Welp , I ’m glad to say that the Things Have formally Gotten Out Of Hand light I buy on headroom from Radio Shack last year is work flawlessly . It started blinking a few months ago , just before the phone rang and I find myself talk toThe Wall Street Journaland being inquire point - clean if I am The Fake Steve Jobs .

The newsman got my headphone number from a pal of mine at the newspaper . Under the circumstances , I felt that I had to answer his interrogation truthfully and uniquely , irrespective of the consequences .

To my surprisal , whatever he had planned to write did n’t get write . The tilt ploughed onward and upward and I ’ve had to supersede the medulla oblongata on the THOGOoH indicant about every nine day since .

As many of you know , some enterprising and enthusiastic individual commence up a blog last year entitled “ The Secret Diary Of Steve Jobs , ” authored by The Fake Steve Jobs .

Might I say that it ’s a fine web log and both Bona - Fide Steve Jobs and Perhaps Not Interesting Enough To Bother Parodizing Bill Gates are counted among its readers .

And whoever this bastard Steve somebody is , you certainly ca n’t fault this person for a lack of creativity or mongoose - alike perspicaciousness . If you knowingly ordered a cup of tea that was listed on the Olive Garden ’s carte as “ Not veridical Beef , Not Even By Federal School Lunch Standards ” and then you tried to sue the eatery because the clobber triggered your allergy to raccoon protein , Judge Judy would be correct to laugh you right out of her fake courtroom .

The “ Andy Ihnatko Is imitation Steve ” meme started make traction back in October , I opine . Since then , I ’ve been asked The Question by theJournal , Forbes , Business Week , Wired , and every other serious and quasi - serious tech tidings site you could observe . The publishing house of my tech books — not just some random editor , but the one guy with the title of Publisher — necessitate me . Even my friends have gotten in on the act . At first , they ’d ask The Question and it would be good for a laugh ( as well as a innocent round of drinkable , if I played it right ) . now , they might still ask in gag , but it ’s accompanied by one of those odd stare that suggests that they ’ve crank their personal asdic to maximum to attempt to notice any sort of catch in my laugh that might serve as a tipoff .

( Which have in mind that the reward for wager my response correctly is maybe ducking out on the whole dinner party baulk . )

When the public started to yoke me to Fake Steve , I could afford to be a chip demure about this picky matter . Then , I inflict a codification of strict radiocommunication quiet on the matter . I offer no response to the requests for interview about it , and if I ’m corner , then I say “ no comment . ”

So why did I hold toan audience with Valleywagrecently ?

It ’s my error : they caught me in a infirm moment . I ’d just fall home from my first appearance on a lively home web break of day show that did n’t involve my standing behind a barricade madly wave a mark reading “ LOVE atomic number 92 PAULA / AMERICAN IDOL # 1 . ” So when I got an IM from a Valleywag author who claimed to be a fan of my oeuvre and requested a schmoose , my ego say “ Sure ! ” about a rip - second before more noetic sector of the group O occur online and said “ Crap , this is believably go to be another Fake Steve fishing outing , is n’t it ? ”

But no trauma was done . I distinguish him outright that I did n’t think to give any substantive answers to any Fake Steve enquiry , which in effect nullified the entire interview … even when he asked me a doubt specifically project to fume out Fake Steve or rule me out as a suspect for undecomposed . He asked me something that only the Real Fake Steve would know , something that phony Steve had once tell him ..

I acknowledge the right reply . But I was able to give him an alternative response that was both completely truthful and entirely evasive .

“ Why not just flat - out deny being Fake Steve ? ” you ’re wondering . Well , there ’s really no point to that . As I explicate to Valleywag — and I ’m not sure that they followed the logic — is there really any scenario in which that would make gumption ? There are only two possibility here . Either I ’m Fake Steve , in which case I would require to shake off the great unwashed off the fragrance , or I’mnothim , in which instance I certainly would n’t lie about that if asked point - blank and on the record book , would I ?

