Scientific Hoax as a Technology of Resistance
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fake virus warning emails and UN petitions, are patterned after the technology of
the computer virus rather than the steam engine as they use the very information
systems they infiltrate to disseminate a very different message than the one
intended by the system administrators. But whatever the pattern for the hoax, the
embarrassment it produces always comes with an indirect social message. For a
scientific media hoax, the indirect message is always some version of the
following: “You think science will save us from ourselves, but it’s only an
illusion.” The “reality” that the hoaxer wishes to instill in place of the illusion of
popular science in the American imagination varies with the political and social
agendas of each hoaxer.
In the nineteenth century the big scientific media hoaxers were Edgar
Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and Dan De Quille. Poe wished to embarrass his readers
for their patronage of scientists instead of artists. He also wished to substitute for
the dominant Baconian model of scientific inquiry his own imaginative model as
outlined in Eureka. Mark Twain had a slightly different axe to grind in his
scientific hoaxing. He wished to sensitize readers to their subscription to the ideal
of American progress through industrialization—an ideal which, as graphically
illustrated in the “Sand-Belt” chapter of A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's
Court—actually resulted in the colonization and destruction of non-Westem
cultures. Twain’s social project in his hoaxing was not entirely humanitarian,
however. He also wished to establish himself, instead of the American scientist,
as the only true oracle through which readers could divine the social reality of
America.
The hoaxing of Dan De Quille evolved even past Twain’s on the social
continuum. After Twain returned East, De Quille stayed on in the West for
almost thirty years and wrote probably a few dozen hoaxes about science