Distortion

by Gautam Malkani

  I let him carry on trying to sound bearded and brainful. Even rearrange my facial muscles to encourage him.

  “The printing press was just an aberration, Dillon. Briefly replacing rewriting and modifying with identical reproduction and copyright and whatnot. But while all those monks may have edited and shortened things as they copied them, I doubt they ever edited things down quite as much as you did. And so I’m inviting you to tell me why.”

  By now I’m ready to hit him with some premium level beard-stroking bullshit digital jism – I tell him I edited down Dad’s stories in order to make them more byte-sized.

  “You think I’m that stupid, Dillon? Did your father tell you to omit all the eyewitness quotes? Only, I’m almost certain he doesn’t even know what you were up to that night. I mean, do you think I’m stupid?”

  My face like permafrost Botox.

  “Your father told you that he made them up, didn’t he? The quotes – that’s why you left them out.”

  Fuck it – I nod.

  “Well, hats off and all that. You did a remarkable job.” Starts stroking his stubble. “You’ve engineered stories that are actually designed to not be clicked on – written by a man who can’t be googled. I can’t tell you what a breath of refreshment that is.”

  Tell him I’m happy to be of service – that I know how much he hates clickbait stories. That I think maybe he might’ve mentioned it before.

  He holds out his sumo fingers like he’s pointing a gun. Starts clicking in my face again. “Okay, fine,” he says. “You want to mock me? Then come on, count my click rates. You want to feel the effects of clickbait and clickety click clicks? Then let’s do this. Count my clicks.”

  I flinch my whole head. “What the hell you doing, man?”

  “My clicks. My fingers – what other clicking sound could I be talking about? I’m not the one who’s obsessed with the sound of women walking in high heels. So, come on, count my finger clicks.” Steps up to me again snapping his flabby fingers – once, twice, three times. Each snap releasing some kinda ash cloud – or dandruff or pixels or whatever. “My click-through rates. My swipe-throughs. Shares. Likes. Web hits. Video watch time. Viralness. Engagement levels. Strategic hyperlinks and optimised headlines. Whatever you want to call them, Dillon – whatever propels stories to the top of social media feeds and search engine ranking systems.”

  Fuck knows whether I’m now ducking my head to dodge his clicking fingers or to take shelter from another incoming Media Studies lecture.

  “Of course, the tech companies have a friendly term for all this clickability. They call it ‘a relevant user experience’. And as soon as they decided to give it more weight than accuracy – to effectively devalue the currency of truthfulness – well, then it was only a matter of time before the fuckfest commenced.” And then another set of three clicks, but with less ash now so the sound is wet and slippery – dirty, meaty echo like smacking up a carcass. “Just a matter of mere time before all their clever digital architecture – the basis of your society – became one great big feedback machine for people’s fears, anxieties, prejudice, anger, perversions, righteousness.” Now double-clicking his fingers in my face like as if he’s double-jointed. Slipping off the beat now and then because of the sweat. “Algorithms curating your own alternate reality. The exclusion of facts that you might find disagreeable. Ethnosupremacists running around thinking that evil is now just a valid partisan position. Facebook feeding you up with—”

  “Okay, okay,” I go – holding up some textbook to shield me from his clicks – “I get it, okay. So you got some serious beef about bullshit fake news stories. Why you telling me all this again? What exactly is it you trying to tell me?”

  “We’re not just talking about bullshit, Dillon, we’re talking about a cocktail of bovine laxatives. A plague of projectile bull dysentery. The truth becoming whatever the hell a person wants it to be. And a digital infrastructure that couldn’t have been better at persuading you to drink up all the bull dysentery. Couldn’t have been better if it had been specifically built for that purpose.” The man’s actually spitting now. Proper convulsating. His botched-Botox like he’s got air sacks in his face. I offer to make him a cup of tea or Horlicks, whatever, my mother’s morphine. One lump or two? Dude just looks like at me like how the fuck is tea gonna fix this?

  “The bile and bull diarrhoea have already bolted through the floodgates, kid. Burst right through the banks. It’s all very well for those overindulged tech giants to try and clean up their acts and their algorithms now. For Facebook to try and save face by finally taking some responsibility for the junk they’ve been putting in people’s newsfeeds. For the Silicon Valley superpowers to finally wake up to the kinds of accountability and quality control that every other industry has to abide by. Good for them. Give them a medal. But the bile and the bull diarrhoea have already bolted the floodgates. What has happened over the past few years cannot just be undone, Dillon. Certain kinds of demons, you can’t just put them back in the bottle. Took the human race decades, if not centuries, to make some types of evil socially or ethically unacceptable. You can’t just put them back in the bottle.”

  And then once again with his finger-clicking. But, again, it ain’t hypnotism. It ain’t faith healing. Ain’t a magician snapping his fingers to signal some break in reality or establish their commanding authority or whatever. Then, finally, he drops his hands by his sides, like as if he knows he’s already over-milked the overdramatic effect. Looking like he’s about to start crying or someshit. We’re talking proper eye saliva. Asks me if I’ve figured out what he’s trying to tell me yet. Takes the mug of Horlicks I give him. When the fuck did I just make Horlicks?

