Managing Editor takes her time with her comeback. “Well, I wouldn’t expect a bumbling geriatric to understand this, but stories get shared on social media faster than we could verify the facts even if we could afford to hire proper fact-checkers. And if you don’t publish fast enough, you don’t get any shares and if you don’t get any shares, you don’t get any clicks. Even our Luddite film critic appreciates this new reality – last week she helpfully filed her review of the new Star Wars movie before the end of the press screening.”
“I’m up to speed with your speed problem,” he says. “The tech firms call it ‘sharing’ instead of ‘spreading’ so that it sounds less virulent. But I guess I am too geriatric in one respect: you see, I always thought reporting and fact-checking were the same thing.”
Boss person just starts casual-style checking her emails.
The Botox man presses on. “If our publication can’t survive as a business without undermining the sanctity of our stories, then surely it’s better we don’t survive.”
Can’t see her screen from the sofa – I just know she’s checking her emails cos of the way she types her replies. The rhythm of it. Like she’s talking in Morse code. Then she stops. And she asks the Botox man to hit repeat.
“I said if our publication can’t survive as a business without undermining the sanctity of our stories, then better that we don’t survive.”
She switches back to emailing or messaging or tweeting or whatever.
The Botox man leans forward on the sofa. “You sure you got that?”
“Yep,” she nods. “Just typing it up now.”
He throat-clears. Starts speaking at a lower speed-setting. “Which means the value of our stories must no longer be measured by likes, shares and clicks.”
Again the tapping of her typing this up. We’re talking proper old-school dictation action. Followed by her firing out a question – though just the starting gun of a question. “Why shouldn’t—”
“Why shouldn’t stories be measured by clicks?” he cuts her off. “Because stories shouldn’t be clickbait. They should just be the stories they’re meant to be.”
Now mouthing the words while she types them. Cracking her knuckles like it’s punctuation. Looking up from her screen when she’s done: “But we—”
And again he cuts her off. “But we shall also stop publishing clickbait headlines that don’t reflect the stories beneath them. Even though Facebook has been designed so that people can share or like stories without actually reading them.”
Can feel her keyboard flinching. Her deskphones start ringing and her ceiling lights are flickering. She just presses on typing.
“And even though cleverly optimised headlines have often got our stories ranked higher in Google’s search results.”
A guy with more balls or backbone or whatever would just ask these jokers straight up what the fuck is going on here. Me, I just offer to help her type. She looks at me like as if to say, what the hell am I still doing here? Stares at her hands, like why the fuck are they held out in front of her?
“And we shall preserve the sanctity of storytelling by ensuring our writers don’t even know how many clicks their stories get.”
They carry on rocking back and forth like this, each line of dictation getting more and more technical. (Technical term for that shit is “inside baseball”.) Start chatting about the old days, the pre-click days, when all the “toxic lunatic fringe bullshit” stayed on the fringes. When no self-respectable news organisation would dare give space to hate preachers just for clicks – even if the hate preacher was running for some highest public office or something. Then he starts busting out some dictation about ad-free business models – even though Google and Facebook have tended to crap on content that users have to pay for. Wait, what? Botox man’s now holding up some random megaphone. “And our stories shall cease to give more weight to emotionally charged anecdotes rather than actual evidence – even though anecdotes get more likes, shares and clicks.”
Her eyes wincing and watering as if the pace is getting painful. Looking down at her deskphones but just letting them ring – like she doesn’t actually know how to stop the ringing sound.
Allow all this fuckery. So what if some serious weirdness is going down? Probly be weirder if there wasn’t. But there’s also some proper wrongness here. Messed-up power relations. Young Carer’s Playbook #242: No matter the role reversal, always remember who’s the boss – let them run the shots and call the show.
Whatever’s wrong with this picture, though, I ain’t even sure it’d make a pixel of difference if the woman was doing the dictating and the man was being some secretary. Ain’t about male dominationating. The wrongness is coming from something else.
“Even though being quick instead of first checking whether we’re correct has often got our stories ranked higher on Google and therefore got us even more clicks.”
And whatever the hell is happening here, it ain’t some clever Jedi mind trick. Ain’t hypnotism or faith healing or neuro-linguistic programming. Can tell this from the way the Managing Editor eye-rolls whenever the Botox man says something she reckons is stupidness. Even cuts me a look like as if she’s apologising for all this dipshit dumbfuckulousness.
“Even though slanted and sensationalist stories have effectively been favoured by Facebook because they get more shares, more engagement, more clicks.”
Her deskphones are still ringing and the lights are still flickering.
“Because if we don’t differentiate between proper stories and crapfuck bullshit, why the hell should readers?”
She picks up and hangs up and carries on typing. Tries asking another question but, once again, the Botox man cuts her off soon as she starts asking.
