A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  It was also extremely isolating. I wanted Bex back, but she had ghosted me. I texted her a pretty good apology after my fuckup. Let me dig it up.

  Andy: Bex, that was possibly the most disrespectful thing I’ve ever done. I’m very sorry. I’m not going to make excuses for it. If you ever want to have coffee and see if I can make it up to you, let me know.

  She did eventually write back.

  Bex: Thank you for reaching out. I’m very busy now, but I’ll let you know.

  That read, to me, like a pretty firmly closed door. I told myself it wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t really want a relationship now anyway. I was stressed-out, hyperfocused, and when I wasn’t in the Space, I was in The Thread.

  And both of those things felt like a very good use of time. In the Space I could learn and travel and hear the thoughts of strangers, all instead of sleeping. I was learning Spanish—being inside a native speaker’s head was revolutionary. I’d only been doing it for a week, and already I was able to watch this Spanish drama about a 1940s cruise ship mostly without looking at the subtitles, and they talked fucking fast.

  There was no doubt that my productivity had exploded. The Altus Space really was an incredible tool. If only it could be used well and open to everyone. I kinda loved it. I kinda wanted to protect it. But my goal was to destroy it. Right?

  I mean, you can only pretend to be something for so long before you become it.

  MAYA

  DAY SEVEN OF NINETEEN

  Andy would come over every couple of days to check in and bring us supplies. Today, he had brought us a fancy exercise bike, because no matter how fantastic an apartment you live in, it sucks to never leave it for weeks on end. Every time Andy came by, he looked worse. He was always lanky, but it looked like he had lost weight. He and I were talking about Altus while we unpacked the bike.

  “O sea, es todo lo que dicen se. Si acaso, es más,” he said.

  “I mean, that sounds like Spanish?” I said.

  “I said that, if anything, Altus is more than what they say it is . . . I think. Well, probably not exactly, I’m still learning.”

  “So you, you speak Spanish now?”

  “Básicamente,” he said.

  “Fuck,” April said from where she watched us on the couch.

  “And I don’t even know if that’s the most powerful thing it can do. Being inside of a native speaker’s mind is . . .” He couldn’t explain it. “Like, really understanding what someone else is thinking . . .”

  “Ugh.” I rolled my eyes.

  “What?” Andy said.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, like, if I’m missing something, tell me.”

  “OK, I haven’t done this, but what is it like when you’re inside of someone’s head who is like you, like when you’re having the experience of another twenty-something white guy, versus when you’re in the mind of someone who isn’t like you?”

  “Well, I mean, it’s work. It’s a lot of work to be in someone else’s mind. Things don’t make sense sometimes. Especially when they’re different, like, older or from another country, then it’s definitely more work. But it’s work worth doing.”

  “And I think you’ll do it, I just don’t think most people will. Altus doesn’t seem to be designed to help people work harder. I think most people will find the thing they’re comfortable with and stick with it, just like we’ve done for the last hundred thousand years of being human.”

  He looked a little chastened, like I was telling him he couldn’t have his opinion because he was too white. I get that. But then he pushed past it. “On the other hand, we’ve gotten better in the last hundred thousand years. This could be part of that.”

  April was looking a little spooked by the whole conversation. I hadn’t talked about this with her yet. I probably should have dropped it, but I couldn’t.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But how popular do you think an experience of a Black person thinking really nasty thoughts about white people would be? Because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but some white folks really like finding ways to be the victim.”

  He pushed his lips together and looked around the room.

  “I see your point,” he said. And I think he did, but I also think he was thinking that all of this complicated social shit really did get in the way sometimes. But he wasn’t going to say that out loud to me.

  I was extra nice to Andy for the rest of the visit because, y’know, that’s what I have to do, I guess.

  After he was gone, April and I were sitting on the couch organizing our army of social media activists. Carl was curled up at April’s side.

  “I hadn’t thought of any of that stuff before you brought it up,” she said. “I mean, I thought, of course the Space would be bad for inequality because fundamentally some people can’t access it, either because they can’t afford to or because of body dislocation.” She thought for a minute and then said, “But you’re right. People will just share the things that confirm their ideology, and those things will always exist. Our reality isn’t about what’s real, it’s about what we pay attention to.”

  CNBC INTERVIEW BETWEEN ANCHOR STEPHEN JACOBS AND INVESTMENT STRATEGIST LINDSAY MCALLIS

  Stephen Jacobs: Joining us today on Market Showdown is Lindsay McAllis, and Lindsay, wow, today has been a showdown. Nothing is up except one thing. What is an investor to do on a day like today? We were already in a recession, a drop like this is unthinkable. The market is back to the nineties. Is this the time to buy?

  Lindsay McAllis: Stephen, no asset manager wants to be the one to call a panic, but it now might be time to panic. We don’t have granular data right now, but our early research is indicating that every metric is bad. Consumer confidence is down, consumer spending is down, unemployment is up, and, worse, labor participation is cratering. I think the bottom is a long way away from where we’re at right now.

