The Bright Side of Going Dark

by Kelly Harms

  Where I am staying. Where I am staying alone, I realize.

  I have been staying alone since I got to Colorado. It’s hard to be an internet celebrity alone, but I have been doing it because Tucker had to travel for work last week and needed a chance to decompress between work and our wedding. I, too, would have liked to decompress, but my followers won’t have it. They need updates every day, multiple times a day. They need something to like. For some reason, it has to be me.

  Tripods are all well and good, but they are slow and unwieldy, and I bought a cheap remote, so it takes three clicks to get a picture. Three clicks while I am frozen in a certain spot, with a certain look on my face, with my body tilted one way or another, or sometimes in an asana, a yoga pose like warrior two or half moon—one of the positions that photograph well. Not warrior one or crow pose. Though I have been doing yoga for years and have been an internet celebrity for many of those years, I have yet to do crow pose without making an expression that is best described as “gastrointestinal-distress face.”

  “Hey, are you using that bench?”

  I bring my head up slowly, slowly, slowly, until it’s back on top of my shoulders. Sure enough, my neck hurts. In front of me is a guy wearing one of those enormous climbing backpacks, but his mat isn’t loaded up into it yet. I have worn that kind of backpack before, when I did some climbing during hashtag outdoor matters month hashtag sponsored by hashtag Outfitters Inc. and hashtag Mountainhigh Climbing Gym, and I know it is heavy and unwieldy. I stand up from the bench. “Here you go.”

  “Thanks,” he says, then adds, “I won’t be long.”

  I look at him. He is too doughy to be a climber, I think, then remind myself to stop with my assumptions. He is pretty good at getting his gear loaded, compared to me, who had to wave Tucker over and get him to do it and then take my picture after it was done. I smile at Mr. Doughy and say, “I haven’t seen any other climbers out today,” which is true, and well informed, considering I have been waiting near this bench for Tucker for an hour now.

  He shrugs. “Guides never come here. Takes too long to hike out to the routes. And they’re high rated—I mean, they’re steep.”

  I nod but also wonder if I should stay a few more hours, just so I can call 911 when I hear his body hit the ground. “You’re climbing alone?” I ask. I sit back down on the bench because thinking about climbing has made me tired.

  “My girlfriend’s out there already,” he says, scooching away from me.

  I want to clarify. I wasn’t flirting. I want to tell him that my fiancé is on his way here to take the prerehearsal dinner photos with me because we are getting married in two days.

  But we aren’t. Tucker just texted me to say that we aren’t.

  I start to cry.

  The climber looks horrified. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to say it like that. I just meant . . .”

  I wave him off. He doesn’t need to know. “It’s not about you,” I say, and it comes out a bit bitchy, which is fine—I don’t know this guy. But the thought that I’ve been mean to a stranger makes me feel awful, until my mind helpfully turns it back around on him. He could have been nicer, after all. I wasn’t asking him to marry me, was I?

  I turn to leave. It’s well past time I leave. I should have left hours ago. I should have never come.

  But first, the photos. Even at my worst, there have to be photos.

  Carefully, I take my pointer fingers and wipe straight lines under my lower lashes to clear away the tears without smearing my mascara. I am mindful not to open my mouth while I do this—the universal impulse to open one’s mouth when touching one’s lashes was caught on film one time, and I learned never to do it again. I looked like a drowning fish.

  “Can you take my picture?” I ask the climber. “Just a quick snapshot.” I inhale and pivot and lower my chin and widen my eyes into a facsimile of a secret smile. He just needs to get me and some mountainscape in the frame. Beyond that, well, I will edit the crap out of it anyway, like I do all of these pictures. Like we all do.

  Maybe not all of us. The climber looks perplexed. “Well . . . ok,” he says after a second and takes my phone. He points and clicks and hands it back to me without looking. I exhale and let my shoulders slump and flatten my mouth into a line and take the phone back, my real, heartachey, deflated self reappearing as I do. “Thank you,” I say, meaning it. “Have a good climb.”

