Nice Haircut

Nice Haircut

I think one of the big problems of the next ten years is going to be the collision between people’s “internet lives” and their real lives. Besides Jeff Gannon and Mark Foley, here’s another example of internet activity coming back to haunt you… and this time it’s not from a Republican politician! It seems that under anonymity even respected hardened executives (and the writer mentioned below) turn into the equivalent of any other forum boob.

… John Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods Market, who used a fictional identity on the Yahoo message boards for nearly eight years to assail competition and promote his supermarket chain’s stock, according to documents released last week by the Federal Trade Commission.

Mr. Mackey used the online handle “Rahodeb” (an anagram of his wife’s name, Deborah). In one Internet posting sure to enter the annals of chief-executive vanity, Mr. Mackey wrote as Rahodeb, “I like Mackey’s haircut. I think he looks cute!”

UPDATE: Here’s another NYTimes story from a while back featuring a New Republic writer who had the same problem:

The user named sprezzatura, an Italian term for studied carelessness, posted comments that were hyperbolic even in the blogging environment. After readers criticized Mr. Siegel for his post about the host of “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart, sprezzatura wrote: “Siegel is brave, brilliant and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep.” (A later comment deplored other readers’ “inability to withstand a difference in taste without resorting to personal insult.”)