  SJ: That is something to say in a world where we’re already down over 60 percent from highs.

  LM: Assets are moving into two places, heavy metals and cryptocurrency. And the vast majority moving into crypto is in AltaCoin. This isn’t a normal restructuring. It’s not that the market was overvalued, we’re already in a recession. No, I think the market is waking up to the fact that the old ways may actually be over. People who have been to the Premium Altus Space are assuming that a fairly significant portion of the US economy is going to take place only inside of that one company. And since it’s not publicly traded, the only way to capitalize on it without resorting to private markets is AltaCoin. It’s up 500 percent, Stephen, and this time I actually don’t think it’s a bubble. People don’t need to spend money if they’re living their whole lives inside Altus. If anything, the rest of the economy is the bubble.

  APRIL

  DAY NINE OF NINETEEN

  This was when our campaign to hurt Altus’s public image caught fire. Many people were angry at Altus before. There were people who understood the sociology of Altus and were concerned, and others who had lost friends or family to addiction to Altus or even to the increasing number of Altus-related deaths. But if you really want public opinion to turn against you, come for the economy. As the Altus Premium Space was rolled out to hundreds of thousands and then millions, people rushed to mine AltaCoin at the expense of pretty much everything else. Layoffs were rampant; some retirement accounts were down 70 percent. Carl’s brother didn’t care—economic anxiety just made people easier to manipulate. People could hate Altus all they wanted. Companies don’t close because people dislike them.

  But we were hoping maybe public opinion would be a part of the solution. So we hired a company to do a tracking poll—to call people and ask them what their opinions on Altus were. Every day, we were seeing an increase in people with negative views of the company, including lots of people who actually used Altus.

  The tide was turning; unfortunately,
Altus had a big ship, and it was well out to sea.

  DAY TWELVE OF NINETEEN

  We got a little glimpse of something beautiful for a while. At Robin and Maya’s urging, I didn’t tweet anything but @replies or links the entire time we stayed in that apartment. If I wanted to say something, I had two ways of doing it.

  1. I could make a video, which I did, but only a few times.

  2. I could do a podcast.

  Podcasts were nice because they lasted a long time. When you did a radio or TV interview, you had to squish every thought into five or ten minutes. Everything was talking points and nothing was nuance. Podcasts gave you time. You could think together with the host, and it felt natural.

  I did that a little bit, each time setting up an encrypted call so that no one could trace us, even though, apparently, Carl could protect us from snooping.

  In public, I was calm and as noncontroversial as I could manage. Yes, I subtly dropped hints about how Altus was making people more anxious and less connected, but I didn’t say anything confrontational. I left that to the armies we had created.

  And they had, in such a short time, become extremely powerful.

  We had been able to segment people into over five hundred small groups of a hundred or so people with specific concerns and demographic similarities. One person from each of these groups was elected to be a representative in a central committee group. There were around thirty central committees, and each of them sent a representative to the leadership chat.

  That final group was the only one that Maya and I talked to directly. Each one of those thirty people represented roughly three thousand, for a total of ninety thousand people in our little army. They were the ninety thousand most dedicated, most concerned, least-likely-to-rat-us-out individuals from the more than fifty million who had ended up responding to our survey.

  I know ninety thousand people doesn’t sound like a lot, and it’s not! But if they’re organized and work together, they can make things look big when they’re small or small when they’re big. They can weaken arguments and drown out disagreement.

  And it was working.

  The tide was turning against Altus. It didn’t hurt that the world was dystopian as fuck. The moment people could make good money in the Altus Space, a lot of people had just stopped going to their jobs. Some people, desperate for the success that first adopters had seen, were cutting every corner they could to maximize the money they were keeping in AltaCoin. That included, apparently, forgoing rent payments and eventually living on the streets with their headsets chained to metal cuffs on their necks.

  Congress was investigating Altus, and also investigating what laws they could write that would limit it, but they were coming up against the limits of their own power.

  Altus wasn’t an American company, it was based in Val Verde, and they were giving the government of Val Verde so much money that international pressure wasn’t having an effect. It was looking increasingly like Altus had become Val Verde. Forcing laws on them was starting to look roughly as difficult as forcing laws on another nation.

  PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT: WALK WITH US PODCAST

  Adam DiCostanzo: This is the Walk with Us podcast. I talk to interesting people, and you take a walk. And today, we’re a little bit overwhelmed that our guest has agreed to talk with us—it’s April May. Usually I do an intro in this space, but you know who April May is. In fact, it’s much more likely that you don’t know who I am. I’m Adam. I have a podcast where I interview people and, at least I hope, the people listening take a walk. Maybe by themselves, maybe with someone they like or love or maybe have just met.

