artifice - noun - clever devices used to trick or deceive (Google).
Let's face the music and accept that for whatever reason(s), human beings embrace the concept of deception. And now that the Internet (via social media) has opened the backstage door for endless opportunities for a little or a lot of artifice, no one is safe from scammers, or in my case, ordinary people pretending to be rock stars.
Because I am in the music business along with just about everyone else, I have to spend time on social media just advertise my original songs and get them circulating among listeners throughout the globe. Although I am a minuscule presence on TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Linked-In, Facebook, I try to post at least three times a week to generate a following, which isn't easy as there are 100,000 songs released on the music streaming channels daily and 100,000 artists promoting them. Apparently as FB is the medium of choice for celebrities, more grifters use it to impersonate them than any other platform. I am lucky because the con artists who hit on me generally do not want money; they just want to take me to bed. Case in point, one man, who just happens to have the name Christopher Cross like the musician (who is actually the real imposter since his surname isn't actually Cross) tried to impersonate him in order to trick me into meeting him. Fortunately, I was onto him right from the start. Just in case this should ever happen to you (maybe on YouTube in the comments section), an authentic celebrity would never ask you when you became his or her fan. And most likely as an icebreaker, he or she would never thank you for being his or her fan. I know from experience that unless they are extreme narcissists, celebrated people tend to want to step away from themselves for a few and come across as being average. So it was clear that Chris wasn't the celebrated Chris since he made the mistake of doing what all trolls do initially: he asked, "How long have you been my fan?" (I replied, "I've never been your fan." Oh, well. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.)
Of course, it is true that there are famous types out there who do interface with fans and do use artifice (such as different names) so that they don't attract attention. I am contending with someone right now who claims to be Micheal Philip Jagger, which is Mick Jagger's full name. Even though he has the blue checkmark verifying his identity, my daughter claims that he is in no way real, mainly because eighty-year-old men don't know how to navigate FB. Sensible, smart she contends that Mick no doubt has troops of well-paid assistants assigned to connect with the public on social media. The real Mick, romantically linked to a thirty-six-year-old dancer, would not have a second to reach out to me. Which all makes sense, yet this inchoate swindler is atypical so far. Like Macbeth and most politicians after him, Micheal could just be quite good at duplicity until some day, his artifice is exposed as such, and he is uncovered and cancelled (the beauty of social media).
On the other hand, I did read an article on the web stating that you can never truly be sure whether or not you are being hoodwinked. It is possible that the person is indeed the person he or she says he or she is. Just make sure you don't wire any money to him or her and you don't friend him or her. As far as my Micheal, I am playing his game, pretending I don't realize that he is attempting to be Mick. And I am acting as though I am the bigger celeb whose privacy is kept private. In the end, the greater pretender will win, I suppose, if there can be a winner at shenanigans. Let's put it this way, if the actual Mick should die, and Micheal keeps liking my posts, I'll have my answer. (I hope it doesn't come down to that, though, because I am Mick's fan.)
The obvious paradoxical takeaway here is that sometimes you have to be deceptive in order to expose deception. Truth doesn't come easily.
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