career out of impersonating George Washington's childhood
nurse.
- Alternative
Three: There is a massive conspiracy in the works, and this
documentary finally exposed it.
- The
Racial Hoax as Crime: The Law as Affirmation: More hoaxes using
race as a red herring.
- The
Kinderhook Plates and
more:
Spoofs on the Book of Mormon that fooled its author.
- Yippies Invade Wall Street: Another of Hoffman's strokes of genius...
- Palisade, Nevada
-- the "Best Jest in the West."
- Piltdown
Man (and more):
A classic fraud/hoax, the missing link on tour.
- David
Rorvik reported in 1978 that scientists had cloned a human being.
Now that human cloning is in the news again, Omni magazine
revisits the hoax.
- The
Eremin Letter: This document seems to indicate that Stalin
was an informer for Russia's secret police before he went Red -- but
is this just propaganda? Let's get to the bottom of it...
- Defense Memo Tells Anti-Cuba Ideas --
The New York Times reports that the U.S. government came up with
a number of disinformation campaigns and hoaxes aimed at the Cuban
government and the American public.
- Inside
the Department of Dirty Tricks -- that'd be the C.I.A. "We're
not the Boy Scouts."
- From The
Maine to the
Tonkin
Gulf, disinformation has fueled the fires of war in the United
States.
- Report from Iron Mountain and
yet more and
still more:
A wonderful hoax, supposedly put out by a government think-tank to come
up with ways to cope with the threat of world peace. Dreamed up by
60s peaceniks and rediscovered by 90s militia conspiracy fans.
- Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion: My, but this one has some mileage on it. The Energizer hoax, you could call it... The Jews is taking over the world!
- Old manuscript may be a hoax -- The Philadelphia Daily News on the hoax manuscript "The City of Light."
- The Myth of Fingerprints -- Alexander Cockburn on literary hoaxes and such, from The Nation.
- Hoax-busting Resources from c|net.
- The Good Times
Virus Hoax: Don't read this! You might become infected!
- Save
Manhattan!: We could cut the island loose, turn it around, and
then fix it to the mainland so it won't tip over.
- Ban Dihydrogen
Monoxide! a major component of acid rain.
- Rosie Ruiz,
the woman who didn't win the 1980 Boston Marathon.
- Uri Geller, that spoon-bending
phenomenon.
- Miracle Mongers and Their Methods by Harry Houdini.
- The Museum of Questionable Medical
Devices: Weight-reduction glasses ("well, I look lighter...), a
foot-powered breast enlarger, and more.
- Great American
Quacks.
- The
"state" of Idaho: The case for open debate: Just a conspiracy of
cartographers, then?
- The
Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence: They still
believe this one in the Jesse Helms state.
- The Philadelphia
Experiment and
more--
Everything you ever wanted to know about Project Rainbow, and so much
more.
- The Museum of
Forgery
- Fakes & Forgeries,
Frauds & Hoaxes -- a catalog of books on these subjects.
- The Art of the Fake: Egyptian Forgeries from the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology
- Christians for the Cloning of Jesus -- too obviously a put-on you say? Well... people seem to have a weakness for Jesus stuff, as these email messages to the site's author indicate.
- Fritz Kreisler -- A violinist who passed off his own compositions as the works of the masters.
- The
Strange Case of Hans van Meegeren and
more and
more (in Dutch):
Dutch artist and forger who sold a "Vermeer" to Hermann Goering.
- Microsoft's Windows for Macintosh: Heh heh. You knew it was coming, didn't you.
- 1-900-911: A service that lets you pay to listen in on 911 calls in another community. Cute.
- The Kensington
Runestone -- A phony relic of Viking exploration of North America
that still has believers today.
- Burrows Cave -- The site of
some very curious archaeological finds.
- Beringer's
Autographed Stones -- Fake fossils fooled this fellow.
- The Plate of Brass
that had nothing at all to do with Sir Francis Drake.
- The
Vinland Map -- Yep, It's a hoax, but don't tell the
believers!
- Ron McKelvey
(actually Ron Weaver) -- the 30-year-old who played college football
under an assumed identity.
- Impostor Still Touring as Ex-Eagles Guitarist
-- And getting away with it, apparantly.
- Trickster's
Timeline -- hoaxes throughout history.
"Don't picket - vandalize. Don't protest -
deface. When ugliness, poor deisgn & stupid waste are forced upon
you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate. Smash the
symbols of the Empire in the name of nothing but the heart's longing for
grace." -- Hakim Bey.
