Distortion

by Gautam Malkani

  Even though I’m hoping she’ll feel shamed of her ignorance, I ain’t banking my chickens. After all, this is one of them politely pro-deportation newspapers, so maybe she won’t give a flying Febreze-scented fart.

  “You’re implying I’m being a bigot?”

  “I’m just pointing out that my surname is common, is all.”

  “Well, given our content, I suppose it wouldn’t be much of a mental leap.” She starts scoping out these front pages she’s got hung up and framed, like as if they just appeared on her wall right now. Migrants Fuel Housing Crisis; Migrants Bleed National Health Service; Prime Minister Warns of “Swarm” of Migrants. One of the stories about “parasite” immigrant single mothers on benefits. Headline doesn’t say what kind of benefits, though – incapacity or disability living allowance.

  “Just because we publish xenophobic stories that doesn’t mean the people who work here are xenophobic. Would you like me to show you our diversity awards? Or our campaigns against racism?”

  “It’s okay, I can see you’re very diverse.”

  “If you’re referring to the ethnic make-up of the newsroom, that isn’t about racism, it’s about self-confidence – our section chiefs just can’t relate to people who aren’t cocksure of themselves. Race has nothing to do with it.”

  She does that thing where they just wait you out till you nod in agreement.

  “And as for our editorial content, we’re simply responding to the concerns of our readers. Our readers want something straightforward to blame – they don’t want to be told that the world is actually very complicated. So we respond to their concerns by simplifying things and telling them that immigrants are to blame. Or people on welfare. Or single mothers. And the more we make them feel angry and outraged and hateful, the more they’ll click on our stories and share our content on social media. That means more ad revenues for us, more fame and followers for our columnists – and the more I get to go on nice holidays. It isn’t a complicated business model.”

  I ask her why the hell she’s fessing up all this.

  “To demonstrate that I’m not racist.” She looks at me like, wake the fuck up. “This isn’t about racism, it’s about economics. We have an economic imperative to make our readers angry and outraged and hateful.”

  I cut a look at the tissue box again, like as if I’m waiting for the crying part to start.

  “In fact, strictly speaking, we aren’t actually hate-mongering, we’re now more focused on fear-mongering. Generating fear is a much more sustainable way of fuelling anger and hatred – and therefore reader engagement.” She starts busting out some next- level buck-pass about the cutthroat market for people’s eyeballs: “We didn’t design this new world, my friend. Didn’t invent the attention economy – the compulsion to keep smartphone users hooked on compulsive content. The financial incentivisation of virality and reader engagement, which in practice obviously means a system that rewards misinformation and hatred. Novelty. Stronger emotional responses. I mean, do you have any idea how many of our readers only reach our stories via social media and search engines? Last year, Facebook was basically our biggest distributor – sometimes I think they might as well just own us.”

  Fuck’s sake, not again. Everyone trying to blame Facebook and Google for their own fucked-upness. I tell her I already know how the digital economy works. Tell her I also know that her newspaper was hate-baiting way back before the internet was even invented. That immigrant single mothers on benefits been getting fucked over by fake news stories for years. Fuck knows where my front is coming from ­– maybe it’s just cos I’m standing up or something. Like as if I’m taking my posture too literally and trying to stand up for my mum or something. So then what I do is, I try and broaden away from her paper’s hate-baiting and talk about story distortion more generally. Tell her that stories been getting distorted for time – from way back in once-upon-a-time. Even drop some beard-stroking brainfulness about how Freud distorted the story of Oedipus – how he even distorted Hamlet by giving Hamlet an Oedipus complex. I tell her that even the guy who wrote the famous play about Oedipus distorted the original myth.

