Thanatos and fake news
Almost fifteen years ago, an Italian writer named Tommaso De Benedetti gained notoriety for a series of remarkable interviews. His story unravelled more precisely in February 2010, when journalist Paola Zanuttini queried Philip Roth about criticism he had levelled against Barack Obama during an earlier interview for the Italian daily Libero. This conversation — conducted with De Benedetti — was unknown in the English-speaking world, but more importantly, it had never taken place.1
It quickly became clear that De Benedetti’s other interviews — with John Grisham, Arthur Miller, Gore Vidal, and Toni Morrison, among others — were also fabricated. Editorial chaos ensued, pieces were pulled, embarrassed apologies were issued — it was a minor scandal that extended well beyond the Italosphere. De Benedetti rejected accusations that he was doing it for the money, adopting a pro-situ2 stance instead, claiming that his goal from the start was to show how easy it is to fool the media:
“The Italian press never checks anything, especially if it is close to their political line, which is why the rightwing paper Libero liked Roth's attacks on Obama.” Half the time, he added, he suspected editors knew he was peddling made-up interviews, but took them anyway.3
Two years later, he shifted tactics and took to announcing celebrity deaths on Twitter, successfully hoaxing netizens into making viral the fake deaths of Pope Benedict XVI, Fidel Castro, and Pedro Almodovar.
De Benedetti’s pranks were the first thing that crossed my mind when Noam Chomsky’s death trended first on social media and later in the legacy press earlier this week. I became aware of this non-event when a friend forwarded me a Twitter #Mebituary by a very online British poet. Soon, Chomsky’s non-death was all over the former bird’s app. And in a matter of minutes the legacy media worldwide were publishing their own obituaries, without any attempt at fact-checking, lest they fail to be the first outlet to break the news. Obviously, all these pieces have now been retracted.4 On a brighter note, they’ve already got the obituary ready for when Noam C’s actual time comes to shuffle off this mortal coil. They just need to make sure they don’t fire it away when some bored crank decides to announce his fake death for a laugh, inevitably succeeding in going viral, aided by useful idiots like the aforementioned poet.
I have no way of knowing if it was De Benedetti who got the rumours of Chomsky’s death started, but this viral fabulation benefited from the same mix of gullibility, narcissism, and copy-hungry journalism that De Benedetti weaponised for his antics.
#Mebituaries
I have briefly written about #Mebituaries before, but an extended analysis is due here. By this term, I refer to some people’s tendency to make celebrity deaths about themselves on social media. Why they do this is rather transparent: the death of anyone famous provides a very good branding opportunity. Writers, especially so-called indie writers, are the worst at this, starved of attention as they often are.
#Mebituaries always follow the same pattern. Celebrity X kicks the bucket, and soon you start to see the messages desperately trying to establish a connection with the deceased. Naive posters might refer to how Celebrity X changed their life, or how many of their books or albums they’ve bought, and so on. But savvy posters will include a reference to a book or some other product they want to shift, which they’ll forcefully link to the deceased. You know, posts like “RIP Celebrity X. Met them when I was struggling with my memoir — Tales of Wonderful Narcissism — and the advice they gave me made it a better book,” followed by a purchase link later in the day, or even in the same thread. That intellectual celeb Chomsky died while Israel is bombing and starving the fuck out of Gaza arguably forced serial self-promoters to show some restraint, diverting most of the posts towards his lifelong commitment to the Palestinian cause.5 But still, there was no dearth of #MeBituaries with photos bearing witness that the posters had met Chomsky in person in some prestigious conference or similar academic setting, which isn’t as blunt as using death to sell a book, but it’s still an exercise in personal branding passing for affection.
If I sound cynical, let me reassure you that regarding this type of performance, one can only be cynical. Yes, you can use social media effectively and without a narcicophatic agenda, but no, it’s impossible to mourn in a genuine way online, for an audience. This is because a space that is mediated by an algorithm, which encourages engagement in order to sell ads, can’t be a place of genuine mourning. Extrapolate this same situation to real life and see how ridiculous it would be: people raising their thumbs or pinning hearts to your chest or even repeating what you say when you claim to be sad about someone’s sudden departure. And since the dead don’t spend time online reading eulogies, who the hell are #Mebituaries for? What does anyone expect to achieve when they tell others — most of them strangers — that some death is making them feel sad? Is this akin to crying the death of a friend on another friend’s shoulder? Unless you can only relate to others online, unless you are friendless in teh meat space, you know the answer to this set of rhetorical questions.
#Mebituaries aren’t about communal grief but about positioning oneself vis-à-vis whoever crocked it, in an algorithmic space, in order to benefit from this person’s aura, for whatever reason. And just like legacy media outlets are desperate to be the first to break the news, anyone writing a #Mebituary online is eager to be among the first netizens to perform a public act of pseudo-mourning. The longer one waits, the less effective the exercise in personal branding becomes. That’s why this type of narcissist is such an easy target for a hoaxer. But then, the death doesn’t even need to be real for the branding exercise to succeed! At the end of the day we will have seen those photos, or know that Tales of Wonderful Narcissism is on sale.
R.I.P. Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard's 1981 Simulacres et Simulation is a survey of the concept of the “simulacrum” — that is, the possibility that representations or copies may replace things themselves. In a nutshell, Baudrillard argues that in the modern world reality is replaced by symbols and signs. This results in a hyperreality in which the real and the simulated become indistinguishable. Chomsky’s non-death was more fitting for Baudrillard — that’s the second thing that crossed my mind this week.
And what a philosopher, Jean B, and how sad his death! I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when he passed away back in 2007. I was here in London, writing in a café in Clapton. My friend Francois emailed from Paris to tell me that the Frenchman had died. At this time, I was already working on my critically acclaimed collection of short stories, JOLTS. You can get your copy directly from my publisher or in your favourite bookshop. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Baudrillard and neither can I claim his influence. But then, if nothing is real any more, why should this matter at all?
This turn of events must have been quite unsettling for Roth, considering that one of his most renowned novels — the 1993 Operation Shylock — deals with a doppelgänger who has appropriated Roth’s identity. Perhaps De Benedetti had interviewed his double?
Pro-situ refers to those who align themselves with the principles and goals of the Situationist International. The term can be used in derogative ways, both in relation to its romanticisation of the past and lack of practical impact. I leave it to you to decide if I’m being derogatory or not here.
The pantomime included a now-deleted eulogy by Yanis Varoufakis on the New Statesman — regrettably, the internet never forgets.
There were, of course, others who chose to use Chomsky’s non-death as an opportunity to remind the world of controversies pertaining to his positions vis-à-vis Cambodia and Srebrenica.
“Mebituary” is great! It reminds me that I saw someone refer to this type of word as a “portamento,” rather than a portmanteau. This may have been the most erudite error I’ve ever seen.