One notably absent entry in the schedule was Jaan. He rarely spoke to the interns after the first week. Jaan’s e-mails, which he sent every few days, were terse: the name, contact information, and relevant background about the latest advertising client who needed help. Stephen’s job was to determine how to improve the client’s advertisement campaigns—just like Aarti and William had done in their first days. If not diet pills, it was gym equipment, lawyers, videogames, movies, banks, airline tickets, candy, and the list went on and on. Whatever it was, it was advertised on Ubatoo.
The moment a new advertising client learned that their assigned contact, Stephen, was “just an intern,” they rattled off a litany of projects for Stephen to complete immediately. But the five minutes of thought that some mid-level manager had given to his marketing campaign the day after his boss had yelled at him for being sloppy, simply couldn’t compare to the concentration that Stephen put into his work, into finding what information the raw data held and how to best coax it free. None of the clients had played with the raw data from their company’s competitors. Most hadn’t even bothered to play with their own. Before the first conversations were through, nobody remembered that they were talking with “just an intern.” Many were just silently thankful that Stephen wasn’t vying for their own job.
The little discoveries and breakthroughs Stephen made for the advertisers were appreciated—and expected for all of the interns hired. This work was too easy. But boredom was never a concern. Stephen spent hours beyond what was expected, even for an Ubatoo intern, learning how to leverage Ubatoo’s vast infrastructure and harness all the computation power available. He was also one of the few interns beginning to recognize what was possible with all the data Ubatoo had amassed. Nobody limited what Stephen did; the data, resources, and knowledge were ready for the taking by anyone who bothered to reach for them.
Ubatoo’s cocoon—this was why it was created. He knew it. Ubatoo knew it. However anyone wanted to spend their time—working, playing, learning, eating, relaxing—it could all be done without leaving the sanctuary of Ubatoo’s grounds. From the moment of waking to the moment before sleep, his thoughts stayed at work. If not yet his soul, at least his mind and wearied body belonged to Ubatoo. The ivory tower of research in academia was never as completely pristine as the world he was in.
As for the little part of his life that occurred almost four blocks from Ubatoo’s grounds, he and Molly had moved in together, as planned. It worked out without any of the hitches everyone had warned him about. Though his schedule would have destroyed most relationships, with Molly being just as enraptured with her own work it made their absences all the less pronounced. In their times together, they rarely talked about work. They were both too far in the trenches and minutiae of their own research to bring the other one up to speed; it would require too much effort. Besides, the relationship was still new, and there were plenty of other, more typical, ways of spending the forty-five minutes they had together before they fell asleep.
-CANDID CAMERAS-
July 7, 2009.
Pink. It was rare to see anyone who works at Ubatoo blush. Topics usually didn’t veer that way. But there Yuri was, turning shades of pink to match the color in question, a noticeable variation from his usually stark white complexion. His to-the-point words and lack of any intonation didn’t confess his emotions, though his face certainly did. Yuri succinctly replied, “Pink. That’s people searching for porn.”
Though Yuri frequently accompanied Stephen and Kohan on their nightly walks around Ubatoo’s grounds, the attempts to coax him into joining the conversation weren’t met with success. Yuri Wegovich remained exceedingly quiet and his characteristic vacant expression rarely left his face. It was only when, on one of these walks, Yuri sprinted a mile to return to his cubicle’s whiteboard to hurriedly jot down a thought that had apparently been percolating in his mind, that Stephen questioned his initial explanation of Yuri’s perennial vacant expression—perhaps it wasn’t simply an indication of an empty head, but rather the unconcerned obliviousness of deep thought.
Five weeks into the internship, on a nightly walk, Yuri, in his thick Polish accent and peculiarly formal English, spoke of his own accord. “When we have completed this walk, I would very much like a moment with you both.”
Stephen and Kohan immediately stopped walking and turned to face Yuri. Yuri stood silently, inexpressively observing the two concerned faces fixed on him. A few uneasy moments and several self-conscious blinks later, Yuri volunteered, “After listening on many walks about what you two do, I wanted to try it also. I would like to have a few minutes of your time and show you what I have created, if that is okay.”