  She looks at me like as if she reckons I’m on some sarcasm or something. Comes back at me with more of her I’m not racist, but bullshit: “This isn’t about whether we published bias and distortion in the pre-Facebook-and-Twitter days, it’s about the scale and the speed of all the bullshit and bile we’ve had to compete with more recently.” She talks about how all the crap spreads faster and further than she ever thought thinkable. How there’s no time for the clunky old truth to catch up. “And if we don’t play by the rules of the game and work harder and faster to make people feel outraged or righteous or fearful or hateful, then we’ll keep on haemorrhaging readers to all those crackpot fringe sites and fake news merchants and content farms. And the big tech Data Lords will take even more of our audiences and ad revenues until there’s nothing left for them to take from us. So, you see, you mustn’t judge us by the stories we put on our home page or on the front of our paper. We’re not racist, Dylan. Nobody’s looking to lynch you.”

  Scope out all her cardboard folders while I weigh up how the hell to respond to that shit. Start wondering gormless-style if they’d still look so strange if computer drives and directories hadn’t been organised into folders and files? If the original designers of operating systems chose some different structure for arranging shit – envelopes or pockets or cardboard boxes? Would real boxes start looking proper weirdness?

  The boss person rests her head in her hands, elbows on her desk. “Well, now that I’ve reclaimed the moral high ground, Dylan, we can move on to the rest of this conversation. And I’m afraid that for this next part, you’ll probably need to sit down.”

  Fuck knows why I take the sofa by the wood-panelled wall instead of the obvious chair facing her wooden desk. But now it’d look even more dickless to get up and move.

  “Before coming to speak to you, I had our IT geeks review your web activity from this office. As your employer, this is something we’re perfectly entitled to do. I wanted to know if you’d been emailing that man who shares the long-form of your surname – the man you aren’t related to.”

  Start mentally scrolling through my office-based web activity. Minor infractions, mostly – my cache a catalogue of women’s shoe catalogues. Can always just say I was just buying them as a present for my mum.

  Or maybe not.

  The Managing Editor chucks some fileful of printouts from her desk to the coffee table. Hard copies of my search history. The swollen, the fluid-filled, the ankle fetish manifesto. The blog posts. The post-surgical images. The bombed-out. The burnt-out. The respectfully blurred-out. The silicone prosthetics that won’t harm the environment when they finally cremated. The supposed-to-be Oedipal support forum that actually turned out to be just dickhead guys posting on-the-sly fotos of everyday MILFs.

  Ain’t got no choice here now but to tell this boss person the truth.

  I mean the actual truth.

  I mean, no choice but to say it. Tell her how things got proper intense between us cos it was just me and her and her illness and whatever. Tell her how Mum trusted Google and Facebook more than the doctors and experts and how I trusted Google more than I trusted my mum. Tell her how we ended up having to go see this couples therapist who told us to try and see things from inside each other’s shoes. Tell her how I decided to blog from Mum’s perspective instead – proper multimedia blog with interactive graphic images. (Anycase, Mummy wrote stuff by me back when I was a baby.) (Letters in my voice – thank-you notes to my nani and that.) Figured a blog would basically be the same thing as a diary. But because blogs can be organised by subject rather than date, I ended up just maxing out on each subject. Even once wrote a blog from the perspective of some online alter-ego I developed for Mum – you know, like how amputees sometimes create an alternate online persona? I tell her how even back in Year Nine, I was getting proper worried that I weren’t h
ardly able to even see my mum – could only see her illness. And I didn’t want Mummy to see me not seeing her – didn’t want her to catch me hesitating or flinching or looking away. I tell her the most sickening stuff in my search history is cos I didn’t want be fearful or phobic or nothing.

  Tell her that fearfulness fuels anger and hatred.

  The boss person slides her reading glasses back into position. Looks up at the ceiling like she’s praying to the HR department. “Why does it always have to be more complicated than just simple gross misconduct?”

  Then I start hitting her with some next info – not just the sob stories with their violin strings. Also start dropping some theoretical underpinnings: the stuff I read about how the internet can help women transcend dehumanisation, body dysmorphia, bodily objectification, or just generally being defined by their body parts. I tell her I know the digital world doesn’t work like that in practice because men, etc., but it had the potential. Tell her how I tried to help Mummy with her digital living. And the more times I mention the word “digital”, the more she seems to buy what I’m saying, like some bubble-eyed tech investor.

