Mysteries of the Internet:The Kaycee Affair
There's been a recent blogsplosion on Metafilter over the revelation that the supposed recent death from lukemia of a 19-year old weblogger named Kaycee was a hoax. As was her entire(ly web-based) life. She never existed, turns out – and the person or persons who created her personality for the "Living Colours" weblog which tracked her illness, published her poems, and so forth, is a riddle wrapped in an enigma; people all over the world had e-mail, IM, and even phone conversations with both the supposed dying teen and her supposed mother.
When Kaycee's "death" was announced about a week ago, there was a lot of grieving in weblogging circles – there was a note on Blogger about it, with a link to her site, which is where I first heard about it. But as more and more people who had communicated with Kaycee (hash marks around the name can be taken, I hope, as understood) tried to inquire where condolences should be sent in the physical world, and were rebuffed, suspiscions were shared, and this was more or less the picture that the people who were curious started to put together.
What I understand about the story-so-far emerges from the Metafilter threads on the subject, which begin here. I can't direct you to the original site, because the guy who was running it, a weblogger himself who was *apparently a hoax victim himself*, a has taken it down, upon getting an admission from the person who claimed to be the dying girl's mother. But I saw the site while it was still up, before the hoax was revealed, following a link from elsewhere. Rainbows and inspirational poetry: that sort of thing. I didn't read too deeply, nor linger too long, so I'm not a reliable source about what was on the site, but there was a long note from "Debbie" mentioning the girl's recent death, and how the family thanked everyone for support but would not be going into detail about how she'd finally died, or the funeral arrangements.
But there were a great number of people who had corresponded with Kaycee and even spoken with her on the phone, and they started sharing information, and bits and pieces didn't add up, and people started querying the guy who helped the mother publish the site. Some short amount of time later, a person whose name may or may not be Debbie Swenson posted her confession which said, in short, the persona of Kaycee was a composite of three people she had known who had died of cancer, and she created the site out of a misguided attempt to uplift and inspire. And now she'd rather not talk about it.
Posters on MetaFilter quickly established some reasons not to believe that's the end of the story – why, for example, would she carry on such an elaborate hoax over a period of apparently more than a year's time? There are "friends" of Kaycee's who emailed and instant-messaged (pardon the ugly, ugly neologism) with what they thought was this person: the effort involved to maintain the illusion would seem to have been burdensome to say the least.
Now MetaFilter itself is getting so many hits that its server is apparently down. There's nothing like the spectacle of a gruesome auto wreck to clog traffic.
Posted by B T at May 21, 2001 03:09 PM