Dan Lyons, writing as Fake Steve, has posted a series of incredible, amusing, sorrowful indictments of stodgy, short-sighted corporate thinking. It says something about the essential craziness of the web, that he has created in FakeSteve (Jobs) a character who seems more like Steve Jobs than does Teh Steve (not that we’d know.) I’ve had a character take over a novel, and the utter realness of these people, it’s hard to explain.
The first, A Not So Brief Chat With Randall Stephenson, is undoubtedly one of the most important blog posts of the year …
So we set up a call with Randall this morning to discuss some of the profoundly stupid things his guy Ralph de la Vega said recently about creating incentives that would encourage people to stop using AT&T’s data network so much.
It’s long, truthful, and very funny …
First off, before we even start the call, we’ve got problems, because shithead won’t get on the phone unless I’m on the line first.
This is meta-meta-something, when a fictitious character takes on a real corporation, real people—and speaks more to the point, with more passion and clarity …
Steve appeals to Randall:
We’ve got the smartphone equivalent of Meet the Beatles.
Randall listens—and it a wonderful rant, a remarkable rant—but in the end …
There was nothing on the line. Silence. I said, Randall? He goes, Yeah, I’m here. I said, Does any of that make sense? He says, Yeah, but we’re still not going to do it.
Bottom line, folks, no childlike sense of wonder at AT&T.
Now there was silence again. This time I was the one not talking. There was this weird lump in my throat, this tightness in my chest. I had this vision of the future — a ruined empire, run by number crunchers, squalid and stupid and puffed up with phony patriotism, settling for a long slow decline.
“Okay,” I said. “Nice talking to you.” Then I hung up.
A series of posts on and off-topic follows:
Sarkozy: No, Seriously, Did You Bang My Wife Really, did you? Because what was that all about when you told me just now to say hello to her for you?
Not to mention Operation Chokehold, which certainly captured the imagination but which turned out in its own rather sad. I don’t know who the hell got on—would that have been so hard?—me, I overslept.
Louis Farrakhan says he wants to participate. He says he can get 100,000 people to join in and watch Malcolm X speeches on YouTube.
Guess Farrakhan pooped out too; now, that would have been amazing. Malcolm X. Once we had radicals, in America. Sigh.
Forgot to mention this in the previous post — but in our phone call today Randall was like, “Who do you think you are? Freaking Gandhi? With your little round glasses and your vegetarian diet and your stupid protest? You think this Operation Chokehold is like the Salt March to Dandi?”
Steve doesn’t mind the comparison at all. Read the whole series. It doesn’t get much better than this.
photo courtesty FakeSteve
Sounds like Randall could use a little Oscar.
Ralph de la Vega is kind of a weird name. I mean, really Ralph paired with de la Vega??? You expect something with a little more pizazz to go with de la Vega. Like Tim.