  “So you’re a carer, then?”

  I tell her I prefer the word “son”.

  She scopes out some foto on their desk. “It’s awful when they realise that their child is now their parent.” Then she asks me if Mum and I are still seeing the couples therapist. Doesn’t think to ask how Mum is. Or even if Mum is. Just asks how I am. This is another reason I sometimes feel proper constipated about telling people.

  “Listen, Dylan, even though you’re just a freelance data temp, we’d still like to extend to you the support that we’d normally offer our permanent staff. We have a part-time occupational health consultant you might find helpful to talk to. Or if you just want some work experience in the newsroom during the holidays – just to get you out of the house.”

  Try and dodge eye contact. Try not reach for some dipshit tissue. Try counting all the cardboard folders all over her floor space.

  “There’s just one small problem, however. Not with you – with the whole digital archiving project. Even though there evidently wasn’t a security breach in this particular instance, the incident nonetheless highlights the potential. To be honest, the whole hotchpotch of freelancers, temps and subcontractors really isn’t working for us – it was only set up that way to keep the costs down. So we’ll be looking to wind up those freelance arrangements over the next few weeks and then we’ll bring the whole archiving project in-house. We’ll obviously have to hire more permanent staff, but that’ll come out of the IT department’s budget, not mine. I’m sorry about this, Dylan. It’s not my decision. As I said, technically it isn’t even my department – although why the archive is being completely governed by IT and not editorial still defeats me. I mean, what happens when we cease publishing a print edition altogether – surely the archive and the live edition become the same thing? And to make things even more confusing for us, they’ve just this morning parachuted in a new Acting Head of IT. Though ‘parachute’ is probably not the right word, mind, as he was pulled out of retirement – and I don’t mean early retirement. Speaking of whom, if you’ll excuse me …” She nods towards her door as the botched-Botox man walks in, apologising for being early for some meet they meant to be having. Shooting me this shit-eating grin and offering me a chocolate chip cookie. Thing that weirds me out the most, though, ain’t the fact that he’s here, it’s the fact that the man’s still donning his dickhead biker jacket for his first day in some top job.

  17

  SCROLL BACK TO a time when you was little and your parents had a bust-up. What would it teach you about fighting if they never made up again? And what’d it teach you if, every time you had a row with your mum, you thought she’d hit the deck and never wake up?

  Botox man clearly ain’t never got taught these lessons. Comes out the gate sparking with his new colleague like it don’t matter for nothing.

  “Of course I don’t read this publication,” he goes to the boss person Managing Editor. “For the same reason I don’t eat out of the toilet.” Hobbling around her office like he’s looking for some weak spot. Architectural vulnerability. “You see, just because I’m old and decrepit and I’ve never worked in the media before, that doesn’t mean that I’m clueless. For one thing, I know not to even read your publication. By which I mean both your paper edition and digital edition. The object and the subject.”

  “Well, I can see we’re going to have a wonderful working relationship.” Boss person cuts me a look as she says this. Can tell she hears this stuff on the regular. Haters gonna be hated.

  Move to make my exit, but the Botox man’s hand on my shoulder keeps me in check. Then, to make shit proper awkward, he takes a pass on the chair opposite her desk and parks down on the sofa beside me. Feet on the coffee table goes without saying. “But I have to hand it to you people, you’re onto a lucrative business model with all this hatred and division. Give your readers a festering scab to pick at and they’ll keep on picking. And clicking. Should apply the business strategy more laterally – start spreading measles and smallpox just for clicks. I hear those things always go viral.”

  “Oh, for the sake of your sanctimony I hope that accent of yours is Canadian.” Sticks her feet up too now – on the corner of her desk, like the two of them are playing some kinda furniture-dissing game. Black patent four-inch skyscrapers with solid earthquake-proof foundations.

  Botox man’s comeback to this is some advanced-grade childishness. Pulls out a pack of cigarettes – no branding, just fotos of cancer. Doesn’t light up or nothing, though, just flips open the box and pours ash straight out onto the coffee table.

