Memorial Day Weekend was marked in the geek world by a stir over “Biggest Drawing in the World,” an advertising design project by Erik Nordenankar, a student at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm. The “drawing” was supposedly made by sending a GPS tracking device on a convoluted path around the world via DHL and then tracing its path on a map. Nordenankar created a website with sparse information about the project and a breezy YouTube video that “documents” his process:

To bring you up to speed, after an explosion of attention on technology blogs, it became clear that Nordenankar did not execute the plan—it was conceptual spec work done as a thesis of sorts. He’s added a statement explaining as much to the Biggest Drawing site. And thus the Internet became angry.

Some may find it distasteful that Nordenankar created a public site for his project without making the context clear. This was indeed a mistake. For me, though, it’s mitigated somewhat in that there’s no evidence Nordenankar sought out such wide publicity. The presentation is appropriate for its academic setting; did Nordenankar intentionally propagate it beyond that realm? Perhaps—maybe he got a little overzealous. We don’t know, and none of the journalists crying “hoax!” have made any effort to find out. Since a hoax, by definition, connotes an intention to deceive, you’d think they’d want to look into this.

I’m even less impressed by the righteous indignation from bloggers who are now flogging a student for publicity that they created. Among the standard-bearers of the vitriol is Engadget’s Joshua Fruhlinger, who first noted the drawing early Sunday morning.¹ Fruhlinger added an update soon after, when a reader directed him to Nordenankar’s Beckmans student profile. Fruhlinger’s update read:

Ah, well that explains why DHL went out of its way to do a bunch of backtracking loops over the ocean — it was an ad (supposedly in the name of art). From the “artist’s” site: “The best advertising is developed with society. using [sic] a GPs [sic] and the express shipping company DhL [sic], i [sic] drew a self-portrait on our planet. i [sic] used the technological aids of our time to make the world’s biggest drawing, along with advertising adapted to the contemporary era. a [sic] campaign the recipient wants to see and which is interesting enough for people to want to share it with their friends.” Way to sell out, Erik.

It’s difficult to exaggerate the level of dickishness in this screed. I had an especially hard time wrapping my head around the notion that when an advertising-design student designs an advertisement, this constitutes “selling out.” The sarcastic use of “[sic]” is also pretty galling for a publication that plays as fast and loose with the English language as Engadget. Note that as of this update, Fruhlinger still found the story credible enough to believe that DHL had performed “backtracking loops over the ocean.”

“We had a pretty good idea that not only was this whole ‘Biggest Drawing in the World’ business fake, but also impossible,” Fruhlinger wrote today, retroactively discovering that the tale didn’t pass muster with his keen investigative instincts. He also used the post to further condemn Nordenankar, and he tarred DHL with the same brush.²

I found Fruhlinger’s series of posts the ugliest (and most transparently ass-covering) writing on the topic, but he’s hardly the only one to work himself into a froth. Gizmodo’s Kit Eaton chimed in with “GPS-Tracked Biggest Drawing in the World is Complete Fake,” and hack247 offered up “World’s biggest GPS Drawing is a scam!”

My question is, why are we so eager to vilify Nordenankar? Are we that desperate for villains? I mean, the kid’s not exactly The Riddler. He put together an awesome graduation project—I would have given him an “A”—and then bungled his coming-out party. A sane response to the saga would be, “It turns out this was just a conceptual demo; hopefully, Erik has learned from this whole dust-up and will be more careful in his future advertising career.”

It speaks to the immaturity and pent-up testosterone of the gadget blogging world that the response was, instead, to trash the reputation of a hapless college student. (Remember when bloggers were “the little guy”?) Not for a moment did Fruhlinger et al. consider casting partial blame toward the sloppy and credulous “reporting” that amplified the initial error. Nope, it was all Erik’s fault.

Screw that. Hey, Erik: This blogger, at least, thinks your drawing is pretty neat.

Minor update, 5/29: I tried to call Nordenankar at the number provided on his contact page in order to get his take on how things unfolded, but he's directing calls to an voicemail message that refers people back to his statement on the Biggest Drawing in the World site. I suppose that's going to be the extent of his comment on the matter for now.

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1. Fruhlinger got the story from Hack a Day, which got it from Waxy, which got it from Ze Frank, so the concept really did travel around the world, in a manner of speaking. ↑

2. I don’t get the DHL hatred, either. DHL gave a student access to their warehouse, drivers, and other facilities for a college project, and it’s not even remotely their fault that things got out of hand. How can you not simply admire their willingness to help a guy out? Cheers to DHL. ↑