-Bill Bradley, Vanity Fair

By Anaiis Flox

Rebecca Mark’s alleged affair with Jeff Skilling still fuels a healthy share of boardroom fantasies. Vanity Fair was responsible for bringing the gossip to my attention; ironically, that was also the last thing I read from the illustrious publication. It simply stopped engaging me at some point—long before someone associated with VF told me I was too politically conservative and sexually deviant (“i.e., too Republican”) for the mag.
I listed them on my blogroll for a while in the early 00s, mostly because I didn’t know how to use blogrolls then and thought for some incomprehensible reason that they should reflect my magazine subscriptions. As with my subscriptions, the link to VF sat there collecting dust until I eventually cleaned house and threw it out.

I’m an ADD info-whore and scandal-monger, a true product of the blogosphere’s anarchic, vitriolic, infotainment-driven citizen journalism. I want the story as it breaks, right or wrong, tangled in LOLspeak right in the palm of my hand in 140 characters or less. My Twitter stream, composed of a wild mix of web 2.0 pioneers and enthusiasts, kawasakied bloggers, graphic designers, relationship columnists and porn stars is a personalized aggregator of everything I feel I need to know (and a whole lot of things I don’t, but I’m a firm believer in oversharing).

It was through Twitter that I found out about Bill Bradley, an editorial assistant at Vanity Fair who’d been challenged to collect 10,000 fans for the mag on Facebook. Like most things on the internet, it’s lame and pointless and absolutely brilliant as a publicity stunt.

“It will be as aggravating and intrusive as everything else on Facebook,” Bradley wrote on a post in the VF Daily blog. “I will exploit all the technologies at mankind’s disposal, not to mention my close friends and family members. I will befriend people that I clearly don’t know. I will hand out fliers in Times Square. And I will paste my sorry, hopeless face, pale with desperation, on telephone poles around New York City. I will doubtless squander what little self-respect I have left.”

It all fit the Julia Allison business model, down to the in-the-flesh demonstration on Times Square. An avid fan of the microfame game myself, I couldn’t resist. I joined right away.

Sadly, Bradley would never match Julia Allison, not least of all because he would look ridiculous in a top made of Trojan magnums. All the efforts of an unusually friendly Gawker (which gave him close to 100 words), YouTube (which featured Bradley’s video), Graydon Carter’s Waverly Inn (which donated a dinner to the cause, which went on to get Bradley a mention in New York Magazine), etc., could not make enough hype. As of today, Vanity Fair has only 7,276 fans on Facebook.

Of course, like everyone else in the “Gawker crowd,” I’d totally forgotten about Bradley by July and didn’t think of him until Greg Oguss mentioned I was a VF fan on Facebook in his charming little diatribe on the fall of the publication—how Oguss knows about this, I have no idea, as we unfriended each other all over the web after I told him I have no patience for clit-teases. ZOMG, you guys, what would I do without my online stalkers? Maybe I should accept the Facebook friend request he sent me when he came crawling back a few weeks ago so that he can help me keep that profile up to date.

Speaking of which: since Bradley’s deadline was yesterday, I can now safely remove myself as a fan of VF and find some other sad cause to whore on Facebook, like David Armano’s bear—come join me! What? We’re not Facebook friends yet? We totes should be! I post n00dz.

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