  “Excuse me, what do think you’re doing?” She tries fronting with anger but the fear scans more clearly.

  He dips his hand in the ash, rubs it between his fat fingers. “Pixel dust,” he goes. “Hundreds of thousands of tiny black-and- white pixels. You and I clearly need to have words. Well, you can’t have words without pixels.”

  “Look, I don’t know what you’ve been smoking, mister, but if you’ve got a problem with our content, you’re welcome to take it up with the Editor. My remit is managing editorial resources – hence the title Managing Editor. And it appears no one’s told you yet that your remit’s confined to IT.”

  He rubs some more ash between his finger and thumb. “You know what I love about the media business? The way that everything’s a story. A celebrity overdoses and it isn’t simply a death, it’s a story. A local council compiles density studies for different grades of tarmac and, again, it isn’t just a planning inquiry, it’s a story. The same goes for stock-market bubbles and cryptocurrencies – but, then again, even the money in your wallet is a story. The state declares that this piece of paper is worth twenty pounds sterling and their story becomes true. Then they say that the on-screen digital digits are worth the same as the paper notes and then that story becomes true. Same applies to nation states themselves, of course. And of course the same applies to a person. But it’s only in the media business that people talk openly about these things – every little thing and every big thing – in terms of their story-ness.”

  She locks her eyes onto mine like as if to stop hers from rolling.

  Botox man starts giving her some next-level sermon about how stories and storytelling are the basic motherboard building-blocks of all societies – how no one can trust in anything if the thing in question doesn’t have a story behind it. Says the first thing you gotta be able to trust in is the truth of a story’s claim to be true.

  Managing Editor shifts her chair to change to a more comfortable topic of convo. “Before you hobbled into my office, I was telling this young typist here how we’ll be bringing the digital archive project in-house now and restricting access to the storage depot.”

  “Storage device?”

  “Depot – rhymes with deafo. The external storage facility in Stockwell where we keep all our back issu
es.”

  “Won’t be necessary,” he goes.

  “A U-turn on your first day? Not a very good look.”

  “Don’t you read your own publication? Breaking news on your website this morning. Terrible accident over there – seems that a whole section of the tunnel has collapsed. So I guess nobody will be heading down there for some time.” He nods at her PC. “Go on – click on your own story. It includes lots of shaky cellphone footage of sirens and traffic chaos. Oh, and of course your newsdesk has been duly insinuating terrorism to get maximum clicks. Go on, don’t be shy – read your own story.”

  The Managing Editor does as she’s told, shaking her head as she reads or watches or listens or whatever. “But that’s awful. A woman down there has been critically injured. How is such a thing even possible?”

  “I can’t imagine,” goes the Botox man. “Apparently she’s a security guard. Six foot, built like a rugby player. That said, she’s also a Polish immigrant and a single mother so I’m sure you’ll find a way to demonise her.”

  The boss person blanks him so he takes another shot at triggering her. Takes my dumb ass a whole minute to realise the man’s actually trying to trigger me. “Such a pity, really. Poor woman was just a bystander in all this. And she wasn’t even bystanding in the part of tunnel that collapsed. My guess is that she was roughly about, say, 83.7 feet away.”

  The Managing Editor grabs a pen like she’s on some kinda reporting instinct.

  “My understanding is that the tunnel collapse caused the shelves to topple like dominoes and the woman was crushed under the weight of paper. Can you imagine?”

  Boss person’s still jotting down notes.

  “Of course, your reporters will need to verify all that info before you can publish it. Though I appreciate that fact-checking might be a bit novel for them.”

  Botox man carries on dropping laser-guided truth bombs like he’s trying to burn her in some rap battle. Feel like maybe I should try and liquefy the tension or something, but I’m too busy sitting here praying that the paper-crushed security woman story is just another fake news story. That tomorrow they’ll publish a correction – maybe even later this pm. Like all those 180° corrections they dress up as minor story updates. Madonna is Fine: Fury as Pop Star’s Twitter Account Hacked for Death Hoax.