Monday April 04, 2005

UPDATE: The Truth About Toothing

“Toothy Toothing,” aka Ste Curran (who says he was but “part” of Toothy, the other part apparently being Simon Byron), admits to duping Wired and the rest. In response to an email from me—and to the slashdotting of my earlier post—the source of all the toothing tales pointed me to this page, where he tells how it all began, explaining how he and others invented toothing and its pied piper. There, he writes:

All we did was register a forum (which has now been taken down by the service provider, but we have a backup) and fill it with fictional posts by fictional Toothing ‘sceners. A week later, we had what appeared to be a vibrant UK Toothing community all ready to roll, and I sent the link off to Gizmodo, a gadget blog. They reported it (you can see that first story here, with a credit at the end to ‘S’, my super-subtle pseudonym). Everyone else linked to / blogged / ripped off their story. Things started to roll, and we became a ludicrous, implausible meme. In turn, that brought Real People to our forum. Others created forums for their localities—Sweden, Denmark, Italy, whatever.

Outlets that fell for it include Wired, Reuters, the BBC, and on and on. As “Toothy” says, “We kept a record at the start of where we were mentioned, but there were soon too many to record in full. There are hundreds of tiny anecdotes, though. I had to write Penthouse-letters-page style sexual adventure stories for a full page article and interview in The Telegraph.”

Posted by jim at 06:59 PM ||