Pop historian warns of Internet fallacies

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Seife is witty on the many varieties of sock puppetry, the dismal online art of pretending to be, for personal gain, someone other than who you are. One variety of this is to cower under a pseudonym while shivving your enemies.

Witness the British historian Orlando Figes, who attacked his rival's books on Amazon, while writing glowing reviews of his own. He was found out and humiliated, and he agreed to pay damages to some of his victims.

Then there are sock puppeteers who fabricate phony personas to acquire authority or sympathy. It has become so common for bloggers to fabricate young people with terrible diseases, the author notes, that this syndrome now has a name - "virtual factitious disorder" or "Munchausen by Internet".

Seife sums up how these stories tend to go: "Create a sock puppet or two, give it a tragic problem that will garner sympathy and then commit 'pseuicide'. It's almost guaranteed to cause a big stir."

Seife also dilates here upon scam artists, photo manipulators, flash trading on the stock market and the promulgation of "bimbots" (fake online women created to lure lonely men).

Despite his many dire warnings, Seife hasn't given us a soggy litany of complaints. For one thing, he's very often quite surreally funny. "Like the mythical oozlum bird, Wikipedia seems to have the ability to fly around in ever decreasing circles until it flies right up its own rectum," he writes.

For another, he finds much more to like than dislike about the Web. He puts his central concern this way: "Digital information gives power to the people, but it gives even more to those who prey upon us."