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Other fakesters suffered worse fates. God Almighty was deleted altogether.
Friendster has an aura of mystery about it. The "about us" section of the site is skimpy (understandable, as it's still in beta mode), and until Abrams was interviewed by a few media outlets this summer, most Friendster users had no idea who -- or what -- was behind the site. The company has sent few communiqués to users, nor made any official announcements about when and how it will charge its users. So, naturally, rumors abound. One persistent conspiracy theory is that the site is a front for a U.S. Justice Department project to spy on users (most unlikely, since if it were being run on government servers, it would be much faster). And when fakesters got axed without so much as a form letter from Friendster, it fed their paranoia -- and their anger.
"It was just like this faceless entity that came down and wiped us out," says Ratnick.
The purges united fakesters, who began communicating through profiles of those who'd survived Abrams' wrath. Several, including Pure Evil, posted open letters to Friendster on their bulletin boards in hopes they could convince the company that fakesters were people, too.
"[It] seems like Friendster wants to be another site for the Gap crowd," a fakester called PetsUntilEaten e-mailed Abrams. "But the freaks have their foot in the door & they don't want to give it up. Creative freaks make better sites if only because they have cooler photos & funnier things to say."
By then, fakesters (like many others on Friendster) had located Abrams' own profile on the site. Some petitioned him for friendship, hoping to mend fences, but were spurned -- and then abruptly deleted. Rebuffed so rudely, fakesters turned militant.
They whomped up dozens of Abrams clones, Photoshopping his face onto a variety of human and nonhuman bodies. There was Jonny Rotting, a green and moldy-looking Abrams with one eye blackened and the other missing. There was Elton Jon and Gay Clone Jonny, in which Abrams was transformed into a leather daddy. There was even Jonny Nitro, an Abrams-inspired comic book character who took the form of a human torch. A hilariously nasty message was pasted into the "about me" section of most of the Jonny clone profiles:
"I'm a fucking wanker who has such a hard time meeting women that I invented my own dating service. For some reason no one used it for that purpose though. Instead people made up characters and started having fun being creative and writing funny, madcap shit to each other. I couldn't have that, naturally, so I'm slowly tearing all that crap down to make room for a world full of boredom and stupidity. I even think I might get rich for being so white bread ...."
A call to Friendster confirmed that Abrams had seen the clones and found them "annoying."
The fakesters attacked on other fronts. Roy Batty penned a long-winded "Fakester Manifesto" based on the Declaration of Independence, arguing for the legitimacy of fake identities by referring to the writings of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. He also defended the legality of fakesterism, noting that trademarks co-opted for artistic purposes are protected under "fair use" exemptions. Fakesters organized as the Borg Collective and established a Yahoo! Groups bulletin board called FriendsterRevolution on which to hatch their counterattack. In just two weeks, more than 200 people joined.
Their battle strategies are often as ridiculous and pointless as their Friendster profiles. One of the Jesuses, for instance, encourages fakesters to flag the profiles of "uninteresting" realsters. Such people, he says, include those who list Adam Sandler among their favorite movie stars or cite "chillin'" as one of their interests.
When you add a friend on Friendster, you must verify that you know him by providing his last name or e-mail address. Deleted fakesters with hundreds of friends had to start from scratch with their clones. Through FriendsterRevolution, the fictional profilers collected each other's e-mail addresses so that they could easily build back the friend networks of their new clones. One fakester even wrote a program that automatically sent friend requests to this e-mail list and confirmed anybody who asked him to be his friend. (This tactic was controversial, however, as some fakesters saw it as spam.)
Fomenting revolution was a new pastime for fakesters, and their shenanigans became more daring. One of the Jesuses hatched the idea of "self-actualized clones" that displayed their e-mail addresses and passwords in their profiles. Like a house with an open door, anybody could come in and use them. Morgan Johnson, a San Franciscan who operates the fakester Giant Squid, pioneered the use of "kamikaze clones" -- fakesters who send vitriolic messages to Abrams, knowing that he'll quickly delete their profiles.
Though to an outsider the fakester uprising might have looked like a big practical joke, there were serious issues behind it.
"It's symbolic of a larger cultural battle," says an East Bay fakester who asked to be identified only by his profile name, Slushie Petersun. "Creative self-expression is being whittled away in this country because of lawsuits over copyright issues and media mergers."
Roy Batty passionately agrees. "If we continue to allow corporations to dictate what we do or say, it undermines our entire way of life in this country," he says. "If we go down in flames, at least we'll feel like we tried to accomplish something."
When it began, the Internet offered a world of new opportunities for anonymous communication and self-representation. Here was a unique medium that revealed nothing about you -- not the way you looked, the sound of your voice, or even your handwriting. The possibilities for self-invention were nearly limitless -- and, some would say, highly liberating. Online, you have far more control over how people perceive you, free from stereotypes about race, gender, income, and age. But the people behind Friendster want to make their site as unlike the Internet as possible.
