Originally published April 11, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1221
Once upon a time, one had to be face to face in order to have social intercourse. (Remember, kids, be careful when having social intercourse: When you talk to a person, it’s as if you’re talking to everyone that person ever spoke to.) Now, however, you have the solitude of computer terminals, and are able to hide behind fake names and even fake locations.
And yet the anonymity can have curious and fascinating spin-offs. Herewith an intriguing anecdote of the new age of Isolinear Isolation. However I have changed the names of those involved, either to protect them from further public embarrassment, or else because they’re so obnoxious that I don’t want to give them more of the notoriety that their conduct clearly indicates they crave.
It was about 6 in the morning on Sunday and I had worked all night. But I was too awake to sleep, and so I decided to jump onto AOL and see if anyone was around.
I found a chat room where a group of comics fans had gathered. As is customary, everyone was using fake names. I started talking with one of them, while at the same time watching some of the cross-talking going on.
(Keep in mind once more: I am using different names than the real participants were using, while trying to keep the flavor of those actually involved. In doing so I’m probably going to wind up using names of other AOL participants who genuinely go by those handles. To paraphrase the old warning: Any resemblance to the names of actual fake people is purely coincidental.)
One of the participants was Wonder Girl. Wonder Girl, as I noticed in various cross-talk comments, was about fourteen and she lived in the Bronx. Also present was Robin, who was doing some heavy-duty flirting with Wonder Girl. Wonder Girl was being coy in response. Robin wanted to go out with Wonder Girl, and Wonder Girl replied that she had a boyfriend: Flash Gordon.
“I’d fight him for you!” declared Robin zealously. This went on for a bit, and then Wonder Girl announced that she’d be right back, because she was getting a phone call. Moments later she said, “Guess what. That was Flash Gordon. Robin, you said you’d fight him for me. So he’s coming online, so you two can fight it out. Well, I have to go to the supermarket now. Bye.”
And Wonder Girl vanished.
And, about ninety seconds later, Flash Gordon materialized, spoiling for a fight. “Who wants to fight me!” he thundered. “I’m looking for the guy who was interested in Wonder Girl. Come on. Who was it? Who wants to fight me for her?” Robin the Gutless Wonder had lapsed into sudden silence, which was remarkable enough in itself. Who in the world is concerned about getting into a fight—in cyberspace? What was Flash Gordon going to do? Punch out Robin? I mean, forget about walking-the-walk; if you can’t talk-the-talk in cyberspace, where can you?
But Robin’s sudden reticence was secondary to the obvious sham of what I was seeing. And as Flash Gordon continued to look for a fight, I said to the guy I was speaking to, “Do you believe this silliness with Flash Gordon? Who does he think he’s fooling?”
My comments caught Flash’s eye. “What are you talking about?” he demanded.
I said, “Oh, come on. It’s perfectly obvious that you and Wonder Girl are the same person. That there is no Wonder Girl.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he declared.
“Then where is she?” I asked.
“She had to go out food shopping,” Flash informed me.
In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been so blunt. I was dealing with a teenager here. But I hadn’t slept all night and my patience and judgment weren’t what they should have been. Nor did I really, fully understand what I was getting into. I was simply carried along with the flow of the conversation, rather than really dwelling on the impact I was about to have on the person on the other end.
I said, “Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that a teenage girl had to go out food shopping. At 6 in the morning. On a Sunday. In the Bronx.”
“There was probably something she needed,” said Flash Gordon.
“At six in the morning? On a Sunday? In the Bronx?”
“That’s how girls are,” Flash claimed defensively.
I said, “Aw, come on, Flash. You’re asking me to believe that this girl just happens to be talking about you, and then you just happen to call, and then she just happens to leave as you just happen to get online? Don’t you see what a stretch that is?”
“She knew she could leave because I was going to fight on her behalf and take on the guys who were coming on to her,” explained Flash.
“Y’know, that’s pretty odd, Flash,” I replied. “Most teenage girls I know, they would have stayed to watch their boyfriends mix it up with a guy to fight for their honor. But not Wonder Girl, no. She goes food shopping. At 6 in the morning. On a Sunday. In the Bronx.” And other people, noticing the cross-chat, started to comment on the unlikelihood of this as well.
