We can define “fake culture” as one of the most updated “detournement” embodiment, a concept periodically (re)discovered by artists. Facilitated by both the infinite possibilities of coding and the ocean of data on the net, a fake plays with the economy of attention struggling to be legitimated by enough online spectators. Fake is a fake by the Italian group Les Liens Invisibles is the ultimate tactical tool to fight against the online corporate media colonization of such attention. Using the very popular Wordpress blog standard the project is aimed to build and, even more, to share templates that very closely resembles famous online media. In its very first release there are GPL licensed templates resembling the Financial Times, The White House, Le Figaro, La Repubblica, the German Federal Chancellor website, l’Osservatore Romano (the official Vatican newspaper, homage at the historical 0100101110101101.org vaticano.org fake), the Elysee and the WTO (another homage to the Yesmen and their WTO official website fake made with their Reamweaver “parodyware”).

Naturally coupling these running files with a nice domain can easily do the job (actually the result is a sarcastic http://financialtimes.isafake.org for example). The duplication of digital information on one hand has already celebrated the death of the “original”, and on the other hand it pushes on the impossibility of establishing quickly the information sources reliability. Reappropriating mainstream communication spaces and manipulating it extensively means not only to play with its corporate aesthetics, but also to make their established popular identity more fragile. In the daily media hype smorgasbord, the “perception” is what rules on the web economy of attention, so a fake proliferation, that could be triggered by projects like this, can seriously start to question the media veneration by the masses. In 1976 the Italian visionary political zine A/traverso published an inspiring article entitled “false information produce real events”. Should we assume then that a different reality is just ready to strike back? - Fake is a fake, false information produce real events, Neural.