  And then he’s back on some lecturising. Some stampede of footnotes. Says that obviously all them tech tycoons didn’t intend for all this bile and bull dysentery to be unleashed. Didn’t mean for their platforms to get toxic. Problem was, they just never clocked how their giant ad machines that had basically been designed to help advertisers manipulate people could also be used to manipulate people. He says that tech people talk about gaming the system – about Facebook being “weaponised” by dealers of fake news and dodgy foreign agents and political consultants. But, way he sees it, ain’t nobody gamed nothing – they just used the system the way it was designed to be used. Cleverly targeted marketing and manipulation of users who are hooked on cleverly targeted content.

  Then he asks me again if I’ve figured out what he’s trying to tell me.

  Shake my head.

  “All in the name of clickability and user relevance and ad revenues. Think of the colossal stupidity of it, Dillon – that these truth-devaluing business models should have come to govern the largest public spaces the world has ever had. In fact, it’s proved to be such a catastrofuck that one of my colleagues has even been exploring whether the consequences were in some sense metaphysical. After all, the tech giants basically built a digital archive, library and database of all the world’s knowledge, history and likely future intentions. A divine mind. If that isn’t the Tower of Babel or Library of Babel, then I don’t know what the hell is. And, what’s more, it explicitly attempts to translate away all our language barriers in real time. Well, what happened with the Tower of Babel?”

  I start scrolling through my head but obviously the Botox man is happy to answer his own question: “The fragmentation of society into tribes who couldn’t even talk to each other.”

  Then he asks me again if I’ve figured out what he’s telling me. Downs his Horlicks in one shot. Tells me to mix it with milk instead of water next time. “Speaking of which, you know why the tech giants kept claiming that they couldn’t stop every single litre of bull diarrhoea from seeping into their systems? Why for years and years they just refused to take adult responsibility for the problems stoked up by their own products? They said it’s because they have too many billions of users uploading billions of pages of content. As if there’s some kind of edict from heaven t
hat says they must be too big to monitor themselves. And always hiding behind the algorithms that do all the recommending and feeding. As if the algorithms weren’t actually the crux of their own corporate strategies – their own actions. As if personalised relevance and clickability must be given greater weight than accuracy. Google’s algorithm already filtered out pornography so what was to stop them being even more responsible? Likewise, what was to stop Facebook altering its feeds so that users got fed proper reporting over junk stories that go viral? Nobody was asking them to be the arbiters of truth, just to stop devaluing the relative currency of truth. It’s as if the tech giants themselves had been warped and distorted by their own tech bubble. Their jacuzzis of profits from monetising your data. Their ridiculous insistence that they aren’t really media companies – just neutral tech companies with neutral platforms and neutral algorithms.” And then, all sudden-like, he switches his voice back to shouting mode: “Do me a fucking favour! The two largest distributors and gatekeepers of news and information in the history of humankind – that means they aren’t just media companies, they’re the biggest media companies that the world has ever known. Only, they didn’t want the regulations that came with being media companies, they just wanted the readers and the revenues. Didn’t want to deal with any thorny editorial decisions – as if the decision to put user relevance before accuracy wasn’t the single biggest editorial decision anyone ever made. A fucking ten-year-old could have told them that they’re media companies because a ten-year-old gets most of their news and information through Facebook or Google. As you may well remember, Dillon.” He watches me weigh all this up. “Now do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

  I tell him seems like, once again, he’s just trying to get me to blame Google and Facebook for the way my shit got so fucked up and twisted. Same as how he always does. Like as if I should rewrite that poem we done in English Lit. – They fuck you up, Facebook and Google. I tell him I’ve listened to all his lecturising and I still ain’t gonna blame them. Just like I ain’t gonna blame all those predictive Oedipal scare stories. Just like I ain’t gonna blame my mother. Ain’t even gonna blame all them government cutbacks that deliberately turn kids into district nurses and “intimate care” providers. I tell him that I did all my fuckery. Me.

  “Oh come on, Dillon. If all I was trying to say is that you should blame Google and Facebook, I would have stepped off my soapbox days ago.”

  “Then why can’t you just tell me what it is?”

  “I can’t just tell you the answer – and that in itself should tell you something.” He takes a swig from his empty mug and swallows like as if he’s actually drinking. “Look, Dillon, you know that social media and search engines don’t just filter the way a person processes the world now, they filter the way a person processes themselves. That means if you want to know what kind of man you really are – I believe the technical term is ‘to own your own shit’ – then you have to start knowing yourself better than they do. Which means knowing more about the systems that seek to know you and mould you.”

  “The fuck do I even care? I just wanna know why my dad’s stories were blacked out.”

  “You know your problem, Dillon? You’ve clearly been misreading Oedipus. You think that truth just magically forces its way to the surface. That the truth will always out, that it has some inherent power to overcome crapfuck falsity. This is a misapprehension shared by both the chronically guilt-ridden and the chronically naïve – and apparently also by media regulators. Oedipus’ truth doesn’t simply force its way into the open. Oedipus drags it out himself, tooth and toenail. Kicking and shitting.”

  That’s all for today about Oedipus.