  It’s cheesy, I know, and it’s also not a particularly popular show, so I guess I should start by asking, April, well, why on earth did you want to come on my little podcast?

  April May: Because I like it! Things are really loud right now. And they’re scary. And everyone has a lot of opinions. But it seems like you’re really asking people . . . people listening, your guests, even yourself . . . you’re asking us all to listen, to slow down. I don’t know that we do enough listening these days, and I’ve been trying to do more of it. So that’s why, because I want more people to listen.

  AD: Well, I have to say, I appreciate your time and your kind words very much.

  DAY FIFTEEN OF NINETEEN

  “Why is Altus so dangerous?” Maya asked me one morning while we were listening to the Lily Allen album my mind had chosen to play over Josh Crane’s home stereo system and organizing our army of Altus resistance agents.

  “I mean, you’ve made several good cases,” I told her. “Inequality, division, complete economic collapse.”

  “But we’ve been through all of those things before.” I looked up and saw her eyebrows scrunched together. She was actually worrying about this. “Why is Carl so sure that we’re going to destroy ourselves? Why haven’t they told us what they think is so scary?”

  It felt like we’d been over this, but thinking back, maybe we hadn’t. I hate to say it, but I often just took Carl’s word for things. Maya was more likely to have concerns.

  “Well, we haven’t asked,” I said. And then I shouted, “HEY, CARL??”

  We were getting used to our new life, and that included feeling a little like Carl was just a very small roommate. It was only a few seconds before they walked into the room saying, “You have a question?”

  Maya hesitated a bit before she said, “Yeah, it’s just, why is Altus so important. Why are they the key?”

  “Do you know what the panopticon is?” Carl said in reply.

  I did not. But Maya said, “The prison thing. It’s a prison design where every cell can be observed by a central tower, and so all of the prisoners have to behave because they never know if they’re being watched. It’s become, like, a metaphor for the surveillance state. If everyone is being watched all the time, no one will break the rules.”

  “Exactly,” Carl said. “But the mistake that you humans make is that you think any of that is new. You have always acted as if you are being watched, because you always have been. Your minds are constructed to act as both an internal actor and an external observer. You have, in your minds, an idea of what a correct life looks like. Every decision you make, you check it against the story. You have to. The panopticon is inside you.”

  “But,” I said, “we do things society doesn’t expect of us all the time. People break out of the gender binary, they defy the police, they smoke weed. We defy culture all the time.”

  “Exactly,” Carl said, sounding pleased. “But you know when you’re doing it. Sometimes it’s even done because violating the story is exciting. Other times it is done because people have no choice. There are many reasons you stray from the story. The picture is not even internally consistent. You’re supposed to treat people fairly but also succeed in an unfair world, for example.”

  Maya looked annoyed, then said, “I definitely have no idea what this has to do with Altus.”

  “The story is different in every person, and it’s constantly changing, constructed by millions of interactions over a human life. No one has ultimate power over the story, not even the person it is inside of. There are many forces that seek to actively shape the story, but so far, all of those forces have had roughly the same level of ability because they were all run by humans. Humans will always be within an order of magnitude or two of each other in terms of influence. Sometimes one human is much more powerful, sometimes the story lives longer than any individual, but every agent of influence on this planet so far has been invariably mortal, fragile, and limited by its own perspective.

  “That will not be true for long.” I felt the grim reality of that sentence and I could see on Maya’s face that she did too.

  Carl continued, “Soon, the levels of ability will diverge wildly as ever-more-powerful tools are controlled by ever-smaller groups of people. What you’re doin
g here in these nineteen days is an example. Because of the insight my systems grant you, two people, in secret, with no oversight, are able to shape the world’s perception of Altus in a matter of weeks. This is the battlefield every future war will be fought on, and the generals will not be human. The powerful will create them to control the rest. But there will not be one hegemonic story; instead, there will be many battles, mostly metaphorical . . . but not all.

  “Your fiction is full of robot wars. Machines turn on their masters and the two must do battle. But the robots will not turn on their masters, they will be the masters. In some ways, they already are. The robot wars will not be people against robots, they will be people against people. I came here to prevent those centuries of struggle, the ultimate outcome of which, after tremendous suffering, is complete subjugation to the intelligences you will build. My brother came here to skip the suffering and go straight to the subjugation.”

  PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF TELEVISED ADDRESS: PRESIDENT JANICE ASHBY

  This economic collapse is not new. It was not caused by trade wars or scarcity. There are no sleazy bankers to blame. We can and we will keep lending markets flowing freely, but the root of this problem is individual American choices. I have never been one to back down from a challenge, and while this challenge is unique in it’s character, it is not unique in its magnitude. America has faced difficulties of every magnitude and every time—every single time—we come through them stronger. People have asked me what options are on the table right now, and I will tell you, there are no options off the table. Everything is being considered and, yes, that includes direct and potentially stringent regulation of Altus use.