by Ken Liu
It’s all bullshit. Meaningless bullshit.
The pressure in the steamer is rising. Beads of sweat form on my forehead, slide down my face, drip.
“Is it too hot in here?” Lao Xu hands me a wrinkled paper napkin whose color is rather suspect. “Wipe yourself!”
I obey, too terrified to object.
“Mr. Wan wasn’t happy with the marketing plan last time and wanted to switch agencies. I begged and pleaded to get him to stay. If we don’t succeed this time, I think you all understand what that means.”
The cheap napkin comes apart in my hand, and bits of paper are stuck to my sweaty face.
Mr. Wan is our god, the CEO of an Internet company. Out of any ten random people who accost strangers in the streets of Zhongguancun—“China’s Silicon Valley”—one would be engaged in “network marketing,” two would be trying to hook you on pyramid schemes, three would be trying to talk to you about Jesus, and the rest would all be founders or C-whatever-Os of some startup.
But if you got these individuals to engage in one-on-one conversion bouts—time limited to three minutes—I’m sure the last group would achieve complete victory. They’re not interested in selling you a mere product, but an idea that would change the world. They’re not there to speak for some deity; they’re gods already.
Mr. Wan is just such a god.
Due to Lao Xu’s persistence and luck, our little agency managed to land Mr. Wan as a client. We are supposed to spend the euros, dollars, yen, and yuan flowing in from angel investors, from private equity funds, from rounds A-B-C-D, and help Mr. Wan’s company expand the market for their mobile app, raise product awareness, and improve daily engagement levels so that Mr. Wan could then use the new numbers to attract even more investment.
The flywheel goes round and round.
So where is the sticking point?
“Where is the sticking point?” Lao Xu’s dry and thin voice screeches like a subway train shrieking through a tunnel, and an invisible force presses against me until I’m about to black out. Trembling, I stand up, avoiding the gazes of others on purpose. I’m like some two-dimensional inhabitant of a mathematical plane: my body is made up of points, but I can’t see any.
“It’s … a problem with the product.” I lower my head shamefully, prepared for an angry tirade from Lao Xu.
“This is your fucking insight?”
I hold my tongue.
Mr. Wan’s cofounder—let’s call him Y—is a former classmate from USTC who had worked in America for many years. Mr. Wan convinced him to return to China, bringing with him valuable key patent rights to build a business. Y’s patent covers a digital watermarking technology, which, because it involves information theory and complex mathematics, is a bit hard to explain.
I’ll use a simple example. Let’s say you take a picture and use the patented technology to add a watermark invisible to the naked eye; then, no matter how this photograph is subsequently modified or edited—even if eighty percent of the image were cropped—you would still be able to apply a special algorithm to recover the original image. The secret is that the invisible watermark itself carries all the information in the photo at the time it’s applied.
This is, of course, only the most basic application for the technology. It could become an authentication/antitampering mechanism with many uses in fields such as media, finance, forensics, military security, and medicine—the possibilities are endless.
However, after Y returned to China, the two cofounders discovered that all the core industries they were interested in had barriers to entry—the difficulty wasn’t so much that the fences were high, but that they couldn’t even tell where they were. After bumping into walls multiple times, they decided that they had to make an end run around the difficulties by starting with entertainment, hoping to popularize the technology first through grassroots consumer acceptance before gradually infiltrating enterprise business-use cases.
Mr. Wan is always emphasizing the word “sexy,” as though this is the only yardstick by which everything should be judged. But their product rather resembles a punctured, crumpled blowup doll left to dry in the shade.
“Why don’t you use our client’s product?” Lao Xu screams at the young women sitting along the wall. Blood drains from their faces as they pretend to be busy taking notes.
Mr. Wan’s mobile app is called “Truthgram,” and it automatically applies the special digital watermark to every picture the user takes. No matter how many times the image is transmitted, photoshopped, or otherwise altered beyond recognition, a simple button press would restore the original image. At first, the marketing angle focused on safety: As long as you stick to Truthgram, Mom will never have to worry about your face showing up in some photoshopped pornographic image.