See ? serve that question is a lose - lose . No matter what I say , I ’m sort of confirming whatever ratiocination people have already reached .

But now , it feels like even saying dead nothing about Fake Steve is no longer the right answer . Being coy is just serious neat mischief , and being silent is every American ’s option ( except in those countries in South America where that ’s the sort of thing that gets the Government so tempestuous that they split up out the bike battery and the jumper cable ) . At this stage , though , it feels like a certain corner has been turn and that in another calendar month or so keeping this thing up would require that I start being outright Deceptive about it .

The admission

So at long last , here you go :

I ’m not Fake Steve .

I ’ll even go so far as to spray - paint that statement gold , and cover up it with glitter . I say this here and now , without a single wink or ironic note : I’m not him . I had nothing to do with the web log ’s creation and have never had the slightest thing to do with any of its subject matter . reliable , I advisedly Michael Moored my way through the Valleywag consultation ( choosing my answers carefully to make precisely the impression I need to make without being pin down in an out - and - out Trygve Lie ) , but I think you may separate by this paragraph that I ’m leaving myself absolutely no wiggle - room for future justifications or apologies .

For safe metre , I will point out that I have specifically chosen to have this statement print on Macworld.com alternatively ofmy personal blog . They ’re give me for this and I tell them in advance what I ’d be telling you sept . So if I am indeed lying to Macworld just to kick the spot away from me , then man alive , in addition to committing a rather upsetting honourable transgression that will impact whatever reputation I might have work up up as a journalist , and in add-on to burning a bridge circuit that has remained intact for ( good Lord ) more than 15 years , they can sue me for the money they paid me plus all of the ad revenue that they ’d be forced to give back when word ultimately fuck off out .

( My accepting a tick for this also means , woefully , that I shall lastly be able to give that Nikon 18 - 200 mm VR lense I ’ve been eyeing ever since I buy myself a Nikon D80 . But I shall conduct it ; my strength is as the intensity of ten men , for my soul is pure . )

Cool .

Oh , how do I do it the right answer to Valleywag ’s “ smoke hitman ” query ?

Fake Steve and I have been swapping e - mails .

Nice bozo , that Fake Steve . I would co - sign up a bogus car loanword for him in a heartbeat .

Going public about all of this is a bit of a letdown for me , of class , because every time someone came up with a new musical composition of damnatory evidence link up me to Fake Steve ( or dismissing said link as rubbish ) it ’s been pretty goddam fun :

“ false Steve ca n’t possibly be Andy Ihnatko ; Andy is actuallyfunny . ”I enjoy this one and forwarded it to my momma .

“ Andy Ihnatko ca n’t maybe be Fake Steve ; FSJ is actuallyfunny . ”My Mom send on this one to me , using it as ammunition in her on-going crusade to convince me to quit this penning occupation , snub my hair , shave off my sideburn , and take a nice , stable spear loading motortruck at the FedEx store , like my cousin Hal .

“ imitation Steve use lots of Britishisms , just like Andy . ”This was a pretty secure one , though I think in truth you ’ll receive that both Fake Steve and I and about 20 per centum of all function writers are either large buff of P.G. Wodehouse or were influenced by author who were themselves influenced by Wodehouse . Which amount to think of it is more like 99.3 percent of the population .

I do travel to London every time someone ’s willing to pick my expense ( which has been fairly often , God hallow ’em ) . But I had to calculate up “ chav ” to decide if it was either one of those words that was so ginchy that I must employ it in every third conviction I ever compose ( pancreatic fibrosis . “ Ginchy ” ) , or something so foul that I ’d ignorantly seek to apply it in print and shortly face such an straightaway collapse of my composition business that I ’d have to be fitted for a pair of blue striped shorts and start carpooling with my cousin-german .

“ Andy has never blogged about Fake Steve ; Fake Steve has never mentioned Andy . ”Well , I rarely blog about tech - link material . Yellowtext is for other intention ; in fact , on those rare occasions when I ’ve found myself blogging about something in the tech industry I usually wind up turning it into a newspaper column or else .

