The New York Times Magazine: The Year in Ideas: The Open-Source Celebrity:

Celebrities, as we know them, are fictional characters. Sure, yes, there’s a real person named Michael Stipe, who says actual things and goes to real restaurants and eats food and does other actual stuff. But there’s also a character named ‘‘Michael Stipe’’ who exists as a kind of collectively agreed-upon fictive construct. Of course, this character is loosely based on the real-life Michael Stipe. For example, they look quite similar. But according to the Junod Doctrine, ‘‘Michael Stipe’’ – the character – is more real than Michael Stipe the person. Further, he exists in the public domain, like the Linux operating system. Everyone is free to tinker at will; we can ascribe actions, ambitions, desires and quotes to him as we see fit.

Whoah. I think there could be some serious forking problems with that project—for example, when people have Michael at their parties in different parts of the world on the same night.