Fake Steve Jobs has apparently pulled a double-fake by posting as his real self [Dan Lyons] and claiming that Apple has been trying to bribe him to shut down his parody site. Most people, including myself, assumed this was true when the story broke on sites like Techmeme, but it is becoming clear that is in fact just a new layer of fiction, and a sure-fire way to drive Dan’s traffic even higher. Personally I don’t think it’s particularly funny, and I feel kind of sorry for the well meaning readers who expressed real sympathy and support for his fictional predicament. Here’s an excerpt from a recent FSJ post titled God bless you for your support:

Friends, thanks for the outpouring of support. I’m pretty upset here. Actually I’m really upset. Fact is, for all my joking, I really love Apple products and, until now, or even still now I guess, I really love Apple as a company. Sounds silly, I know, but I’m one of those nuts who wears an "I visited the Mothership" T-shirt and feels a kind of kinship with the company. So this hurts. I mean I know it’s just business and these are just legal assholes doing their job. But still. It feels personal.

Why don’t I think it’s funny to make this stuff up? Well ok I kind of do, but I think it’s funny in a cruel way, so I can’t say: Wow, brilliant gag! Because I have always hated such gags in principle. They almost always rely on withholding information or simply lying to people, to later reveal what suckers they are for believing something which they had no real reason to doubt in the first place [although to be fair the FSJ saga gets more obviously silly as it progresses].

Here’s a post revealing the joke, along with a comment thread which is really starting to annoy me because the author appears to think I have no appreciation or understanding of satire. Being patronized is one of those things that I don’t respond well to, hence I thought better of continuing that conversation and decided it might be more interesting to wonder aloud why this fabricated chapter of the FSJ saga bugs me.

* cue sound of Yours Truly wondering *

Ah fuck it. Maybe it’s just really really funny when you make a bunch of people care about you and then laugh at them for being so gullible as to waste their concern on someone who couldn’t give a shit about any of them. Obviously I need to expand my personal understanding of satire…