“We’re two different people,” Flash maintained forcefully. “Check our profiles. You’ll see. There’s different profiles.”
Profiles, you have to understand, are descriptions that people create for themselves when they come online. They have no necessary adherence to reality at all. Nonetheless I checked out both Flash Gordon’s and Wonder Girl’s profiles. Each of them provided detailed information, and each of them also talked about each other in glowing, romantic terms. They also both mentioned a third person, Erik the Red, as a mutual best friend. I came back and said, “Yup. Two different profiles. You’re right.”
“You see?” said Flash, triumphant.
“Strange, though,” I observed, “that there are identical grammatical mistakes and misspellings in both, which would indicate they were created by the same person.”
And Flash Gordon freaked out.
He began doing the computer equivalent of screaming, typing entirely in caps, “WE’RE NOT THE SAME PERSON! WE’RE TWO DIFFERENT PEOPLE!” Profanity-ridden postings screeched across the computer screen.
Now as I noted, I was sleep deprived. I was even starting to drift off a bit, the main thing keeping me awake being the clattering of the keyboard. But this snapped me back to full wakefulness. This was no longer a mental exercise. This was a complete meltdown. A line had been crossed from chat into psychodrama. Realizing that Flash Gordon had lost it, other people in the chat room started to move in for the kill, and I immediately started reining them back, sending them private messages saying, “We better give him some space, fast.” Publicly I typed as quickly as I could, “Okay, Flash, you’re two different people. Fine. You win. I’m sorry I thought otherwise. My mistake.” And Flash seemed to calm back down.
I had never seen anything like it. It had caught me completely off-guard. And later one of the AOL regulars explained it to me as not being uncommon at all. The term for it is “Loner’s Syndrome.”
Imagine yourself as a classic misfit. You have almost no friends, no social life. You’re an outcast, you can’t get a date, you’re socially inept, girls won’t give you the time of day. In short, you’re what I was like all during junior high and the first two years of high school.
And so you flee to the last bastion of societal anonymity. You go to AOL.
And there you create an identity for yourself. Brave. Heroic. Dashing.
But that’s not enough. You want the folks on AOL to think you’re a cool guy. That you’re da bomb (and boy, isn’t it funny how that phrase didn’t exist in a positive connotation when I was a kid, when we were concerned about someone dropping Da Bomb). How do you come across as cool to the other guys? Easy. By having a babe for a girlfriend.
So you create a girlfriend. An aggressive flirt, coy and teasing, who only has eyes for you. Makes the other guys jealous, and elevates you because, hey, there must be something great about you if this hot chick considers you her one-and-only. And you also fabricate a best friend, just to show you can hang with the guys as well. In short, you create an entire social life for yourself—and it’s just you.
On the one hand I can sit here in judgment, separated by several decades from the state of mind that would lead to such actions. On the other hand, I can’t help but note that I create characters for a living, and if there had been computers when I was a teenager, I might have done the same thing.
And so, the moral of the story is: If you’re going to make up other identities, be a little more slick about it.
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. Letters can also be addressed there to his eldest son, Rex, his hot mistress, Gabrielle, his talking dog Cuddles, and, of course, Skippy the Jedi Droid. Next week: more online adventures.)
• 
Fun story, well told; I hadn’t read it in ’97. While I’m sure there are no end of people that undergo major changes from real life to online, I still find it a bit creepy that that someone who create a fake girlfriend to flirt with his fake online identity to make him look like more of a stud with a bunch of people he’s never met, who are also most likely very different in real life. But what I really want to know is,what happened to Cuddles the talking dog?
Oh, it’s definitely creepy; I used to see it all the time in chat rooms and on IRC. And you can be certain that people still do it, particularly with all the games you can play online these days.
What I find more amusing is how easily the creep fell apart when called out on it.
Well, who knows how long he’d been doing it? If he’d been interacting with all these people for a long time, then they all knew him for the lie of a life he’d created. It was where he went to feel good about himself. To feel like somebody. And here comes this guy he’s never heard of who, in less than five minutes, demolishes everything. He was just doing business as usual with other children, and here comes an adult who inadvertently but relentlessly shreds this whole world he’s created. He was as caught off guard by my shredding his world as I was by his reaction.