  “You too,” he says, even though I am obviously not climbing. The only climbing I’m doing today is into a bottle of bourbon. But then maybe, just going from the look on my face, that’s exactly the climb he’s talking about.

  PAIGE

  “I don’t mean to shock anyone, but the FRS just gave this penis a name.”

  My cube farm breaks out in laughter. I’m laughing, too, but also I’m curious. What is it about the penis in question that made our facial recognition software think it was a person, and which person did it think it was? Knowing my company, it will turn out to be someone for whom this mistake is wildly offensive, like Gandhi. Or Pat Nixon.

  “I want to see the penis,” I say.

  “Of course you do, Paige,” says Peter Mason, the original penis announcer. “It’s the only way you’re getting a look, eh?”

  No one laughs. Not because my colleagues think it was unfunny or untrue, but because we have just last week had the fear of God put into us during the latest sexual harassment web seminar, and perhaps with the exception of Peter, who is a moron, we all very badly want to keep our jobs, which, though miserable, are wildly lucrative. We, the staff of the Pictey Standards Enforcement and Quality Assurance Team, are some of the best-paid people in the entire Pictey corporate group and certainly the only people I know who can work forty hours a week, enjoy flexible scheduling, stable workflow, and large corporate benefits, and still make mid–six figures a year.

  There are forty of us, never all in the same place at the same time, and we get paid by the flag. When a Pictey user (or, as our overlords call them, a “Pictigin”) sees a picture that wrinkles their tender noses, they right-click it, and it is flagged, and it goes into some proprietary software to see if it’s, say, a Confederate flag or just a folded Union Jack, a nipple or just duck lips. If the program can’t tell, and it often cannot tell, it shows one of us the photo. And we, in our infinite wisdom, decide if it’s obscene, dangerous, inflammatory, cyberbullying, or any of the other ways humans are awful to each other, or if it’s just innocent stupidity. We see a lot of penises.

  The penis that is now up on my screen is actually quite great. I mean, it’s hideously ugly, as all male genitalia is, but it’s also very friendly looking, and I totally see the face. The skin is pale, and the hat part is being held into a sort of smiley face position. “Did it tell you who it matched to?” I ask over my cubicle.

  My IM opens, and I see the face of a too-tanned white woman with her hair pulled back in a bun and a kind of large, creeping smile. Her eyes are closed. She doesn’t look like the penis, I type back. The penis looks like her.

  My words get thumbs-upped, and I close out the windows and go back to my screen, because in this job, time is money. The photo that pops up is a woman breastfeeding a child. I hit Y. Next is an extreme close-up of an ear. I hit Y. Next is a hairy scrotum. I hit N. Next is a bachelorette with a penis painted on her cheek. I pause, two, three seconds, then hit Y.

  Generally I like this kind of work. We can do up to twenty hours a week of nothing but photo screening. I think, if not for the health needs of my eyeballs, I could do all twenty in one day. But I don’t. I split the time up, thirty minutes in every hour, to spell me through the much murkier work I must also do fifteen hours of weekly to keep my job: context review. This work is awful. It’s god awful, and that is why we are paid so incredibly well.

  I’d say about one in ten thousand photos I screen is truly upsetting, rather than just a body part or a racial slur, any response to which has long been deadened inside me. But with the cruelty potential of
the written word, humans hit a far higher batting average, and the computers are much worse about screening the monsters out. The n-word, for example, is so contextually dependent that I often need to read whole paragraphs before I know whether it’s empowering or racist, and the c-word is the same. And then there are the stranger phrases we have to check, like Ann Coulter, which is used as a truly vile derogative at least 30 percent of the time. Teens tend to use a few key phrases when driving each other to suicide, including, subtly, the word suicide itself, and the sheer number of times I have no-screened the word suicide makes me think that all teenage girls do anymore is tell each other to kill themselves, day in, day out, rain or shine. Which is ironic because in my experience one doesn’t need a ton of extra encouragement during the teen years. But still, we have to screen it, because what if someone comes to our website to talk about suicide prevention awareness or a loss in the family or needs an overstatement for a terrible career choice?

