May 6, 2002
I’m sure it must be a hoax, and that a lot of Internet petitions are. I remember one protesting against some legislation planned by the Brazilian government to cut down some vast proportion of rainforest. There was no such legislation, but that didn’t stop hundreds of environmental activists from signing!Similarly, Simon Bisson comments: “Of the 1100 signatures something over 90% are void due to invalid addresses, and the comments attached to the remaining few are cynical in the extreme. I doubt anyone will take the petition seriously…”
Which was, in fact, my general point: that by and large, and for good reasons, online “petitions” don’t get taken seriously. I must have been singularly bad at putting the point across, though, since even as cogent an activist as my old pal Avedon Carol seemed to miss that that was my point. Oh well. [11:33 PM]
Some friends of mine were e-mailing about this and one passed on this datum & analysis:
YHBT. The petition creator is Kevin Klerck, a Slashdot troll. I'm sure he's laughing at the idiots who signed, the media who
reported it, and the opposition too.
It's been pretty thoroughly documented that this was, indeed, a hoax.
I'm a boring serious-minded person, of course, as evidenced by the fact that I have never really understood the urge to "troll." To hoax, to straightfacedly assert absurd things--sure. But the whole basis of "trolling" seems to be demonstrating that other people care about something and can be, with a little effort and deception, induced by their caring to provide unwitting amusement.
Not to revive a dreary old rasff argument, but this kind of thing--humiliating people for no better reason than that they care about something--seems to me, well, low. The sort of thing very retarded people would do when they'd finished using cigarettes to burn the hair off their arms.
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
Comments on Revisiting petitions: