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Meet Mark Zuckerberg, Conceptual Art Terrorist

A scrapbooked Facebook feed reveals an alternate future designed by an art hacker, a journalist, a sociologist, and a comedian.
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Mark Zuckerberg, former teenage media mogul and founder of the most used/hated social media network in the world, has turned over a new leaf, stolen all of our Facebook data, and become a conceptual art terrorist. At least, that's the premise of The Data Drive, a faux Facebook feed created by four young creative types: Adrian Chen, a freelance writer for New York Times MagazineSam Lavigne, the art hacker behind the Stupid Hackathon, Alix Rule, a PhD candidate and sociologist who co-authored International Art English, and Daniel Kolitz, an internet funnyman whose Printed Internet Tumblr is The Data Drive's genetic ancestor.

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Questions like Why did Zuckerberg free those tigers? and America, are you alright? are the new trending topics in their depraved, hilarious vision of the future. As you click through parodies of VOX explainers and sad-laugh at Humans of New York's Kafkaesque photo albums, which Kolitz literally cut and pasted together with glue and printer paper, you discover what life is like in a post-collapse Facebook. Texas mattress mogul Buck Calhoun has bought the website on discount, Chipotle won't stop Facebook chatting you, and the mystery of Zuckerberg's whereabouts plagues almost everyone who writes for the internet—except for Generation Z, who only care about snorting chemicals on a new social network called Gluhh.

The blue-tinted vortex of trends, brands, and #content that rolls down our computers every time we open Facebook is, for the majority of young people, the #1 way to get news. Our Facebook feeds tell a story about what's happening in the world today, so it was only a matter of time before somebody took the Clickhole approach and parodied the whole thing from the inside out. Chen, Rule, and Lavigne's new group, a purveyor of "internet things" called Useless Press, officially launches today, with Kolitz's much-needed social media satire as their first product.

To celebrate, and bring their URL work into the real world, they'll be spreading informational pamphlets about the danger of Zuckerberg's art-terrorism outside of Facebook's offices in New York, which you can check out below.

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The Creators Project also spoke to Kolitz, the comedian collaborating with Useless Press on the project, about how it happened, what it means, and why you should read the whole damn thing:

Exclusive image courtesy the artist

The Creators Project: What tools and materials went into The Data Drive?  

Daniel Kolitz: On my end, nothing much more than scissors, printer paper and 99-cent Elmer's gluesticks. Also, for one piece, an old shirt I hacked up with a steak knife. I ended up with around a hundred collage-fragments, which I then scanned and shared with Sam Lavigne, a straight-up sorcerer of code, who brought the whole thing to life.

Where did the idea come from?

Well, for a while there I maintained a conceptual Tumblr blog called The Printed Internet. Earlier this year Adrian Chen emailed me about maybe expanding its gimmick into a full-fledged Carnival of Gimmickry (not his words), as part of a larger project he was starting called Useless Press.

Pretty much from the start the idea was to make a near-future Facebook. The difference was that originally Zuckerberg had actually died (versus fled), leaving his eight brothers to jostle for control of the company, per Zuckerberg's will. And so I ended up spending hours and hours writing sentences like "they say Zuckerbergs can’t be tamed—that their very DNA forces them to pursue fast-paced lives of boozing and meaningless sex. Well, tell that to Bertram Zuckerberg," or "[Seamus is] just your average down-home country Zuckerberg," etc. Eventually the interlocking histories and feuds of this Zuckerberg clan became so complex, and so untethered from any kind of satirical 'point,' that it seemed wise to just abandon the concept entirely. But one of the brothers—a straight-shooting, sense-lacking Texas mattress magnate—became Buck Calhoun, Zuckerberg's replacement as CEO in the finished version.

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By the way, you know those Art of Fiction interviews? This is what I imagine they'd sound like: If The Paris Review took a break from interviewing eminent novelists to chat up the least-stable-looking person on the McDonald's bathroom line.

How long did building your end take you?

About three months, start to finish, though I was doing other things during that time, such as earning a living. (Tough to hack it as a full-time internet satirist, in this economy.) A part of me—probably the part that went totally fucking insane after elaborately handcrafting the 20th or 50th joke-collage—kind of wishes I could've spent another decade on it. Not because it would make me happy. On the contrary, it would make me very, very sad. It's more that I can think of no other way to capture/comment on even a small fraction of the internet's sprawling weirdness.

But even that would never work, because the internet and the world it (allegedly) represents are ever-changing, to the point where multiple seemingly well-established facts of existence (the NSA's direct access to our metadata, for example) were no longer facts by the time I finished writing this thing, necessitating all kind of changes. (These changes were made all the more difficult by the fact that simply fixing a minor typo meant hauling out my battered pair—yes, pair—of HP Deskjets for some strenuous scissor 'n gluestick action.) Plus like, my 'take' on the What Color is This Dress? thing—I wrote that right when it was happening, but now it might as well be a parody of the Lewinsky scandal, or a popular dance craze from the 1950s.

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You could probably read it all in less than two hours, but there's no definite 'ending.' It's not meant to be read in any particular order. If there is any overarching plot, it's meant to be absorbed the way you'd absorb the day's news on The Actual Facebook: by idly opening tabs. Preferably with a terrible headache.

Did you have to do a lot of research to get the style of each website you're parodying? 

Wish I could say I was some kind of method satirical collagist, listicling for months at some low-rent Jersey content farm just to get the tone right, but the truth is a lot of it came naturally. Like millions of other office-workers, numbly ingesting huge quantities of content is just part of my daily routine.

What makes the idea of Mark Zuckerberg as a conceptual art terrorist so funny? Were you inspired by internet-oriented dystopian sci-fi shows like Black Mirror

I mean, to me, the idea of Zuckerberg doing anything illicit—say, jaywalking, or bringing outside snacks into a movie theater—is kind of funny. Breaks my heart that Zuckerberg, who is basically a child star, never went through any kind of bad-boy phase.

I wasn't directly inspired by Black Mirror, but this project definitely is in part a response to that kind of bleak, speculative sci-fi. I like the idea that sites like Facebook, which are supposed to be fundamentally reordering how we communicate, are just as likely to devolve into spammy low-traffic wastelands. Even now, Facebook is (to me) not much more than a multi-billion dollar company designed to revolutionize the process of wishing strangers a happy birthday.

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How are you not writing for Clickhole yet? 

Man, Clickhole! Pretty much the reason I stopped updating my Tumblr is that Clickhole rendered it irrelevant. I believe Clickhole is the best website on the internet.

Can you tell me about one or two moments in the whole experience that you're particularly proud of?

I'm pretty satisfied with the revamped New York Times paywall, and the real-time trendpiece, and the one-sided Chipotle-chat.  There is definitely at least one easily-missable portion; without giving too much away, I'll say that it may or may not have something to do with the Deep Web, and a struggling Polish restaurant in New Jersey.

Click through Daniel Kolitz' other work on The Printed Internet, and then get lost on The Data Drive here.

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