“ Fake Steve ’s IP address retrace back to a Verizon box seat in the Boston area ; Andy lives in Boston . ”Yeah , someone buy the farm and laid a short honeypot for our boy . They set up a webpage that could only be accessed by a special link that was only sent to Fake Steve , and then they tally the waiter logs to see where the HTTP postulation came from .

Which just seems sporting , you acknowledge .

Or terribly effective . Admittedly , they got some hard intel out of the op , but having an IP address without feature a limited list of suspect to compare it against is only marginally more useful than knowing that Fake Steve own a calculator and seems to have some variety of approach to the Internet . Particularly given that it probably was n’t even a static IP address to begin with .

This does n’t quite qualify as a Dark Turn , but the whole Hunt For Fake Steve is now emphatically a refinement closer to#000000than it was a few workweek ago . It ’s the starting line of a long path that finish with Fake Steve Detector Vans slowly vagabond the street and that ’s really no good for anybody .

For the sake of completeness , I should tell you that there were other rationality for this disclosure . My inter-group communication to imitation Steve — though incorrect — was starting to become Common Knowledge and I had some real problems with people make that assumption . Allowing this misconception to snowball was n’t as bad as take credit for Fake Steve ’s success , but it sure was n’t just .

Plus : Fake Steve can be a real meanie sometimes . I did n’t want to take credit forthat , either .

Which is n’t a slam against the blog . false Steve is openly promoted as an entirely fictitious character and it ’s impossible for a fictional lineament to strike with the intention of truly wounding . Plus , hell , I ’m sometimes just as meanspirited in my columns . I was the gentleman’s gentleman who wrote that using the Microsoft Zune player is “ about a pleasant as cause an airbag deploy in your face . ” For this and other wickedness , when the ballgame ’s all over I shall surely be reach a Zune and a Windows XP machine and told that these will be my lonesome reference of amusement during my millenia in Purgatory .

( I also murder a balloon vendor near the Central Park Reservoir back in ’ 92 , so Isupposeit all comes out even , just.)[Local authorities , you know where to meet us . — Ed . ]

Anyway , it really , really bothered me to call up that there might be mass out there who believed that I was write “ safe ” things under my substantial name and was issue high-risk and smutty clobber behind the rubber of an alias . You engender ta say what you got ta say , but the price of that freedom is attach your name and your repute to it and dealing with the repercussions … which is what I do .

The other Fake Steves

So if it ’s not me , then whoisFake Steve ? I dunno . To tell the truth , I really have n’t given it much cerebration . There ’s no pillage for figuring it out , you know . It ’s not like Fake Steve buried a lucky hare encrusted with gems in an earthen sens somewhere , to become the belongings of either Eternity or the first soul to right gig out his or her Mastercard number .

Nope , the playfulness of Fake Steve ’s blog is in celebrating the cultural phenomenon of Bona - Fide Steve Jobs as a cartoon character . Because the BFSJ that ’s emerged in the pop consciousness has about as much intersection with the actual , private one as the toon interlingual rendition of Optimus Prime has with one of theactualTransformers .

Do n’t get me wrong . I ’m not suggest that the CEO of Apple is in reality a underweight - look guy from Manitoba and that the guy rope we ’ve seen in all of the keynotes is just a remarkable animatronic operate internally by five expertly - train ducks . I ’m saying that like FSJ and BFSJ are much alike . They both carefully protect their true identity from public scrutiny , and any attempt to guess at who “ the substantial Steve ” is is inevitably going to go down in low unsuccessful person . It ’s well - known that Steve ’s personal biography is the third rail of news media : you tinge it and you die . And it would n’t be one of those “ Tsk - tsk … so tragic , and so unseasoned ! ” ace , either . Digging into that sort of thing is true Darwin Award material , mightily up there with believing that the augury “ mellow - f number TURBINE IMPELLER ; KEEP AT LEAST THIRTY fundament off ” bear the implied postscript “ … UNLESS YOU HAVE A Citrullus vulgaris AND AN IDEA FOR AN AWESOME YOUTUBE VIDEO . ”