  “When Oedipus starts searching for the identity of whoever has committed the sins that have brought a curse on his city, he’s initially hobbled by all the usual fallibilities of the human mind – all those cognitive biases you’ve learnt about in Behavioural Economics. He uses reason and logic to reject things that don’t conform with his own preconceptions. Only believes those things he already agrees with. Digs his heels in when confronted with counter-evidence and contrary opinions. Accuses his own brother-in-law of plotting against him.” The Botox man hands me the empty mug like as if he expects a top up or someshit. Turns out, he just wants to bust out some gesticulationary action. “But then, slowly, Oedipus switches right before our eyes. He stops simply rejecting inconvenient information and grows into someone who actively seeks out the hard facts regardless of how unpalatable they are. He starts to curb his own righteousness. Makes a point of really listening to people who have different views. And why is he able to make this switch – to overcome his natural tendencies towards confirmation bias and so forth?”

  “Cos he’s heroic and that just happens to be his designated superpower?”

  “Because he isn’t stuck in some digital echo chamber, Dillon. He’s not trapped in a bubble of like-minded opinions and self-reinforcing thoughts. Because the inbuilt fallibilities of his human mind haven’t been given external rocket boosters by social media and search engines. Because all the reports and information that he amasses don’t appear on the same platform, the same cellphone screen, which means they don’t all appear equally credible. Herdsmen, messengers, shepherds, seers, oracles, relatives who beg him to ignore the prophecies, relatives who beg him to quit searching. Oedipus consciously chooses to carry on clicking on the most credible sources and stops clicking on the less credible sources – even though the latter are telling him the things that he’d much rather hear. This is how Oedipus wills the truth to emerge. How he breaks out of his own alternate reality. And not just the truth about having inadvertently married his mother and killed his father, also the truth about the fuck-up that set his whole misadventure in motion.”

  I finish the rest of the movie for him. It weren’t cos of the prophecy. Weren’t cos he was just dumb to the true facts about his real mum and dad. It’s cos he believed in false facts. And cos, after hearing the predictive prophecy, he acted like as if the false facts and misinformation were true.

  As the man’s Botox finally stops bulging or bubbling or whatever, his face looks a little less botched. Young Carer’s Playbook #498: Sometimes going ape can be good for them. And, yeh – I hate it how that shit works.

  I tell the Botox man that I think maybe he’s putting just a bit too much personalised spin on the story of Oedipus, though. That I don’t think all them audiences in Ancient Greek theatres were clapping cos the dude didn’t just blindly pull out his smartfone and go with the top five Google results. “Anycase, so what is it, then?” I ask him. “What’s the false fact?”

  Cuts me a look like as if to pretend that now he’s the one who ain’t clued up.

  “Come on, man. You keep saying how it’s known that I know this and it’s known that I know that. So then clearly you also know what I don’t know. All this time I been thinking you’re trying to get me to blame Google and Facebook, but, truth is, you just been trying to make me wise up to how some false fact slipped into my head. Which means what you’re really trying to tell me is the fact that there’s some false facts in my head.”

  And again with that look. Longing it out this time, though – full-on stare down. Can even hear him breathing. And munching his cookies. Crunching his cookies – crunching the data. Then, finally, he speaks. “Who says I’m even talking about your mother, Dillon? I was under the impression I was talking about search engines and social media. About the bile and bull dysentery. About swastikas and whooping cough. About the fact that truth doesn’t always beat falseness. So why do you have to make everything about you and your mommy?”

  “Ain’t even saying it’s about my mum – obviously it’s got someshit to do with my dad. After all, that’s why you come here, ain’t it? You came here and asked about me digitising his stories. So don’t treat me like a fool. Just tell me: what’s the false fact? What is it that I don’t know?”

  “I’ve given you more than en
ough metadata, Dillon. Information about information.”

  “I know what metadata is.”

  “Yes. Just a shame you didn’t apply any metadata to your father’s stories so that they’d show up in search results. In fact, you’ve made them so near-impossible to search for that I now have to ask you something directly – and you may have noticed that I don’t normally do directly. But are you absolutely sure you omitted each and every single one of your father’s fabricated eyewitnesses and their fabricated quotes?”

  I tell him I’m sure.

  “For all thirty-six stories?”

  I tell him there ain’t no names, no quotes.

  “Well that’s incredibly fortunate. For you and for me. Why do you think your father’s panicking so much about his missing clippings book? You know you really had better return it to him.”

  Before he splits he looks towards my window like as if to ask why the hell I don’t just open the curtains.

  Door closes behind him; I flip open my laptop.

  The newspaper’s publishing system. The online archive. My password.

  Sorry, my username before my password.

  Fuck, not that username – my Dylan username.

  I’m now single-zone focused by the need to make double, triple sure I didn’t accidentally let through any of my father’s fabrications.

  Invalid username. Invalid password.

  Of course, I can’t log on cos I got my butt kicked off the project. So I try going on their website like as if I was just some casual reader – access the archive from the front end.

  Invalid username. Invalid password.

  It ain’t a pay-for website, but you need to be registered so that they can put you under watch and target the ads.

  Invalid username. Invalid password.