Silicon Insider: 'Fake Steve Jobs' Is a Coward

Aug. 10, 2007 — -- You can call Steve Jobs a lot of things, but never a coward. Good or bad, success or failure, he puts himself out there in the public eye and takes his kudos and his shots.

By comparison, Fake Steve Jobs aka Dan Lyons is a coward. And what he has accomplished, again both good and bad, over the last year, tells us some important things about how the blogosphere has rewritten the rules of journalism.

If you aren't a Silicon Valleyite, or an Apple fanboy, you may have missed Fake Steve Jobs. It seemed to appear out of nowhere more than a year ago as a sort of pseudo-blog/diary written by Apple's Steve Jobs — with the added flip that it identified itself as not being by the real Jobs.

At its best, Fake Steve Jobs was an amusing take on what might be going on in the mind of the ever-elusive Mr. Jobs. Whether it actually captured Jobs' real personality, which for the most part I don't think it did, Fake Steve Jobs often brilliantly portrayed what everybody thinks is Jobs' interior life — or at least what it ought to be.

Thus, Fake Steve Jobs was alternately serene, petulant, cruel, vindictive and shrewdly insightful of the failings of others. He had a gift for portraying faux encounters with other high-tech mavens that gave us a pitiless analysis of those worthies as well.

He also had a talent for coming up with inspired nicknames for other tech biggies, i.e., "beastmaster" Bill Gates and "squirrel boy" Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Most entertaining of all was when Fake Steve Jobs turned on Apple's own customers, which he dismissed as "iTards."

While some readers have professed that Fake Steve Jobs was their favorite blog, I have to admit that I found it rather inconsistent and often tiresome. I caught onto the site pretty early on, read it for a few weeks then drifted away. After that I would dip in about once a month, scroll it for amusing nuggets (which were relatively far between) and move on. It increasingly struck me as a satire more appealing to people who had never met any of the individuals portrayed, but only knew of their reputations.

On the other hand, Jobs himself reportedly said he found Fake Steve Jobs pretty funny. So perhaps the portrayal was more accurate than we know.

The Rise of Fake Steve Jobs

While I was moving on, Fake Steve Jobs became increasingly popular among Third Generation Silicon Valley types. And for about the last six months, guessing the identity of the author of Fake Steve Jobs became the most popular Valley parlor game. Driving the search was Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes magazine, who used his column to speculate on the real FSJ.

Rich's guesses, which were all over the map (even including me at one point), helped fuel the search … right up until the moment in April when he suddenly dropped the topic. Being an old friend of Karlgaard's, I should have been suspicious, but frankly, I'd lost interest in Fake Steve Jobs.

And then, last weekend, Fake Steve Jobs was unexpectedly unmasked. San Francisco-based New York Times tech writer Brad Stone, comparing some stock phrases in FSJ — writing "tics," if you will — with the writings of other journalists, determined the author of Fake Steve Jobs to be Daniel Lyons, a 46-year-old senior editor at Forbes Magazine. Lyons confessed — and Forbes immediately began publishing Fake Steve Jobs under its own label.

Not surprisingly, the blogosphere, which by definition is filled with gearheads, lit up with the news. But once the thrill of discovery passed, more than one loyal FSJ reader began to have second thoughts about the whole experience.

For one thing, there were the ironies. I don't think I've ever met Lyons, unless it was at some Forbes event, but the consensus in the blogosphere seems to be that he is something of a pompous jerk — which is something Fake Steve Jobs was not. Indeed, the character Lyons created seems to be a lot more charismatic and endearing than he is.

Then there is the matter of Rich Karlgaard and his "search." Rich and I swapped e-mails last weekend when the news broke and he admitted that, after leading the search for months, he learned of Lyons' authorship in April and immediately stopped writing about the topic He added that he was surprised by how many people at Forbes knew as well.

But the biggest irony of all was the fact that, much remarked upon by both the blogosphere and the media, Lyons was also the author of one of the most notorious and wrongheaded articles about the blogosphere ever written, the November 2005 Forbes cover story entitled, "Attack of the Blogs."

In it, Lyons claimed to chart the growing threat by maverick bloggers to wound large corporations by attacking their brands, printing company gossip and leaking secrets. After that, Lyons was known as the poster boy of the Establishment's backlash against the blogosphere … only to turn around and secretly create a blog that both undermined his original message and enabled him to join the other side.

But then, so what? If hypocrisy is made a crime, most of us journalists would be in jail. And, frankly, I'm glad to see someone as stupidly misguided as Lyons get such a wonderful life lesson.

That said, there are two things I find deeply disturbing about what Lyons did.

As anyone who read FSJ knows, there were moments when the author seemed to drop the Jobs persona and go off on a rant that seemed to emanate from someone else's spleen. This most often happened when FSJ/Lyons attacked fellow reporters, such as Fortune's Brent Schendler, Walt Mossberg, or, in one personally notable case, me.

I'm a big boy, and I've been in this business a long time now, so I'm used to personal attacks. In fact, I get a kick out of them. But Fake Steve Jobs' attack was so off the wall, so obscene, and so unlike most of the rest of his stuff that I was curious where it came from.

When the news broke last weekend, I suddenly understood.

The Attacks Get Personal

As you may remember, when "Attack of the Blogs" appeared in Forbes, I used this column to make what was probably the biggest mainstream media attack on Lyons as a reporter, and on Forbes magazine for its enduring inability to get anything right in its coverage of tech. At the time, I heard from inside the magazine that people were talking about how to "get even" with me. I also know that I helped drive Lyons' buddy at Forbes out of Forbes.com for being a liar and an incompetent.

So was the Fake Steve Jobs attack on me Lyons' sneaky and gutless way of getting even? Or does he honestly think I'm a "the hack of all hacks"?

Who knows? And that is my second point. In making the announcement that Forbes.com would now host FSJ, editor Paul Maidment said, "From Jonathan Swift to Jon Stewart, satire has spoken truth to power as well as amused." True enough, but Maidment is a smart guy, and even he must have noticed that the two individuals he mentioned used their own names.

Writing to me, Karlgaard suggested that I should be proud of what Lyons had done, as he was in the tradition of my own savage essays about Silicon Valley back in our days at Upside Magazine. On the contrary, I told him, if this is my legacy I am deeply ashamed. Because I always put my byline on my pieces. It's part of an unwritten code of satire, especially in a free society: If you are going to write it, you got to have the guts to put your name on it.

That Dan Lyons, and increasingly scores of others on the Web, have abandoned that code not only brands them as gutless cowards but represents a nasty new trend. It is one thing for some troll out there to take verbal sniper shots at people in the news, but it is another for a professional journalist to anonymously act out his private grudges, no matter how clever and amusing the prose.

And of course it also begs one more important question: How much did folks at Forbes know?

This work is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone, once called the Boswell of Silicon Valley, is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News, as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world's largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is best-known as the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the bestselling "Virtual Corporation." Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." He has been the ABCNEWS.com Silicon Insider columnist since 2000.