Brilliant: Fake Steve Jobs Fakes Apple Shutdown Drama

I can’t be 100% certain, but I’ll wager that Dan Lyons, AKA Fake Steve Jobs, is staging what, if it does turn out to be fake, one of the most brilliant bits of satire since A Modest Proposal.

Fake Steve has been posting today about receiving an offer from Apple to shut down The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs through a settlement similar to the one that resulted in the shut down of Think Secret. This post was followed by a series claiming that Apple was pissed at him for posting about the discussion in public, and was now threatening to sue him to shut down the blog. He even claims that Apple sent him a list of all his assets, with the implied threat that they would wipe him out:

And then, I swear to friggin God, there’s a list of my assets with an estimated value for each and I suppose the implied threat that I stand to lose them. Which kinda scares the living shit out of me, to be honest, since they’ve got a pretty thorough list, which means they’ve been doing some research on this and the offer didn’t just come out of thin air. Their lists includes my home address, most recent assessed value of my house and all the information about my mortgage; a rental property that we own; my bank accounts and investment accounts, including the college funds for our kids, whose names are used; and our boat and two cars.

Dan claims he can’t afford a lawyer and that he can’t ask the Electronic Frontier Foundation to represent him as they did Think Secret because of the post he did the day before skewering them for facilitating a settlement that resulted in Think Secret getting shut down.

I’ll admit, he had me going. The guy is a master. Until I read this comment in the most recent open comments post:

Alright commentards, you all are a huge bunch of idiots, fools, and hypocrites. This is so obviously fake. Don’t you get it??? Jesus people, everything on this blog has been a parody, a satire, a joke. What evidence do you have that this is real? None.

Doh!

What other evidence is there that this drama is fake, beyond FSJ being a fake satire blog? Well, for one thing, Dan did a rippingly funny post about an Apple “blogger amnesty program” to cut other “deals” with rogue blogs like Think Secret.

And there’s one other teeny bit of evidence that Dan Lyons is currently laughing his ass off at the outpouring of support for his “plight” — the Fake Steve Jobs blog is owned by Forbes.com!!! Don’t you think they have lawyers?

Brilliant, Dan, mind-blowingly brilliant.