An Artist Is Creating a Facebook ‘Army’ Out of Dead Soldier's Names

Constant Dullaart is resurrecting an army in order to wage a war against Facebook. Why? He's fed up with the social media giant's commodification of our identities and lives.

Dullaart, a Dutch artist, is compiling thousands of fake Facebook profiles based on the names of dead soldiers from the state of Hesse, whom the British paid to fight in the US revolution in the 18th century.

"We're now in this social media revolution, which is run by these American corporations," Dullaart told me over the phone. "I thought it would be interesting to bring these identities back to life."

The idea behind Dullaart's project is to challenge the way Facebook commodifies user identities and to subvert its real-name policy, which demands that users only use their true identities. Dullaart wants to create up to 20,000 fake profile accounts. So far, he has 1,000, which he made by buying up phone numbers and internet proxies in bulk.

An exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle Gallery in Frankfurt entitled The Possibility of an Army shows the early stages of Dullaart's project.

Dullaart knows, however, that his fake soldier army will be vulnerable to attack.

"Facebook is continuously on the hunt to close down these types of profiles. […] It will kill off a lot of these soldiers," said Dullaart.

Dullaart is against what he calls Facebook's use of "quantified social capital." This is basically the way the social media giant lets you build your personal online brand and identity around the amount of "likes" your pictures receive, the number of people who follow you, and the things that you tell the platform about yourself. All this information, according to Dullaart, can be pillaged by the tech giant to make more money, for example by targeting advertising.

"But I'm trying to highlight that there is an enormous industry out there that thrives on circumventing these rules," he continued, and pointed to the industry of low-wage labourers in the developing world who create fake profiles or likes for people in wealthier countries to buy up for marketing purposes. "We're supporting all this by using Facebook."

Last year, Dullaart bought two and half million fake Instagram followers and selected 30 accounts from leading figures in the art world such as Ai Weiwei that he could plonk them onto.

"I thought it would be a good thing to publicly manipulate and alter these figures so that people would become more aware of the dark side of social media," said Dullaart who equalized the follower numbers of his selected accounts so that they all had 100,000 followers each.

"It's quite easy to manipulate these figures but there are still an enormous amount of people who believe that these numbers are real. I think that it's supporting a false economy of social media," said Dullaart.