  Fatty is one of the easier ones, I suppose, though I don’t much like it. Fatty plus fish and plus acids is okayed for us by sentiment analysis software. Fatty plus tuna and fatty plus breasts are a smidge harder because they could absolutely mean legitimate things—or be repulsive insults. And fatty followed by nearly any other word in the English language, as well as used to end a sentence, is probably an insult, but insults are allowed when aimed at certain parts of the population. For example, on Pictey, everyone is allowed to call the president a fatty. He is indeed a fatty, but I still don’t think it’s very helpful to say so in the public discourse. I myself am a fatty, and I don’t really like reading the word two thousand times a week, but then, thanks to the word fatty, I’m a very rich fatty. One who can afford lots of fatty plus tuna at the best sushi restaurants in the valley.

  You can’t call a young person a fatty on pictey.com. As a result, lots of teens call each other tubs of lard and sacks of lard and just generally any sort of containers of rendered hog fat. They get flagged by users, and I read them, and I decide if Sandra Langingham of South Bend, Indiana, should have to see such personal attacks on her Pictey feed for the rest of time eternal.

  My decision is always no.

  Pictey is available for download in the Apple store and on Google Play in 168 nations. One time, we tried to list 168 nations on our whiteboard in the office, and all forty of us put together couldn’t do it, though I did make an admirable contribution by knowing all the former Soviet countries in clockwise order. (Everyone always forgets Moldova.)

  In each of the Pictey nations there is an office like this one. In each office like this one there are between one and eighty people who are native speakers who do what I do, all day long, though only those of us in England, Scandinavia, Japan, Dubai, and the States get paid so well. In Australia they make half as much, or so we’re told, and in Russia they make next to nothing, though we infer that’s because they have nothing to do because the state prescreens everything anyway. In Nepal we have an office of just six people, and they make a dime for every dollar I do. A dime! But according to interoffice talk, there is no cyberbullying in Nepal. Not yet, at least. If I could do this job without reading any more cyberbullying, I would take a pay cut. A modest pay cut.

  It’s a strange, strange business I’m in.

  When I was a child, I did not tell my then-married mother and father I wanted to be an online standards and quality enforcer when I grew up. I did not tell them I wanted to sit in a big open-concept office all day with excellently comfortable ergonomic chairs and look at pictures of scrotums and duck lips. I did not say, I hope I work a job where I get free therapy included each week as a matter of personal safety.

  I wanted to be a mail carrier.

  My Pomodoro timer dings. I am done with screening for today. The flag I was on, something loquacious from the comments thread of a major influencer, just hovers on my screen. I log out over the top of it, unconcerned, because we’ve been taught how to walk away unconcerned, and my manager and quasi therapist checks that I do regularly. I start whizzing through the Emotional Safety Questionnaire. Yes, I am calm. No, there is nothing I need to talk about from today’s flags. Yes, I am ready to leave the work behind for the day and be present in the rest of my life. The prompts come up in a different order each day, with slight variations to the phrasing time and again so we are forced to really read them all rather than click through by memory. If you get one wrong, you have to schedule a therapy call for either right then or the next morning before you can start working again, so it’s worth taking the time to do it right. And by that I mean to lie. I have answered truthfully a couple of times and learned that it’s better to just lie and then go have a nice half a Valium tablet than it is to go through the online-therapy rigmarole.

  After all, the Valium is analog.

  I click on the last question. No, my heart is not racing. I put my thumb on the USB fingerprint reader for confirmation. It turns green. ESQ completed, I can now do anything in the world that I like for the rest of the day, which is long, since my shift is done by four p.m. I can take a walk, go for a hike, or sit in a chic bar with a martini and write my memoirs. Anything I want.