This is when I clock that I been getting the timing all wrong. The Managing Editor ain’t simply typing up what he says. First, she starts typing up her own question, then he interrupts her – and then she types up what he says. I scope them more closely just to be sure. Yep, we’re talking proper autocomplete action – even stronger than my mum’s. And right now that shit feels even creepier than some creepy old boss man giving dictation.
“Because if all stories look equally credible, then of course readers will disregard anything they disagree with.”
He closes out by saying that clearly they’ll lose a shit-ton of readers if they don’t focus on maxing their clicks and engagement. “But better to lose people than to bullshit them” – gut-nudging me as he says this.
The boss person stops typing. Fingers seizing up all the way up to her face. “Okay, now you’re just living in fucking La La Land.”
18
FOURTH TIME YOUR mum told you she had the C-bomb, you figured it was best not to mention the deadline for your GCSE Business Studies coursework. Best not to mention deadlines full stop. When you headed out to school that morning, she’d told you she was positive the results of her bone scan would turn out negative. When she followed you to your room in the afternoon, she was already walking with a limp. Standing in your doorway, asking you to guess where it had spread to, like you was playing pin the dying donkey. Part of you thinking if you just picked the right spot, you might change things, make shit okay. Pin the voodoo-doll donkey. Your mummy still hanging in your doorway while you tried coming up with some least-critical location on her body. Her little toenail. A thumbnail. Cancer of the earrings. Didn’t just tell her your final answer, you decided to write it down. Make shit more official. Her shakes as she limped up to your laptop to read what you’d just typed.
“My tear ducts?”
Told her you were trying to think of the smallest organ of the body.
“Well, I can see why you dropped Biology.” Could practically hear levers and pulleys and chains in her face as she made her eyes smile in sync with her mouth. “Hey, it’s just another challenge for us both to beat, Dhilan. Just one more push and we can be happy again.”
You cut to the safe question, the straight-down-to-bus
iness question. The turnaround strategy – the net-net.
Plan was to hit her hip with post-surgery radiotherapy before a second-line chemo regime. Probly a shot of docetaxel laced with carboplatin. Steroids as a chaser, anti-vomiting drugs for the morning after.
And then the answer to the question you couldn’t ask. The doctor had said she could still live a good few years – would depend on how she responded to the new kind of chemo they gave her. Apparently the exact word he’d used was “maybe”. Weren’t sure of the exact wording of his exact words, though – whether he’d said your mum would “maybe still live a good few years” or whether he’d just said the word “maybe” when she’d asked if she could still live a good few years.
Soon as she hit the bathroom to fix some plumbing and stuff – some leaky tap or some busted hinge – you shut your bedroom door and pulled out your fone.
Because knowledge and so on.
Because you needed to know.
Her oncologist had given you his mobile number a couple years back to stop you crying in his consulting room. You’d never dialled it of course – never dialled any of them numbers people gave you. But you dialled it that afternoon. Didn’t actually expect to get through, though. The fuck did you manage to get through?
Her doctor told you that if she didn’t respond well to the chemo, she might only have a few more months. Told you it was impossible to predict “the aggression of its progression”. Talking like some hip-hop artist who reckoned having their name on a clothing range made them a bona fide businessman. That they’d “realign their outlook in response to various variables”. That they “couldn’t determine their strategic direction till in possession of more visible projections”.
You asked him how long before they knew whether she’d have a few years or a few months.
“Dhilan, you know how this works by now,” he said. “It’ll take a few months to know how she responds to the chemo.”
And then you was alone again in your bedroom. Just you and your fone. Would there be any after-recovery surgery? Google said any long-term wrecking of her hip bone would be fixed up with surgical pin-and-plating. What kinds of things could go wrong with hip surgery? Google told you some patients lost lots of blood during hip surgery so there might be “complications”.
You had a special set of rituals for whenever your mummy went under the knife. Specific OCD routines, specific trinkets. Whenever the surgery was longed out, you worried it meant something had gone wrong. But when the surgery wasn’t longed out, you worried that maybe the docs had done shit on the quick. Hadn’t been concentrating while slicing or scraping or splicing her.
You searched for another opinion. Another link. Another person’s personal experience. A cure. Was like the search engine was sparking the questions instead of the other way round. You scrolled all the way down to the risks. You scrolled straight to the worse-case scenarios. You clicked on the risks. You clicked on the worst-case scenarios. An even riskier risk. The outside chances slowly moving to the centre of your screen.
Sound of hammering from the bathroom. Or just hitting the walls with her fists. Hitting herself, even – smacking herself on her forehead again.
You called out to ask if she was okay. If she needed any help.
Then Facebook stories – using social media like as if it was a search engine, same way search engines now tap into social media. Then YouTube videos. YouTube is now the world’s second-largest search engine; YouTube is owned by Google. How to do in-home physio on her hip. How to fart on a blowtorch. How to build a nail bomb. How to insert a cannula. Fix a leaky catheter. How to give her those weekly injections without fucking up her veins again. How to sedate her with aromatherapy. How to do the surgery yourself.