Besides priming the sales channels, we also planned a web marketing event called “The Big Reveal.” We recruited a hundred women and helped them take selfies with Truthgram, which we then retouched until everyone looked like a supermodel. We posted the photos on the web along with an animated GIF explaining how to use Mr. Wan’s app to reveal the truth: “Turn Beauty to Beast in less than one second!”
Male users—maybe losers would be more accurate—responded to the gimmick with extraordinary exuberance, recommending the app to each other and coming up with a veritable flood of variations that fulfilled the promise of user-generated content. Women, on the other hand, detested the marketing trick. They filled the forums with negative commentary about the company, arguing that the app vilified and insulted women by playing up the hoary trope of treating a woman’s right to pursue beauty as a twisted form of narcissistic deceit. The marketing event became a PR crisis.
If it were up to me, I would have declared victory. Developing a market is all about pressing the key point, like plunging a sharp needle into the hypothalamus, the emotional center of the brain. If you don’t see some blood spill, it probably means your needle is too dull or maybe you haven’t stabbed at the right spot.
But Mr. Wan thought our little exercise could only grab some eyeballs temporarily at the cost of damaging the long-term brand value. As it turned out, the data proved him right. After a brief spike, the number of downloads went down and stayed down, and the losers we managed to attract eventually stopped using the app because we couldn’t keep them stimulated with a constant stream of new content.
“I’m more interested in whether others see me from the most beautiful angle than in the security of my photos,” a perfectly ordinary girl stated in an interview we conducted with our customers. Her phone’s photo album was filled with selfies that showed signs of excessive retouching, all of them similar and none resembling her. Still, every half hour or so, she would hold her phone overhead at a 45-degree angle, pout her lips like a duck, and snap a shot.
If a tower’s foundations are built on the shifting sands of a beach, how can you expect it to stay standing until the tides come in?
Lao Xu stares at me; I stare at the whiteboard; the whiteboard stares at everyone; everyone stares at their phone. We are like a flock of birds lost in fog, constantly drawn to flashing screens until we’ve forgotten the direction we were headed in. Yet, cold night has fallen, and hungry predators are approaching in the dark.
My phone beeps, indicating that it’s nearly out of battery. My instinctive reaction is not to conserve, but to rush to look through WeChat Moments posted in my network. Every last drop of juice must be used to its fullest extent and not be wasted with invisible background processes. Now you get a glimpse of my values, my philosophy.
I see the latest posts by Mr. Wan. All of a sudden, the dumpling skin has burst, and the fillings spill out.
“I’ve got it!” I slam my hand down on the table. Everyone jerks awake from their somnambulant state.
I hold my phone under Lao Xu’s nose.
Under Mr. Wan’s profile, he has posted a new photo, accompanied by the following caption:
On Saturday, the fifteenth of the month under the
lunar calendar, I’m going to perform the Buddhist good deed of freeing captive animals on the shore of Wenyu River. I’ll purchase and free river snails laden with eggs; birds; reptiles; fish; and other animals. By this compassionate deed, I hope the Buddha brings blessings to everyone so that the aged may live longer, the middle-aged may have harmonious families, and children may gain wisdom and health! Happy Saturday! (Donations to help purchase more animals to free gratefully accepted: more animals = more good karma for all! Funds may be sent to this account: XXXXXXX. Sharing and reposting this message will also gain you blessings.)
“Err—I hadn’t realized that they were running so low on funds.” Lao Xu’s eyes are wide as teacups. “They haven’t paid us our last invoice yet!”
“Keep on reading,” I say. I continue to slide my finger up the screen. Mr. Wan’s dynamic timeline is woven from high-tech news and pop-Buddhism, a mixture of concentrated caffeine pills and chicken soup for the soul. “I think we’ve discovered his other passion.”
