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 instability was not accidental. Most of it was method, though the process became deeply emotional. I was working inside a live digital environment as an amateur “sociologist” while declining to provide the full interpretive key. That choice was difficult but 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 falsities.

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

I was not running a prank, duping people for fun, or creating a fabrication. The project was never about fooling others in the cheap sense. It was about remaining private 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 your story before they actually have enough information to do so?

This 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 along those lines, though a label does not do the concept any favors. The work involved lived participation and plenty of naïve vulnerability as well. It was technically staged, but not in the form of fiction. It employed close observation, but not from a distance. I was knee-deep inside the field, as we all are in many ways. 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 in an art book at a furniture showroom 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 in various social settings. Cindy Sherman demonstrated that image does not reveal the self so much as trigger cultural scripts about it. What connects these practices is definitely not trickery for its own sake. It is the understanding that a curated exterior (or an obscure mask) 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 radical endeavor such as this one. Traditional art contexts leave open the possibility that the audience is encountering something staged, while 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 while in line at Whole Foods or horizontal in bed. In this case, a lack of explanation does not remain suspended long enough to be understood.

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 encourages illusions and produces situations in which people are sized up unfairly, too quickly, and with conviction. It leads viewers to believe that repeated exposure to the content of some random acquaintance is the same thing as knowing them personally. It trains them to treat chaos as evidence of a lack of emotional balance, feeling as fact, and visibility as intimate access. Once you understand that truth, the question no longer has to do with a person being authentic online. For me, the more interesting question is what kinds of interpretation the medium itself is creating, and at whose expense. McLuhan strikes again.

So yes, there was somewhat of a role involved. But “role” can mislead too, as it suggests that I stepped into a digital costume each day and knowingly delivered scenes to a phantom audience. It was murkier than that because the role itself was not separate from my identity. It was built from inexplicable circumstances 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 thunderstorms, 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 very unglamorous 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 inaccurate representations of users. They act on bodies, relationships, self-concepts, and reputations. 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, as it is necessary for understanding the body of work that has begun to emerge around it. What previously appeared as digital excess (or garbage) belongs to a longer and more complex composition.

That does not mean that every single moment was super calculated. Life (and research) 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 from 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 close proximity to categories that people often use lazily online which include irony, 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, now is the point at which earlier actions take on a new meaning.

They will not disappear now that the method has been 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 act conducted in a real social environment 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 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 mystery is profound, but because I believed in the work, which revealed something valuable about how people now interact with each other in our contemporary social world.

And now, we evolve.