You knew it was batfuck crazy to think some next man’s opinions about medical science should have the same weightage as a qualified doctor’s, but that’s how shit seemed to work on your fone. Like as if having some strong opinion about someshit was the same thing as actually knowing shit. As if equal rights somehow meant everyone was equally qualified. Just bypass the doctors and experts and ask some neighbour to perform the op. Like diagnosing your own hypochondria. Evicting the pilot and letting the passengers fly the plane. Blanking the mosque or the church for some online hate preacher. Telling your mummy that everything’s gonna be okay.
And then more sounds from your mother – sound of the shower head dropping into the bathtub.
You stood outside the bathroom and asked if she was okay, if she was managing.
How to pick the lock on a bathroom door.
How to remove the lock altogether.
Her behind the shower curtain. Peek-a-boo. Hide-and-seek. Mummy both there and not there. Click on, click off. (You didn’t realise that all them childhood peek-a-boo games were basically just rehearsals.) (Didn’t realise it till a year later, when she first fell unconscious.)
Later, clicking away from your coursework again to ask Google for the lowdown on hip-op blood loss.
Turned out that some hospitals would squirt a bag of blood into her arm right there and then in the operating theatre.
Turned out other hospitals waited till after surgery to see if the patient needed a pint of the red stuff.
Turned out he was a typical mummy’s boy.
Turned out some guy from your school called Dave was having some family holiday in some family foto.
Turned out that another serial killer was blaming it all on his mother.
Turned out that Anjali had ordered the salad … And so on and so what. Not to pretend it wasn’t happening; to prepare yourself. Not to prepare yourself; to pretend it wasn’t happening. Till in the end just doing both – clicking and swiping and scrolling and switching so quickly that, in the end, everything you read and watched and thought and did was both. Your coursework slowly dying of link-rot while Google morphed into some kinda helpdesk for your soul. Facebook still schooling itself to profile your psyche, micro-target your desires, troll your inner demons. Both of them hitting you with even more answers. Stories to your questions. Drowning out all them dickheads who randomly wrote shit on your wall. And even if the babble of bullshit fake stories started with health stories, who else was gonna show you how to find the right fucking vein?
Google told you her bone scan had involved injecting her with this radioactive liquid that would joyride through her bloodstream and then park up in her bones.
“Your mum’s so thick that when they told her the drinks were on the house, she went and got a ladder.”
YouTube showed you the kinds of fotos they’d taken of her bones with some high-tech bad-boy called a gamma camera. The places where lots of liquid collected were called “hot spots”.
“Tell your mum to stick with one shade of lipstick – my dick looks like a rainbow.”
Facebook told you the odds of survival after working out the odds that you wanted to know this.
“Your mum’s so anal that before she slit her wrists, she sterilised the knife.”
“Your mum’s so fat she had to slit her wrists with a chainsaw.”
In the end, everyone at school just cut to the chase and told each other that their mum had died. “Shut your mouth, you dicksplash, your mum’s dead.”
“Fucking give me back my cricket bat, you wanker, your mum’s dead.”
Not that you gave a shit what people wrote on your walls and your school exercise books and stuff. That’s what Facebook walls and exercise books were basically for – like plaster casts and toilet cubicles. One time, even your dad wrote something. Once – he once wrote your name. On the cover of your first-ever exercise book, which was for drawing in cos it was before you’d learnt to write – except basic words like Cat and Dog and Mum and Dad. He’d crossed out your name and written “Dylan” in marker pen. Then later, your mum crossed out “Dylan” and wrote “Dhilan” in darker pen.
“Nice trainers, shitface – shame your mum’s dead.”
Google told you about some other
bone-strengthening technique that involved injecting her hip with cement.
“Good morning, dude, your mum’s dead.”
Google told you about special private clinics that did special hip cement. Even told you the name, phone number and fee for each clinic – cos, after all, ads are basically answers.
Back in them days, though, Google mainly decided what stories and info to hit you with depending on how often your keyword appeared in each webpage, and by the popularity of the websites that contained them.
i.e. before ads and search results became fully custom-tailorised according to your search history and personal data. Your tastes, your fears, your twistedness.
i.e. before Google started trying to guess the shit you were looking for before you’d even finished typing your search query.
i.e. before Google started hitting you with ads for morning- sickness tablets, boob-job clinics, books about Oedipus.
i.e. before search engines became psychic and started pumping out prophecies. Data-crunching your future based on what you done in the past. Predicting where the sickness would spread to next. What would happen next.
How you’d feel.
What you’d do.
19
“SHOULD’VE WANKED. YOU’D be more relaxed.”
I look at Ramona like I ain’t actually for sure if she’s joking.
“I could even loan you my insoles. Though let’s be clear: that’d be the limit of my participation.”
Minor spillage of my McDonald’s milkshake while I’m like, WTF? Scanning around to check ain’t no other diners are eaveslistening.
“Or maybe you could’ve just scored some weed or beta blockers? Or even morphine.”
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