Fake Steve: Techmeme uber-troll
Due to a surfeit of Christmas parties, I missed much of the Fake Steve Jobs takedown frenzy, in which the writer — otherwise known as David Lyons of Forbes — claimed in a series of posts that Apple was trying to shut down his blog.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs spent mid-2007 as an anonymous sensation before being unmasked as Forbes writer Dan Lyons, who gave his first straight answers that July while TUAW traced the trail to his identity; by August, TechCrunch was treating him as the leading edge of a broader fake-blogger wave.
This week's posts claiming Apple was trying to shut the blog down landed days after Apple's confirmed settlement that closed the tip site Think Secret, and alongside rumors of a Think Secret-style offer conditioned on ending an online impersonation — timing that made the claim plausible enough to run across Techmeme, even though it remains unconfirmed and Publishing 2.0 judged the whole shutdown drama to be faked.
First-order effects
- Lyons converts Apple's real legal posture toward bloggers into traffic for himself and Forbes, with the blog's own posts ('I'm weighing an offer from Apple', 'Breakfast with an Apple lawyer') keeping readers unable to confirm whether any threat exists.
- Apple's genuine enforcement wins — the Think Secret shutdown above all — are what give the fictional takedown its bite, so the company's legal credibility is now being spent as someone else's material.
Second-order effects
- Every other satirical or anonymous blogger from the 2007 fake-blogger wave inherits an authenticity discount: after one prominent fake legal drama, their own claims of corporate pressure will be read as performance first.
- Apple's future legal signals lose discriminating power — if a real cease-and-desist arrives in the same news cycle as a parody of one, targets and the press will discount both.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, corporate legal action against blogs stops deterring and starts feeding the target: enforcement becomes content the satirist monetizes, inverting the economics the lawyers intended.
- The Think Secret template — settle and go silent — collides with a counter-template of settling loudly and fictitiously, leaving companies like Apple with no clean way to signal which legal threats are real.
The trend: Corporate legal pressure on independent blogs is becoming raw material for the very satirists it targets, with each enforcement action doubling as content.