OK, one more from April Fool's, another social hack: A LiveJournal user, Moroveus decided to lodge a kind of distributed protest on April Fool'sfirst called Operation Fuck with the LJ Christians and later renamed Operation Jour de Poisson; the prank was a comment on the recent Pledge of Allegiance lawsuit. Here is his To Do list detailing the mechanics of the prank: Then, on April Fool's, he replaced the original root image with this one:
Hilarity ensued. The joke is topological (and who doesn't love a good social topology joke?) -- Moroveus was using personal behavior to insert himself into a number of situations he ordinarily wouldn't frequent, using behaviors he knew would get him included as a member in good standing. And then, when he was in all those different situations, he switched to a broadcast topology, taking advantage of the fact that a single image change would suddenly cause a message to appear in many different places at the same time. It's akin to that moment in Flatland where the inhabitants of the flatland world perceive a hand moving through their two-dimensional environment as a series of disconnected dots (the fingers, though the residents of a 2D plan experience them as irregular ovals) which are mysteriously connected somehow. In this case, Moroveus was for most of the prank moving though separate "worlds" as an individual, and then, when needed, he was able to act across all those social dimensions in an instant. There's also a discussion about it on the blog_sociology community on LJ.