  I go to the employee lounge with my satchel.

  I set up the espresso machine. I make an Americano and put it down on the little spin-out table attached to the comfiest chair in the place, the one with the stretched vinyl seat in almost the exact shape of my own, ah, seat.

  I take out my laptop. Sit down with my coffee. Take in and let out a deep breath of relief. When I’m in the right mind-set, I open up my laptop.

  I open up pictey.com.

  MIA

  Sometimes I can’t believe it’s only been three months since Tucker and I decided to #tietheknot. In that time I’ve been bride-ing hard and loving every second. Here’s a throwback post of the engagement. Best surprise ever. #blessed

  Now we’re thisclose to the day and I’m just over the moon. Will be posting the #weddingdress from #vintagegown dot com soon and you guys will be blown away—I hope? Let me know which dress you think I picked from the try-ons last month! Link to the dress posts in comments. xoxo Mia

  Lucky for me, we were having a private ceremony: Tucker, me, our parents, the justice of the peace. That means I won’t have to spend the next twenty-four hours calling cousins I barely know and telling them to turn their cars around because Tucker doesn’t think we should do this.

  Slightly unluckier, I have taken large sums of sponsorship money to post every detail of the wedding, start to finish, on my Pictey feed, to be viewed by some large percentage of my five hundred thousand followers.

  If I told my sponsors that Tucker and I aren’t getting married, I would be out of cash. Actually, I’d need to go into debt. Let’s be honest—I’m never seeing any of my wedding deposits ever again.

  If I told my followers that Tucker doesn’t think we should do this, they would kill him. I think I’m probably exaggerating about this, but I’m not sure enough to put it to the test. My followers need me to be happy. They care about me in a time-consuming sort of way that I think they should probably care about their own daughters, sisters, friends. But they put it all on me. They talk to me, and each other, every day, and because there are too many to keep track of, they become in my mind this single amalgam of a person, full of problems and sorrows and self-inflicted wounds, and they are counting on me to do things right every single day, several times a day. To keep them happy, I must do things perfectly.

  And I don’t want to let them down. I owe them so much. After all, look at what they’ve given me.

  A few years ago, when everyone was pretty bored with Instagram, and only book clubs were still using Facebook, and Twitter had become a political quagmire, I went on a date with a guy who had just gotten hired by a social start-up and was feeling pretty great about himself. The start-up was called Pictey, and absolutely no one was using it. I had an Instagram account that I used to show my college friends my life and keep in touch with theirs, and I h
alf-heartedly posted promotional stuff for my yoga studio. Just me in poses, generally, because I had no marketing budget and didn’t know what else to do to try to get yogis into my classes.

  I didn’t see the harm in double posting from my Instagram feed on the start-up, partly just because the guy didn’t ask me out on a second date and I wanted him to know what I could do with my legs.

  On Instagram, I had about a thousand followers and followed at least five thousand people. My feed was a jumble, and I’d go days without posting only to post ten times in one day later. I was not winning social media, to say the least. I sometimes posted quotes from the Dalai Lama or Pema Chödrön superimposed over pictures of flowers.

  By my current standards, my feed was the pits.

  But Pictey had started with computer programmers, and computer programmers were, back then, mostly “bros” of the highest level. They were guys hired by the company and guys who had applied to work at the company but not gotten the job and guys who read Wired and guys who did yoga to meet girls. So my Pictey posts, which were just exactly the same content as what went to die on Instagram, got a lot of likes, or as many as you can get when you’re on a platform that has fewer than ten thousand users. I liked the likes. Everyone likes likes, right? So I posted more on Pictey. Then I posted some new things on there. I tried different hashtags. I posted about Pictey on Instagram. Some of my followers came from Instagram and followed me there. And then I started posting about Mike.

  Mike was very photogenic.

  Things picked up fast.

  Year one, Pictey grew to two hundred thousand users. Twenty thousand of them were following me. I was, by Pictey standards, a star.