“We knew we’d convert you, hanging out with us for so long. It was all just sinking in, wasn’t it? Forget all that computer vision stuff, or whatever it is your group does, Yuri. It’s all about the data,” Kohan said.
Whether it was the thick accent, the pause between words, or simply his distraction with Kohan’s all-denim outfit of the day, Yuri’s response sounded impatient. “Yes, yes. Just look at my demo, and you let me know what you think. Okay?”
The novelty of Yuri contributing to the conversation outweighed Stephen’s need to stick to his normal schedule, so he didn’t give in to the strong pull of his midnight snack and coffee ritual. Instead, he walked with them to Yuri’s desk.
Yuri grabbed a remote control, and immediately four enormous LCDs around the room blinked to life as the recognizable outline of California came into view on the map displayed. He clicked his mouse a few times as he zoomed in tighter and tighter until the neighborhood surrounding Ubatoo’s grounds was prominently visible. Then, each house, one by one, blinked and then glowed red, blue, or green or some other hue, until the whole screen was awash in myriad colors. “The red houses mean someone in that house is currently using our search engine. The house is blue if they are chatting or e-mailing; the really dark blue means they’ve been chatting for hours; purple if they are looking at our photo site; and green if they have just bought something using one of our credit cards. Black just means we have no data on that house, but there aren’t too many of those.”
They were silent for a few seconds as Yuri virtually steered the camera through the streets of one neighborhood and into the next—all the houses emanating a bright glow, disclosing, across the four LCD screens, whatever activity the inhabitants were doing in their homes. Yuri stopped at a randomly chosen two-level house, glowing red, and clicked it. In a moment, a bubble surfaced above it, displaying all the searches and images the user in that house was looking at, only a few milliseconds after the user saw it himself. He moved his mouse over other houses and clicked, until he had repeated the motion a dozen times. All of the houses had bubbles above them, showing the activities in progress.
Stephen was the first one to speak. “You’re going to make some product marketing person ecstatic, Yuri. This is really beautifully done. Some of the houses are pink, by the way. What are they looking at?”
It was then that the blushing started. Yuri didn’t want to respond, but Kohan and Stephen were waiting for an answer, watching him squirm uneasily. Then came Yuri’s embarrassed explanation for pink: “Pink is for Porn.” Stephen glanced at Kohan, hoping somehow he would convey the message not to poke too much fun at Yuri for monitoring this, as Kohan would inevitably want to do. Whether Kohan picked up the hint or decided it for himself was uncertain, but thankfully Kohan let it go. “I get all the data-mining stuff, Yuri. We do that everywhere on everything. But how in the world did you get such detailed, high-resolution images of the houses? I’ve never seen that before,” Kohan said.
Stephen replied instead since Yuri was still taken aback by the pink conversation. “It’s all available on the Web, Kohan. There’s a small company that provides them for anyone to use how they want. Just do any search. You’ll find them.” Kohan just shrugged his shoulders.
Yuri had regained some of his composure. They were now talk
ing about his area of expertise, and though he would never bring up his own work, he welcomed this opportunity to talk about it. “Actually, Stephen, we don’t want to rely on anyone else’s images for too much longer. I do not know if you are aware, but we are building our own neighborhood scanning vans with many high-resolution cameras to have this data all to ourselves. We have only a few right now that are driving through California taking pictures, but we’ll have more soon. That’s my project this summer, integrating all the images we’re collecting from the vans ourselves with the images we’re getting from satellites.”
“What have these two done to a nice boy like you, Yuri?” an unexpected voice called out behind them. They turned to find Aarti standing and watching the monitors with the same fascination they had. “These two look harmless, Yuri, but be careful. Don’t let them corrupt you, okay?” she said smiling. If Yuri had blushed a bit earlier, he was beet red and sweating now.
