Confidential to the Dutch girl who faked her trip to Southeast Asia: You're in the running for the stupidest person on the planet

Here's a friendly thought, Zilla: Now that you've established your claim to be the most pompous twit in the history of the human race, why not eat poison and die? (See, it's even a gastronomic thought!)

by Ken

I know, I know, by giving her attention I'm only legitimizing this bimbo's self-aggrandizing, pretentious, wackadoodle bullshit, but I have to say, I'm kind of outraged -- not least because anyone is paying attention to this imbecilic stunt. Of course, here I am, paying attention to it. Well, so what? You wanna make sumpin' of it? Huh? You talkin' to me?

In case you, like me, had been lucky enough to miss this so-called story, which has apparently seized the attention of new-thinkers all over the media universe, here it is in a nutshell courtesy of one Jake Flanagin on "Op-Talk" ("a new feature of NYT Opinion"), in a piece called "How to Fake Your Next Vacation" (note: except for the link to the GapYear.com source piece, I'm leaving it to you to track down any links you may care about onsite):

Zilla van der Born, a Dutch national, spent five weeks traveling through Southeast Asia and documented the trip in photos on Facebook. She posed for pictures while dining on dumplings, snorkeling among colorful fish in azure waters and visiting ornately decorated Buddhist temples — compiling the lot into a series of videos for her Vimeo account. All in all, Ms. van der Born seemed to have enjoyed a busy, albeit conventional, trip to Phuket, Luang Prabang or some other regional tourist hub.

Or so it would appear.

In reality, Ms. van der Born never left her home city, Amsterdam. Each photograph was expertly contrived. According to Will Jones at GapYear.com, the restaurant and temple were all local Dutch establishments. The snorkeling photo? Taken in the pool at her apartment complex; the fish were added after the fact with Photoshop. “Zilla even redecorated her own bedroom to make it look like an Oriental hotel room so that she could have Skype conversations with her family — at random times in the night, of course — without raising suspicion,” Mr. Jones reports.

Gasp!

My first question is who in his/her right mind Zany Zilla imagines could possibly have given the slightest damn about her Southeast Asia trip even if it had been real? In the event that there is any such person, he/she may now consider him/herself informed: Anything you read online could be a lie. Of course, it has always been true that anything you read anywhere could have been a lie, but the Internet is Ground Zero for liars -- you can say anything you damn please.

You're thinking, I bet Zilla had some really deep reason for perpetrating such a profoundly pointless and uninteresting hoax. Am I right? Well, judge for yourself.

Why the ruse? To take part in that distinctly 21st-century phenomenon of socially acceptable online bragging? The visual “humblebrag”? Born of so-called selfie-loathing?

Yes, and no. “I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media,” Ms. van der Born told Dutch journalists. “We create an online world which reality can no longer meet.”

The ultimate goal was to “prove how easy it is to distort reality,” she said. “Everybody knows that pictures of models are manipulated. But we often overlook the fact that we manipulate reality also in our own lives.”

Whoa, is this heavy or what? (Answer: What?) But it sets Jake Flanagin off in a delirious recollection of the stunt by at 28-year-old Japanese photographer who "coined the concept of a 'hitori date,' or 'one-man date,' " in which he "would set up Instagram photos to give viewers the impression that he was spending time with a girlfriend," when "in reality, each was a glorified selfie, specially angled to imply someone else was playing photographer."

And boy, are our man Jake's juices flowing. I hope you're sitting down.

The Facebook photo fake-out raises some profound ideas about aesthetics and ontology in this age of interconnectedness. Whereas photo sharing once entailed passing around thick Kodak envelopes or negotiating bulky slide projectors, we now tell entire visual stories with a few clicks of a mouse. And the “fakecation” is a skewering critique of the delusion it can breed.

“I’ve always been fascinated by Photoshop and before/after pictures,” Ms. van der Born told Caitlin Dewey at The Washington Post. “It intrigues me that a photo has an insidious, ambiguous relationship with reality, because there is a constant battle going on between two photographic considerations: making the photographed object as beautiful as possible, and telling the truth. What a picture finally really shows is never the exact situation as it really was, it is a flavored version of the truth!”

SAY IT AGAIN, JAKE

No, our man Jake didn't really say that, did he? I mean: "The Facebook photo fake-out raises some profound ideas about aesthetics and ontology in this age of interconnectedness."

Um, no, Jake, it doesn't raise any profound ideas. As far as I can tell, it doesn't raise any ideas at all, unless you count the question: How do people get away with peddling this crap as if it mattered?

What seem to be passing for "ideas" here are the following:

(a) "We filter and manipulate what we show on social media."

No! Really? Could we have a quick show of hands here -- anyone to whom this is an idea that has just been raised -- by, you know, Zany Zilla? No,  I didn't think so.

(b) "We often overlook the fact that we manipulate reality also in our own lives."

We do? Well, I suppose, but actually, Zilla, at the moment this seems to be primarily true of you.

(c) "What a picture finally really shows is never the exact situation as it really was, it is a flavored version of the truth!"

Oh, for Pete's sake.


CONFIDENTIAL TO THE NYT DIGITAL MARKETING TEAM

Each day when you prepare to send me my latest "last chance" offer to sign up at never-heard-of savings rates, remember this, and do us all a favor and send the offer to Jake Flanagin instead.

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