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Creative Vandalism:
"Why did I do it? While my method was
satirical, my motivation is utterly serious. What concerns me is the
proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se, but
of a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking..." -- Alan
Sokal
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Theory and Advocacy:
- Z100 -- Fakes, Hoaxes,
Scams and Forgeries: The Culture of Inauthenticity -- A fake class
about fakes.
- "We
Interrupt this Program..." -- a real class about culture
jamming -- good links.
- The Electronic
Revolution by William S. Burroughs. Theory of culture jamming
in cut-up context.
- Art Sabotage
and Poetic Terrorism by Hakim Bey.
- No
New Hoax Under the Sun says U.S. News Online, reporting on the
history of literary hoaxes.
- Wobbly Sabotage: an
instruction guide by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
- Goy Division: Evangelical
Radio meets its match.
- Barry Minkow,
founder of ZZZZ Best, one of the great business scams of the
1980s, now on the lecture circuit.
- Culture
Jamming and
more
-- it's not just a job, it's an adventure.
- The School Stoppers' Textbook
-- Warning! It may be considered a felony to distribute this document
to school children in the state of California! So if you're a minor,
please don't click
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here.
- The
Encyclopedia of Direct Action: Reference work for the civil
disobedience crowd.
- Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare: Reference work for the CIA crowd.
- Swindler, Spy, Rebel: The Confidence Woman in Nineteenth-Century America. (Ad.)
- How to Break the Law:
If you're gonna do something illegal, read this first. It might save
you a lot of trouble...
- Spam
Libs: How to make email spam-fiends nervous.
- Action Not
Art, but action is art!
- Hoax or Hokum: The Computer as Joker: Political direct-mail polls and fund-raisers use up-to-date computer-aided dishonesty and manipulation. Pay attention, would-be pranksters!
- Push Polls and Smear Calls: Tele-campaign Dirty Tricks: Political ads disguised as phone polls.
- Assassination by the
Press: Memetic worms devour the carcass of the press. A parody of
media-fanned conspiracy theories.
"Pranks are symbolic gestures, but they
are not merely symbolic gestures. They are symbolic weapons
ideally suited to vanquish foes that rule in turn by the use of symbols."
-- d0k H0l0day
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Extraordinary popular delusions, scams and the madness of crowds:
- The Tulip
Mania of 17th-century Holland.
- Milli
Vanilli and the Scapegoating of the Inauthentic
- Charles K. Ponzi --
originator of the "Ponzi Scheme."
- The Sexygirls Scam
-- Free software for viewing erotic pictures quietly uses
your modem to call a $3/minute phone number on Moldova!
- The 419 Coalition --
home for information about "The Nigerian Scam." After a fool and his
money part ways, the money often vacations in Nigeria.
- A Bre-X chronology -- How one company made zillions announcing it was mining nonexistant gold until they were caught in 1997.
- Pyramid
Schemes -- Bargain basement Ponzi schemes for the millions who
believe in getting something for nothing.
- Scam Alerts -- A catalog
of ways in which money is redistributed from the ignorant and trusting
to the unethical and ruthless.
- Introduction to Net Scams and Hoaxes
- The South-Sea Bubble: valueless stock sells like hotcakes.
- The Impact
of McCarthyism -- The U.S.A.'s anti-communist hysteria of the
1950s.
- Shroud of Turin -- Relics R Us.
- Pons' and
Fleischmann's Cold Fusion. Would you like cream & sugar with
that?
- Troubles reported in the public schools, then and now: Why, in my day, things was diff'rent.
- The LSD Tattoo urban
legend: Mickey Mouse has some strychnine for your
kindergartener.
- Cult
Archaeology, Pseudoscience, and Creationism Topics
- The O.J. Simpson drama. What the 20th Century will be remembered for, if you ask me.
- IdEAL ORDER Psychic TV:
Hoax or delusions of reference? You make the call.
- The Book of Mormon and
even more: P.T. Barnum ain't got nothin' on this, baby.
- The Church of Scientology:
L. Ron's classic remake of the old religion scam.
- This could go on forever, so: The Yahoo! religion index will do nicely for comparisons of the "I know that my explanation of the unknowable is better than your explanation of the unknowable" arguments and associated snake-oil.
- Mystic Takes Pulpit to Read 'Love Letter' From Jesus: Yup, this sort of thing didn't die out in centuries past...
- Creators Admit Unix, C Hoax: Some pranks go too far.
"Hoaxes are like those old black and white films where a bolt of
lightning illuminates for a split second the murderer in the upstairs
bedroom with the knife raised above his head. The weird light they
cast allows us to glimpse the cultural weather that let them happen."
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Martians and Monsters:
This page created and maintained by Ishmael Gradsdovic