(no subject)

[jack]

When I was looking up what happened in #amazonfail weekend (see previous post) I read Mike Daisey's web site. He's a stand up comedian and other things who wrote a book about having worked at amazon in a cubicle farm.

And then I was seized with uncertainty. Is this website genuine? Normally, faked websites and comments are sufficiently artificial that you can see them if you have some idea what to expect, although phishing sites, ziphead comment spam ("astroturf" -- supposedly independent comments in fact methodically generated by paid volunteers), google tricking sites stealing content from other web sites, etc are now problems.

But if a few intelligent and professional[1] trouble-shooters got together for a day, they could fake a completely convincing website. For all I knew, not knowing anything about loud american comedians, Mr Daisey had been entirely fictitious (or a real person with a newly created website). And the website just good enough to fool a few random clickings. And that in a few days would come out and say "my friend in amazon says it's all ok, he can't talk about it, but I trust him, it wasn't malice, it actually was an awful but minor mistake."

In fact, the website was especially archive-ful, and checking archive.org and wikipedia page history, has been around for ages in much the same form. But I was temporarily seized with uncertainty -- when that happens, will I know it? It's checked mainly by people checking things retrospectively later (which has also been helped a lot by the internet) and that people aren't organised enough to keep up a conspiracy long-term. That sort of thing already happens a lot, how much worse will it get?

[1] In the sense of being consistently competent to the level of being paid for it, not in the sense of being responsible.

Comments

[deborah_c]

Similarly, someone has confessed to doing this (with some details) partly because he hates user-feedback mechanisms (like the one that reports a book as "adult"), but mostly "for the lulz". I am entirely uncertain whether to believe this, or whether the confession is also simply to generate drama...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

There was a post concluding that that was plausible in general, but not true in this case (I think there's a link in my other post), which sounded right although I've not evaluated it myself.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

People who claim to have been up to no good are not to be trusted in general, of course...