Surfing the blogroll, I found myself on Helen DeWitt’s page and noticed the link to the Joshua Clover, alias Jane Dark. I hadn’t checked out Clover for awhile (see my reactions here and here), so I decided to head on over.

Here’s what it looked like:

“The case against the Federal minimum wage,” huh? That surprised me, as I had the vague impression that Clover was on the far left of the American political spectrum. But I guess he could have some sort of wonky thing going on, or maybe there’s some unexpected twist? It seemed a bit off of Clover’s usual cultural-criticism beat, so I clicked through to take a look . . . and it was just a boring set of paragraphs on the minimum wage.

Hmmmm. I went back to the homepage, looked around more carefully, and realized that the blog is fake, the online equivalent of those fake book spines that are used to simulate rows of books on a bookshelf.

I don’t know what happened. My guess is that Clover got tired of blogging and let the domain name lapse, and then some loser entrepreneur noticed it was still getting some hits (from DeWitt’s blog?) so they put up a fake blog.

I can only assume it was all done automatically? Somebody has a webcrawler that looks for dead sites with links, then buys them up for something close to $0 and fills ’em with crap? Yuck.