“So what?”
“Let’s think about why, every day, so many people share and forward these posts about how to do good deeds to build up merit and gain the Buddha’s protection. Are they really that faithful? I doubt it. Maybe preventing their photographs from being tempered with isn’t a core need for people, but the anxious contemporary Chinese are obsessed with personal security, especially the psychological sense of being safe. We have to connect Mr. Wan’s product with this psychological need.”
“Be specific!”
“Everyone, what kind of posts would you share to feel more secure?” I ask.
“Powerful mantras!” “Pictures of Buddhas!” “The Birthday of the Buddha, and other festival birthdays!” “Wise sayings by famous master monks!”
“What sort of posts would make you believe and willingly hand over money?”
There’s a pause as everyone in the room ponders my question. Then, one of the girls timidly speaks up. “Something that’s been con-consecrated … um, you know, when the light has been—”
“Bingo!”
The room falls silent. Lao Xu gets up and, poker-faced, walks behind me. I hear a loud slam, and a chill wind pours into the back of my shirt as though a bucket of ice has been emptied into it. The haze in the room instantly dissipates.
“Awake now?” Lao Xu closes the window. “Explain what you mean again, but stop being so damned mystical.”
I hold his gaze and speak slowly. “Let’s find a famous and respected monk to consecrate this app—‘bring light into it’—so that every picture it takes becomes a charm to ward off evil. We’ll create a sharing economy of blessings.”
Everyone shifts their gaze from the phone screen to me; I gaze at Lao Xu; Lao Xu says nothing but gazes at the phone.
After a while, he lets out a held breath. “You know, all those Rinpoches in Chaoyang District are going to get you for this.”
I have no idea what’s in store for me.
10.
My wife is a Neo-Luddite.
Once, she had been a heavy gamer. She spent so much time on the computer that her parents sent her to a summer camp that specialized in curing Internet addiction. The experience caused her attitude toward technology to turn a hundred and eighty degrees.
Many times I asked her, what really happened in that campground located on Phoenix Mountain called “The Nirvana Plan”?
She never answered me directly.
This was the biggest philosophical difference between us. She believed that despite the appearance of unprecedented novelty, the high-tech industry was ultimately no different from another ancient trade: they both took advantage of the weaknesses of ordinary men and women, and, under the guise of words like “progress,” “uplift,” and “salvation,” manipulated their emotions. Whether you put your hand on a Bible or an iPad, in the end you were praying to the same god.
We only give the people what they want. They desire comfort, joy, a sense of security. They want to improve themselves, to see themselves stand out in the crowd. We can’t take such desires away from them. That was how I always argued back at her.
Oh, please! Don’t give me that. You’re just playing a game to satisfy your own yearning for control, she said.
Come on; give people a little credit! I said. Everyone’s got a brain. How can anyone “control” anyone else?
There are always NPCs.
What are you talking about?
Non-Player Characters. What if everything is controlled from behind the scenes by some invisible background process? Then every action you take will affect the game logic. The system will react with NPCs and they will carry out their predetermined programming.
I stared at her face as though I’d never really known her. I even wondered whether she had just joined some new cult.
You don’t really believe that, do you?
I’m going to walk the dog. There shouldn’t be much dog poop in the streets this early in the morning.
11.
Every day, as the temple bell tolls five, I have to get up to sweep the grounds. I sweep the wooden floor of the gallery from the new library to the stone steps, and thence to the temple gates, where the ancient pagoda tree grows, its gnarled branches spread like the talons of a rampant beast.
As for whether I will be quietly reciting the Surangama Sutra, the Lotus Sutra, or the Diamond Sutra as I sweep, that depends on the day’s PM2.5 air quality index. My throat hurts when I breathe the polluted air; I don’t need the distraction.