Aarti walked closer to the LCDs. “All that’s pink is porn,” Aarti said to herself, or maybe it was a question. She was watching the bubbles above the now pink houses reveal image after image of explicit sexual acts of every sordid kind. “Amazing, isn’t it, Stephen?” she started as Stephen walked up to her. “For everything else we do, this is what people decide to look at.”
Stephen was about to reply, to make some incredibly witty remark that would doubtless both impress Aarti by demonstrating just how clever he was, and encapsulate the whole state of the pornographic world they lived in, when Kohan unfortunately cut him off.
Ignoring Aarti, Kohan began interrogating Yuri. “How did you get access to this data? Not everybody is allowed to have it, you know. We had to sign a huge document to even be allowed to look at this stuff . . . ” Kohan was territorial, almost outright jealous.
Stephen and Aarti decided to find the nearest barista, leaving Yuri and Kohan alone to discuss the finer points of who should and shouldn’t be allowed to look at Ubatoo’s data. All while the LCD screens graciously kept displaying a moment-by-moment update of people’s interests, desires, and fetishes, as if the screens themselves had their own desire—that someone would just look at them. Soon, many people would.
-EPISODES-
July 7, 2009.
Stephen’s daydreams didn’t wander to things he didn’t possess or conquests he hadn’t yet made. Instead, he imagined himself on a TV show replete with a prime-time audience scrutinizing his every move, and wondered, what would they think? Would they need a narrator to understand him or would his actions say enough? Now, in particular, he questioned how even a narrator could justify the last two and a half wasted years. What could possibly be said, except that he had been tired. Exhausted. Burned out.
He came into the Greene-Smart-years spent, and in his time there, the weariness didn’t subside. The closing of SteelXchange took every last modicum of what he could give. And now it was clear that every facet of his choices for SteelXchange had been monumentally flawed. What did he know about steel anyway? It wasn’t as if his lack of knowledge was offset by his love of the metal. He had never given it a second thought before he joined the company. There wasn’t a single reason to believe he could do something revolutionary with SteelXchange. Transform the steel industry? Please. This shouldn’t have been something he could have been duped by. But clarity had been elusive.
Nobody in the steel industry had paid attention to them for months. That should have been a glaring clue of things to come. And when they finally granted a meeting, it was all too apparent that they didn’t want, or as it was spun, simply weren’t ready, for doing things the SteelXchange way. But he and his team were far too intoxicated with their dreams to see the obvious. Instead, the pieces of his plan were thought and then re-thought and endlessly tweaked, so much so that eventually they were so meticulously and intricately crafted that any possibility of them not being realized simply couldn’t be fathomed. The idea lived beyond him; it no longer needed him to survive, though the same could not be said for him. Then, in a period far too short to rationalize even now, it went from a future too vibrantly alive with possibilities—to absolutely nothing.
Two years and six months after that state of nothing was reached, still no life directions had revealed themselves. But then came Molly. At GreeneSmart.
He returned again to the thought of what a narrator might convey about the last two and a half years. Though he could hear how the narrator might speak, in uneven tones and eclectic nuances to keep the listener attentive, the words she spoke eluded him. Would the narrator only see someone who had been wasting time? Would she understand how altogether drained he had been? Would he be put into some category of underachiever, to be conveniently classified and so easily forgotten?
No, that needn’t be the case. There were better explanations. On the screen, the audience would watch as an image of Stephen came into focus and a distant minor chord was heard. Over this scene’s opening shots, the narrator would start simply: “Molly,” and then say nothing for an adequately sustained moment of stillness as the thoughtful notes faded—as if thinking of what other pertinent details need be conveyed.
The narrator would have to find the words to deftly express how unlikely it was that Molly and Stephen would ever find each other. It was as unlikely in GreeneSmart as it was anywhere else. Everything about them and their lives was so perfectly divergent that the possibilities of ever meeting should have been virtually nonexistent. The narrator would need to then underscore how well the two of them fit together, and that it was not long until Stephen would realize that this was the first time in years he had found someone whose life he wanted inexorably intertwined with his own. A good narrator would be remiss in not giving some explanation for all of this. Perhaps it would suffice to simply defer to the authority of felicitous timing. Perhaps that would be enough.
