The Fool’s Odyssey

Artwork by Andrew Riley

This essay was published on April Fool’s Day of 2026.

There is a difference between hiding and withholding.

Hiding tries to evade detection, and withholding delays explanation.

I chose the second.

What appeared online as inconsistency, theatrics, or unresolved contradiction was not always accidental. Most of it was method. I was working inside a live digital environment as an amateur social scientist while declining to provide the full interpretive key. That choice was intentional because it allowed me to observe what kinds of stories would be generated in the absence of transparency on a platform that rewards speed and false confidence.

This is the part that is easiest to misunderstand, so it is worth stating plainly.

I was not running a prank in any way, shape, or form. I was not trying to dupe people for fun, humiliate anyone, or fabricate a fake life. The project was never about fooling others in the cheap sense. It was about remaining mysterious inside a system that forces everyone toward disclosure, then watching what the system and its audience would do with that confusion. I was interested in the mechanics of interpretation under platform conditions. How quickly do people convert abstract clues into judgements? How much gets built from image, timing, tone, or omission, and how aggressively does a social platform train its users to complete the picture before they actually have enough information to do so?

That approach belongs to an older artistic and literary lineage, though the setting here was contemporary and unusually volatile. I’ve come to realize that the closest term is probably “durational auto-ethnographic performance” or something, though even that does not fully do it justice. The work involved lived participation, but not naïve vulnerability. It involved self-staging, but not pure fiction. It also involved close observation, but not from a distance. I was knee-deep inside the field. My own odyssey became part of the material.

There are precedents for this kind of operation. Sophie Calle used self-placement, surveillance, and delayed framing to turn ordinary social reality into rich narrative material. I adore Calle. I found her work on Wikipedia roughly two years ago and then forgot about her, only to return to her philosophies a little over a month ago as a guide for the exhibition of conceptual art. Adrian Piper used persona to show that identity is never just possessed but continually misunderstood and negotiated under social pressure. Cindy Sherman demonstrated that image does not reveal the self so much as trigger cultural scripts about it. What connects these practices is not trickery for its own sake. It is the understanding that a curated exterior can expose the assumptions of the viewer more effectively than a direct declaration ever could. As I learned in every writing class I ever took, “show, don’t tell.”

The difference is that my project did not unfold in a gallery, a film, or a book. It unfolded on the platform in question, which is a far less stable setting for a project such as this one. Traditional art contexts leave open the possibility that the audience is encountering something staged. Social media does the exact opposite. It totally collapses performance, confession, branding, desire, hostility, irony, and self-exposure et cetera into one feed, then asks everyone to interpret one another within seconds. Under those conditions, a lack of explanation does not remain suspended long enough to be contemplated. 

It gets converted almost immediately into false assumptions, which is human nature.

That conversion was part of what I was studying. A place like Instagram does not just display illusions. It produces conditions under which people are sized up too quickly, and with conviction. It encourages viewers to believe that repeated exposure is the same thing as understanding. It trains them to treat chaos as evidence, feeling as fact, and visibility as intimate access. Once you understand that, the question is no longer whether a person is being authentic online. The far more interesting question is what kinds of interpretation the medium itself is manufacturing, and at whose expense. McLuhan strikes again.

So yes, there was somewhat of a role involved. But “role” can mislead too, because it suggests something performative, as though I stepped into costume each day and knowingly delivered scenes to an audience. It was murkier than that because the role itself was not separate from my identity. It was built from a real situation, delicate emotions, and actual consequences. What made it a method was not that it was fake, but that it was carefully mapped out, comically in Canva. I allowed a gap to remain between what was visible and what was meant to be explained. That gap generated inference, which generated social reality, which generated monetizable data.

The cost of that choice was pretty major. One of the strangest things about doing this kind of work is that the more conceptually clear it becomes in retrospect, the less graceful it felt while living through it. Endurance is not glamorous from the inside. There were stretches of time in which maintaining the project required an insane amount of faith. Not faith in applause or vindication, but faith that the pattern would reveal itself, that the research would one day justify the discomfort of its own formation. There were consequences I anticipated, and others that took me by surprise like whiplash. Some forms of misreading were predictable, while others were painful. There is no clean way to remain under interpretation for that long without absorbing damage from it.

That damage does not invalidate the work. It was a sacrifice that informed the outcome.

If anything, it clarified the focal point of the project, which is that digital environments do not just circulate representations of users. They act on bodies, relationships, self-concepts, and (especially) reputations. To become an object of sustained interpretation inside such a system is to encounter its distortions firsthand. That was not always pleasant knowledge to acquire, but it was knowledge nonetheless.

This is why I resist the language of shame when describing what is being revealed now. Shame would suggest that the central issue was impropriety, as though the main drama was that I had concealed something morally compromising and now wished to clear my conscience. This is a methodological disclosure. I am naming the frame because the frame is now necessary for understanding the body of work that has begun to emerge around it. What previously appeared as contradiction or excess belongs to a longer and more complex composition.

That does not mean every moment was super calculated in some masterful sense, though it was on some level. Life is way messier than that, and I have zero interest in rewriting the past as omniscient design. But that does not mean the nature of the experiment was meaningless. It had a clear purpose that I had previously discussed at length with two trusted professors in college, and it was sustained for rational reasons. What looked from one angle like a scattered form of expression was a deep inquiry that had not yet been disclosed in such terms.

That is why I chose April Fool’s Day as the correct date for a plot twist.

This project is not a joke. For half a decade, the work lived in proximity to categories that people often use lazily online which include irony, instability, performance, volatility, unreliability, and spectacle. April Fool’s Day acknowledges that the project moved through the territory of the trick, while refusing the shallowness usually associated with tricks. It marks the moment when a silent riddle begins naming itself.

In that sense, this “reveal” is the point at which the earlier pieces take on a brand new meaning.

They did not disappear once the method was disclosed. Posts, silences, and tonal shifts that may have once seemed personal now sit inside a very different frame. Continuum bends backward, which matters because it is not only autobiographical. Instead, it is the point at which the narrative admits that it has been aware of its own construction.

And that, finally, is the clearest description I can give of the project for now. It was a digital performance conducted under real social conditions, using withheld information as both shield and instrument. It asked what a platform would do when it could not fully stabilize its subject and how audiences behave when forced to interpret without sufficient information — to be specific, they fill in the blank out of boredom or often insecurity. It also asked how much of online social reality is produced not by truth, but through these overconfident and slightly cruel guessing games. 

I was prepared for some of that. I was less prepared for how much perseverance it would require to continue once the emotional cost became undeniable. There were moments when the easiest thing would have been to end the experiment, explain everything, and try to reclaim my original narrative. I did not do that. I kept going. Not because suffering is noble, and not because mystery is profound, but because I believed the work was revealing something valuable about the conditions under which people now encounter one another in our contemporary social world.

And now, we evolve.