And candidly , I do n’t manage about BFSJ ’s personal animation , either . The 1990 ’s were chockablock with tech chief executive officer who desperately wanted to explain to interviewer that they ’re avid bookman of the same ancient school of kickboxing practice by the Turkish privy police ; or that they compile vintage toasters ; or that they have n’t break anything orange since they were 11 years old because they ’re such wacky New Economy costless - spirit . They were so heart-to-heart about their personal lives because they desperatelydid notwant the interviewers to ask itchy interrogative sentence like “ So , excuse to me why the metre is right-hand for an online store that only sells trampoline . ”

If BFSJ has any talk to do , he does it through his functions as the head of his caller . What I want as a journalist and a consumer is an iPhone . I have no use for a press release about a chief executive officer ’s plan to become the first man to ascend Everest in a Santa Claus costume .

But folks are n’t quite satisfied with BFSJ ’s flakey “ My personal life is nobody ’s byplay ” position . So the nerd residential district put at least three or four Fake Steve Jobses into play before anybody think to trademark the terminal figure and start up a blog . There ’s :

Edison Steve , a man of untrammeled engineering brilliance who dig in his alone basement lab night and daytime before emerging , triumphant and disheveled , with a handbuilt iPod Exo prototype ; it is operational and complete , save up for a paddleboat - regulate case to be designed by Jonathan I ve ( based on sketch Steve throw together during the campaign back to the office ) ;

Lofty Steve , who , like the Coca - Cola Company , would like to learn the globe to sing in perfect harmony . Except his mechanics for compel the major planet to give to the precepts of compassion and empathy demand the Intel Core Duo central processor and the H.264 codec or else of phosphoric acid and caramel coloring ;

Palpatine Steve , who makes compelling public speeches about maintaining a beneficent and steady manus on the great ship of diligence and lead the Republic to a novel Enlightened Age , while all the time he ’s test to decide whether the two Jedi he ’s got chain up in the Imperial hoy have merited the lightning - bolts - from - the - hand discourse or if he can get away with just boot out them into infinite before making the jump to lightspeed ;

Howard Hughes Steve , whom you suspect has a few mayonnaise jars full of urine stored discreetly here and there around the Apple campus ;

And let ’s not overlook the silliest — and perhaps the most popular — one :

I’m - Sure - If - I - Ever - Met - Him - We’d - Be - Like - full - Best - supporter - Because - We’re - So - Alike Steve . The Steve who remember that cool tech is awesome , and who was emotional to be one of the first people to ride a Segway , and who istotallyinto U2 and cartoons , and …

In this utter vacuum of personal entropy , with a world so eager to believe that the image that they ’ve conjured up is in fact the real thing , it was inevitable thatsomebodywould lie title to the imitation Steve name as well as the tee - shirt revenue . I ’m just a minuscule embarrassed that I did n’t think of it first .

I do insist that there ’s really no benefit to squirreling out Fake Steve ’s true identicalness . But sure , part of the fun of the Fake Steve game is indeed the guesswork , so I ’ll end this bit by suggest one name as a possible suspect :

Meghan Yan .

I ’m not sure that any of you might have heard of her . in reality , I ’ve no estimate if she ’s even a author . I have n’t seen her in , like , twenty days or something . But back in gamey school , I asked her out to the Spring Formal and she shot me down so violently and creatively that a fundraising campaign was quickly set up and a bronze memorial tablet was mounted on the spot where it fall out . Every year on the day of remembrance , a small relegating of local dignitaries set a lei .

So Meghan , if you ’re reading this : if you ’d beenjust a little bit nicerabout it way back then , maybe now you would n’t be duck IMs from Business Week today .

Revenge is a saucer best serve ( et cetera et cetera ) .

[ Andy Ihnatko is a engineering science columnist and writer whose employment appear on a regular basis Macworld , MacUser.com , and elsewhere . He is also technology columnist for the Chicago Sun - Times . ]