Some advice to the narrator: The narrator would be served well to shy away from all-too-common four-letter words of affection or trite clichés. Would it matter that neither Stephen nor Molly had put forth such words yet? Maybe they would in time, but that was reaching too far, too quickly. It wasn’t to be in this episode, and so the viewer must wait. And as the camera panned back in the all-too-familiar slow dramatic retreat from Stephen’s close-up to reveal an expansive panorama that somehow encapsulated Stephen’s life, the audience would be left with an image of Stephen alone. The shot must be carefully selected to ensure the audience is not-so-subtly reminded of Stephen’s life without Molly. They should have no recourse other than to believe she should have been in the scene with him, and that any other outcome must surely be a mistake.
Then the start of the close: The narrator should say what ought to be already clear: “Two and a half years. The time had amounted to this: both being where they needed to be at the right time.” A slow fade to black, and the narrator’s final words until the next episode: “It felt like something real and worthy, and that was enough for Molly. That it felt at all was enough for Stephen. And that it was so much more for both, well, that was simply the cherry on top.”
-LIBERAL FOOD AND EVEN
MORE LIBERAL ACTIVISM-
July 9, 2009.
The Touchpoints group grew steadily under the auspices of Atiq and Jaan. In the months since Stephen had entered the intern programming contest, nine new scientists had been hired onto the team—an astounding number for any group in such a short time. Atiq had taken Xiao’s admonitions to heart. He wouldn’t face them again.
The team of Atiq and Jaan was well known in academic circles and was the envy of what few competitors Ubatoo had. Almost every university professor and their students were vying for a chance to join Ubatoo, and in particular its data-mining team. Xiao, using his connections, had the duo of Atiq and Jaan interviewed in both Forbes and The New York Times—and had their articles appear the same week. As Xiao had instructed, Atiq sold the vision and Jaan sold the technical brilliance. It was rare for modern-day number crunchers to receive such a large amount of press coverag
e. It was no surprise that following the interviews over 390 doctoral-level candidates applied to work with Atiq and Jaan.
Only a tiny fraction of the candidates would see Ubatoo, however. A minuscule one out of every thirty-six Ph.D.s who submitted their resumes was even given the opportunity to interview in person with the Touchpoints group. For the interviewee, the process was a grueling full ten hours. The morning of the interview day was primarily spent giving a prepared talk about the research the candidate had done, his publications that he thought were the most interesting, and what research he planned to do if hired. The topics spanned the spectrum of computer science, from applications to system design to theory. Talk titles included the well-attended “Improving the Ability to Advertise Through Tracking: A Machine Learning Approach to Incorporating Weak Signals,” to the not-so-well-attended “Theoretical Limits on Data Privacy.” Of course, none of the incoming Ph.D.s had ever tried their approaches on the amount of user data Ubatoo had, despite being utterly confident that any amount could be handled by their, as yet largely untested, theories. The unwarranted confidence was excused by the interviewers. More data was gathered here in a single hour than any incoming candidate had ever dealt with. Had this particular hubris not been forgiven, it was quite likely no candidates would ever have been hired.
After forty-five minutes of questions following the candidate’s presentation, the candidate was escorted to lunch by various members of the data-mining group. On those occasions when there weren’t enough people to accompany the candidate to lunch, interns were sometimes invited.
Depending on which set of people had lunch with the interviewee, lunch could easily be the most relaxed part of the day, or the most dreaded. If the interviewee was fortunate enough to meet with the people who were not new hires (those at Ubatoo for more than six months), the members of the lunch crowd usually did well in ensuring that absolutely nothing about the presentation, or even work, was discussed. Likely, they’d already decided whether they would vote for the person to be hired, and now they wanted to know the person on a more informal level. The topic of conversation usually revolved around all the perks available, the food they were eating, how much the company had changed in just the last six months (the old days), and how the candidate would unquestionably regret not joining, if given an offer.
The Silicon Jungle Page 10