PAD
I’m glad you were able to show up a teenager, Peter. 😉
Me, I had a somewhat similar experience several years ago. On the IMDB boards, I was talking about an upcoming serial killer thriller that I had seen at a test screening to which I had been invited. I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to talk about it, maybe tell others it was good, and contrast it with a similar movie I had seen that approached the genre in a more techno way. It wasn’t one of the screenings conducted by the company I worked for at the time, mind you. Perhaps not surprisingly, some churl calling himself Snowrider64 or something came on and called me a liar, arbitrarily accusing me, without providing any evidence or reason, of course, of claiming to have seen a movie that I had not. He even posted on other boards and created ones on the site for the purpose of defaming me as a liar. He and I had some back-and-forth over this for a bit, until he said something that caused me to reevaluate who I was talking to. Toward the end of one of his missives about me, he dropped an extraneous mention of an upcoming birthday party he was having. It was then that I realized it.
I was talking to a grade schooler.
Not someone whose intelligence I impugned as such, mind you, a literal grade school student.
Who, after all, drops extraneous mentions of upcoming birthday parties who’s older than thirteen?
I can’t remember if I noted this in my next post following this or not, but I remember realizing that it was pointless talking to this kid.
Life is too short wasting it online with people who are puffed up by the cowardly shield of anonymity to behave in ways that they’d never do in person.
Addendum:
Something that I didn’t mention because I didn’t think it was a relevant detail, but which I now realize has an oddly coincidental relevance to this thread and the title of the BID column:
The name of the movie I was talking about on that IMDB thread?
Identity with John Cusack and Ray Liotta, about a bunch of people being picked off one by one by an unseen serial killer at a motel, only for it to be revealed that the entire situation exists only within the imagination of an institutionalized patient with dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder), and each of the characters at the motel are one of his multiple identities
I’m not making this up. But I can’t believe I didn’t think about this until now. Eerie.
Imagine yourself as a classic misfit. You have almost no friends, no social life. You’re an outcast, you can’t get a date, you’re socially inept, girls won’t give you the time of day.
—-
Congrats…now you know what it’s like to have PDD-NOS
Except that those of us on the spectrum don’t usually bother with all that “fake social life” nonsense. There are enough obnoxious people in the world as it is.
In the wise words of Marvin the Paranoid Android, “‘Making it up’? Why would I make anything up? Life’s bad enough as it is, without wanting to invent more of it.”
I hear ye…I once tried Facebook….I lasted about three weeks before I ran away screaming.
Or my life in junior high and the first two years of high school.
PAD
Who says the guy was actually a teenager? You might very well have been arguing with someone your own age or older.
I suppose it’s possible; it could have been a creepy middle aged guy. But the vibe I got was teen.
PAD
That would be the way to bet…but I could give you some examples of guys in their 30s and 40s who do this all the time. One in particular is infamous among the indie film community for making multiple names pimping his films, pretending to be kids, women, old ladies, famous film producers, pirates, poets etc, all proclaiming his movie the greatest thing since antibiotics and cursing the haters who have caused it to have a whopping 1 star on IMDB.
Wasn’t there also someone on the Harlan Ellison board who had people following a sad tale of woe and then revealed himself to be someone conducting a “social experiment” or whatever it is that these douchenozzles claim to be doing when it all falls apart?
And I’ve been in APAs where I’m pretty sure people have used fake identities to create characters who support their real identity in whatever ridiculous feud is raging.
And all of these people were old enough to know better!
But yeah, this kid sounds like a kid and it does you credit that you backed off. Winning one of these fights is, as the non-PC joke goes, like winning in special olympics, a lesson I must periodically relearn.
And in the end, Flash Gordon/Wonder Girl turned out to be John Lovitz, who attributed his performance to “ACTING!”
Genius!
PAD
Maybe it was a teenage girl inventing a boyfriend and not the other way around.
Again, possible, but all I can tell you is the vibe I was getting off everything that was going on. Especially when he was talking about “how girls are” and I was thinking, “No, they’re not.” I got the impression it was commentary from someone who knew nothing about girls.
PAD