A Walk on The Shady Side

After featuring Twitter last month, it seems appropriate to feature a project which engages with that medium, although it ends up producing something wholly more sinister.

You may be familiar with Ron T. Beck from Facebook, where the fictional character has been active for several years, subverting the social networking site by attending every event and leaving cryptic status updates (and once being banned for inciting terrorist activity). He also pops up in other places occasionally, on YouTube and on a blog he ran for a while. Whether these fragments can add up to an artwork is up for debate, but I think over time it has become one of the rarer of digital projects: one that isn't about the medium exclusively. Recently, and understandably considering its explosion, he has started posting on Twitter, where his pithy 140 character statements play somewhere in between spy narrative and creepy real life security go-to guy.

The narrative aspect of Beck's tweets adds a sense of verisimilitude, lending the character a certain lifelikeness, in sharp contrast to the random links and statements that constitutes much of Twitter. This lifelikeness gives it an eeriness, similar to a doll wetting itself and croaking for mama. Ron T. Beck is a sort of international dirty salesman, hawking weapons in Korea, oil pipes in Russia and every sort of non-specific creepy thing in between that marks the dark side of the capitalist power system. But far from being a spy story driven by plot, Beck's Twitter narrative ranges to the more philosophical and iconic, with post such as:

Parts the blind, peers out. A man has been in the phone booth all day. Another of Vlad's goons? Shrugs his shoulders, leaves via the basement

and:

Is staying in the Orbita Hotel 39 Pushkin Ave, Minsk contact me on ext 216 or meet me in the Laguna club after 11pm local time.

are punctuated with revelations like:

Everything else aside he just seems to exude a profound sadness.

and:

Has all his desires clustered into a single surface, sometimes it is just not enough.

It's a good reminder, if you follow it, that the dark side is far away from all of us.