Any of the faithful coming to the temple to make offerings can see that I haven’t been truly called by the Buddha. Just like all the other “disciples” flocking here on weekends to study Buddhist doctrine, I’m here to hide from the real world.
In a way, I’m not too different from the throngs of shoppers at the Buddhist shop outside Yonghe Lamasery vying to buy electronic “Buddha boxes.” They bring the box home, push a button, and the box starts chanting sutras. On the hour (or at designated times), the box will even emit a tranquil, meditative duannnnng, like the ringing of the bell in a temple. The purchasers apparently think this will bring them blessings and cleanse bad karma. I often imagine all the passengers squeezed like canned sardines into the number 2 subway train leaving from the lamasery station, all of their Buddha boxes ringing harmoniously together on the hour. Perhaps the so-called Chan state of mind refers to the detachment of such a moment from real life.
And now that I have to commit to a Buddhist vegetarian diet, I miss the restaurant at Beixinqiao where they serve chitterlings soup made from ancient stock that has supposedly been accumulating flavor for years.
I’ve canceled my mobile number and deleted all my accounts on social media; my wife has left me and returned to her hometown; I’ve even been given a Dharma name: “Chenwu”—“Free of Worldly Dust.” All I want is for those crazy people to never find me again.
I’ve had enough.
Everything began that night with the crazy marketing scheme that seemed to make no sense.
Mr. Wan bought my idea. Overnight he summoned the engineers to develop the new product. Lao Xu laid out the marketing plan and strategy. The most important piece of the project, of course, was assigned to me, the originator.
I had to go find a respected master monk willing to consecrate our app, to bring it light.
Lao Xu demanded that the entire process be filmed and turned loose online to go viral. I ran through every excuse I could think of: My family have been Christians for three generations; my wife is pregnant and can’t come in contact with raw foods, animal fur, or anything having to do with spirits….
Lao Xu responded with only one line: This is your baby. If you don’t want to see it through, get out and don’t come back, you get me?
I visited every temple in Beijing, begging and pleading with the master monks, and I sought out every lama secluded in spiritual solitude in the city’s various nooks and crannies. Each time, however, even after having come to an agreement on the
price, as soon as I brought out my camera, the monks’ faces turned stony, and after a few “Amitabha,” they would cover their faces and escape my presence.
We tried using hidden cameras a few times, but the combination of incense haze and camera shake made the results unwatchable.
As the deadline approached, I could no longer sleep, but tossed and turned all night. My wife asked me what I was doing.
“Rolling dough for pancakes,” I said.
She kicked me. “If you want to do that, get on the floor. Don’t pretend you’re a rolling pin in bed. I’m trying to sleep.”
The kick managed to free my clogged neural pathways. Instantly, I was inspired.
Mr. Wan’s new app went on sale on time. Lao Xu, energized like his Land Rover, shifted into high gear and whipped us into a frenzy. Videos, new concepts, and new campaigns were released one after another. Soon, a video depicting a master monk consecrating a mobile phone went viral, and Buddhagrams began to conquer Weibo and WeChat. The number of downloads and daily engagement level rose exponentially like rockets heading for the clouds at escape velocity.
Don’t ask me the impact of such growth on the long-term brand value; don’t ask me what this meant for the subsequent development and application of the digital watermark technology. Those are problems Mr. Wan had to solve. I was only a strategist for a third-rate marketing company who had some crazy ideas. I could only work on problems that I was capable of solving with my own methods.
In the end, we underestimated the creativity of users. It turned out that Buddhagram pictures, due to the presence of the watermark, could be recovered from even low-resolution copies or cropped fragments. This meant they could be shared and forwarded without taking up much bandwidth or time. Trying to take advantage of the situation, we released a series of new ads touting this newly discovered advantage.
Downloads spiked again, but no one anticipated what happened next.
It started with a picture of an apple taken with Buddhagram. A week later, the poster shared a second picture of the same apple: it was apparently rotting at a much slower rate than other apples.